Inside PR and PRSA present: 2012 Best of Silver Anvil Awards Winner

June 24, 2012 • admin • PR

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Inside PR and PRSA present a special interview with the 2012 Best of Silver Anvil award winner: IBM’s ‘Centennial Celebration of Public Service’ featuring Lisa Lanspery, manager of Corporate Communications, IBM and Esty Pujadas, partner and director of the Global Technology Practice at Ketchum.

Last year IBM turned 100, a rare milestone for a technology company, and the organization wanted to mark the occasion with a year of celebrations. Looking to their values and heritage for inspiration, they created a comprehensive corporate social responsibility program that focused on activating and engaging employees to share their skills in projects around the world.

IBM has over 400,000 employees globally and all were encouraged to contribute at least eight hours of their time. The corporate communications team and Ketchum developed an integrated communications strategy inviting staff to give back through active participation in hyper-local programs that provided a direct benefit to the communities involved. And they wanted to provide a platform that enabled staff to share stories and visuals about the positive impact their work produced.

Central to the program was a digital map of the world showcasing the various activities. The employees’ stories offered a glimpse into their dedication and the breadth of the volunteerism whether it was engineering and computer projects or personal donations of time. What made it stand out was the human element – how the company empowered employees to help.

For its anniversary, IBM wanted to make a difference its staff’s efforts and their results were impressive: 80 per cent of IBMs work force volunteered on programs in 120 countries and touched the lives of 10 million people.

And it was captured and amplified via social sharing and traditional media, with a message to spread the word to others to volunteer.

It’s an innovative and inspiring initiative and we want to congratulate IBM and Ketchum on their honor. And the volunteerism from within IBM continues.

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Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 2.99: We Mesh with David Weinberger

June 13, 2012 • admin • PR

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The Mesh Conference, in it’s seventh year, hit Toronto once again this month, where attendees were able to hobnob with some of the best and brightest minds of social media.

Martin Waxman attended the conference and caught up with David Weinberger, the author of Cluetrain Manifesto and Too Big to Know. They discussed networked knowledge, which is a contrast to book-based knowledge we’re accustomed to having most of our lives.

Weinberger brings up a great point about knowledge. It used to be that knowledge had to be settled enough that it fit between the two covers of a book. There was no jumping out of the book, on to the web, to get more information, to have debates, disagreements, or even confirm what we were thinking after having read a particular book.

We used to think knowledge could be mastered, but now we’ve come to realize it’s linked and messy and contradictory. We tend towards media the confirms our beliefs, which creates an echo chamber and it also makes us more extreme in our stances.

Moving from books to the web happens every day. In fact, Joe Thornley has been talking about this for a couple of years, when he discusses how long-form reading is slowing down as we read smaller stories, essays, blog posts, and articles so we can bounce around the web to learn more about what the author is theorizing.

The interview goes into this further. Listen on to learn more!

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Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR and PRSA present: Silver Anvil Awards Finalists – Part 2

June 5, 2012 • admin • PR

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This week, Inside PR and PRSA present the second of two special episodes featuring Martin’s interviews with Silver Anvil Awards finalists.

Adrienne Hayes is the general manager of consumer marketing at Edelman in New York. She led the team on its campaign for Church and Dwight called ‘Trojan Pulls Back the Sheets on Sexy Tech’.

Focusing their strategy on making the subject matter more approachable, they leveraged ‘adjacency categories’, that is industries that were also known for product breakthroughs. They decided to treat the new Trojan products as cool ‘tech gadgets’ and launch them at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And while some media were red-faced when presented with the story, they quickly understood the tie in; it appealed to media who wanted something new and fresh to write about.

They continued their creative approach during the second part of the year when they took the show on the road and launched the ‘Good Vibrations Truck Tour’ around Manhattan to give people an opportunity to ‘see, touch and feel’ the different products. They used social media to drive awareness of where the trucks would be and encouraged consumers to talk openly about what has traditionally been a taboo subject.

Doug Piwinski, senior vice president of marketing and communications at Toms, tells us about the company’s ‘One Day Without Shoes’ initiative, which began as an April Fool’s gag and developed into a global campaign. Tom’s is unique as a business because they don’t rely on traditional advertising and instead build relationships with customers through social media and word of mouth. Each year the company activates its community by asking them to give up wearing shoes for one day in order to experience what life is like for children who don’t have shoes.

The program comes to life through a series of grassroots events in cities around the world and is promoted via a microsite which encourages people to plan and post events.

They worked with Ketchum PR in LA to craft a phased strategy and weren’t expecting the snowball effect that took place this year including stories on the home page of AOL and MSN and becoming number one trending topic on Twitter. Toms effectively uses an influencer strategy to inspire people to engage, raise awareness for an important cause and think about social entrepreneurship in a new way.

This year’s Silver Anvil awards will be presented in New York City on June 7, 2012. Inside PR will be there.

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Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Inside PR 2.98: Diving in to content marketing with Marcus Sheridan.

June 1, 2012 • admin • PR

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Would you like to be able to generate more than $2 million in new revenue for your company simply by writing a blog post? Marcus Sheridan, our guest on inside PR this week, has done just that.

Gini Dietrich caught up with Marcus after his keynote speech at the PRSA Conference last month in New Orleans.

Marcus shared an in-your-face and engaging presentation at the conference about content marketing. Marcus made a name for himself when he started a blog about fiber glass pools. His goal was to drive traffic to the website and eventually lead potential customers to his front door. To accomplish this, he answered common questions he had heard relating to installing or buying a fiber glass pool on his blog. Long story short, the traffic to his website blew up. He and his partners became “the guys that knew about fiber glass pools”.

Martin Waxman, Gini and Joseph Thornley discuss how Marcus’ image of content marketing can be adapted to the way PR and communications professionals craft and promote their key messages today in the connected era.
For more information on Marcus and his story, here is a little video that sums it all up.

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Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.