A couple weeks ago, my colleague Lizzie and I drove up to LA for a media trip. We met with editors and freelancers for various publications, such as the LA Times, Robb Report and Urban Daddy. In our constant efforts to better understand and be accommodating to the media, we asked every journalist we met a few questions: What makes you open up and read one pitch versus another? Is a catchy, funny subject line or a straightforward, all business subject line better? Or is a strong lead paragraph most important?

The unanimous response from every single person was that they read pitches from PR people they know, recognize and trust. Beyond that, every person had personal preferences for how they liked to be pitched but again they all shared a common theme. Most agreed that short pitches with very clear bulleted and bolded details were ideal. They most definitely did NOT want us to send a press release. They are just too busy and get too much email to have time to read your beautifully crafted pitch or release.

While I have blogged about the importance of media relationships before, this little exercise was still eye-opening for me. We focus so much on our writing skills – perfecting AP style, refining press releases, etc – and while I still wholeheartedly believe PR people should know how to write well, maybe it isn’t as important as we think. Yes, you need to understand proper grammar. Yes, you need a writing style and yes you need to be able to pitch a client with flair when needed. But, if the media prefer a bulleted, outlined pitch with a “just the facts ma’am” approach, maybe we just need to put more attention towards building those media relationships. That way, the media will actually open my emails and read my pitch. And, if I write my pitch in a clear simple format, then they will be able to get the information they want, the way they want it.

There are always exceptions to every rule, and this is no different. Obviously, there are times when press releases are needed. And there are times when a well-written pitch definitely helps, like when pitching a feature story with multiple elements. But my question remains: What is better – a beautifully constructed press release that never gets opened or read, or a bullet pointed quick pitch that my media friends open as soon as they see my name?

We’re a fast-paced shop with great clients and we’re looking for another piece to fit our growing puzzle. Specifically, a Front End Web Developer with programming skills and good design sensibilities. (That’s right, we know you exist.)

If the following list sums up what you bring to the table, then clearly you’re awesome and we’d love to talk to you.

Requirements:

• BS in graphic design, web design, computer science or related field, or equivalent experience
• Experience writing technical and functional specifications and driving them through development
• Effective verbal and written communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences 
• Ability to work well within a team environment and laugh in the face of doom.
• Working knowledge in Flash with ActionScript 2 & 3
• 2-3+yrs experience with advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP
• Understanding of best practices for web according W3C standards, email and mobile with solid typography, layout and color skills.
• Experience with hand-coding HTML, CSS and jQuery
• Experience working with CMS – Wordpress 3x+, Drupal 6x+
• Basic knowledge of MySQL
• Basic understanding of Information Architecture, UI/UX principles
• Ability to translate design pixel to pixel
• Documentation of web development projects
• Comfortable working on a Mac platform
• Proficient in Adobe Flash, Illustrator, and Photoshop
• Should have familiarity with Coda and/or Transmit

Responsibilities

• See web projects through from start to completion including wire frames, comps and programming
• Manage your own projects, respect deadlines and use good judgment in time management to ensure your jobs are delivered on time and on budget.
• Build web development projects to spec
• Keep up with web standards, follow web trends (HTML5) and foster forward-looking development for alternate digital channels
• Collaborate with and take direction from senior creative team to create successful campaigns.

Salary will be commensurate with experience and competitive. We offer medical, dental, paid vacation, holidays, sick/PT, 401k and profit sharing, not to mention great weather.

No calls or emails. Really.

Send resume to resume@baileygardiner.com.

The PR plan is the foundation to any public relations campaign. It outlines, over a certain time frame, what the agency intends to do for the client. It ensures that client is clear on what is being promised and the PR agency can use the plan to hold itself accountable and stay on track. Oftentimes, however, PR pros get caught up in the to-do list and focus the PR plan too much on tactics, and not enough on the bigger picture – how PR can help a company or brand reach its objectives and goals. As David Davidoff mentioned on Spin Sucks, PR needs to focus on results not process, and I couldn’t agree more. Below are a few steps every PR pro should think about while drafting a PR plan:

1. What are the company’s objectives? Before you can begin to put a PR plan together, think about what the company’s goals and objectives are and include these in your PR plan. A goal, by definition, is a broad plan with a generic action. An objective is a narrow plan with a specific, measurable action. Does the client want to increase sales by 10%? Increase traffic to the website? Get more brand awareness in a certain demographic? Before you can start pitching and discussing initiatives, you have to figure out how you can help the bottom line. It may not necessarily mean that PR alone will increase sales by a certain percentage, but it can certainly help.

2. Who is the audience? This is another important thing to consider before putting pen to paper on a PR plan. Is the client trying to reach the Hispanic community, for example? If a client only wants to reach a niche audience with a specific interest, say boat owners in San Diego for example, it may be more effective to target specific blogs that cater to this niche audience rather than the New York Times.

3. Now that you know the objectives and audience, what is your strategy? This is the plan or method to achieve your goal. Perhaps if your goal for a client is the build awareness and drive traffic to a new restaurant, your strategy is to target local and regional media and blogs to build buzz around the launch. This will help guide the rest of your plan.

4. What are the tactics that support your strategy? This is when you can finally break down your plan month by month with the specific actions you will use to fulfill the strategy. You can get into the nitty gritty of the plan, like which publications you will contact when and with what story.

If you follow these steps you will have a more well-rounded PR plan that is focused on RESULTS not tactics. If you do not know the answer to the questions above, it is a good idea to meet with the client and ask. Not only will the client be clear that you understand their situation and needs, but the PR agency and client will be working together towards the same goals and hopefully the client will get the results they are looking for.

Quora: in a nutshell, allows you to ask and answer questions that are of personal interest.

It does what social networkers are already doing: asking questions of your network and followers. However, it conveniently groups all of the responses together.  It’s kind of like if Twitter, Digg, Google Wave and Yahoo Answers had a baby.

It was just made public the summer of 2010 and has been growing (in hype) ever since. Launched by a former CTO of Facebook, the site and concept at least have street cred.

Here’s the breakdown:

Pros:

• Helps consolidate topics. If the question has been asked in another format, it points you in that direction and/or adds your query to the topic.
• Helps promote your question through other social platforms.
• The best answers will rise to the top of the question/topic by a voting platform similar to digg
• Helps you spot trends – what people are talking about and what they want to know more about
• Responses are real time
• Questions and answers come up in Google

Con:

• It’s another platform to keep up with
• It takes time to position yourself as an expert
• It is getting a lot of knocks. Have you visited Cwora?!
• If you are looking for an answer to a one-time question, this isn’t the platform for you. It’s more for people seeking an ongoing way of sharing their expertise.
• Beware of privacy settings and auto-follows
• It’s kind of been done before

How company’s can use Quora right now:

• Listen to what people have to say
• Observe potential candidates and their real life knowledge on a subject
• Don’t go crazy building a profile and answering a million questions just yet. Brands should wait it out and see what really starts to happen. After all, look what happened to Chatroulette.

Don’t write off this fairly new platform just yet. If Quora positions itself and monitors itself for spam correctly, it just may have a place in the social sphere.

A quick look at a recent list of top 100 Twitter users in the PR industry shows that the majority of top 100 don’t list their agency name in their handle and I would bet that many of their followers wouldn’t be able to name the agency where most of them work. And many of these top 100 have a certain social media celebrity status that will follow them wherever they go, regardless. After all, true to social media 101, Twitter is all about the one-on-one engagement and usually, particularly in the PR industry, it is the person the followers are interested in, not their agency.

So how will the rise of the personal brand affect agencies and how can they capitalize on it?

• The importance of company blogs - It will become more crucial for agencies to have a successful, reputable blog. Blogs are still an ideal avenue for agencies to build a stronger reputation, position the agency as a leader and market the agency as a whole. For some agencies it might make sense to have a dedicated Twitter handle, for others it may not. But every agency at this point is missing out if they do not have a blog. Also, the blog is a way to connect the employees’ personal brand to the agency. If an employee with a strong brand and influence is often sharing blog posts from their company blog, their followers will begin making the connection between the person and the agency, strengthening the reputation of the agency.

• Building each employee’s personal brand - Agencies will benefit from encouraging and helping to boost the individual influence of each employee at the agency. As companies and brands begin to research agencies more on social media before hiring one and the media continue to source stories online and get pitched on Twitter, it will be important for the entire team to be active, social and influential on these platforms. Agencies should encourage their team to increase their personal influence, as it will benefit the agency, too. Having a team of strong influencers will help clients and will also only help boost the agency’s blog influence, as each team member will have a strong, loyal following with which to share the blog’s posts, hopefully growing the blog’s audience and reputation as well. Also, as PR pros grow their personal influence, they can gain opportunities to guest blog, which can greatly benefit the agency not only in influence but in SEO, as incoming links are great for a blog’s SEO. Also, as Lizzie noted this week, social media now affects search, so having influential employees sharing blog posts and client information will become more and more important.

• Looking at personal influence when hiring - As PR pros continue building their personal brands, I wouldn’t be surprised if this affects how agencies hire and how potential employees represent themselves to prospective employers. Will agencies start measuring candidates’ influence before hiring? Will candidates start putting Klout scores on their resume? It will be interesting to see if influence will become a PR prerequisite, just like good writing and verbal skills. Not only that, but social media gives employers huge insight into candidates, including what kind of person they are, what their strengths are and what they like – invaluable information for employers.

As 2010 draws to a close, I am making my predictions for 2011 trends in the agency world. We’ve come a long way since Don Draper on Madison Avenue. The industry continues to change at warp speed. The best agencies keep up. The rest, well, the economy has a way of weeding them out.

Here are my predictions for the top five agency trends for 2011:

1. Creative thinking will make a comeback. After a few years of countless safe, ho-hum campaigns, agencies will be yearning for more use of the right sides of their brain. New, innovative, never-been-done before thinking will make its way out into the world.

2. To say that social media spending will grow in 2011 is so 2009. As Callan mentioned in her post on social media trends for 2011, clients will be looking for new social media agencies. No, not for the first time. They will have grown wiser and realized that the agency that “said they could do social media” isn’t based in strategy and certainly isn’t integrating the medium into all aspects of the brand. Therefore, there will be an insurgence of clients looking for real social experts. Social media experts that have proven successes and case studies in the field. The agencies that thought they knew social media will do one of two things: run away with their tail between their legs and revert to their traditional (and comfortable) way of doing things. OR they will humbly realize they must invest in social media (training, strategic partnerships or pro bono work to build case studies) in order to become experts with proven success.

3. Account management (from coordinator to VP) will experience an expansion in their job description. No longer is account management simply tending to the day-to-day needs of a client and their projects. It will now include contributing to new business, account planning and research, and managing profitability. Lean and mean started as a reaction to the recession and is now the new normal.

4. Metrics are king. Gone are the days of — “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know which half” — being okay. Investments in any form of marketing will need a measure of success tied to them. Agencies will feel the pressure as the jobs and the success of our clients will be directly tied to these measures.

5. Agencies (hopefully, for the love of God) will wise up and realize that integration, already the buzzword for 2011, is simply being creative. It is about knowing where your consumer is and speaking to them there.

Last week, the anonymous LA Times food critic, S. Irene Virbila, was “outed” by restaurateur Noah Ellis at his new restaurant, Red Medicine in Beverly Hills. Not only did Ellis throw Virbila out of his restaurant and refuse to serve her, he took a picture of her and posted it on his restaurant’s website.

I was fascinated by this story for a few reasons. Not only does such an act take major guts, but it also got me thinking about the role of the critic in the media these days. With the growing influence of Yelp, everyone is a critic. It also had me questioning whether a critic can expect to or needs to remain anonymous anymore. Most importantly, will this be a PR nightmare or a PR home run for the restaurant?

On one hand, Red Medicine is probably getting more PR now for outing Virbila than it would have had they let her eat and review the restaurant as planned. The story has gotten national exposure by Gawker, New York Times, a lengthy response by the LA Times. and countless other newspapers, online sites and blogs. This story has definitely put Red Medicine on the map, and I imagine more than a few curious readers will want to try the restaurant that brazenly kicked out a revered food critic. At the very least, the restaurant has definitely increased its visibility and awareness.

What Ellis may not have anticipated is the enormous backlash his restaurant has suffered. A quick look at the restaurant’s Yelp page shows dozens of angry people who heard the story and then gave the restaurant one-star and an angry review. Many other media and restaurant industry insiders have come out in support of Virbila and have critiqued Red Medicine’s handling of the situation, claiming a good restaurant would not fear a review. I am curious to see what other restaurant reviewers decide to do with this restaurant. Will they all want to review it, or will they ignore it (a fate which is much worse in the restaurant industry)? Will they be harsher on it?

What effect Ellis’ stunt will have on the long-term success of the restaurant remains to be seen. And, I cannot wait to see what kind of review the restaurant gets from the LA Times, who have made it clear they intend to move forward with their review. It will be interesting to see if the old adage is true, that all press is good press, or if the backlash from this stunt will damage the new restaurant for good.

Had the restaurant been my client, I would have never condoned or advised that Ellis publish the blog post or out Virbila to the public. However, now that the damage is done, Ellis is better off owning what he did and standing by his decision. Hopefully he has enough supporters who believe he was in the right – and of course, most importantly, hopefully he has great food to validate the restaurant – to get him through this crisis and make his restaurant a success. Yelp is already seeing some counter reviews supporting Red Medicine and it’s food. Would you dine at Red Medicine after Ellis’ stunt?

This week, Super Bowl advertisers Audi and Mercedes-Benz both announced plans to launch social media contests leading up to the 2011 Super Bowl. Both car companies are offering big prizes – new cars! trips! – to the winners of their social media contests, which will utilize Facebook and Twitter.

So what do you have to do to win these contests? According to USA Today, Mercedes-Benz is awarding cars to the two-person team that can get the brand the most tweets and Facebook “likes.” Audi is going a similar route, awarding trips to fans based who post the best, and most, on Facebook and Twitter.

While I love seeing more major- and especially luxury- brands jumping further into the social media game, I question whether these contests are the most effective ways to use these mediums. Basically, it seems these car brands are asking their fans to spam their online communities by focusing on quantity of posts over quality. I for one, am not interested in sending dozens of tweets and Facebook status updates to my followers for any car brand, no matter how much I want a new car. I imagine others who have worked hard to build credibility and influence amongst their social networks feel the same way.

So will these social media contests reach the RIGHT kind of audience? My guess is no. It will reach the type of people who have no problem spamming everyone and who, in that case, are probably not that influential or engaged.

There are many other directions Audi and Mercedes-Benz could have gone that focus on engagement and influence, rather than quantity of posts. Utilizing Klout, asking fans to create original content (videos, pictures, blog posts, etc) and using some more recent social media platforms and tools like QR codes and Foursquare seem like they would be much more effective in targeting, and engaging with, the right demographic for their brand. Most importantly, these brands could then focus on the quality of their engagement, not quantity. Both brands have not yet released their full strategies and campaigns, so I am holding out hope that they have a bigger picture that utilizes some of the things I mention above.

Do you think Audi and Mercedes-Benz are on the right track with their new social media campaigns?

Are you looking for the “right” job? We’re an eclectic group of people with a common thread of creativity. Sound interesting? If you’re curious about who we are, check out our portfolio, read our blog, and comment on your favorite post. Then apply for this job.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent. Marketing or advertising preferred.
• 6-8 years of integrated (multi-discipline) advertising agency experience. Those with home builder or real estate marketing/advertising experience will be given preference.
• Solution oriented, professional, self-motivated and organized
• Ability to manage various projects and clients on different timelines
• Strong verbal and written communication skills and comfort in presenting to groups
• Work well with different personalities, especially clients
• Deep understanding of client relationship and project management
• Real online experience and case studies or work samples (rich media, PPC, email, SEO and Mobile)
• You strike the delicate balance of pleasing clients without being a pushover

Specific Responsibilities

• Ensure client and agency goals are met on each project
• Manage client expectations before project commencement
• Conduct and report ongoing competitive research
• Analyze, interpret and present the metrics from campaigns
• Procure new projects and organic client growth to contribute to new agency income
• Maintain account profitability
• Prepare estimates, manage budget, issue billings, reconcile budgets and project revenue
• Provide day to day management of Account Executives and Account Coordinators
• Strategic and creative client counsel
• Contribute to agency and client meetings with insightful industry experience
• Independently represent the agency at client meetings
• Conduct project “post mortems” that lead to greater efficiencies

Salary will be commensurate with experience and competitive. We offer medical, dental, paid vacation, holidays, sick/PT, 401k and profit sharing, not to mention great weather.

No calls or emails. Really.

Send resume to resume@baileygardiner.com

This week I had the pleasure of guest blogging for the first time for the highly respected Spin Sucks. Not only was it a fun experience, it was also a great reminder of the benefits to guest blogging.

• Guest blogging allows you to reach a new audience. By guest blogging, you are exposing yourself, your agency and your blog to a whole new audience who may not know about you. This new audience can now follow your blog and other social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook), hopefully growing traffic to your site.  It is also an easy way to find other like-minded people to follow on Twitter. Use TweetMeme to see who has tweeted your guest post and follow them on Twitter. It is likely they will follow you back, too.

• It builds your credibility and reputation in the industry. By guest blogging for influential blogs you are essentially positioning yourself as an expert on a topic/category. It is great for your agency’s reputation and credibility to have an expert on staff and doesn’t hurt your personal resume either.

• Back links to your blog are great for SEO. Back links have become the SEO buzzword of the moment. Getting inbound links to your blog are great for SEO, especially if you are guest blogging for a very influential blog with a large audience. Liat Weis gives some great insights on the SEO benefits of guest blogging in his post on Synergy Blog.

• Guest blogging is great practice and a great experience. Not only is guest blogging a good opportunity to continue to hone your blogging skills, but it is a chance to get some feedback from a reliable, outside source and see what kind of response you get on another blog.

I know there are many more benefits of guest blogging. Anyone have a great experience guest blogging and have an unexpected benefit?