PAN Communications prSPEAK

With the countdown to the 2010 Winter Olympics dwindling down, NBC is gearing up (and bundling up) to provide real-time coverage from Vancouver, Canada.

During the 2008 Summer Olympics, YouTube videos and news blogs caused the games to leap into the viral world. A year and a half later, social media will be even further integrated into the Olympics Games. Widgets, RSS feeds, tweets and mobile alerts will all have their moments in the spotlight during this years’ games.

NBC, the network host of the Olympic Games, has launched a website dedicated to the games: www.nbcolympics.com. The site makes it easy to pick from a slew of widgets and pre-setup RSS feeds.

The website is just the beginning. The network is happily jumping on the applications bandwagon and has designed two apps that will help Olympic fans stay up-to-date. These apps will bring iPhone and Blackberry users top stories, medal counts, videos and more right to their cell phones. The videos are also accessible on Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon internet-enabled phones. Users can also receive SMS messages with this information by texting Olympics to 51515.

U.S. Athletes have a collaborative Twitter page right on the NBC olympic page titled “Tweet Sheet.” Athletes such as World Champion Erin Hamlin, who competes in the luge event; five-time Olympic medalist Apolo Ohno, who competes in short track skating; and gold medal winner Shaun White, who competes in both skateboarding and snowboarding, will all update in real-time during the games. Right now, the athletes are tweeting about everything from how their practice runs went earlier in the day to radio shows they will be guest starring on.

Members of the NBC team will not be the only people utilizing social media during the olympics. One user tweeted on February 4: “@Charisma_Events The Big O is coming – not Oprah – the 2010 Olympics.”

Blogs are springing up from every corner of the world to report on the upcoming Olympics. It seems fitting that all these fast-paced forms of media that join the masses on the web, will cover an event that brings the world together.

We just had to post this video of Boston-area weatherman Pete Bouchard (@pbouchardon7) to see if Channel 7 will send us a DMCA takedown notice, too.

This story by Mike Masnick @TechDirt tackles fair use and whether or not Channel 7 actually can demand people not use the clip, which until now had stayed semi-under the radar.  Of course, the very best way to generate more unwanted publicity for video, audio or text posted to the web is to hire a bunch of lawyers to spook the few people who posted the video and moved on, until they got spooked by lawyers.

It’s like poking a tiger in a cage.  First bloggers will echo the story, then pundits move in to dissect the situation (which is where we’re at now), then the story will get more blown out of proportion by mainstream outlets.

Of course, with events in the world being what they are this is not anything of consequence.  But still, there’s something interesting in watching digital media (mostly open) wrestle with legacy media (mostly proprietary, filtered) over control of content’s soul.

Today we find Bloomberg had rushed in at the last minute to buy BusinessWeek, which was arguably (if not lately) considered to be the bible of the business world; and The Wall Street Journal overtook USA Today as the nation’s largest paper measured by paid subscribers.  Either news item on its own has enough weight to merit reflection and analysis, but one following the other so closely?  Well, that’s a lot of conflicting information out of the media for one day.  Although not yet fully understood, there will certainly be real implications for publishing, advertising, PR and the media industry as a whole.

The Wall Street Journal news is a little surprising given the past year’s prevailing atmosphere of media consolidation, collapses and closures.  The paper seems to be bucking the trend and turning Rupert Murdoch into a “could be” prophet when he said “the philistine phase of the Digital Age is almost over.” Is it really possible not everyone on the web will demand free content?  The Journal’s news seems to say so.  But The Journal is The Journal and certainly–just as in all industries–there are islands unaffected by tides.

BusinessWeek’s situation likely more accurately reflects the publishing industry’s status.  While the ‘08/’09 economic crash can take some of the blame for the decline in advertising revenue, the industry’s problems had been building for some time.  The web has forced newsrooms to shrink, foreign bureaus to close and has hampered the ability of mainstream publications to keep up with breaking news over social tools and networks.  Traditional outlets may excel at analysis, but they can’t beat the web in a number of areas which used to be dominated by newspapers, news programs, radios and magazines–especially weekly magazines.  Eventually and surely, new technology overcomes old methods.  Bloomberg is a data-driven organization that has learned to adapt to the web, and the web has made available more data to an increasingly wider audience which Bloomberg would like to tap.  BusinessWeek’s straightforward ability to analyze and simplify market news probably fills an increasingly larger need in Bloomberg’s organization as it looks to expand its influence beyond the financial spectrum.

For the media (and for advertising, PR and other dependent industries) the signals to adapt and even plan for what’s ahead couldn’t be more clear.  The media has to write for the web, business has to build for it, and the rest of us need to embrace living in that world.

As we see fewer editorial contacts at the major print outlets, we will see an increase in freelance and even “citizen” journalists with the ability to publish and build an audience at their whim. Social media savvy has become increasingly critical in reaching and influencing these new thought leaders, and the successful employment of tactics and strategies take more than just passing familiarity with the medium.  The mainstream media’s mixed messages are keeping all of us on our toes, and for the best of us, on top of our game, too.

In 1964, author and media pundit Marshall McLuhan introduced a controversial concept that would forever alter mainstream media (and subsequently, our role as PR practitioners): “The medium is the message.”

In his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan writes that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways and argues that any given medium affects an individual’s understanding of its content.

Without getting mired too deeply in his media classifications of hot/high definition and cool/low definition media, much of McLuhan’s theory revolved around the senses receiving the communication: sight, sound and touch.

As PR practitioners today, our job is ultimately to ensure the successful receipt of our clients’ messages by their target audiences. Far too often we labor first and foremost over the content of our message—be it a press release, bylined article, white paper, blog post or tweet—while relegating the message’s delivery and medium to an afterthought.

While there is consideration for the medium, the decision is generally influenced by the content and target of the message, e.g., “We want to reach young adults, ages 18-24 who earn less than $60,000 per year… let’s Tweet!” or “Our buyers are teenage guys… let’s do a YouTube campaign!”

Of course, I’m making generalizations here, but the truth is that many times we choose a particular medium based on the statistical, demographic information of its audience rather than taking the time to understand the effectiveness of the medium for influencing the “aha!” factor.

Successful PR is more than having a great message. It also goes beyond delivering that message to the right recipients. From start to finish, it involves a series of decisions that, as mentioned above, ultimately ensure that the right message (read: understood the way it was intended) is received by the right audience, leading to the right response or action. In a presentation to the staff recently comparing various wire services, junior associate Adam Novak comically quipped, “If a press release goes out over the wire but nobody sees it, did it really go out?”

Obviously, the medium is going to impact the successful delivery of a message, but let’s not forget that our job is not just to deliver the message. Rather it is to make sure it is received and interpreted the way you, or your client, want it to be.

We have tools at our disposal today to create and distribute content quickly and easily over any medium imaginable, and at PAN, we’re finding that clients are eager to make these a strategic part of their message. Where “pitch” and “press release” were formerly limited by pre-defined parameters, PR practitioners around the world are now enjoying the freedom and creativity to reshape the way we do our jobs.

That’s what Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Jay Mariotti has to say. We keep hearing about, reading about and seeing the shift in the way traditional news sources (papers, magazines, nightly news) have gone about covering news – but is this a sign that traditional papers are going bye-bye? Is it just the big city and national outlets – will this trickle down to local and regional outlets? We shall see. One thing I have noticed is the quick growth of visuals in news outlets – in reading my hometown paper and others such as the Boston Globe, video and user generated content is everywhere. Is our attention span really down to a three-minute video clip?

As I am sure everyone is aware, Harry Potter mania is definitely in full swing. However as a PR professional, and someone who works with the media on a daily basis, I was very excited to hear that although it was reported that “spoilers” had received copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (book 7) and posted the ending on the Internet, not one major news network has released the ending of the book. Sure, they have all talked about the story itself – that someone took photos of the book and is trying to retype them into something more legible, but no one in the Boston media (print and television) nor the national news (CNN, FoxNews, AP, etc.) has released the ending.

Some would say this is the biggest story of the summer so why wouldn’t the media release it? I think most are thinking however, that they would NEVER want to be the news station or newspaper that was associated for spoiling the ending of the most anticipated book of the year – for children and adults.

As a very big Harry Potter fan myself, thank you to the media. For once not releasing breaking news, you have made me and millions others Harry Potter enthusiasts very happy. A surprising twist near the end of the Harry Potter story.

I thought I would be among the first to look into the crystal ball for 2007. Here’s what I think will be the dominant trends for 07 in the media. Faith Popcorn, I am not.

(more…)