So, in recent discussions I’ve tried finding new ways to discuss roles and responsibilities within an Agency PR team.  Like any organizational chart, when you really break it down, the best way to provide an overview of the team is to look at it like a mob family.  C’mon – go with me on this.  Believe it or not, this is not meant to be a negative connotation. (For any snickering readers, no, it’s not because PR pros are unrelenting or extortionists.)  Much like the mob, Agency teams can grow very protective of their members and work together to benefit the overall “family.”

Here are some thoughts on how it all breaks down:

VP/Director: The Don

Much like a Don, the head of the team should be setting direction, winning new business, setting up new alliances/networks and of course being the one to “drop the hammer” when necessary.  However, this person is not expected to get their hands dirty in the day-to-day work of an account (pitching, database work, etc.) As leader of the Family, this is the person that will provide overall guidance to the team with respect to its growth and the career paths of its members.

AM/SAM: The Capo

The fabled “underboss.”  As the next in line, Account Managers and Senior Account Managers act as the voice and enforcement of “the Don.”  These are the people that put into motion the activities set from above.  These are the ones junior staffers should be directing questions to and receiving daily assignments from.  Much like how Don Corleone wouldn’t remind his bookies that they need to collect, the VP shouldn’t be the one sending reminders for competitive tracking or database work.  (**As a note, this isn’t to say there aren’t hands-on VPs or that this position is unapproachable in any way)

The Capos are also the names that clients view as their “go-to’s” for questions and status updates on account projects.

SAE/AE/AC: Foot soldiers or “Button men”

These are the PR “feet on the street” enforcers.  In most cases these are the hard working boys and girls uncovering editorial, speaking & award opportunities for their clients.  These are the button men, the smile & dial-ers and the pros feared and loved by those they call.  This is a fun place to be in as it provides a lot of opportunity to grow and try new opportunities.  However, this can often be one of the scariest as you put yourself in “the line of fire” for rejection, rebuttal, etc.

Interns: “Newsies” or local street kids

We can’t forget to give credit to the interns.  In any agency there is always an intern or two helping out throughout the office.  In any mob movie you notice there is always some local kid that they trust to run numbers, deliver packages and send messages.  These kids are in training for future membership in the family.  Although they may not realize it, their tasks add up to major contributions as it frees up the soldiers to do other tasks.  Interns take on that same task, working hard on a project that may not seem huge in the micro, but will play a much larger role in the macro.

And, what about the owners or Principals you may be asking? Well, there is always a Boss of Bosses somewhere.  Bada Bing.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a PR pro.

By Amanda Guisbond, (@agbond)

This past Thursday, July 22, the Boston office of SHIFT Communications (@SHIFTComm) held an in-office happy hour and salsa (and dip) competition. SHIFTers came out in full force with an array of inspiring salsas, dips and chips, including pineapple salsa, avocado and cucumber dip, HOT pineapple ginger salsa, southwestern style hummus, and BBQ chicken dip.

In true SHIFT style, awards were handed out to the most ambitious chefs. Christina Feeney (@CFeeney) took home the “Should Be on a Menu” title for her grilled pineapple and mango salsa; Mike Fearon (@mdfearon) won “Spiciest” salsa for his flaming hot pineapple ginger salsa, and Ciri Haugh (@chaugh) won for “Best Overall” for her guacamole.

Thankfully, Ciri was kind enough to share her talents with the Slice team – here is a recipe for the winning guacamole in case you’d like to bring some to your own Showdown.

Ciri’s “Championship” Guacamole
Ingredients:

3 Ripe Haas Avocados
2 Jalapenos
½ Red Onion
2 Roma Tomatoes
1 Clove of Garlic
Salt
Pepper
Lime juice
Fresh Cilantro

Instructions:

Half, peel and seed avocados then mash them into a bowl. Dice jalapenos, red onion, roma tomatoes, cilantro and garlic and mix with avocados. Add salt, pepper, lime juice to taste. Note: Don’t prepare the guacamole until right before serving it (Abby learned this the hard way – sorry, Abby). Avocados oxygenate and will turn brown if left out too long.

Any suggestions for the next in-office happy hour? In addition to salsa and dips, the Boston office has held a cookie bake-off in past. Other ideas??

Check out what SHIFTers were talking about around the watercooler (or “bubbler” as some in our Boston office might say) this week:

Mary S (@marys213) was reading about Wal-Mart’s plans to roll out an electronic ID tag system in order to track clothing and ensure better inventory controls.

Danielle M (@dmancano) really wants the hanging faux fireplace on DailyGrommet.com, a SHIFT client.

Katie D (@kdespres) was reading “Facebook hits 500 million users,” courtesy of Julianne Pepitone (@julpepitone) of CNNmoney.com.

Lauren G (@lgainor) was referred to a new study showing that Americans are moodiest on Thursdays and happiest on Sundays.

Andrew W (@LetsPercolate) was captivated by the Economist article on why some major media brands (including the Beatles and Harry Potter) have yet to embrace digital.

Britt R (@brAb27) is currently submitting a tip to The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur on how businesses can reduce their carbon footprint.

Amanda G (@agbond) was memorizing line items from the New York Times version of the watercooler, “The 10 Things to Talk About This Weekend.”

Last year, a little tweet told me that the Boston Derby Dames were holding their opening bout of the 2009 season. Being a lifelong supporter of local athletics, teamwork, puns, colorful uniforms and the Shriners, I was immediately drawn to attend my first event.

It was love at first jam. When you attend a live bout, the passion and camaraderie that the women display is obvious and contagious. You can’t help but want to get involved or tell a friend. Thanks to that fateful tweet and a good show by our local squad, I’ve been telling everyone and taking friends to bouts as often as possible.

It didn’t take squads across the country long to realize that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and team websites were the best forums to extend derby devotion outside of the track. Today, I was lucky enough to interview one of the best examples of Roller Derby social media success, Lauren Bishop a.k.a. Miss Print of the Cincinnati Rollergirls and blogger for the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Roller Derby Diva. You can follow Lauren on Twitter @MissPrint95.

In the below Q&A, Miss Print provides great advice for maintaining a social presence, dishes on the Rollergirls’ Facebook strategy, gives props to MySpace, offers blogging tips and hints at the possibility of an OchoCinco/Ouchocinco YouTube showdown.

Twitter was the first place I heard about the “second coming” of roller derby – how important has social media been to creating awareness about the sport?

Roller derby has been called the fastest-growing sport in the country, and it’s largely due to the Internet and social media. Not many people watched the short-lived A&E series “Rollergirls” in early 2006, but it seems like everyone who did went on to become involved in roller derby in some way. People went online to find out more about it, and just about every team that was around back then had a MySpace page because it was quicker and easier to start up than a web site, and free. People started sharing information through MySpace, Yahoo groups and e-mail about how to start up a team, how to play and how to promote themselves. Now, Twitter and Facebook have introduced a whole new set of fans to the sport.

The Rollergirls have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace – not to mention individual blogs on cincinnatirollergirls.com. How many people does it take to manage your social media efforts? How many players participate and how much time a week do you think is spent on connecting with fans across these outlets? Do you feel like fans respond more on one format than another? Is MySpace a lost cause?

I’m the main person managing our Facebook and Twitter pages, but I have help from a few other people, especially on game days, when I’m usually busy skating. That’s critically important: Because the mainstream media doesn’t cover our games on a regular basis, much less as they’re actually happening, our fans rely on Facebook and Twitter to get score updates and other news – and we know that many fans are checking our Facebook and Twitter pages from their mobile devices even when they’re at the game. Our website is primarily maintained by one of our refs, Jennemy of the Skate, who designed it, but I also help to edit and post content, which is contributed by many different people. We try to send fans from Twitter and Facebook to our website as much as we can, but most fans seem to find it easier to interact with us on Facebook. I check the page multiple times a day and try to respond to comments and questions as soon as I see them. Another skater manages our MySpace page, which is seeing less and less traffic these days. We still want to keep our presence there because we want to be anywhere that a fan could potentially find us, but we don’t spend a lot of time on it. Unless you’re a band, I don’t think MySpace needs to be a big part of your social media strategy.

The Rollergirls have a very impressive 7,474 Facebook “Likes.” What’s the best advice you can give to someone looking to build a presence on Facebook? What are some of the promotions that have been most successful for attracting Facebook fans? Does the team have any preferred tools for tracking fan engagement/behavior?

My advice for someone looking to build a presence on Facebook is very simple: Create a Facebook ad. We had about 2,000 fans at the beginning of this year, and then one of our announcers, Caesar, suggested that we start running an ad before our season opener. We used an eye-catching photo of one of our star skaters and some very basic text: “Cincinnati’s all-female roller derby team returns to the Cincinnati Gardens for its fifth season, March 27 to June 19!” We targeted it very broadly, so it would potentially show up on the page of any Facebook user within a 50-mile radius of Cincinnati. We didn’t want to target the ad so it would show up only on the pages of only certain users – say, people between the ages of 25 and 34 who list extreme sports as an interest – because we want every kind of fan. We set a modest budget of $10 per day, which paid for up to 40 daily clicks on the ad, and got more than 1,000 new fans in less than a week. More than 3,200 people came to our March season opener, our biggest turnout to date. I don’t think that can be attributed entirely to our increased presence on Facebook – we did many other promotions too, including appearances at big events around town – but it definitely helped.

I check Facebook Insights occasionally for tracking, but I don’t over-analyze it. My advice for anyone maintaining a fan page: Try to post at least one update every day, but no more than three a day, and spread them out throughout the day, so you don’t annoy your fans by flooding their news feeds. (The only exception to that rule is game days, when you should be giving occasional score updates.) Occasionally throw out questions to your fans and ask for feedback to further engage them. And always respond to fans’ comments and questions as quickly as possible.

The team has produced some really great ads that are up on its YouTube page – what’s the feedback been like?

The feedback has been fantastic. We were extremely fortunate to have a local start-up production company called Plum St. Productions approach us this season and ask if they could produce ads and documentary-style Web vignettes for us. They were already Cincinnati Rollergirls fans, and saw a partnership as a great cross-promotional opportunity. The ads and vignettes have received more than 18,000 views on the Cincinnati Rollergirls YouTube channel from our fans and likely other skaters and teams – we’re all constantly looking for ideas on how to promote ourselves (and scope out the competition).

Roller Derby Diva has been on the Cincinnati Enquirer for over four years – was it a tough sell to your editors? We have a lot of aspiring bloggers at SHIFT – as a person that’s blogged for over four years, got any advice for our fresh-faced writers looking to make a splash in the blogosphere?

It was a surprisingly easy sell. This was in an era at the Cincinnati Enquirer when the editors wanted just about every reporter to have a blog, so they asked me to start a pop culture blog. I struggled with it because I simply didn’t have the time to post on it daily, and I thought it was impossible to compete with more well-known blogs.  But when I got involved with the Cincinnati Rollergirls, I saw that as an opportunity to blog about something that almost no one else was blogging about, and definitely not from the perspective of a newspaper reporter-slash-rollergirl. The fact that my blog was part of the Enquirer’s website gave it some credibility (though, naturally, there were some disparaging comments from readers who didn’t understand why the Enquirer would waste precious web space on such a frivolous topic) and I became well-known in the derby world fairly quickly. It’s had some surprising effects: An ESPN producer found my blog in 2008 when he was researching a piece on roller derby, and I ended up narrating and appearing in the piece, “Roller Derby Revival,” which first aired on SportsCenter in May 2008.

There aren’t many things that someone isn’t already blogging about, but it’s still possible to make a splash in the blogosphere. The key is to find a fresh angle on a topic, post regularly, occasionally surprise your readers and above all, be honest. I just blogged about not making a roster, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write. I didn’t write it to fish for compliments or comforting words; I wrote it as a way to sort through my own feelings, and to help other skaters who might be struggling with the same issues that I am. If your readers can relate to you, they’ll keep coming back.

Amen. I’d love to hear your feedback on this interview. If you like sports and social media, you’ll appreciate what teams are doing to engage with fans after the last jam is called. Hopefully, this will urge you to like or follow your local squad and maybe even attend a bout. I now leave you with this link to the World Famous Rollergirl Name Generator. Check it out and leave the results in your comments. Thanks for reading!

Recently (Friday, July 9) I took the opportunity to attend Social Media Breakfast (SMB) #18: Content Creation in the New Age of Search and Engagement, held in Watertown, Mass. Three presenters discussed what they believe are the new trends in content “creation” and “curation” – Pawan Deshpande, CEO of HiveFire, Robert Davis, SVP, Digital Marketing at PJA, and Andrew Davis, chief strategy officer at TippingPoint Labs.

Having attended SMBs in the past, I was ready to take notes – lots of good ideas come out of the sessions, and many are immediately relevant to the work we do at SHIFT, and in the greater PR world. For example, I was looking to get some fresh ideas on how to build out content on a client’s blog. Following are my “curated” notes or key takeaways from the event (which boasted an impressive turnout, despite the summer heat):

1) Great content is the key to traffic to your website/blog/group, etc. – not SEO

2) Content brand aggregators are a great way to find out what kind of content will be relevant to your audience – Andrew Davis defined content brand aggregators as “human-edited, trusted sources of a consistent quality and volume” otherwise known as Yelp, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, etc. For example, if you’re a small business with say, a focus on organic products, you might want to investigate how prospective customers find information about organic foods, including reviews/references and recipes, via some of these aggregators. This will help determine what kind of content attracts your customers and how that can be used to develop original content for your brand.

3) There are already several content “curators” out there today – social curators (Diggit, Reddit), machine curators (Google News) and editorial curators (FierceMarkets was a great example from Deshpande of an online media outlet that picks and chooses relevant news and then repurposes it with links to the original stories). Brands, too, can curate what’s relevant in the industry to them, organize it into repurposed/original content, and share it via all of their external channels – kind of like a super savvy strainer.

4) If your intended content or key message is not already out there being discussed, look for opportunities to “build bridges” using “today” terms and topics that already drive search results, page views, etc. Robert Davis gave the example of “cloud computing,” a “today” buzz term that one of his clients was blogging about as a bridge to discussing its target “tomorrow” term of “workload data management.”

5) Content is not just what you put in a blog – it’s what you put into every extension of your brand! This wasn’t discussed by the presenters, but was something I was thinking about as Andrew Davis gave his presentation using Prezi, a really, neat software that I hadn’t seen before (refer to SHIFTer Mikinzie Stuart’s great post on Prezi to learn more!). His ability to give a stand-out presentation (and make people laugh) made you think, wow, he’s a sharp guy, TippingPoint Labs must know what they’re doing. Putting the extra oomph in a presentation to a room of 50 people at SMB 18 was, for me, an example of taking great content wherever you go.

For me, SMBs always end with a desire to go online and check out some of the cool companies/brands that were mentioned during the presentations. Thus, I present Link Love:

• Kosmix – Search engine that aggregates different kinds of results – video, news, reviews, pictures, etc. – and not just web links.
• Duck Duck Go – Another search engine that will ask you up front whether you meant wooden “doors” or “The Doors” the band and tell you how it came to those different conclusions.
• 5min.com – Instructional, “how to” video content, all under 5 minutes – sorry, Lebron.

What is Prezi? The best way to answer this is what it is NOT: Prezi is not just another lame Powerpoint presentation. The Prezi administrators use the analogy “sketches on a digital napkin.” In my own words, Prezi is “presentation-making on steroids.”

Not quite sure how Prezi differs from other presentation tools? Check out a snapshot of the features it offers for creating and sharing presentations:

• Bubble menu
• Write text
• Use frames
• Insert arrows/lines/markers
• Insert web links
• Move, scale and rotate with the transformation zebra
• Copy and paste
• Undo and redo
• Change fonts and colors
• Insert images, video, sound, files, pdf, powerpoint, excel, flash files, complex graphics, youtube videos,
• Smart zooming
  • finds the best possible view for that specific object: it will bring the object fully into view, center it, and rotate the view to match the rotation of the object.
  • Option of autoplay with timed intervals or one move per click
  • invite others to collaborate online
  • Create online on internet browser ( e.g. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari) without the need to install anything.
  • Create offline with Prezi desktop application if Pro license
  • Use online or offline
    • Play presentation from the web or download and play from your computer
    • Able to use keyboard shortcuts

Pros – Prezi is visually interesting and appealing – very different from the typical PowerPoint presentation. One large Web canvas and no slides enable more creativity and give the ability to present your thoughts in a more natural manner. You can present from a browser or desktop (w/o internet). Not sure where to start? There are lots of tutorials available, a free trial and low costs. There is also a great help center and customer service.  Best yet? Prezi is on Twitter and actually engages.

Cons – Users actually have to read and watch the tutorials to figure it out. I’m not going to lie – it takes practice to efficiently use the transformation zebra and make pathways. So it can be somewhat time consuming depending on how comfortable you are using it. And be careful – there’s no spell check (yet).

Price: You can sign up for free 30-day trial of a Prezi Enjoy or Prezi Pro account. Your credit card will not be charged until this period expires.  You can also download and try out the Desktop Editor free for 30 days using every account.

So how could SHIFT and other PR pros use Prezi? Client pitches and presentations, sketch ideas during brainstorms and make into a coherent presentation afterwards, create presentations for a client’s campaign, Facebook page and website design, etc.

I used Prezi for an in-class presentation I gave last year while attending Ferris State University. Using Prezi got the audience engaged by giving me the ability to integrate offline examples and games into the presentation. The visual dynamic of using Prezi for my presentation also made it easier to make an otherwise boring topic (chapter overviews about writing, editing and proper grammar) more interesting and easier to interject humor when appropriate.

All in all, Prezi has a lot of potential to be a useful tool for any communication professionals. Although it does take time and practice to learn how to use it, it is worth the time investment to capitalize on our creativity and stand out from the crowd.

I give Prezi 4 out of 5 slices (because no spell check, want more options for themes/ symbols, etc, slight difficulty with usability)

Play with it! http://www.prezi.com

Yesterday morning, I joined our client, Mobclix, as they passed out dozens upon dozens of Krispy Kreme donuts to the incredibly long lines of Apple fans waiting eagerly for the iPhone 4. It started at an ungodly hour and it was cold (what can I say, it was a typical San Francisco summer day), but you could see and feel the excitement in the air. Don’t believe me? Just check out our footage of the lines, which basically wrapped around the entire block, to see for yourself:  

The Opportunity & The Tactic: Given the sheer volume of buzz and press coverage that iPhone day gets each year, SHIFT advised the Mobclix executive team to be on-site at SF’s Flagship Apple Store at the crack of dawn to serve a resource for press. 

The Result: By being at the right place at the right time, the team scored an interview with CNBC! 

[Mobclix co-founder, Krishna Subramanian, speaks to CNBC]

By Kimberly Moniz (@kimmiekm)

Hosting a contest on Facebook seems like a great way to engage fans and attract lots of new people to your brand’s Page. In Facebook’s early days, we saw contests cropping up all the time, but at the end of last year, the folks at Facebook created contest guidelines that have made hosting promotions a tricky business. You can sift through the entire promotions guide online here, but these are some of the most important and relevant rules for brands:

Administering the Contest:

• You are only allowed to host a contest as an application – on the canvas page of an application or on an application box in a tab on a Fan Page. A canvas page is the main page of the application that the user sees each time they click on your app.

• You cannot notify winners through Facebook, such as through Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles or Pages.
• You cannot condition entry to the contest upon taking any action on Facebook – for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page or uploading a photo.
• But, you may condition entry to the promotion upon becoming a fan of a Page.

Promoting the Contest:

• You can never directly or indirectly indicate that Facebook is a sponsor of the promotion or mention Facebook in any way in the rules or materials relating to the promotion.

General Contest Rules:

• The promotion must comply with all federal and state laws and industry rules.
• The contest cannot be marketed to people under the age of 18 and you can’t be promoting alcohol, tobacco, firearms, gambling or gasoline. Yes, you read that correctly, gasoline.

If you read the rules in their entirety you’ll see that many of the guidelines can be avoided if you host your contest through a third party application. For instance, one of the rules is that seven days prior to the promotion’s start date, you must submit contest details to your account representative. Account representatives are only assigned to those who spend $10,000 per month on Facebook advertising. But, if you run your contest on a third party application, this rule doesn’t apply.

A third party application is a program written to work within Facebook, but it is developed by a company or person not affiliated with Facebook. So if you host your contest on a third party application (like Wildfire) and use Facebook Connect, you can get around this rule.

There has definitely been some buzz around Facebook contests and the excessive guidelines.  What do you think – are the rules too complicated and limiting to make hosting a promotion on Facebook worth it?  Or are the rules workable and necessary now that Facebook has grown?

Hometown
Newport Beach, CA

Where did you go to college?
UCSB

How long have you worked at SHIFT?
1.5 years

Use four words to describe yourself
Goofy, Intelligent, Cheerful, Easy-going

What made you enter the PR industry?
Chance. I started as an intern after college not really knowing what I was getting myself into, but I’ve never looked back!

When you Google yourself, what’s the first thing that pops up?
LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles. And, unfortunately, this random Facebook group my friend made as a joke four years ago called, “People Who Think Casey Ibbetson Needs To Change Her Picture.”

What blogs or Web sites do you ready everyday?
Yahoo! Shine (mostly to check my horoscope), eMarketer and Today Show site

What do you feel is your greatest personal success in PR thus far?
I’d have to say it was when I brought my manager to tears – happy tears of course! It was the best pat on the back I’ve ever received and the best motivation to keep working hard!

If there was a cocktail created just for you, what would you name it?
Chief Jungle Waterfall

Tell us something unexpected/surprising about you
I speak Spanish and am left-handed

If you are a Gmail user, and honestly, who isn’t one today, chances are you’ve checked out Google Buzz at least once. This latest offering from Google definitely attracted attention, partly because of its initial privacy goof up—it automatically followed people you e-mailed^*—partly because it was hailed as the next Twitter/Facebook, and partly because, well, it’s Google we’re talking about here.

At the very outset, let me say that it’s definitely NOT the next Twitter or Facebook or whatever else is hot out there. It is, however, comparable to Friendfeed, another network whose utility always seemed extremely restricted to me. Buzz, like Friendfeed, is basically an aggregator. You can link your presence on other networks to it, and everything that you feed into them will show up in your Buzz feed, in addition to what you post on Buzz itself. What does that mean? It means you get a whole lot of noise and very little signal. 90 percent of what I see on my Buzz feed, I’ve already checked out on Gtalk, Google Reader and Twitter.

Google, as part of its master plan to take over the world, was obviously trying to compete with Twitter here – and it failed. The motivations of people on Twitter are entirely different from those of a Buzz user’s: building new relationships/sharing information (Twitter) vs. sharing information with existing contacts (Buzz). Having said that, it does win over Twitter in one way: the commenting feature, which it borrowed from–wait for it– Facebook. You can have sequenced conversations on Buzz, a breeze compared to the scattered @mentions on Twitter.

So what relevance does this have for PR people? Minimal, if any. For one, it’s more personal than professional. It’s an extension of your inbox and if your client contact or reporter doesn’t have Gmail, then you’re pretty much stranded. But if they do, and that’s a big if, you have a real chance of getting to know them better and building a relationship that may have taken you far longer otherwise. This is assuming that they like Buzz and share freely on it, have not blocked you from following them since they want it to be their “personal” space and lastly, that they have linked to other websites allowing you to get to know them better.

The only business application I can think of for Buzz, and one that actually has potential, is to use it as a sort of an internal company network where employees can share, chat and comment on each other’s status messages. Drawback: it’s not an official network, you can’t monitor it, you can’t tell if you’re blocked and it might be too personal to be taken professionally.

Buzz wanted to be Twitter, but ended up being a Facebook/Friendfeed mashup and if you’re using it on the phone, well then, it’s kind of like Foursquare, thanks to its location reporting feature. In short, this has to be the most plagiarized social networking tools ever.

Recommendation: It’s not worth the effort, so I’d rate this 2 out of 5 slices.

*Note: Google fixed that soon enough. This week, they also launched a screen which prompts you to okay your settings before you start using it- in response to all the privacy-hyper criticism.