Grow Old Along With Me...

ME & THE DANCER

I love everything about my Gramps; his incredible humor, his astounding intelligence and his endless energy.  That’s right; my 88 year young Gramps runs circles around most of my friends, both intellectually and physically. In fact, on October 16 he even earned the title of ‘The Dancer’ at my wedding (mind you, there were 200+ people competing for that title!). This past weekend I spent some time with Gramps. I learned some valuable lessons about power walking, horse racing and living blackberry-free!

The first thing I noticed this weekend was Gramps’ impressive, busy time – at one point he was bored with me and left me at Starbucks while he made his daily rounds walking the mall. I was literally ditched. After 4 rounds of power walking he yanked my Twittering hand from my blackberry and dragged me along. During our trot he told me that I am going to get Arthritis from texting too much and my social skills will be gone by 40 if I keep my nose in my blackberry. This conversation got me thinking… so on the way home from the mall-a-thon, I of course took out my blackberry and Googled “shopping effects on longevity” and boy was I surprised by the results.

Carell Makes General Stores Trendy (that's what she said)

Steve Carell – just the name makes me laugh. I immediately picture his character from LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE running as fast as he can to hop into that van-on-the-go. Aside from making millions laugh both on the small and the big screens, Carell has a list of unique accomplishments; Carell has made Marshfield MA locals thankful for refurbishing their historical downtown hot stop and he's made the words 'GENERAL STORE' trendy!

Intranet users --- Can I get a heck yeah?!

Tracy has come to my rescue as my go-to-gal for all things intranet! Since Ethan was such a great IBM guy, I thought I would stick with the IBM theme for this one...

As an employee at IBM, Tracy uses the intranet every day at her job. I was able to ask her some questions that came from our reading and class discussion on intranets. See below;

Good afternoon, Tracy. Thank you for agreeing to do this and expose your company’s intranet to this blog! I promise that your email inbox will not explode with a furry of intranet questions.

To begin, how big is your company and can you tell us a bit about what you do?
I work at IBM and there are approximately 400k-500k employees. I am currently a financial analyst.

OK, now that we know what you do, what intranet do you use at work?
Its called the IBM intranet to external people who don't work at IBM, but IBMers refer to it as "W3" we can access it directly while in the office or at home by dialing in through AT&T net client.

What is the main purpose of W3 for employees? The main purpose of W3 is to manage your own career (HR, benefits, etc), and to update employees on what is new. It is a great way to know what is happening at IBM.

By "manage your career," what do you mean? Not only do I manage my benefits on W3, I also set my yearly goals, and then have to provide feedback at the end of the year regarding whether or not I achieved what I set out to do -- this measures my bonus potential.

Wow, so does this showcase your growth to management? Yes. My manager is then able to see what I write and evaluate me in writing every 6 months. I am able to see her feedback via IBM's intranet. In addition, my boss does encourage me to use W3 for promotional growth.

How so? On our intranet they exemplify each characteristic you need to master before reaching the next level. You would go on the intranet to find out what internal IBM classes are being offered to help strengthen a certain skill set so that you can master it, and apply then be able to apply for promotional job opportunities which are also listed on our intranet.

Today’s secret word is… COMEBACK!

If you’re a child of the 80s then in addition to Fraggle Rock and Alf, you’ll remember turning on Saturday morning television and hearing the distinctive laugh of Pee Wee Herman on his hit show Pee Wee’s Playhouse. The show ran for five seasons and 45 episodes, coming to an end in 1991. Unfortunately those of us who remember the excitement of Pee Wee’s secret word also remember the ill-fated reputation that followed the actor as the show wrapped up. At that time Paul Reuben (who played Pee Wee) was arrested for exposing himself in an adult movie theatre. The show was stopped immediately. No more re-runs. No more Pee Wee. Or so we thought.

Skip ahead 20 years. 

Its noon on October 7, 2010 and the West 4^th Street basketball courts in NYC are filled with twenty-somethings that clearly are not here for a slam-dunk contest. The crowd is jumbled in small groups, everyone refreshing their blackberries every four seconds to reread the same Twitter message that gathered them all there in the first place.

  

All of this was part of the Pee Wee Herman social media strategy aka his “comeback”. 

The strategy was for Reuben to directly engage with his fans. His team conducted research to find out where his fans were virtually and where they hung out. Once the data was collected they utilized social media optimization to promote him on social networks like FourSquare, Facebook and Twitter.

To the surprise of MANY - it worked! This is a prime example of the power of social media. 

Leave the tweeting to the birds, Obama!

Obama is hip. He can talk in full sentences AND hang with Jay-Z. But, did his Twitter Town Hall (TTH) push him into the "uncomfortable zone" and try to make him something he is not? Lots of tweople think so.

Obama’s been credited for harnessing the power of the Web early on in his presidency so the idea behind the TTH worked into Obama's presidential DNA. The tweople of the United States were eager to connect with Obama and excited for him to be the first president to utilize an emerging forum like Twitter. But like most marketed political events the TTH was more hype than anything. The format was fresh but the answers were stale. And oddly, Obama himself seemed out of his comfort zone with Twitter’s format (even though it's been said he tweets himself from the White House) and his hang time with Jack D.

How did something so promising take a nose dive? Well, let's take a look at what has worked...

Back on April 19 Obama joined Mark Zuckerberg for a Facebook Town Hall. During that time Obama seemed extremely comfortable with the host and very familiar with the new medium. Things started off with Obama introducing himself and poking fun at Zuckerberg, “I’m Barack Obama and I am the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie.” He never lost his Obama cool and the town hall was “liked” by most.

So what happened at the Twitter Town Hall to make it #fail in comparison to the Facebook Town Hall?

Social Media: The Zinger in PR's To Do List

Social media has had a huge impact on PR and has certainly changed the way we do things.

I remember making my first “blog list” and thinking how incredibly strange it would be to pitch a blogger. At the time I pictured a sluggish-college kid sitting behind his computer, writing about sneakers with hopes that Nike would “gift” him a pair. It took a long while before I embraced the idea that bloggers deserve a PR professional's time, and are very significant to our industry.

A few years after I finally grasped the blog world I was introduced to social media, a world beyond bloggers. I knew better than to hesitate this time. I embraced the digital craze, after all bloggers had become my new best friends, why not add in some Twitter peeps, too?!

Airwalk was my first client to push the social media envelope and flip priorities from print to online placements. This was a huge disruption! All of the sudden my valuable relationships with Antenna and Details editors were invalid. I felt like a freshman in new school that walked into the wrong class - full of seniors. I had to make new friends and find a way to be a relevant cool kid again.