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.