One month ago, I posted some thoughts on the pros and cons of communicating via e-mail. As promised, I’d like now to outline some best practices that have served me well (even if I’ve learned them the hard way).
Granted, some of these are idiosyncratic, so if you disagree or have additional insights, definitely please let me know.
Would you hire this self-described Internet strategist? He rarely blogs, doesn’t much tweet, and uses YouTube for quick and dirty videos filmed with a Flip camera.
No? Would your mind change if you knew he were a veteran of Microsoft and Yahoo, whom the Washington Post described as “one of the elder statesmen in the … class of online political operatives”? What if NationalJournal.com credited him with expanding the Republican National Committee’s e-mail list from 1.8 million to 12 million, and “dramatically improving the party’s social media outreach”? His name: Cyrus Krohn.
I love e-mail. I think of it as I think of Google: I’d be lost without it. Indeed, with the exception of family and close friends and personal situations, I prefer communicating via my inbox.
I enjoy the challenge of converting my thoughts into words, of committing something to paper. I appreciate the chance to think before responding. And, above all, I embrace the opportunity to stay organized and keep everyone accountable. Here are two examples of the latter:
In my first op-ed in a while, I answer this question today at PRWeek. Here’s the text:
Clients often ask, What is new media? To answer this, I like to step back and ask, What is public relations?
Public relations is the practice of improving public perception. In a word, it’s promotion. A corollary of this is strategizing: What media should you use to get your message out?
New media is simply one of these outlets; specifically—and appropriately—it’s the newest outlet. But instead of developing relationships with producers on TV and radio shows, or editors and reporters at newspapers and magazines, we new media folk work with online sources: bloggers, podcasters, Web masters, news aggregators.
Our old media colleagues spend their days on the phone with journalists, meeting them for coffee, drafting press releases, crafting pitches, and compiling media lists. In essence, we do the same thing, but with a different vocabulary and under different rules.
In the continuing debate over new media vs. old media—what’s online vs. what’s offline—the sub-debate about advertising is instructive.
On one hand, online ads are vulnerable to the tyranny of choice. The metrics can be overwhelming, the jargon can be off-putting and success can be mistaken for failure. Moreover, unlike traditional ad buys, online campaigns demand continuous monitoring and fine-tuning.
On the other hand, if you’re tired of one-off shots in the dark—where your one-page spread for life insurance runs opposite to an article on video games, or your spot for an SUV runs in the middle of a segment on high gas prices—then online ads may be right for your organization. Here’s why:
In the first week of my first job, my boss sent me the following e-mail:
“Jonathan: Please find out who voted for BCRA.”
My first instinct was to reply, “Hi Bill: So sorry about this, but I don’t know what BCRA is.” Fortunately, before clicking Send, I rethought my response and instead Googled “BCRA.” Ten seconds later, I found the answer: BCRA stood for the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold.
These differing responses represent the two types of employees. The first response, which foists the burden back onto the questioner, comes from the slothful employee, who wants to go about his job without exertion and who does not seek success. The second response, which embraces the burden, comes from the achiever. He may not know the answer—and even be utterly ignorant of the subject—but he takes it upon himself to learn. He is averse to answering a question with a question, and considers it a failure if he cannot do what is asked, even with limited information. (A third response, research without success, is fine, as long as the research is undertaken in good faith.)
Recently, PR News named Susan Davis International a finalist for Small PR Firm of the Year. As part of this process, SDI was asked to submit a one-minute, day-in-the-life-of video. Our submission, called “Check,” was produced in high definition by Jon Miles of Lagnaippe. My cameo comes at the :31 mark.
The below excerpts come from e-mails between Marshall Manson, of Edelman, and Rob Port of the Say Anything blog. They span a two-month period in 2006 — though the first four selections all come from the same, original e-mail.
They changed it today, for Veterans’ Day. But as the Los Angeles Times reported last month, they didn’t do so last year:
Congratulations to Citizens Against Government Waste, which recently launched a blog, Swineline. Unfortunately, Swineline suffers from the same irritant that afflicts the blogs of the Cato Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Project on Government Oversight: It resides on a domain independent of the host organization (e.g., www.swineline.org instead of www.cagw.org/blog).
To me, this is myopic and counterproductive. Why build and drive people to an entirely new site when, by integrating the blog into your already developed site, you can centralize your traffic?