Believe it or not, but holiday planning begins long before the temperatures start to drop and the turkey is on the table. In the PR world, holiday planning begins months in advance, often as early as the summer and spring months.

Today, I’m sending out dozens of holiday packages filled with my clients’ product samples. The power of touch can be extremely powerful, especially when if you’re looking to get your client into a holiday gift-guide.

If you’re planning to send out holiday mailers this season, here are a few tips to ensure you’ll get the most out of every shipped package:

• Know your targets – do your research ahead of time to make sure that each recipient is the right fit for your clients’ brand or product
• Plan ahead – if you know that who your targeting writes their gift-guide in late November, make sure they receive their samples ahead of time so that they have plenty of time to review and / or compare to other products
• Stay in touch – your mailer shouldn’t end with the package delivery. Following-up with your target is crucial to ensuring coverage for your client. This will help the writer with any questions that he or she may have

These are just a few tips to help you plan your holiday mailing. What has proved successful for you or your clients?

My college roommate, Monya, had two particularly enviable traits: an indelible eye for whatever nightlife spots/new designers/under-the-radar bands/dining options were cool and the ability to talk to – and become  fast friends with – anyone. Even in an otherwise anonymous, large university, Monya couldn’t strut two steps without running into someone she knew by name, complete with colorful back story on how or why they met. People constantly sought her out for recommendations on everything from what parties to attend that weekend to which professor to avoid when filling out classes schedules. In short, she was a natural born social influencer. I’d post a back-in-the-day photo of us here, but that would A.) mean finding a scanner (pre-Facebook) and B.) reveal an unfortunate, late 90′s proclivity to long hair.

While I’d agree that you can improve your own social skills by learning how to make better small-to-medium talk and putting yourself into varied settings for practice, you can’t teach someone to be a social influencer. People like Monya are born that way - possessing a rare combination of charisma and genuine interest in the people around them – and they have tremendous power to sway their social circles.

Tastemakers with large networks don’t just walk our college campuses, they’re everywhere – especially online. Bloggers, Twitterati superstars and Facebook fiends (and those who are all of the above) affect consumer preferences whether it be on the most reliable diaper or the best cloud service for SMBs.

At Matter, we’ve recognized how the “Monyas” have gone digital and are wielding their influence throughout the social space. To harness the power of these individuals, we’ve created what we call a TIP (Targeted Influencer Program) offering for our clients. TIP is a formalized way to strengthen relationships with those key people who shape buying decisions of their readers, followers and friends. Of course, these programs are customized to each client and depend on a thorough research and measurement process to identify the players in our clients’ spaces and quantify the impact of their social sway both before and during a TIP campaign.

We’ve seen great success for consumer and technology clients already, from positive shifts in overall conversation about their brands across social platforms to changing perceptions of individual influencers, and, if I can use another college reference/term, we’re psyched to help more brands do the same.

Sourced from The New York Times online, "The Elusive Big Idea," by Neal Gabler

Last week I read an article in The New York Times called, “The Elusive Big Idea.”

It scared the crap out of me.

We’re living in a time when information is fast, efficient, neatly-packaged & delivered— suspended in a magical (and convenient!) web of ether just waiting to be accessed.

…But how much of it are we actually processing?

As a new PR professional, I’ve noticed a change in my way of thinking. While I was in school, I took home books or articles, read them at a steady pace, underlined, revisited— and mulled, if you will. Most of the time, I would then sit down and start writing in order to develop and lengthen these study-lounge musings.

I find there to be much less time these days to study and mull. I’m submerged in the deep end of the information pool where quick facts, stats, industry news headlines, blurbs, and witty one-liners leave me drenched. Keeping the best interest of my clients’ business in mind, I pay attention to a much different, and much wider range of topics now than before. Relevant information is quickly bouncing back and forth between status updates, twitter handles, and blog posts. Web addresses aren’t even written in full anymore— our short messages are shortened further by bit.ly’s and tinyURL’s, even embedded behind # and @ signs.  It’s enough to make my head spin. I’ve learned, though, that scanning alone does not produce the best results.

As Gabler writes in his NYT piece,

“In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world, but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.”

Does this new trend of “apprehension” truly make us more informed? Smarter? I’m inclined to say no, that it only gives us the ability to move more quickly —finish the lap— call out a message first in order to win the recognition of passing the baton. We can certainly find the answer to just about any question online, but we need to remember to reflect on what we know first. The relevancy, context, and reliability of what we find must then be considered, as well as how we plan to use our new information sensibly.

Getting a bit more philosophical, can you say that you’ve thought through your own worldview, end to end, amidst the blur of contradicting information that’s available to us? If there was a line drawn across a particular ideal you’ve lived by, would you be able to confidently stand on one side armed with sturdy reasoning, or are you positioned a bit more shakily (and perhaps more safely) in the gray middle area? Have you thought through any one thing so thoroughly that you could ignite a fiery debate, and still stand unburned on your own turf?

As intellectual people with such amazing innate potential, I hope we can all say yes.

“We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.”

Isn’t it strange to consider that this overload of information, be it significant or trivial, has actually occupied space in our minds meant for new ideas?

For the maintenance of my own sanity, I need to set aside some time to step away, process, think, and comprehend. This is the key to generating innovative ideas! There comes a point when in order to be a good PR pro (or person of real substance, for that matter), we may need to disconnect in order to reconnect to our own thought process.

My favorite blog isn’t a newspaper site. It’s a blog by a lobster dealer who started working on the docks when he was 9 years old. Good Morning Gloucester gives a daily snapshot of life in Gloucester, Mass., the nation’s oldest fishing harbor. It’s hugely popular, with 22,000 to 30,000 page views per day.

The main reason Good Morning Gloucester connects with readers around the world is because it’s so real. The language is how real people talk and the people on the blog come across as real, likable people with interesting stories. There are lessons there for those of us who communicate for a living. Use simple, clear language. Be likable. Tell a good story.

My friend Joey Ciaramitaro is the lobster dealer behind Good Morning Gloucester. We interviewed him for ideas on ways to engage readers, build an audience and create, as he would say, “a blog that doesn’t suck.” Here are his tips.

What do you think? Which tips did we miss?

Sometimes we come across those clients who are only interested in receiving coverage in national print publications and are reluctant to see the value in online coverage. Because social media has become integrated in everyday public relations in such a major way, we PR professionals must help our clients see the impact of online coverage and social media mentions, in addition to the benefits of secured print coverage. I recently shared an interesting article from the New York Times discussing the powerful impact mom bloggers have on the social media space with two of my clients.

The article, “Harnessing the Power of the Mom Blogger,” discusses how the mother blogger niche is active, loyal and deeply involved with spreading brand messages through different mediums.  It also stresses the importance of starting conversations with users and to engage users on social media, rather than pushing out a generic brand message.  

The impacts of a brand discussed on these mom blogger sites and on their social media outlets vary from customer retention, and trust to brand recognition and lead generation. Once your client is able to see the benefits of working with these bloggers, you can work to build your relationships with a group of loyal, enthusiastic, mom bloggers.

Do your clients appreciate the power of the Mom Blogger?

During the past few years buzz has been building around the idea of hyperlocal journalism and the PR industry has followed suit, seeking out ways to pitch these outlets. The execution of hyperlocal coverage varies slightly by outlet, but in general it appears to be a mix of user-generated and professional edited content. Media watchers, including those of us in the PR game, are waiting to see which services will emerge as the strongest – with the biggest backing to hire staff and / or with the largest readership and / or commanding the biggest ad revenue.

The Columbia Journalism Review this past fall noted in a lengthy piece on the reconstruction of American journalism that, “Reporting is becoming more participatory and collaborative.” Indeed, USA Today publisher Gannett recently announced plans for hyperlocal sites in 10 markets across the U.S. while it’s been reported that AOL will pour $50 million into Patch this year. Even YouTube is throwing its hat into the ring, last month launching its test CitizenTube news feed.

Locally, in Massachusetts, GateHouse Media has been ramping up its WickedLocal.com site during the past several years to be a “portal” site representing featured content from 158 individual community websites.

Advertising Age recently detailed some of the bigger players on the hyperlocal scene:

The big story about the news business these days, as a matter of fact, revolves around companies that generate news and information using big networks of cheap freelancers. They include Associated Content, which Yahoo bought last month for about $100 million; Demand Media, which is reportedly considering going public this summer; Seed, where writers, photographers and others can submit their content for publication on AOL; and Examiner.com, which says it has 40,000 freelance “Examiners.”

They’ve already got big traction with readers. Examiner’s sites got more than 14.4 million visitors in May, according to ComScore — more than the 14 million people who visited all the McClatchy newspaper sites combined, or the 13.4 million people who visited MediaNews sites, or the 12 million who visited Hearst newspaper sites.

AOL and Yahoo have separately been staffing up their original blogs and news sections; Yahoo is currently advertising for a blog editor for Yahoo Finance, who will report original stories plus hire a team of bloggers. And sites that aggregate local content are also mixing things up. Last year MSNBC.com acquired EveryBlock, giving it a new ability to horn in on newspapers’ role as local information centers.

Newspapers have, meanwhile, been cutting reporters, thinning the distinction between their products and those of their rivals.

However, even The Gray Lady has stumbled in its foray into the hyperlocal market. The New York Times just last week shuttered its hyperlocal and collaborative journalism experiment called, appropriately, The Local, and hooked up with the New Jersey-based Baristanet.com which now has free reign to link to The Local archives.

As PR professionals we should all be on the look-out to make sure any articles we submit or post are transparent in their origin and clear in their objective. While sites such as these or Allvoices.com, NowPublic.com or Helium make it easier than ever for PR pros to submit news and feature stories we’ve still got to rely on some of our tried-and-true pitching strategies: know who we are pitching and make the info clear and relevant for their readers. In Matter’s own backyard, The Cape Cod Times recently cautioned readers of hyperlocal sites to look closely at and consider the source of their news. Newsroom ombudsman Jayne M. Iafrate wrote, “Citizen journalists are reporters and editors with little, if any, professional journalism training who write and publish news. Many practitioners have a specific point of view they wish to promote; others mean well, but fall short of professional ethics and standards simply because they lack training. And other citizen journalists flourish because they provide unvarnished glimpses into their worlds — places and ideas left unexplored by or unavailable to trained journalists.”

Have you been pitching hyperlocal or user-generated sites? What tips would you share with other PR pros for dealing with this new breed of media?

Peter Shankman makes all the right moves.

The guy is brilliant and, if you’re in PR, you can’t help but know that he has a cat named Karma and, when he’s not jumping from an insane altitude, he’s training for an Ironman. Oh, and he’s the founder and CEO of a PR/journalism game-changing company called Help a Reporter Out (HARO).

HARO was founded on Facebook in 2008 and has since grown to be THE social media services company that connects writers and sources. In my opinion, two things make HARO particularly unique: It’s a free service for all involved and it’s a no-BS community where PR pros are held accountable for the pitches they send. Users get booted for spammy, spray-and-pray pitches and, as a result, HARO is somewhat of a safe haven for members of the media.

The lucrative HARO “sponsorship” program that Shankman created is also noteworthy. He places advertisements at the start of each email, which are chock-full of media queries, and the open rates are said (by HARO) to be about 75 percent.

In fact, this business model is so remarkable that, just last week, Shankman announced that his little enterprise had been scooped up by Vocus, a company that provides on-demand software for public relations management and manages the press release distribution service called PRWeb.

We join the industry in congratulating Peter Shankman on this significant accomplishment. According to a Mashable story, he will continue to build the HARO brand with the help of the folks at Vocus and, more importantly, the service will remain free. We look forward to seeing what the future holds for HARO – and continuing to use this fantastic service to supplement our daily PR activities and outreach!

Are bloggers wired differently than traditional journalists?

This week I came across new research by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that uses hard data to quantify the differences between the news agenda of new and old media.

The Pew Research Center’s study, titled “New Media, Old Media,” collected a year’s worth of data on the top news stories linked to on blogs, discussed on Twitter, and shared on Youtube. The major finding was that each social media platform “seems to have its own personality and function.”

Among the other key findings:

·         Bloggers tended to focus more on stories that “elicited emotion, concerned individual or group rights or triggered ideological passion.” Often these were stories that people could easily share on social networks with their own personal thoughts;

·         Social media tends to focus on stories that don’t get a lot of traction in the mainstream press. Rarely does a story get picked up in social media first, then by traditional media outlets;

·         Technology is a big topic of discussion on Twitter, while politics is less so. Blogs tended to focus more on politics and foreign events, less on technology;

·         All three social media platforms (blogs, Twitter, Youtube) shared the common characteristic of not staying on one story very long.  On blogs, 53 percent of top stories remain on the list of the most discussed stories for no more than three days, while on Twitter, the same is true for 72 percent of lead stories.

What does this all mean for PR professionals? Keeping in mind the different personalities of the new and old media, and how they interrelate, is key. There is a huge disparity between what the mainstream media considers to be the most important news and what each social media platform is most interested in discussing. It bears close watching as to whether traditional media outlets will continue to adjust their news coverage to better align with the interests of each social platform.

Michael Arrington’s recent post about his exchanges with the PR group at Fortune have stirred up some lively discussions – online and around the office. We’ve kept the profanity that is common among TechCrunch commentators out of our debates, but have nonetheless tried to get to the right side of the debate.

I’ll summarize it for you, in case you missed it: The PR team at Fortune reached out to Arrington, offering exclusive posts of The Facebook Effect. In Arrington’s words, “[The rules] were fine. We’d print the excerpts. And we’d link to Fortune. We don’t get much out of that deal, but… we want to support Kirkpatrick and I figured Fortune could owe us a favor.”

After the posts went live, Fortune changed its mind. As Tina Fey might say, they asked for a do-over. The Fortune team wanted Arrington to post excerpts of the excerpts – not the whole excerpt. Sounds crazy, but the publisher cried copyright infringement.

The lessons are numerous, but three really stand out. First, there’s the obvious – that favors are still big currency. Online and off. Make sure you know what you’re being asked, and what you’re asking of others. Secondly, poke holes in plans –someone in Fortune’s PR department should have played out various scenarios and asked more questions (what if they run the full excerpt? Is that the desired outcome? Is it allowed?). And finally, whether you like it or not, remember that your emails are public.

Gawker is one of my favorite blogs to read – it’s snarky, it’s fun, it’s informative and usually it’s right on the money. The other day though, I was a little surprised to read an entry on “The Laziest Journalists on Twitter.” In the post, Ryan Tate called out BusinessWeek’s Douglas MacMillan, WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro, Wired’s Priya Ganapati and Fortune’s Jessi Hempel, calling them lazy for tweeting requests for sources when working on stories.

Now, I realize Ryan may have been teasing more than shaming, since he acknowledged Gawker itself tweets for sources all the time. But I was surprised anyone would consider a journalist tweeting for help getting in touch with sources to be lazy behavior. On the flip side – it’s a smart and resourceful use of a really effective (and efficient) social networking tool. Reporters have been using tools like Help A Reporter Out and ProfNet to find sources, and no one criticizes those tactics. More old-school journos keep a database of their PR friends and past sources and when they are in a bind, they shoot out email blasts soliciting pitches on a particular topic. Using Twitter, Facebook and any other mode of communication to accomplish the same thing should be a non-issue. I’m proud to admit I’ve responded to numerous “calls for pitches” on Twitter over the past few months – for everyone from Doug to a local news station in New Hampshire and just the other night, another BusinessWeek reporter (Rachael King).

Mainstream media should be encouraged to use the newest tools and networks to do their jobs better – not chastized for it.

Related reading: “How can journalists use Twitter?“