Karen’s PR & Social Media Blog

In honor of 'Retro Week" on Facebook, I am using this photo of me as my profile picture! I loved that dress!

Here is what I am reading today:

• the joy of books

(Karen’s note: In my family we share a job of books, we collect them, study them and we even READ them! With Libraries disappearing as we know them and as they shed their books, we have the opportunity to start our own collections!)

• you can dance, but do you TWEESH?

“Users simply added the hash tag #tweeshes to all new year wish tweets. These tweets were then assigned to a point on the world map dependant on their origin. This map had been transformed into a synthesiser and each tweet became a musical note. Check out the Best Tweeshes website and listen to the first piece of music composed by the whole world. I love the idea of bringing these tweets together to create something different and unique. What do you think?”

• if you can draw a picture, you can search google images

“Searching for images on Google isn’t always an easy task using words alone. Your search is going to rely on how images on the web are tagged or captioned. A new tool, however, lets you use self-created images, rather than words, to find pictures on the web. Unofficial Google Image Search by Drawing lets you draw a picture, drag and drop a photo from your computer, or take a picture. It then searches the web for similar-looking images.”

• making the best of Pinterest

“At its core, Pinterest is a visual social bookmarking service.  Its masonry style layout presents material in a pleasing way.  Pinterest relies on user-created, high quality visual imagery from the web along with an addictive UX.  The competitive social aspect of the service help keep the taste level of the participants elevated.  But without strong content from the web, the service would not exist.”

• landing a job in public relations

“This time of year reminds me of when I first started working at Spectrum as an intern during my senior year in college. In some ways, I feel like I was more buttoned up with my PR know-how then. I mastered Grunig and Hunt’s four models of public relations and could outline an RPIE approach to a campaign in no time.
After being in the “real world” for a few years, I know that PR cannot be so easily defined or broken down into four simple models. And there’s never as much time as I’d like to R (research), P (plan) and E (evaluate)—which is unfortunate, really.”

• looking at 2012 6 months ago and they were right!

“…If we look back to 2001, the world pretty much looked like the graph below. The traditional media industries were absolutely dominating our world. People primarily bought physical CDs. They mostly rented movies at physical stores. They only bought printed books. And, newspapers and magazines were dominantly consumed in the form of print….”

• the future of psychology and why it’s important to all of us

My mother was interviewed lately in Detroit on a new way of thinking about Psychology, research and the understanding of our world. John Cacioppo and Laura Freberg have a new textbook that — I think — will have profound influence… even with how we view public relations! Congratulation!

YouTube has been listed as the main go to place to search for online videos, presentations, and see launches of new commercials (just what we are currently seeing right now in preparation for the Super Bowl this upcoming weekend).  I have to say – my favorite so far is the Bark Side for Wolkswagen – classic!

However, when you look at the overall statistics and uses of the video sharing website – the figures are pretty impressive.  YouTube has just passed the mark of four billion videos being uploaded – per day!  That is amazing!  With all of this visual data being created, uploaded, and shared within the digital community, one of the challenges that we are seeing emerging is that there is just so much information out there that it is hard to category and save some of these great visual tools to use for the classroom or in research.  Here is a video from Video Infographics highlighting the role of not only social media for searching information, but also the role YouTube has played in this area:

Now – this is where emerging companies can stake out their claim and showcase their products to not only be viewed similarly to a video uploading and sharing establishment on social media, but offer something that may intrigue others to gravitate to. This is happening with the new video search engine Blinkx.  The company recently announced that they got the patent for their moving thumbnail technology. Incorporating more specific searching within video uploading and sharing is going to be the future within this particular social media platform.  With this site, you can search for various terms and you will not only get information from YouTube, but also results from Hulu, Vator.tv, and Blip.tv to name a few.  What you get to see are some other examples of videos that you might have not been aware of previously, but are exposed to when looking at this particular video sharing site.

There are many opportunities you can use for this new search engine for videos – both in the classroom as well as in research.  Here are just a few ways to use Blinkx in both PR research and teaching:

• Including Blinkx videos in presentations: There are many examples of PR being discussed both in the traditional news as well as popular television shows that you might have not been aware or.  One way to use this particular site is to look for video clips to embed into your presentation to share with your students.
• Following news coverage from one centralized location during event:  When a natural disaster hits or a crisis emerges for a company – if you are doing research that involves looking at how the media (traditional, web, or social) are covering the event – this may be a good tool for your research. For example, if you wanted to see how the media was reporting the Costa Concordia crisis in Italy, all you have to do is search for these terms and you will get many results (approx 11,000 videos in total).  Great research project to work on.
• Teaching yourself a new skill or educate yourself on a topic:  We are all lifelong learners – we never start learning and we have to explore new emerging technologies and features that would help us in our research and practice.  There are various topics you can look at for videos – and one is related to teaching social media.  Interviews, step-by-step use for some of the new sites, and personal commentary are just some of the types of videos you may get among your results.

In summary, what we have to be aware of when it comes to public relations and social media practices is that we have to look at the main platforms with specific features.  We think of Facebook with social networking and Twitter with microblogs and of course videos with YouTube.  While these are the mainstream social media platforms – our job as PR researchers and practitioners is to explore these new start ups and see if 1) they offer something that is similar to other products yet offers a unique characteristic; 2) understanding the pros and cons of the site and what are some of the key features it offers and 3) determine how this site and platform could potentially help in both the classroom and in research.

While there are going to be many startups in this area of visual and video searching and data visualization – we just have to see where this technology takes us as a business and communication society.  We can always use more resources for our role as educators, researchers, and practitioners – and Blinkx could become revolutionary in the area of video search engines.

Hope you all are having a great day.

Best Wishes,

Karen

By popular request, Monica has received a lot of correspondence asking for a copy of our wonderful presentation at BOBCATSSS 2012! Congratulations, Monica for creating a lot of buzz! CLICK on the picture above to view the powerpoint!

POWERPOINT Version

PDF Version

Pinterest continues to grow as a visual social networking site where people are sharing photos, posters, and other images related to specific topics on their boards for others to see.  Here is a good introduction video on the site (it is a couple months old), but you can get the picture with the new site and overall features of the site.

There are many ways people are using Pinterest - from shopping for various items of interest to showcasing business products and services to getting real-time feedback on designs and event planning.  Cision had a great blog post on Pinterest as well as discussing some of the major brands and PR firms who are using the site strategically for their PR efforts.

For PR professionals in particular, this is a great way to generate another avenue for e-commerce and engage in conversation and dialogue visually with potential customers and other stakeholders.  Incorporating visual elements within a PR and Marketing campaign is becoming more of an expectation for the industry presently in 2012.  Why are PR firms doing this?  Pinterest is a way to visually tell a brand’s story authentically through multiple categories where people have the power to comment, share, and redistribute this information to their followers and networks.

Another emerging area PR professionals may want to explore further as well as how this will determine social media influence. Is influence and reputation similar or different compared to other social media platforms?  What makes some of the individuals on Pinterest a must-follow?  Is it do to their activity online and sharing compelling visuals, or is it their engagement with their followers and fans?  Or is it a combination of both?  These are questions we have to answer in PR and determine for our campaigns and clients if these are going to be individuals we have to reach out to for our campaigns to establish a long-term relationship.

Metrics for Pinterest also need to be taken into consideration as well.  Like Facebook (ex. Like button, comments, page views, link click throughs, etc), Twitter (RT, links, hashtags, etc), and other social media sites have their own list of metrics for businesses and researchers to look at in terms of evaluating their efforts using the social media platform during their PR campaign.

Inspiration is one of the results from Pinterest that really is generating the buzz for the social networking and visual tagging site.  People can log in and search for various topics of interest or elements key to their daily lives (style, household design, travel, cooking, etc) and look at what other people are willing to share with the world, and they can draw on these visual cues to create their own unique interpretation.  The overall purpose of Pinterest for users is to curate and share photos, posters, images, and pictures that you love.  There is definitely great potential for PR practitioners and researchers to look further into the strategic application of Pinterest for PR.

Hope you all are having a great day.

Best Wishes,

Karen

I had the pleasure of participating in the 2012 American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual meeting this past week.  Not only was this a fabulous event, but this marked my first ever virtual conference presentation.

My friend Gina Eosco (who I met a few years ago at AEJMC and is an amazing weather/risk communication professional with AMS and studying her doctoral studies at Cornell) introduced me for my presentation focusing on how to use social media for weather professionals operating in risk and crisis communications.

Presenting virtually was a really fun experience for me – I was able to multitask by having my PowerPoint presentation on my MacBook and then use my iPhone to call and present virtually, and I used my iMac to look at the Twitter feed for the conference (the conference hashtag was #AMS2012).  Gina and Nate both mentioned that I would be able to take virtual questions from the audience if they used my Twitter name (@kfreberg) and the assigned conference hashtag.  It was fun for me to see the comments emerge when I was speaking and getting asked some great and insightful questions!

I thoroughly enjoyed presenting at the AMS Annual meeting – what a great group of professionals working together and sharing their insights with the community around so many timely and significant topics.  It was exciting for me to read all of the updates from the event through Twitter – I felt like I was there!

I have to give out a big thanks to my friend Gina – I really appreciated her reaching out to me to present at the AMS meeting and she did a tremendous and fabulous job with the social media activities during the conference.  Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and many more social media platforms were used during this event in New Orleans.  Very fabulous. I also have to give big thanks for her friend Nate for letting us use his iPhone to call me for my presentation.  Thanks Nate and way to go, Gina!

Hope you all are having a wonderful day!

Best Wishes,

Karen