As a certified “old school kinda guy” (my tastes in music, movies, books and on occasion, clothing all hearken back to a better time) it should be no surprise that I am saddened over what’s being described as a slow, painful and inevitable death for the newspaper industry.  I will put aside for the moment that it is in my best interest as a PR professional that there be as many and various types of media outlets for me to pitch as possible.  I simply like the newspaper.  Without waxing too poetic about ink-smudged fingertips and the like -  I really do like rifling through it in the morning.  I like folding it to my tastes.  I like passing an article over to my wife at the table.  I like that my Mom still occasionally cuts out an article in her local paper to mail to me, rather than e-mail it.  I can’t help it – I’m old school.

The issue I have is that living in our present culture and, in particular, being in public relations, I am inevitably using and playing up the electronic resources that are leading to the demise of the newspaper.  It’s a requirement that I continue to be connected via social media – whether it be blogs, online news sources, Facebook or even Google Alerts.  I read my news on the go like everyone else with a smartphone.  And I truly embrace these sources and encourage my clients to do the same.  Does this essentially mean that I’m giving up on the newspaper?  Aside from the intimacy of having the paper in hand at home or during the morning commute, would my life be all that much different if I ditched the paper?

I hope not, as I’m personally not ready to give up on the paper.  I believe newspapers still maintain most (if not all) the best standards of journalism and employ people that still truly care about their stories – whether they’re chasing major national headlines or covering the city council or local high school football.  While there are more than a few instances of the process happening in reverse, it is still far more typical that news flows from the mainstream media/print journalism which then drives blogs and other important online sources (read all about it here).  Content is still king and I maintain that the best producers of unbiased, unfiltered content still write for newspapers.

Again, I truly enjoy and respect the value of social media, but I feel the need to forewarn clients and co-workers not to get too over-committed to all of the ‘new toys’ that these outlets afford us.  The technologists have already come up with the social media tool that’s going to out-do twitter and Facebook and they’re calling the rest of us Neanderthals for not recognizing it.  While we try to find the next new thing, the news agendas will still be set in the newspapers.  They will (hopefully) do the investigating and the real reporting and offer us a source we can generally trust as a reflection of society and our priorities.

Here’s hoping there’s room enough in our collective attention spans for everyone…

I was on the phone recently with a senior reporter from one of my client’s top-tier trade publications, and we were talking about Twitter. It turns out that his publication has a Twitter feed, but the reporter doesn’t have his own account or contribute to the pub’s feed. He claimed that he didn’t know what he’d use it for, but was still a bit intrigued by the communication medium. I saw the opportunity to offer him some information and suggestions outside of the normal thought leadership and company news I would normally pitch, and I promised to write up a list of ways he could use Twitter.

So I sat at my computer , unsure of what to say, and getting increasingly agitated at the unmoving cursor as it blinked away, mocking my inability to come up with the ideas I promised. Eventually, I figured there were a few basic things he could do, like tweet about his articles to drive traffic to them. I mentioned sending out appeals to his PR followers for sources for upcoming stories (I suggested this one rather selfishly – I thought it’d be clever to respond to one of his first tweets with a source). I also suggested he use Twitter to provide sneak peeks to upcoming pieces, and announce new webinars that were scheduled for the pub’s Web site.

And while I feel like my suggestions were helpful, especially for a person who wants to use Twitter but hasn’t before, he still hasn’t signed up and used it. Naturally, being the neurotic PR guy that I am, I worry that what I provided wasn’t creative or specific enough for him to become a full-fledged Twitter-freak like so many other journalists.

So I ask the larger PR community: How can journalists use Twitter to make their jobs easier? What are some of the ways we, as PR and communication professionals, would like the media to use this tool.

A few months ago, an editor I was pitching suddenly stopped replying to my emails after a lengthy back-and-forth exchange. We’d been talking about scheduling an interview with one of Matter’s clients for more than a month, and just as it looked like the interview would happen, she vanished.

After a few unanswered follow-up emails, I picked up the phone and dialed her office number. No answer. I hung up, waited an hour, and tried again. Voicemail. Although I was 99 percent sure she wouldn’t return my call, I left a message anyway.

Twenty minutes later my cell phone rang. It was her. Before I could finish answering, she replied, “You left a voicemail! No one leaves voicemails anymore.”

Confused, and a little scared that I did something wrong, I replied jokingly, “You weren’t returning my emails, so I figured I’d try something different.” She broke into laughter and told me “I get more emails in an hour than I get voicemails in a year.”

We went on to talk for nearly a half hour about the lost art of phone communications, and how email, texting and social media might phase out the phone all together.

Needless to say, we finally scheduled the interview, which resulted in a great article for my client. But more importantly, our conversation taught me the valuable lesson of following up with a phone call and always leaving a message.

Just because email, texting and social media have become a big part of our day-to-day communications, doesn’t mean we should completely abandon methods such as a simple phone call. Try it and you might be suprised at the results.

The New York Times recently caught our eye with a thought-provoking article on the changing role of technology-focused public relations pros. Claire Cain Miller penned an article published July 5 titled, “Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley,” which discussed how public relations gurus are courting influential voices on services like Twitter to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets, perhaps forever altering their roles. We think there will always be a place for traditional media outreach in PR, but it’s definitely an interesting time as new and social media outlets continue to amass larger audiences.

Last week, I was reminded of how much I value in-person meetings. My team and I met with long-standing client Lexar for the purpose of planning our program for the year ahead. While we’ve been working as an extension of Lexar’s dynamite marketing team for some time – and we’ve been informed and aligned throughout the relationship – the opportunity to collaborate first-hand and overcome planning challenges together during a working session was the key to a successful process.

There’s much value in spending time with those who you respect and trust, and who share your charge to succeed. Beyond tactical accomplishments, so much happens when you gather as we did last week. Some anecdotes shared before our meetings began or when they ended may prove to be as valuable as the plan itself, and first-hand exposure to internal clients who we contact less frequently led to more insightful and useful information that can be directly applied to our work.

I’m pleased with last week’s planning process, and reminded that meeting in-person is often a valuable use of time and energy.

When discussing the effectiveness of social media, we always prepare ourselves to answer the ultimate, decision-driving question – “When will we start to see a difference in sales?”

That, of course, is the wrong question to ask. Naturally, the strategy behind the entrance to the social media realm can be customized to influence sales as much as possible.  Promotions and activities can be designed to drive traffic to homepages and online stores – coupons and codes can be awarded that can be brought right into retail locations.  Success in social media, however, can’t be completely summed up in a rise in sales.  To quote Abraham Harrison, “It’s about making the firm overall more marketable to clients, which will end up making the firm as a whole more profitable.”

Brands are commonly and correctly thought of as living entities.  They require planning and constant TLC, and social media provides one of the most visual representations of what it means to have a “living brand.”  Take a moment to visit an active brand’s MySpace or Facebook page or Twitter stream, and you’ll see exactly what I mean – posts, comments, likes / dislikes, contributed photos, re-Tweets – the brand lives through the activity of its fans, followers and customers.  Tending to those fans, followers and customers is an act of brand management, and the more a brand demonstrates its level of caring for its customers’ experiences and opinions, the more publicly favorable the brand will be.

The moral here is “don’t let profits outweigh benefits.”  Social media isn’t a sprint – it’s a marathon, and when given the proper time and attention to develop, the benefits it reaps on behalf of its brand can go much farther than any profits earned by flash-in-the-pan promotions.

Greg Verdino recently blogged about the apparent differences between “earned media” and “earned attention”. The former garners a great deal of coverage on the world wide web, including its own entry on Wikipedia. The latter may as well be a tree falling in the forest when no one’s around. He goes on to explain, in great detail and elaboration, the difference between the two. Earned media is “any effort by which a marketer gains unpaid publicity through either mainstream outlets like television, radio or print, digital outlets like traditional web publishers, or social media outlets like blogs, communities, forums or podcasts.” Meanwhile, earned attention is a far more challenging target. The goal should not be to simply throw your brand into the faces of as many onlookers as possible, but rather to really engage their attention – to give them a voice, and let them be heard. The goal is to award customers that are willing to stop, listen and speak with your own willingness to listen to what’s being said. It requires so much more of the brand, and so much more of the messengers that have been dispatched to sing praises.

Of course, I’m simplifying a much longer and fascinating read, which you can find here.

More and more, we push to use our social platforms to ask consumers the important questions – the dangerous questions – and it is understandable when there is a resistance against putting mass audiences into the position of being able to publicly criticize and ultimately customize a product for themselves. But the fear misses the point – giving consumers the opportunity to express honest feedback, positive or negative, awards them with the relationship they want from the brand. And that is the purpose behind it all. Social media is about being social. It is about developing relationships. And relationships, much like effective communication, are two-way streets.

If you’re juggling multiple Twitter accounts and you’re not using HootSuite yet, your life is way too difficult.

As a busy PR account executive who enjoys a healthy dose of social media each day, I’m currently managing and/or contributing to more than five Twitter accounts. I have one personal account, but, like all of my colleagues, I also chime in on our company account and help Tweet new and interesting news on behalf of a number of our clients. This seems to be a lot of work, but it’s actually a lot easier than it sounds.

That is, of course, if you have a handy-dandy tool like HootSuite. Now, before I go any further, let me be perfectly clear that while I would love a little kickback for this healthy endorsement, there aren’t any checks in the mail. I’ve simply test-driven a couple Twitter tools and I happen to like HootSuite the best. Well, actually, I like HootSuite for Tweeting on multiple accounts and I love Tweetdeck for keeping track of it all. Someday, when someone develops an application that combines both tools’ best features, life will be even easier.

So, what is this glorious, self-proclaimed, “ultimate Twitter toolbox”? It’s an easy-to-use interface that allows you to manage all of your Twitter accounts from one place. You simply enter all of your usernames and passwords, and they are forever stored on your HootSuite account. Then, when you are ready to Tweet, you use a drop-down menu to view those accounts or simply click on the account icon to Tweet from that username.

There’s no logging in and logging out of your various accounts and, if you want to, you can Tweet from several accounts at once. Aside from making it really easy to jump from account to account, there are two other things that I really like about HootSuite: it allows you to schedule Tweets for a later date and its built-in URL shortener, ow.ly, tracks and collects stats based the number of times people click on the links you Tweet.

Rafe Needleman, CNET’s Webware editor, recently did a nice piece about HootSuite and another similar, yet now unavailable, technology called CoTweet. My colleagues and I have had several conversations about what Twitter tools are best and, in general, it often boils down to personal choice. I’d encourage everyone to take a few tools for a spin to determine what works best for you. In the meantime, check out Needleman’s piece here. Happy Tweeting!

I’ve been finding a lot of interesting articles on PCWorld.com lately – today they have a good write-up from Juan Carlos Perez, a writer with IDG News Service that we’ve had the pleasure of working with in the past. Perez takes a look at the latest updates Facebook is making to privacy settings, and also at some of the ways the site is trying to more overtly compete with Twitter. It’s good stuff; definitely worth a quick read.

When I first heard about Twitter, I quickly dismissed it.

In college, my friends and I all religiously updated our “Away messages” on AOL Instant Messenger, providing a constant stream of FYIs to our friends about where we were, what mood we were in, or what we were doing at any given moment. In those days, it was unheard of to simply sign off when you were done chatting, and even if you were going to leave a funny quote or a set of song lyrics, you were still expected to include a quick blurb at the bottom – something to the effect of, “at class ‘til 11:30…then lunch?”

As Facebook came to prominence, Away messages became less important and everyone’s attention turned to status updates. Having a profile without entering a status was like admitting you hadn’t logged on in a few days. It was definitely not cool…and borderline social suicide.

When people started buzzing about Twitter, it was clear that Facebook was continuing to grow and so I (like many others, I suspect) scoffed at the notion that people would want yet another site to update, to tell people what they were doing at that exact moment. I even blogged and commented on articles I read, proclaiming how confused I was that so many people were into this idea. “It’s not exactly an innovative concept,” I thought. “So why are people getting so pumped up about it?”

Today (three years later) I’m an active Twitter user and practically an evangelist for the company. I Tweet in the morning, in the car, before major meetings, after lunch. I Tweet before leaving work in the evening, while I’m watching TV, as I’m headed to bed. I Tweet useless thoughts and musings, interesting links and helpful resources, and I help clients Tweet news updates and coupon offers to their customers.

I’ll openly admit that I only gave the site a second chance because of all the buzz about it in the media, and how much my colleagues and I were hearing about companies using Twitter for marketing purposes. We already considered ourselves pretty savvy in social media, and have continually tried to improve our expertise in the area. Yet for some reason, Twitter still seemed like a stretch. Until we actually gave it an earnest try, that is.

The second time around, I embraced Twitter because I started to see how useful it was to have real-time access to other people’s thoughts on a piece of breaking news or a product or company. The search features seemed to add a lot of value, and helped me find people to follow that were using the site for more than just a stream of “Headed back to work!”-type updates. The more I Tweeted, the more connections I made, and suddenly the site became an easy and important way for me to stay on top of news and nurture relationships with friends, journalists, analysts and fellow practitioners. There was something to this after all!

This week alone, Twitter’s helped me to do my job better in two different ways that I can think of.

In one case, I secured an interview with a national business publication for one of my clients, simply because I saw that the reporter had Tweeted about a meeting he had with someone else, and so I had insight on what topic he was interested in right now and could connect him with another expert on the subject. Sure, it’s the same concept as researching a reporter or editor before pitching them – but the fact that it happened in real-time made it that much more powerful.

A day later, I was searching for interesting links and discovered a user who was affiliated with an organization I’d never heard of, but was very relevant to another client. Clicking over to their website, it was immediately apparent that this association was someone my team should definitely keep on our radar, because it provided a huge stable of industry statistics that support many of the themes we pitch to trade media on a daily basis.

As time goes on, Twitter is an increasingly important tool for me – and I know each and every one of my colleagues has stories like those…despite the fact that many of us were resistant to the site three years ago. It seems like many of the tools we read about aren’t that useful when we first hear about them, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be in the long run.