Being the go-getters that we are at BG, we never shy away from a challenge. So when San Diego Hospice and the Institute for Palliative Medicine (SDHIPM for short) approached us to help them with an integrated local outreach campaign, we jumped at the chance not only to help an incredible organization, but also to learn about an industry that none of us had much experience with.

Despite being far and away the leader in non-profit hospice care and palliative medicine in CA, SDH faced numerous challenges in attracting people to its service:

• Public sensitivity about the very topic of hospice
• Widespread misconceptions (that even we ourselves held) of hospices as somber places where terminally-ill people go to give up and die
• Increasingly aggressive competition from for-profit hospice providers in the local market
• Niche target audience

Our reeducation began almost from day 1, when we paid a site visit to SDHIPM’s Hillcrest care facility. With Melissa De La Calzada, Associate Director of Marketing and Communications, as our capable guide, we learned so much about the benefits of what SDH actually provides, and the truly inspiring stories that result. We came to understand that far from being the “death-house” that people tend to imagine, hospice is not a place, but a philosophy that focuses on alleviating physical, spiritual and mental pain, to allow people to live life to the fullest.

With this fundamental understanding, we set to work developing a strategy for reaching our target audience of both the terminally-ill and the people (typically family and friends) who are caring for them. Recognizing the sensitivity of our topic, BG’s creative team came through beautifully, with the simple, yet warm “It’s Time” campaign, that conveyed the compassion, understanding and most importantly, support that SDHIPM offers to caregivers as well as those in need of care. The message played out over an integrated, locally-focused media plan encompassing behaviorally-targeted online advertising, email outreach, custom landing pages, and even Twitter, Facebook and their very own blog, that would maximize coverage, but also minimize the exposure of our message to people outside of our target market. Below are some examples of the creative:

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Thus, the end result of countless hours of research, consideration and careful honing of creative is a campaign that is making a tangible impact on SDHIPM’s patient intake, not to mention a powerful learning experience for all of us in a new industry that few advertisers would think to take on.

There’s been a lot of hype lately regarding the constant changes to Facebook fan pages.  One of the most upsetting changes for marketers was the newly added restrictions regarding contests held on Facebook..  As marketers, what we loved about Facebook contests were that it leveled the playing field for companies and brands of all sizes.  Brand recognition and money had nothing to do with whether or not you became visible on Facebook. But sometimes good things must come to an end…or in our case, come to a crossroad, where we’re forced to be more creative with our outreach.

While Facebook hasn’t entirely banned all contests, here are the most important new guidelines to keep in mind:

• You need written approval from Facebook before beginning a contest.  Sounds easy enough, right?  Not so much!  Facebook has companies “fill out” a contact form and in that form, they ask what your ad budget is.  From our own findings, we discovered that this form is somewhat useless if you don’t plan to spend at least $25,000 in advertising, as we were directed away from the contact form when not entering a high enough dollar amount.   Out of curiosity, we entered the $25,000 amount and sure enough, the contact form continues with its questionnaire.  Hey, I guess we finally know how Facebook makes their money.

• You’re limited in how you publicize your contest. If you’re lucky enough to gain permission to run a contest from  Facebook, this means you probably have a larger budget for ad spending than most and also that you need to be aware that you’re still limited with how you promote your contest.

1. You can only run contests on third party applications and may only share info regarding said contest on the canvas page of an application or an application box in a tab on your fan page.
2. You cannot condition that participants take any action on Facebook – that includes uploading photos or videos, updating status, or updating a profile or page.
3. You cannot notify winners of contests through Facebook – that includes private message, IM, status update, or wall post.

Whether or not Facebook took the wind out of your sails, we’d recommend that you re-think running a contest on the platform. Even if you think Facebook wouldn’t notice a tiny Mom & Pop Shop running a contest, iyou are risking having your page shut down and losing your already-established fan base.  Facebook is still a behemoth platform where the demographic is constantly changing and the public is more than eager to interact.  If your brand doesn’t qualify for running a contest, you may just have to find a new/creative way to market you Facebook Fan page.

*This post is part of Bailey Gardiner’s Public Relations Tactics series, which highlights tools and best practices to ensure a successful public relations campaign. The series will run weekly.

Whether your public relations campaign lasts three months or 5 years, it’s important to develop an accurate and timely calendar to keep your campaign on track. From magazines to local events, each outlet and opportunity operates on a different timeline, some of which are easily spelled out and others which are more of a guessing game. Either way, miss their deadline and you’re toast.

Here are 5 tips for developing a PR calendar that works.

• Think Long Leads: Long lead publications operate anywhere between 4-6 months in advance, which makes it easy to lose track of what kinds of stories they’re looking for (when we’re thinking about hitting the beach, they’re thinking about holiday gift guides). Depending on the goals of your campaign, it can be nightmarish to miss these opportunities because you didn’t act in time.  By adding long lead pitch ideas and reminders to your calendar you’ll keep yourself thinking 4-6 months ahead all year long. Now, what are we all doing for the 4th (of July)?

• Editorial Calendars: Want to be included in a “Top 10″ list that runs annually or a “Best of” section. More often than not, long and short lead publication have an editorial calendar that outlines the months these will occur during the following year. Even if you don’t have something specific in mind, Ed Cals will tell you exactly what publications are planning to cover and when. These can often be a gold mine of information and should always be top priority when developing a PR calendar.

• Include Short Leads: While short lead publications don’t require much advance notice, they typically plan special sections and some feature stories further in advance. For topics like back to school, summer travel stories, and holiday gift guides it’s best to allow more time than less; especially now that papers have smaller staffs to cover the same number of stories.

• Events: If your client is interested in having a booth at, attending, or sponsoring an event, there’s a deadline for that. When kicking off a PR campaign see if your client is interested in national events, local events, sporting events, charitable events, etc. and then bring them opportunities that will help them grow their brand and image. Just make sure you bring them that opportunity in time. Even if the deadline hasn’t passed, booths and space fill up.

• Awards: There are awards for everything. Trust me. Submitting your client for appropriate industry and media awards can be an important part of a PR campaign. (Plus, everyone likes winning). When developing a PR calendar, look at major industry awards and awards in appropriate publications and make sure you note the deadlines and submission information.

Every holiday season, I feel I see a mix of new television commercials and repeats from previous years. I know there will always be a “different” (if that’s the right way to put it) Old Navy commercial, the typical jewelry commercial and a ton of car commercials.

When I see these car commercials, I almost always see the same thing. The big red bow or a woman opening a jewelry box and there is a Lexus car key in it. They are all the same, all overdone, and pretty much all boring.

Why do advertisers feel that during the holiday season they have to stick with tradition? Why do they have to do the exact same commercial they’ve run year after year?

With people now fast-forwarding commercials more than ever, television commercials have become one of the quickest declining traditional forms of advertising. That should be an instant wake-up call to advertisers and their marketing agencies. You need to make your commercial stand out. Make people not want to fast-forward. Make them want to actually watch your commercial.

When I saw the first second of the first Honda commercial this season, I thought, great a repeat from the last few years. Happy Honda Days! But then I kept watching until the end. I realized they were telling a story with the commercial. At the end they say, “You have your holiday traditions. We have ours.” I went, wow, they made a little tweak to the commercial they did last year–You have your holiday traditions. I started seeing more and more of them. Each commercial is specifically tailored to a certain type of person/interest and they show the exact car that would be perfect for that type of person. Genius you may ask? I think so. Make a commercial 100% tailored to an individual, to the every day person.

Some of my favorite out of the bunch are as follows:

1) Happy Honda Days winter golfing (guys’ day out)

2) Happy Honda Days football game (how men- and myself- won’t miss a football game no matter what the weather)

3) Happy Honda Days dog sled (a holiday family outing)

And my personal favorite and so appropriate for anyone living where it stays warm during the holidays (thank you San Diego): Happy Honda Days Surfing Santa.

Thank you, Honda. By making this slight change, without breaking too far away from your traditional holiday commercials, you have actually made me want to watch commercials instead of fast-forwarding.  However, I currently drive a Honda Civic so you haven’t enticed me to actually buy a new one. But, I will gladly take one as a present, if you would like to give me one, since mine is getting old. I mean, it is the holidays right?

In 2009 many of us learned to do more with less. In the agency world that translated to doing more work for our clients on slimmer budgets. Part of making that work has been figuring out inexpensive ways to both disseminate information and monitor/gather coverage and conversations. While agencies will continue to be pressed in 2010, it is critical that clients support their efforts with the right tools.

This is particularly the case because (effective Dec. 1st) the FTC has put a stake in the ground regarding transparency in the social media world, and while we will see over the next six months if they were just saber rattling or for real, companies ignore certain aspects at their own risk. One of the most potentially troublesome pieces of the new FTC regulations is the requirement that companies monitor and correct misinformation posted to social media sites about their products or services. That is a lot of liability in an enormous landscape.

As I think about the coming year, there are two things that I believe every company that is engaged in social media and/or public relations should be considering. Neither has to be very expensive, but companies that don’t implement them will be at a competitive disadvantage, and possibly high risk, in 2010.

1. Twitter search and Google Alerts (which are both currently free) are great, but they are not a guarantee that you are catching every mention about your company on the millions of blogs, forums, tweets and Facebook posts made each day. Invest in a credible monitoring service. It will save your team time in gathering posts and also provide a reporting structure. Some that we like and have heard great things about include Filtrbox, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Spiral16.

2. Set up your online press room. No more excuses. If you do not have a press room on your website, which is preferable, then go directly to pitchengine.com and set one up. It’s $50 a month for a dynamic, linkable, social press room. The web is where the media go first for info. If you don’t make it easy for them, they will find another company that will.

Simple, but I believe very important for any company still holding on to the belief that doing social media and public relations without the right tools is possible.

So our holiday caroling video was a bit of a hit. Feedback has been good for our purposely “bad” execution.

When I first presented the idea of all of us butchering a song, there was a lot of nervous laughter in the room. Everyone at Bailey Gardiner seemed to think it was funny. But an important question remained. Would we all be willing to make asses out of ourselves? Well… clearly that was well within our skill set.

Nothing teaches like the act of doing. And in the course of filming, I learned a few things. I learned that…

- Sticking a camcorder in front of someone can severely limit motor skills.

- Some of us can actually sing (Katy and Jason). Yo, Susan Boyle- watch your back.

- Exiting a bathroom stall – while singing and eating a candy cane – wasn’t nearly as cool as I thought it would be. Perhaps bathroom humor is best left to the experts.

Without much further ado, here’s a short clip of outtakes and bloopers, as well as the original, just in case you missed it. Enjoy.

When companies hire on an agency, they hire them on for a specific reason. Whether it is branding, public relations, or advertising, they have a goal in mind and they want their agency to get them there as quickly as possible.

Over three years ago, Laurel Bay Homes, came to Bailey Gardiner to help them sell their condominiums in Bankers Hill. I wasn’t here in the very beginning, but I’ve worked on this account for the last 2.5 years. In that period I have partaken in numerous different strategies, creative campaigns and media buys. Our advertising consisted of everything from out-of-home, to online, to newspapers to traditional print.

Before creating the final campaign, we conducted a survey among everyone who had bought a Laurel Bay home within the last year. Our goal was to learn more about the types of people that bought at Laurel Bay, where they were coming from and where they had heard about Laurel Bay. What we learned was this:

- #1 reason people bought was the location

- 71% bought at Laurel Bay for a second home

- 80% of buyers did not live in San Diego

- 51 was the average age

- The vast majority had heard of Laurel Bay from a Realtor

With this information, we learned that we really should be targeting people in drive markets (primarily LA, OC and Phoenix) instead of placing a lot of our advertising in San Diego. We also focused on targeting Realtors more by calling out the incentives Laurel Bay offered them.

With this shift, we were able to help Laurel Bay officially sell out in December 2009.

It’s bittersweet that this goal has been accomplished. On one side, we helped the client achieve exactly what they wanted. On the other, that means they are no longer our client. It was strange for me to see my very first client leave, but I understand that this is just another part of the agency world.

So, to Laurel Bay, thank you for a great three years and congratulations on selling out!

For decades, advertising agencies and the media industry have measured radio listenership based on Arbitron ratings. That rating system utilized diaries, or a paper based system that required a group of chosen listeners to manually record what stations they listened to, relying on their honesty to report where and when they were actually tuned in.  Many suspected that this was not the most statistically accurate or accountable process, and now their suspicions are proving true.

I laughed out loud when I read a recent New York Times story about the new and improved “Portable People Meters“, because this true measurement tactic calls out those fakers that say they never listen to soft rock by Celine Dion.  I personally HATE Celine Dion and her “vocal accomplishments” so my report would be true, but I guess there are a lot of people that say they don’t listen to that kind of music – and actually do.

See, Arbitron’s new People Meters are devices that record what a radio listener is actually listening to, in real time – warts and all.  And they have the radio industry’s panties in a bunch, because the numbers are coming in very differently than what had been reported the old way.  Imagine that – people were not being completely honest about what they tuned in to, and instead recorded in their old diaries what they thought people would expect them to write.  So Joe Six-Pack, who wants everyone to think he’s super tough and macho, is actually listening to my friend Celine Dion warble and butcher love songs instead of the sport talk station he said was his favorite.

I know this to be true, because last year I was tagged to participate in Arbitron’s ratings program, and was excited to see how it worked from the inside. I was literally mailed a “diary”, divided by dayparts and calendar dates, and asked to write in what radio stations I listened to, and when.  Knowing my good friend Monique Marvez was doing her morning show at San Diego’s Jack FM, I naturally “listened” to her.  A lot. Now a people meter might have proven otherwise.

This has huge implications for our industry, and for media buyers across the country.  Radio stations that had enjoyed market domination and high ratings, with the advertising rates that went with that position, are dropping dramatically in the new ratings world, while others are rising.  Some can no longer charge the big bucks, because their accurate listener numbers are far lower than previously reported.  In this topsy turvy new world, soft rock is showing stronger listenership, talk radio is dropping, and unfortunately we are witnessing the death knell for classical music on radio because no one is apparently listening to that at all.

Good thing advertising agencies like ours have savvy media buyers who can navigate these new waters and plan an effective media buy.  It will be interesting to see which radio stations come out on top, and which scramble to adopt more competitive new formats as these numbers continue to unfold…

This week AdAge published a story announcing that CBS interactive is dumping ad networks. In the article, AdAge recaps the longstanding debate on whether or not Advertising networks are good for publishers.

What I’ve come to understand is that it’s a fair-weather situation. When publishers have large media buyers knocking down their doors, publishers don’t need ad networks to fill the rest of the space.

A good example of this from my recent experience has been with national military sites. Because the military receives full rate card for run of site from the Government, I can’t purchase ad space in just the San Diego market. In fact, on one phone call to a military site I won’t name, I spent half an hour describing what I wanted and when the rep finally understood, I heard a chuckle on the other end.

The same thing applies for large publishers. If big advertisers are buying out their space, why deal with the headache, and paperwork of ad networks who slice up their inventory into a million different pieces, all for less money?

So, now that the economy is turning the corner, CBS and other sites with the power of over 60 million unique visitors per month can go back to their old ways when things were simple and advertisers paid big money for the space.

As a boutique agency with smaller clients, we rely on ad networks on a number of levels. Using an ad network allows us to:

• Be very targeted by using the ad network’s established filters (i.e. I want to reach females over the age of 35 with annual household income > $100,000).
• Appear on large, credible sites, which allows our brands to appear larger by association.
• Deal with one contact, one contract and deliver one suite of creative to appear on thousands of sites in front of our target market.

In short, it’s incredibly smart and efficient for us.

So, if CBS has set a tone that will carry through to other large publishers, I’m worried about my ability to get my clients optimal exposure without spending profuse amounts of time (and money) strategizing, coordinating and adapting creative.

With that said, I see one positive result of publishers taking their interactive ad programs in house. This time around, they have mined their own site(s) for information on their users to offer more sophisticated ad programs. They act as their own mini-network. So for those advertisers who have the time and money, you can look forward to a more effective spend.

*This post is part of Bailey Gardiner’s Public Relations Tactics series, which highlights tools and best practices to ensure a successful public relations campaign. The series will run weekly.

Media relations and writing successful pitches are two skills that get better with practice, much like how wine and cheese get better with age – two of my other favorite things, in addition to public relations. My first successful pitches were written during my days as a PR intern at Bailey Gardiner, and I’ve since learned a few tips on writing pitches that work and deliver results, like one to LA Times’ Brand X for Electra Bicycle Company.

Electra bikes featured in LA Times' Brand X

• Consider starting with a question and keep the intro brief. I started this pitch by asking, “Are you familiar with Electra Bicycle Company?” Then, I summarized what the company is known for in one sentence. Reporters are people. Have a conversation.
• If what you’re pitching isn’t new, make it sound new. It’s all in the delivery and how you phrase your sentences.  Are you pitching a story angle the publication has not yet covered? Can you offer the reporter an idea of what’s to come next from your client and when?
• Pick one angle and stick to the point. Electra has four bike lines and more than 200 different styles of bikes. Where to start? I picked three bikes and explained in three bullet points why readers would want these specific bikes.
• Be specific in your ask. Instead of closing with something general like, “Please feel free to contact me with questions or more information,” try closing your pitch with something more specific. Offer photos or an interview.

Now, it’s about landing the PR hit by following up and calling the reporter. What other tips do you have for writing successful public relations pitches?