How To Run A Media Event

Some time ago I wrote a post on tips and best practices that I felt startups ought to consider in getting the most out of media relationships. The impetus had to do with recent reports I had been getting from portfolio companies about media interviews that had not gone as well as company management had hoped. Story angles had been mishandled, sensitive information had been unwittingly divulged, and statements were seemingly taken out of context.
In this piece I’d like to cover a sunnier subject: How to effectively run a media event.
Last night, portfolio company Runka.com, a destination site for eco-friendly products at discount prices, conducted its first formal media mixer in San Francisco. I prefer to use the term “mixer” as opposed to ”launch party” given that the site went live some weeks ago and, quite frankly, “launch party” still carries with it some dot-com era connotations for many in the start-up/VC community. To this day I have a hard time seeing the phrase “launch party” on an invite without it conjuring up images of hosted martini bars and overflowing trays of sushi in a wildly overpriced nightclub.
In any event, the Runka.com gathering was by all accounts a success. Vendors were contentedly exhibiting their wares. Oscar-winning actress, author, and environmental spokesperson Mariel Hemingway was the headline speaker. Organic wines and delectables were served (on biodegradable plates, naturally). Finally, there was a good but manageable number of representatives from the media in attendance.
Pulling off a successful media event is by no means a herculean task, but it does take some planning. For those start-ups planning a function to broaden their brands and get the word out about new products, services or strategic relationships, below are a few tips that can make a big difference in how best to meet the objective.
Setting and Managing Expectations: This should fall directly into the ‘painfully obvious’ category, but I am endessly amazed how seldom start-up teams methodically think through what their media events are intended to accomplish. Sometimes the excitement and buzz of throwing a party or press conference swamps all the sober thinking that needs to take place about what the objectives are of the events being considered. What, specifically, needs to be achieved in order to consider the event a success? Is success being defined quantitatively?  (i.e., how many reporters attend; how many stories get written and appear on the event in print and other media, etc) or…is it more qualitative? (how our customers, partners and employees perceive the event and how our brand or our new product is thought of?) Get clear on this early so as to best avoid awkward post-mortems on poorly executed events.
Consider Logistics Carefully: A good decision on a venue depends less on how fancy the room is or how trendy the nightclub is and more on practical considerations. Does the room photograph well? Is there sufficient lighting for good shots and clear audio for videographers? Is there sufficient protection for weather changes? Is the staff well-trained working with media people and their demands? Is there excessive noise, traffic, other distractions? Is it close to downtown and/or is it easy to get to from where most of your VIPs live and work? (This is very important if you are considering a happy hour mixer and expect media people and other VIPs to pop over after work.) Finally, think through the date. Do you want the event to stand alone and not compete with anything else that day or week or would it be better attended piggy-backed on another event going on simultaneously whereby people might already be in town and could stop over? (This works particularly well if there is a big convention going on at the same time. People are not likely to fly in for your mixer, but they can be enticed to attend if they are already in town for the convention down the street.)
Develop A Clear Newsworthy Angle: Ask, ‘where is the story here?’ Media people won’t be responsive to a plea to offer coverage for a clearly promotional event no matter how good the free booze, snacks and gift bags. Make sure there is an angle or hook on which a story can be developed? Is your angle local or national? Is it timely? Will there be information disseminated at the event not available in a press release? Is the event piggy-backing on something recently in the news? [For the Runka.com event, the team scheduled it on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. This offered up obvious story lines to reporters about how far the green movement has come since the first Earth Day in 1970, the evolution of eco-friendly products into the mainstream, how Runka.com product offerings intersect with that evolution, etc.] Finally, will there be a newsmaker there? Credible spokespersons and even celebrities can add a certain punch to an event if there is a reasonable chance that that person might make news at your event.
Woo Everyone; Not Just Media Folks. A common mistake of start-up teams is that they focus too intently on wooing representatives from the media and they lose sight of the most important goal which is to have a great event. Media people are followers, not leaders. They are not interested in being the story and, what’s more, you wouldn’t want a room full of nothing but media people anyway.  People don’t attend events because they think there will be a lot of media there; media attend events because they think there will be a lot of people there and, hence, potential for a scoop on a new product/service or other story angle.
Following Up: After the media event is over, the cheese trays have been picked clean, and the blue recycling bins are filled with empty wine bottles, the real work begins. The long-term value that comes out of a media event is in how well the follow-ups are handled, how media relationships are forged and managed, and how the event is talked about in the past tense. You might find that only half the number of reporters that RSVP’d actually showed up. Don’t be discouraged. Reporters routinely overbook and skip events they planned to attend. Follow up anyway with the media–those who attended and those who didn’t–with appropriate press clippings, blog postings, video clips of important speeches, and any other info on the event. With the plethora of social media tools and video apps like live streaming now available, there are innumerable ways to relive or recreate a media event for someone who couldn’t otherwise attend. Even if the reporter skipped the event, he or she may still write a piece later on the company or the event itself; if not, there is a good chance he or she will make the next event if it appeared that the skipped event was successful.
Don’t Be a Media Snob: Echoing an earlier point, just as it is a mistake to focus solely on media folks at the expense of getting a good group of attendees, it is similarly a mistake to get too caught up in wooing mainstream, big-name media outlets at the expense of smaller publications, bloggers and influencers. The media landscape is rapidly evolving. More often than not, establishment media outlets are late to the game on catching a new tech trend or hot company. Bloggers, local trade publications, and online magazines are often the ones breaking stories on emerging companies and trends. Use this to your advantage. As the budgets at mainstream outlets continue to get squeezed, they lean more and more on what is being tweeted and written about in cyberspace to develop story ideas. If your event is only attended by a smattering of small-time bloggers and niche publications, fear not. These outlets can open enormous doors for you and your company. More than 20 years ago, as a college student, I launched my first startup. As the company grew rapidly, none of the establishment media showed any interest in what the company was doing; that is, not until I was quoted in an American Airlines in-flight magazine. At the time, I thought little of appearing in an in-flight magazine. However, that small blurb was read by a reporter at The New York Times. That led to a profile on me and my company appearing in the Sunday NYT a few weeks later. Before long, The Wall Street Journal called. You guessed it, they read the NYT piece. And on it went — all because I took that call from that American Airlines freelance writer that needed a quick quote on a story about to go to press. Print stories begat other print stories. Media was viral, even back in 1988. It is only exponentially more so now. In much the same way that a successful start-up must take care of its earliest customers, a company intent on a healthy relationship with the media must take care of even the most obscure news outlets that first show interest in what it is doing.
Jonathan Tower is a Managing Director at Citron Capital, a global private equity and venture capital firm, where he focuses primarily on Enterprise Software, Consumer Internet, Media, Web Services and Infrastructure investments. His blog is called The Adventure Capitalist.

Social media is about the customer experience

By Rebecca Jones, for the Daily Tribune

ROYAL OAK — When it comes to social media, everyone wants to know: "What's the next big thing?"
 Entrepreneur Joe Jaffe said he hates that question.

"The next big thing is now," Jaffe told a crowd at the FutureMidwest conference at the Royal Oak Music Theatre. "We as marketers have never had such a big opportunity" to network and crowd-source.

However, he warned that customer service will make the difference. It's not about what's next, Jaffe said, as much as it what is the experience.

That turned out to be a theme for presenters, such Scott Monty, the head of social media for Ford Motor Co.

Social media is more about retaining customers, not trying to create new ones, Jaffe said. Happy customers who are engaged will become ambassadors for the brand.

"The voice of the customer has never echoed so loudly," said Jaffe, an author of three books on social media. "Toyota could have used ambassadors, but unfortunately ... I have more followers than they do."

He recommends finding ways to reward and recognize customers and he said it doesn't have to cost a lot, if anything. Dunkin' Donuts, for example, promotes its customer of the week by using his or her picture as the profile on the company's Facebook fan page.

That idea struck a chord with Stephanie McIntyre, downtown manager for the Royal Oak Downtown Development Authority. She said the DDA's fan page has surpassed 5,600 fans. If the DDA offered them the opportunity for a store gift card, she said, "There's an opportunity to connect our fans to some of the businesses in town."

— Rebecca Jones, For the Daily Tribune

From Social Media to Social Strategy

From Social Media to Social Strategy

By Umair Haque.

Marshall McLuhan once famously said, "The medium is the message." Here's what he meant:

"The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs."

Today, the meaning is the message. The "message" of the Internet's social revolution is more meaningful work, economics, politics, society, and organization. It promises radically more meaning: to make stuff matter, once again, in human terms, not just financial ones.

And that's never mattered more. Industrial era business was "meaningless" because it was antisocial. Here's how the DSM IV defines antisocial personality disorder:

"...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood."

It fits most organizations to a T — from Wall Street to Detroit to Big Pharma to Big Food to Big Energy. Our research suggests that 95% of organizations are unable to offer socially useful stuff that creates meaningful value for people, communities, and tomorrow's generations.

Yet, most "social media" strategies have one or more of three goals: to "push product," "build buzz," or "engage consumers." None of these lives up to the Internet's promise of meaning. They're just slightly cleverer ways to sell more of the same old junk. But the great challenge of the 21st century is making stuff radically better in the first place — stuff that creates what I've been calling thicker value.

Organizations don't need "social media" strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it's the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond.

Here are seven social strategies that are turning yesterday'szombieconomy upside down. They're what I look for when evaluating investments, innovations, and ideas across the social mediascape.

Character. Most organizations have no character, in the traditional sense of the word. They'll never stand up for what's right, noble, or true. If they were a hyper-Dickens character, they'd be Ebenezer Scrooge squared. The character strategy utilizes social tools to help an organizations develop a moral compass, often via ethical accelerators. One of my favorite examples is Gwilym Davies' disloyalty card, which rewards coffee-drinkers for trying out other local cafés. Now that's a coffeeshop with character.

Control. Most organizations are run by bosses. By contrast, an organization with a social control strategy radically decentralizes decision-making, giving the control that was formerly vested in echelons upon echelons of managers directly to people, communities, and society. ThinkThreadless, whose corporate anarchy is upsetting the tired, increasingly profitless clothes market.

Creativity. Most organizations are, from an economic perspective, brain-dead: they are unable to come up with newer, better ideas consistently and reliably. The result is that they defend old ones tooth and nail: a formidable source of antisocial behavior. The creativity strategy hinges on utilizing social tools to explode how imaginative organizations are. Lego's social approach to toy production and consumption — textbook awesomeness — has turned the table on its rivals, by giving Lego the capacity to be more imaginative than they can be.

Culture. Culture is how an organization makes sense of the world, a set of assumptions internalized by all its members. Most organizations are the cultural equivalent of stone age tribes: focused on "the hunt," "the kill," and what's for dinner today. Like stone age tribes, they're fractious, unproductive, and easily broken. In the culture strategy, social tools are used to help an organization make better sense of the world. Accountability, roles, tasks, processes, incentives — that's what shapes culture, and in the culture strategy, social tools are utilized to reconceive them. Wal-Mart's Sustainability Index is a radical example of a culture-changer, altering all of the above, helping Wal-Mart's entire ecosystem make sense of the world anew. 

Clarity. The clarity strategy is perhaps the simplest. Most organizations are flying blind: they have limited visibility about changes in the marketplace. Social tools are a powerful way to gain clarity: better, faster information about what's happening not just in the boardroom, but in the real world. My favorite example of clarity is Google's rapid, frequent, consistent experimentation. Because of it, Google always has more clarity about what really creates meaningful value — and what really doesn't — than rivals. Here's a tiny example of Google helping searchers gain clarity on hotel pricing using Google Maps.

Cohesion. Relationship inflation is the most visible sign of social media decay. The cohesion strategy says: in relationships, seek quality, not quantity. One of my favorite recent examples of cohesion is "Tummling" — the art of social engagement. It's a form of moderation pioneered by Heather Gold, Deb Schultz, and Kevin Marks. The Tummler's job, Kevin says, is "setting the tone and establishing the norm," deciding who speaks where and when, summarizing, and synthesizing. The goal of Tummling is to help dialogue happen — and make relationships not merely inflate, but cohere, thicken, blossom, and mature.

Choreography. Most organizations seek "high performance." Today, performance is no longer enough: excelling in yesterday's terms is excelling at the wrong things. This is downright self-destructive (just ask Wall Street). Today's radical innovators aren't merely mute performers, precisely executing the empty steps of a meaningless dance: they're more like choreographers. Choreographers define the steps of a better dance — they lay down better rules for interactions between supply and demand to take place. Yelp's getting its choreography wrong, failing to build a better dialogue between buyers and sellers (instead of just isolated, drive-by "reviews"). Etsy's still on the brink of greatness, pioneering highly productive relationships between buyers and sellers. My favorite example is M-Pesa, which lays down a new choreography for finance: from person to person, instead of bank to bank.

Using the social to "build buzz" and "push product" is about as smart as using a warp drive to visit your local Wal-Mart. Social tools today are used mostly as a new "channel" to push the same old useless stuff of the industrial era at hapless "consumers." That's meaninglessness at it's finest. It's the least productive — and most soul-deadening — use of a formidably powerful tool.

Social media strategy fits inside a marketing (business, corporate) strategy, and is shaped by it. Social strategy fits outside business and corporate strategies, and shapes them. Social strategies are about rewriting the logic of the industrial era entirely, shifting gears in how we think, envisioning a broader, more powerful, more challenging use of social tools. They are about developing the capacity to understand an organization's role in society, and how to play a more constructive one, wielding sociality as a source of advantage — by acting radically more meaningfully than rivals.

Social strategies are about reinventing tomorrow. Their goal is nothing less than changing the DNA of an organization, ecosystem, or industry. Want to get radical? Stop applying 20th century principles ("product," "buzz," "loyalty") to 21st century media. The fundamental change of scale and pace that social tools introduce into human affairs — their great tectonic shift — is the promise of more meaningful work, stuff, and organization. Start with "the meaning is the message" instead.

http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/04/from_social_media_to_social_strategy.html

Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab. He also founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that shaped strategies across media and consumer industries.

Social media 'more widely used than phone'

By Craig Coulson (Wed, 24th March 2010)

Social networking is here and it would appear it's here to stay.

That's because an expert from Dansway Communications and Online Social Media has declared it an essential utility in the lives of Brits and one that is more readily used than the telephone.

It was recently revealed by InSites Consulting that 72 per cent of all internet users - that's 940 million people around the world - are signed up to at least one social network.

Facebook currently leads the way in terms of popularity with 51 per cent of users logging on, while Myspace has 20 per cent of browsers and 17 per cent of web surfers are on Twitter.

In addition, another study that lends weight to this suggestion - this time published by Retrevo - showed that close to 50 per cent of younger social media users check or update their account in bed, throughout the night or first thing in the morning.

So, it looks like Daniel Chubb, chief executive officer at Dansway Communications and Online Social Media, may just be right.

He commented: "Users right now use Facebook and Twitter more times a day than they do the telephone. It is not like this for everyone, but the younger generation certainly cannot live without social media and using Facebook to chat to friends and game together."

He added: "Facebook overshadows all, but niche social media sites are more popular with many users with specific interests."

Could you live without social networking websites?

http://www.broadband-finder.co.uk/news/broadband/social-media-more-widely-used-than-phone_19686476.html

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