Trafcom News

Highlights from the IABC International Conference in New York

When I heard that the IABC International Conference would be in New York this year, I registered immediately, because I never pass up a reason to visit my home town. I really do like living in the Toronto area, but I’ll always love New York (as this sculpture on Sixth Avenue says).

Over four days, I met hundreds of people, attended some great sessions, spent time with friends outside the conference, and walked miles around Manhattan. Yes, I felt like a tourist gaping at the Empire State Building, meandering through the cool greenness of Central Park and wearing out my MasterCard at Bloomingdale’s.

Here are some of my impressions:

• Two years ago, at the IABC International Conference in Vancouver, social media was seen as a sort of odd duck. Blogs and podcasts were  new and different, and communicators weren’t quite sure what to make of them. Now, presenters would mention an employee blog or podcast as an integral part of a relaunched intranet without blinking an eye. We’ve come a long way, baby.
• If Bill Marriott can find the time to blog, so can your CEO. In his speech accepting the IABC’s EXCEL Award for Excellence in Communication Leadership, Marriott said that he dictates his blog content into a recorder, and someone on his communications team actually writes it up. Visiting 300 hotel properties per year, he’s a busy guy, yet  he invests the time to tell stories using this medium. That’s because he values storytelling as a way to engage employees and reach out to the public. He also acknowledged that his blog has generated millions of dollars in hotel bookings via a link on the home page.
• Seth Godin never disappoints. His high-energy closing keynote was sure to fire up some of the savvy communicators in the room and frighten the pants off those who don’t appreciate the way marketing has changed in the last few years. If you can’t be remarkable, then get out of the way.
• The conference parties will be hard to top at future IABC events. Kudos to Deloitte for the gorgeous food and drink at the opening reception at the Rainbow Room, and to CNW Group for the fantastic Canadian party at the Pegasus Suite.

And on a more personal note:

• Do Tokyo department stores not have nice washrooms? I ran into a gaggle of giggling Japanese girls photographing the ladies’ lounge at Bloomies. I guess I should have taken their picture.
• Speaking of stores, the level of service in New York is extraordinary – from the waiters in restaurants, clerks in retail establishments, even the woman selling subway tickets (who let me purchase a single ride, even though it’s against the rules).

Were you at the IABC conference? What did you think?

An interview with the Queen of PR Measurement

Katie Paine of KD Paine and Partners, the Queen of PR Measurement, was in Toronto recently for a Third Tuesday meetup and the Roundtable on Social Media Measurement. I was fortunate to get a quick interview with Katie, in which she touched on the value of measurement and how it's often misunderstood in the business world.

You can listen to this 18-minute podcast at the Trafcom News Podcast blog. Please let me know what you think!

The feast for independent communicators

Stan Didzbalis, co-founder of AgencyLink, impressed me when I met him a few weeks ago at a meeting of the Alliance of Independent Practitioners (AIP), a subgroup of the Toronto chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators. Stan was there to deliver a talk called “The Feast Before You,” in which he shared an overview of current business trends that favour nimble independents. He knows his stuff, having devoted his career to making things happen in journalism, marketing and PR.

AgencyLink, his new venture, aims to bring together PR clients and firms in a new, more productive way. In a short interview you can download right here, you’ll hear Stan briefly talk about this, but the main subject of this quick podcast is the world of independent communicators and how they can specialize to survive.

By the way, this audio file is part of a pilot series I’m working on for AIP. It currently lives behind a firewall at the IABC eXchange, but in the future, we’ll be making some of this content public.

If you’re an independent, be sure to check out AIP Toronto.

Here are the show notes:
00:45 Intro of Stan Didzbalis of AgencyLink
01:20 About Agency Link and its mission
01:57 Independents must specialize; if you try to be a chameleon, you’ll end up a charlatan
03:10 Corporate clients want people who understand their business, who can come in and provide value from day one. Specialization also helps you to target your marketing.
04:00 Being a trusted advisor
04:20 Value of networking and building alliances
06:09 Comments from members at the meeting

Pick your podcast style and format

What should your podcast be? Commentary, one-on-one interview, or script and clip? If you need help choosing, listen to this interview with Victoria Fenner, a talented radio and podcast producer.

Victoria and I  sometimes collaborate on podcast production, particularly for my conference podcasting business, PodcastYourConference.com. Check out Victoria’s Web site and blog.

You’ll find the 27-minute podcast and the show notes at the Trafcom News Podcast page. Please listen and let me know what you think.

Third Tuesday does social media measurement

As Joe Thornley says in his blog post, measurable results in the realm of social media are hard to come by. But guidance is at hand. At the Third Tuesday Toronto meetup on May 20, you can learn from a panel of measurement experts, who’ll tackle this tricky concept: Measurement queen Katie Paine, President of KD Paine and Partners and author of Measuring Public Relationships; Marshall Sponder, the Chair of the Web Analytics Association’s Community and Social Media Committee; and Marcel Lebrun, President of Radian6.

The panelists will be coming to Third Tuesday straight from the Roundtable on Social Media Measurement and Metrics, which Joe has spearheaded.

Visit the meetup page for details. See you there!

Terry Fallis wins Leacock award for humorous novel

Terry Fallis of Thornley Fallis and the Inside PR podcast has won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for his novel about Canadian politics, The Best Laid Plans.

Why is this something I’d blog about? Well, Terry has become a friend of mine in Toronto’s social media world. And, he self-published the book after he couldn’t get a publisher to bite, then he podcasted podcast the novel, a chapter at a time, making it freely available. So if you’re trying to get your novel out there for the world to notice, take a page from Terry’s book (OK, not literally).

I loved the story, which I consumed over the Christmas holidays, laughing out loud at times.

Congratulations, Terry! Three questions: When will The Best Laid Plans become a major motion picture? What’s your next book about? Why does everyone think Dave Jones is the funny one on Inside PR?

The challenge of staging a social-media conference

Now that I can peek out from under the pile of work to be tended to in yet another post-conference period, I can fully reflect on my experience in California last week.

Jen McClure and the team at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), who ran the New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, did a wonderful job. In particular, Jen was everywhere, making sure we were all busy, happy and well fed (including this picnic lunch in the garden). Thank you, SNCR!

I can only imagine the difficulty in trying to come up with a program to satisfy everyone, especially when the crowd represents a mixed bag of seasoned social-media pros who are familiar with all the shiny toys, and newbies who aren’t blogging, haven’t heard of Twitter, don’t know how to download a podcast, and aren’t yet monitoring their presence on the Internet.

Phil Gomes, one of the people I finally met in person (along with his lovely wife Leticia), wrote an interesting post about NewComms Forum attendees not seeing the doughnut for the hole: ignoring big-picture issues (like net neutrality) in favour of tactical stuff like the social media news release. Phil is a very smart guy, and I see his point. But let me look at this from another perspective. I too am keenly interested in the issue of net neutrality, and try to keep up to date on its developments in my online and mainstream reading. But I didn’t fly across the continent to learn about net neutrality. 

Someone like me, a small-business owner who has to plan for a month to get away from the office (and home!) for a full work week (including two days of travel), wants to come away from a conference with information I can use – not necessarily immediately, but soon. Agency types who have to justify the expense of a conference may be in the same boat. A session like Shel Holtz’s, on “Employees are the Brand,” was perfect in my view, because Shel presented a trend and then backed it up with solid examples. And then there was the panel with Mike Manuel, Jeff Rubenstein and Patrick Seybold, on “An Inside Look at Bringing the Sony PlayStation Blog to Life.” Again, a well-executed talk that was presented as a case study. Great stuff. Ditto Francois Gossieaux’s session on “How to Measure Progress and Success in Business Communities.” A little more esoteric than the others I mentioned, but interesting and valuable.

Attendees like me, who came away from some sessions scratching their heads, might have been confused by the names of the sessions listed in the program. If I’d known that “Using Social Networks to Build Your Professional and Personal Brand” was actually “LinkedIn 101,” I would have skipped it. Perhaps we need longer blurbs to explain what the sessions are about, to help us choose from among five tracks. Overall, there was a lot of excellent content, but it was hard to decide where to go at any given hour.

Everyone talks about the real-life networking at these events. And it’s true. I loved catching up with people I’ve schmoozed with before, and meeting the faces I only know online, like Kami Watson Huyse, Jim Long, Joseph Jaffe, and, at long last, “Professor” Sallie Goetsch, someone I’ve been acquainted with online for about three years (pictured in her Podcast Asylum coat). I won’t name the other people I was delighted to meet, because I know I’ll leave someone out.

Others more erudite than I have reported on the conference.  If you’re a conference organizer, I’d love to hear your take on designing sessions to meet broad audiences, and on writing program copy.

Why Google hates podcasters

If you're a podcaster,  please consider the role of show notes as a marketing tool and a service to your audience. As you'll learn by listening to Trafcom News Podcast 74, The secrets of show notes, "Google hates you" if you're a podcaster who doesn't take the time to write show notes.

In this  22-minute podcast, you'll get advice from experienced podcasters: Nicole Simon, Christopher S. Penn, Dave Jones, Wayne MacPhail and Aaron Strout.

And be sure to listen to Chris Penn's secret for getting his show notes picked up in the Google News feed!

Do you end the interview too soon?

Have you ever experienced premature interview termination? Here’s how it goes: At the end of an interview – whether it’s for a magazine article, corporate newsletter piece or podcast – you thank the subject, snap your notebook shut and switch off your recorder. In the chatter that follows, your interviewee utters the most quotable quote of the last half hour.

I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me. So, over the years, I’ve learned to not turn off the recorder until the last possible minute – way beyond the thank-yous – and to keep my pen poised to capture every juicy bit.  Half the time, the best material emanates from those last comments.

There’s a lesson here for the interview subject too: Don’t assume that what you believe to be an off-hand comment won’t actually be on the record. (Of course, in the corporate world, endless rounds of approvals will ensure that the final product won’t violate anyone’s sensibilities; for external publications, it’s a different matter.)

What do you think?

Big Ideas, Small Budget: The podcast

If you work for a nonprofit, you'll be especially interested in this podcast, which is based on a conference call where a group of us talked about communications ideas for nonprofits. The discussion ranges from  finding skilled yet inexpensive voice talent, recruiting volunteers, communicating with donors and the public, and the reluctance of some colleagues to adopt new technology.

To keep the discussion going, I've created a wiki to accompany this podcast. If you work in the nonprofit sector and you want to share ideas or resources, please contribute to the wiki (email me for the password). Of course if, you were a participant in the conference call, I really hope you'll add your thoughts to the wiki.

Hop over to the Trafcom News Podcast page to listen to the podcast.