Most of the brands and businesses I know have some sort of social media presence. Those that know how to do it right can really make my day, and those that do it all wrong usually end up paying the price for failing to understand the nuances and sensibilities of social communities and channels. 

"Right" and "wrong" can mean different things to different people, but most have generally been able to recognize train wrecks when they see them. Think McDonald's #McStories and, a little further back in the day, Kenneth Cole hijacking the #Cairo hashtag during political unrest in Egypt to introduce its Spring collection.

The posiblity that social media could go wrong is often cause for hesitation. But most brands decide to participate because the cost of not reaching out to their constituencies via social media, and/or the idea of what could be gained from it more often than not come out to be greater than choosing to not get involved with social media at all.

So when I visited Saturday Night Live cast member Kristin Wiig's barely-even-a-website and read the short, but decisive note on the home page, I was slightly taken aback:

"Kristen Wiig is not on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site"

After wondering why a celebrity who could potentially gain so much from interacting with her fans would choose not to participate in social media, I concluded with a simple -- Power to her. I respect making the decision to not half-ass it. 

What do you think? Missed opportunity? 

It has been QUITE some time since my last post. Long story short:

• I earned my master's degree
• I backpacked around South America (read about some of those adventures here)
• I moved from Washington, D.C. to Austin, Texas
• I started a new job
• I finally finished furnishing my new aparment
• I have reunited with old friends and made new friends
• Work, work, work

It's been a little more than eight months since I started working at my agency and I can't say enough about how much I've been exercising my public relations and social media muscles in this relatively short period of time. I have had the opportunity to work on a number of projects ranging from traditional public relations, to digital communications, and all that is in between that ties those two approaches together. I'm learning a lot. And quickly.

I do regret that I have had no extra time to dedicate to my personal social media projects. Until a few days ago, I was doing nothing about the fact that my personal social media activity had slowed significantly. I didn't want to feel exhausted by turning my life into a 24/7 social media frenzy, and I didn't want to exhaust others who prefer to limit their personal use of every social network that isn't Facebook.

But two days ago, I jotted down what must have been my 37th idea for a blog post and realized that my attempts to leave social media at the office were futile and made no sense. The fact that social media is a personal hobby of mine is the first reason I chose to study and later work in my field.  

I'm excited to get back to mixing business with pleasure. Last night I imported my Wordpress blog to Posterous (a "one platform to rule them all" sort of decision).

I'm back!

 

Literally right after watching my brand-new Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows DVD, I looked through my GoogleReader and came upon a very pleasant surprise. Peter Jackson, who very famously directed "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, released the first video blog from the set of "The Hobbit." My reactions unfolded as follows:

• Squeal whilst opening link.
• Click "Play" button.
• Disappointment / excitement about the fact that it was 10 minutes long
• Thoughts about Peter Jackson losing all that weight.
• "Two to three years?!?!"
• Disappointment about 3-Dness of movie. Immediate excitement after realizing that Peter Jackson wouldn't do it in 3-D unless it turns out amazing. Unlike "Alice and Wonderland."
• Swords!
• More squeals.
• Gandaaaalf!
• Anticipation and nostalgia.
• "Oh man, I can't wait. I'm SO staying tuned into all the pre-production and behind-the-scene stuff... because I want to AND because I CAN."

Not too long ago, only actors and staff were privvy to behind-the-scenes action but these days even us non-VIP peasants are getting access to content that makes us feel even closer to the things we know to and love. Many movies, brands, organizations, etc. have become very gratifying online experiences (and many more still have the potential to do so), and if executed properly, they have can turn into very gratifying offline experiences that not just make the bottom line happy, but leave consumers very satisfied as well. Will Jackson's video and blog posts make a difference in terms of whether or not I'll watch the movie? Not really. I always planned to. But will it make a difference in terms of how much I will enjoy it? You bet. In a way it will feel as though the movie is not just Jackson's baby, but mine as well because I saw it come to life. Marketers, take note.  

The sexiest thing I've seen today came to me by way of The New York Times. Project Cascade is the lastest technology developed by The New York Times R&D Group in order to better understand how a story goes viral on Twitter in order to change and improve the ways in which the newspaper delivers value to its readers. Project Cascade is exciting to me for a number of reasons:

1. While other Twitter visualizations focus on connections and following/follower relationships, Project Cascade delves into the content of tweets and how it is disseminated throughout the Twittersphere.
2. While other visualizations focus on retweets, hashtags, replies, mentions, and other specific parts of Twitter conversations,Project Cascade takes a more holistic view of the rather complex ecosystem that is Twitter.
3. While many metrics and social media measurement platforms tend to emphasize the role of influencers and opinion leaders (or the people we have labeled as such), Project Cascade has the potential to show that Twitter conversations diffuse throughout the Twittersphere by way of everyday/average users.
4. Project Cascade also has the potential to help us learn more about what messages have a longer life expectancy or chance of propagating throughout the Twittersphere. This could have very practical implications, not only for media companies but for brands, organizations and individual Twitter users. Learning what constitutes value on Twitter is a secret we have yet to decode, and Project Cascade shows a lot of promise in terms of helping us move in that direction.
5. Project Cascade will soon be used to visualize conversations for other publications and content providers, which means that this is a project that will not only help The New York Times learn from its own readers' social conversations, but other organizations using social media will be able to do the same with their readers, viewers, customers, etc.

As a visual learner, infographics and visualizations are immensely valuable and infinitely more meaningful when it comes to learning concepts and understanding how they work, how they can be applied, and how they interact with each other. Here is a fantastic article about Project Cascade from the Fast Company Design blog. Below is a video that explains Project Cascade in more detail. I'm looking forward to its continued development and applications. Long live The New York Times. What are your thoughts on Project Cascade? Is it really the first of it's kind? What take aways would you most look forward to?

A few days ago I stumbled upon this retweet on my Twitter feed: Some sound advice delivered in the words of @50cent. Make sure your Twitter profile picture is of something that is not the "Twitter egg," random graphics, or a part of your body that is not your face. People will feel more comfortable following you and interacting with you. As open as our social media communities and networks seem to be becoming, the basic tenets of trust still apply. What are other ways we can inspire trust in people who are meeting us for the first time via a social network? Here are some items, what would you add?  

• Actual profile picture
• Name and lastname
• Basic info
• Links to other sites related to our personal or professional identities
• Using a trusted or known platform to tweet and share content
• Grammar and spelling
• Geo-tagged data

Is it important to include these items in our public social networking profiles or are we overexposing ourselves and walking right into the lion's den?  

During this week’s #pr20chat, Justin Goldsborough (@JGoldsborough) asked how PR professionals can best identify and cater to the needs of their target audience. My response was something only a current public relations graduate student, fresh out of taking her comprehensive written and oral examinations and, appropriately trained in methods by her we-mean-business-when-we-say-research university would respond... and that response led to a comment by @JGoldsborough who shared that the practice of conducting surveys is not one that PR professionals employ as frequently as they should. After all, if the public is at the heart of public relations, why wouldn’t we ask them how they feel about certain issues that involve our organizations, clients, industry, and even current events that directly or indirectly affect us and them?  

Read the full post on Shonali Burke's Waxing Unlyrical

We all make mistakes. And especially since Twitter came along, I make a LOT of mistakes. I’ve sent public tweets that were meant to be DMs. I’ve misspelled some words. I’ve forgotten to send a link with a tweet. Luckily, my community of followers and followees has been kind to me and has helped me remember that we’re all human. However, despite how much we say that social media has humanized brands, it seems that when brands tweet we tend to be less forgiving when they make mistakes. Certain Twitter blunders have caused uproars of relative magnitude, which leads me to my current investigation – responding to social media crises in 140 characters. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="288" caption="Do they even make whiteout anymore? "] [/caption] I’m searching for at least 10 crisis managers and public relations professionals who can speak with me for 30-45 minutes about recent crises caused by rogue Tweets sent from corporate Twitter accounts, and discuss their thoughts on how the organization experiencing the crisis responded in 140 characters. If you are interested or know someone who would be interested in participating in the study, please let me know. You can send a tweet to @andinarvaez or email me at andinarvaez [at] gmail [dot] com. Please help me spread the word by tweeting:

Are you a crisis manager or PR pro? Help @andinarvaez with her study RE: responding to crisis in 140 characters http://bit.ly/140study

Thank you! Be sure to check back here to read about the results.

It’s been two weeks since I’ve been back from spending the holidays with my family in Ecuador. I was there for a whole month (thank you University of Maryland’s long, long winter break) hanging out with my mom, sisters, and my niece and nephew – who rock, by the way. I caught up on sleep and put in some holiday work. But really, it’s been two weeks since I’ve been back to life as I used to know it. Over the break I realized how anxious I was to go back to being myself after tearing my ACL in a freak soccer accident back in August. For about a month, I carried on as usual. Since I didn’t have a ligament I literally had nothing to “loose” (Hah! Still got it). So I strapped on my knee brace and did my thing – I even karaoked (Figure A) and put on a fundraiser (Figure B). [caption id="" align="alignright" width="227" caption="Figure A"] [/caption] But on October 8, 2010 I underwent a surgical procedure I wasn’t ready for. Young and naïve as I am, I was 100 percent sure that it would take three weeks (See? I didn’t even give myself a month) to get over the pain, lose the crutches, and go back to kicking ass and things. I was 150 percent wrong. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="216" caption="Figure B"] [/caption] Not being able to function physically led to mental and emotional suckyness. I stopped going out (that counts limited commuting, running errands, and no social life), I had to skip classes, I struggled to teach my own class, I stopped blogging (but you already knew that), I gave up on a lot of my hobbies, and everything felt inadequate because I felt inadequate. In strangely related news, when my contract with AT&T ended late last year, I decided to switch to Verizon and get a Droid X. Only 10 days went by before I went crawling back to AT&T to get my iPhone back. There ain’t nothing like the iPhone. Maybe I’m weaker than others. Maybe I’m not the early adapter I thought I was. The truth is I can’t work without the right tools. I need my knee and I need my iPhone, among a few other things. But while the iPhone was simple enough to get back, my knee has just a few more months to reach full recovery. But if I’m blogging again, you know it’s because I’m going up and down stairs like a boss again, speed walking, and – I don’t want to show off – but these days I’ve been sitting in lotus position. What tools do you need to function? Do you take some more for granted than others?

I have been very active in the social media sphere for approximately three years now, but you have to think of that in terms of dog years to compensate for how quickly social media and technology develop and evolve. Over the course of those three years I have been very involved in my local social media community, I worked full-time at a public relations agency, and one year ago, I decided to go back to school to earn my Master’s degree. Most recently, I've also become involved in Social Media Club Education Connection (#SMCEDU). What I discovered when I went back to school to learn and to teach an undergraduate course, was that the gap between practice and theory that we always talk about is getting wider by the minute. And it’s getting away from us. This is a huge problem. And I’ve decided to look further with the hope of finding some solutions.

Enter my study.

I wish to gain an appreciation for how the relationship between PR professors and professionals shapes the destiny of future PR professionals in today's fast-evolving, world 2.0. Through applying and potentially extending relationship management theory, this study will seek to understand what PR professionals expect from recent graduates in terms of technology and social media knowledge and skills, and what professors are doing to prepare students to meet those expectations. The study aims to contribute to the field of public relations by attempting to identify and bridge any communication and relationship management gaps that may exist between professionals and educators and proposing solutions that will benefit current students and graduates entering the field

Enter YOU.

I will be interviewing public relations educators and practitioners throughout the months of October and November. I would only need one hour of your time. Interviews can take place over the phone, Skype, or in person if you are in the DC area. Please share this with colleagues and friends. I’d love to interview as many educators and professionals as humanly possible. If you have any questions or would like to participate leave a comment, send a tweet (@andinarvaez), or write an email to andinarvaez [at] gmail [dot] com.

Tweet to share

Are you a #PR pro or prof? Help @andinarvaez with her study RE: bridging the gap between theory and practice http://bit.ly/prprosandprofs

THANK YOU!

A short note on relationships management theory and this study

Relationship management theory of public relations explores how organizations can better relate to their customers. I am throwing in a new twist and extending the use of this theory beyond organizations as we know them. If we think of public relations educators as the organization and PR students as the product of their work, then PR professionals who hire these students become the customers educators must build relationships with. If we think of PR professionals as the organization and industry best practices as the product of their work, then PR educators who adapt the PR curriculum in order to teach these to future professionals become the customers and PR pros must build relationships with them to ensure that students are being prepared accordingly.