Linda VandeVrede - Photo by Adam Nollmeyer, Phoenix Photographer

The following is a guest post from PR Consultant & Author, Linda VandeVrede

On most days I am really fascinated by public relations. There are a few things, however, that always seem to get under my skin and ruin the moment when I come across them. I call them my personal PR pet peeves.

1. Magazine websites with no helpful contact information at all. Women’s consumer magazines are the absolute worst. Many of these publications are based in New York City. Now I’m originally from the East Coast, and I still find their switchboard people incredibly rude.
2. Expensive directories with out-of-date information. These often sell for anywhere from $500 – $1500.  Whether you buy the print or online version, usually the great majority of contact information is completely wrong. You can’t trust them for accuracy. How many times have you called a contact in one of these directories, only to have them completely irritated that they are even listed?
3. People who call press releases a “PR,” as in, “Can you write a PR for me?”  PR means public relations.  It’s a field, not a document. ‘Nuff said.
4. Male executives I overhear saying, “I’ll get my PR girl to do that.” That’s when I want to put my hands on my hips and do my own Foghorn Leghorn impression:  “Boy, I say boy….”
5. Writing copy that has to have an approval list a mile long. Folks, we’re not creating the Magna Carta. The worst approval cycle was at a publicly held company I worked with that, honest-to-goodness, had a review list that included 11 people in two different states and two different timezones. Many times I wouldn’t get the information to write the material announcement until late in the afternoon. Eleven people have 11 different opinions about how copy should be written. Sometimes I think the only thing they didn’t change was the spelling of my name.

I probably have more than five peeves, but for some reason these are the ones that really steam up my reading glasses.

First, I am a contributing author to the newly released book, “The Social Media Bible” which was published by John Wiley and Sons and hit shelves this week.  The author Lon Safko tirelessly interviewed hundreds of the founders of many of the tools you play with today – Twitter, Facebook, and the like.  My pages speak to how public relations ties into social media as a practice and has changed the world of communication.  Amanda Vega Consulting is giving away 5 copies of this almost 900 page reference guide to the first people that do one of three things: enter your email into the news section of the web site, tweet about the book, or post something on Facebook about the book. Please see more about the book, The Social Media Bible, and please go to your local bookstore and pick up a copy today!

Additionally, Amanda Vega and Lon Safko will be speaking along with Steven Groves at an ASBA event on May 19th. Tickets are $125 and will cover your Arizona Small Business Association yearly dues if you are not already a member. Amanda Vega Consulting is giving away 10 tickets to this even to the people that shoot us an email with a quick statement as to why they want to attend. For more information on the event, please see ASBA events web page.

And for the final giveaway, the PR team is offering 5 free copies of “PR in a Jar” to those that tweet about the book/package with a link to the site which is found at PR in a Jar. Please remember, the self-serve public relations package gives you EVERYTHING you need to do your own PR – and only for $1,000.

Amanda Vega Consulting, social media management, public relations and blogging and activities in online media that few agencies understand and can monetize like us.

What initially resonates with me is the sheer simplistic truth of it all. Where most agencies and brands go wrong is that they embark on social media ventures in the same way that they do traditional advertising programs. They assume that social media/social networks are just other avenues to repurpose the same creative and peddle their wares AT people. We all know that this is not the case. Social media outlets and venues are built and supported on the principle of the two-way conversation. You can’t talk AT people. You have to talk WITH them. And if you can’t do that, then you can’t do social media.

So what is a brand to do? Assuredly we have yet to find a client that doesn’t find value in our social media management engagements. We have case studies proving brand recognition increase, traffic increase, sales conversions, and even some off kilter monetization of Twitter “campaigns” of sorts. The key for the agencies and for the brands is to hire a team that DOES socialize naturally. A good social media firm (like ours, of course) works with you to manage conversations – not solely push a one sided agenda.

By nature of those who choose to go into public relations as a profession, they likely will make amazing social media managers as time goes on and training extends. In the meantime, we suggest that PR firms partner with social media experts and zealots (like us with 15 years experience in this stuff) to help you integrate social media into you killer PR plans. And from there, we will all learn to use social media properly, and have a better chance of not screwing up those social interactions at all.

Specifically, really good agencies come out with GENIUS ad campaigns.  They can craft messages and long streams of advertising snippets that take life in various mediums, and sometimes, the very nature of the campaign is so creative and interesting that you have to commend whoever the idea came from in a cocktail laden planning session.  You see this a lot with Crispin Porter – always fabulous.

See, the beauty of a big agency is that they get paid money to do mostly really lame and easy tasks.  But, the 10% creative genius that happens in a good agency is where the payoff can be for a client.  There’s no art in writing a media plan, or really in doing PR, or even general ad campaigns that follow the standards that have been in place forever.  Where the “magic happens” is when you get a creative team that is allowed the luxury of time (based on crazy retainers and really high billable hours the client is paying) to come up with something that would really capture attention.  See this awesome campaign for LG that was just uncovered!

LG Electronics kicked off a $100 million global marketing push with a long-awaited event that promised to be the red-carpet premiere of a TV series by director David Nutter called “Scarlet.” However, the show, which had been previewed in the press and even listed in online movie database IMDB.com, was a promotional hoax designed to focus attention on LG Electronics’ new line of flat-panel TVs.

I was “victim” to their campaign seeing commercial after commercial thinking – “what an odd show, but maybe I’ll Tivo the first one to check it out…”

Genius. 

So kudos to the brand manager, and the “number of agencies” they say they used (who sadly didn’t get any praise from all the press attention – shame on your press..and shame on you Kwan-Sup Lee if you didn’t tell the writer to include them.)

So, I’ll say it again – use ad agencies (good ones) to craft genius stuff – let them spin their wheels and come up with cool ideas that get attention from multiple streams (goodness knows you won’t pay your interactive team to spend time THINKING or CRAFTING) and then let them work with us to help implement these creative streams to even higher success (like, why isn’t LG blogging about this, or posting it on their site and pushing it out into the relevant blogs with trackbacks, etc. – see, there’s where the agencies go really wrong…)

And, let me also offer up a pre-response rebuttal to anyone that uses the “do you know how much spam I get in a day” argument because (a) we get over 200 pieces every 4 hours – which is not uncommon for those of us that are heavily involved in social media and interactive advertising for our clients as we are forced to subscribe and leave our email for thousands of sites and advertisers and the like to do our appropriate job of finding AS MANY outlets to reach their clients/customers as possible, and (b) it really takes like less than a second to scan and see what is spam and what isn’t so how much time are you REALLY losing. Let me also add to those that love to banter back the whole “cost” issue (usually people that really don’t know anything about bandwidth or email server space, and 9 times out of 10 are freemail users who miss the point completely – yes, you AOL, HOTMAIL, and GMAILERS, this means you…) because a media outlet should be already invested in a surplus of backup and space due to heavy inquiry from PR as well as customers. But more importantly…

Here’s the crux. There is a symbiotic relationship between writers/producers and the public relations professionals that is often misunderstood and unappreciated from both sides of the fence. For media professionals that fall outside the “news” category, a large amount of your story ideas and delivery depend on the PR companies feeding you information in form of release, inquiry, or even direct access to the top dogs that you need quoted in your story to make it more impressive. That being said, I would think that part of your very job description and daily task would be to sift through thousands of emails and (for those old schoolers) faxes. So, why then if you get something that isn’t a good fit, do you feel the need to flame the sender? Even more to my point, if you are SO limited in your time, then how did you find time to send a mean email?

The bottom line is that you need us as much as we need you. And, many of you probably don’t know this, but we are also at the mercy of the companies that provide the tools to us. While our agency specifically does the best we can to funnel through every contact and look at their beat and also READ their publication, there are ti

There are so many things to discuss over the coming week with regard to this conference, but a specific highlight of course was finally meeting Chris Heuer, the founder of the Social Media Clubwho truly has grasped not only a vision of social media and it’s impact on business, but more exciting to me personally, the once again realization that this “new media” or “internet world” has completely changed the rules of business, entreprenuership, and the economy.

I was joined by many esteemed panelists including Allan Sabo, Pamela Slim, Max Fose, Celia Blackwood, Kevin Donnellan, and
Ben Gordon.

Last, but not least, Robert Scoble closed out the day with many quips from a blogging fanatic – most importantly, a point that I think many missed but really need to remember is to simply pay attention to your customers. Acknowledge them. Period.

I’ll have more in the coming days to chat about, such as a warning not to dislike ice cream or you may be sued, how companies should see blogs as insurance rather than cost centers, and of course why old schoolers tick me off.