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Strategy Comes First: PR Mashup Report

By: Cathy Dunkin | 06/07/2010

Recently I helped lead a breakout session called "PR Mashup: Blending New Media with the Old" at PRSA's Travel and Tourism Conference in Aspen, Colo. I joined colleagues Mike McDougall of Bausch & Lomb and Tom Hoehn of Kodak to describe how organizations can blend new and old media tools to create more successful reputation management plans.

The idea for the presentation came from a conversation at an earlier PRSA conference about how so many communications programs today use only social media tactics and ignore other traditional program components. We agreed it's vital for organizations today to understand and use both new and traditional approaches - but most important of all is to understand that solid strategy must come first.

For our PRSA panel, we wanted to give a high-energy presentation to keep our audience engaged for the last session of the afternoon. So, we gave the audience voting machines to participate in periodic polls and used visual presentation slides incorporating Tweets, YouTube videos and photographs from sample campaigns.

The audience voted on which of our various case studies they wanted to hear first based on titles like, "There's Ash in My Flight Path" (referring to British Airways' multi-faceted strategic response to the volcanic ash incident in Europe) and "Arch Support" (referring to the branding campaign Standing is currently developing for the famous Gateway Arch here in St. Louis).

As panelists, we hoped our two-minute case studies would offer thought-starters, encouraging about 100 attendees to consider their program objectives, do careful research and then develop strategies to include traditional media, social media or a strategic "mashup" to address their own challenges.

Those unable to attend the session at the Travel and Tourism conference will be able to see the encore at the PRSA 2010 International Conference in Washington, D.C., Oct. 16-19.

To get an idea of some of the not-so-stuffy case studies we used for the presentation:

• Watch the video with the rapping flight attendant at The Southwest Airlines blog.
• Read about the campaign to name the new Kodak Video Camera at Kodak: A Thousand Words.
• Discover The Eastman House's spacey April Fool's joke - that fooled both traditional reporters and the social networking world.

Our slides from "PR Mashup: Blending New Media with the Old" can be downloaded as a PDF by clicking here.

Posted in Digital Communications, Public Relations, Reputation Management