Greg Hazley recently wrote a post about Twitter and how PR professionals are using the micro-blogging tool. Erin, my chief (I am one of the 50 that report to her), was featured and mentioned her use of Twitter: a means for group communication and updates.

I can attest to the effectiveness of Twitter and to what Erin refers to as “genuine nature”. From the tweets, you really begin to know a person, their interests, moods, feelings, and day-to-day life. It is as if you are with the people that you are following on Twitter.

There are many stories I could share, but the most appropriate for this post has to be a recent Tweet (“frame grab” from Greg’s blog – look closely) right before Erin had to meet with a client. My response was “shorts” – I never did hear back from Erin on that one – maybe she’ll post a comment.

PS - You can follow Erin @ http://twitter.com/erinbyrne or mine @ http://twitter.com/fleander

The Financial Times published an article last week advising companies that they could manage the web without the help of PR firms. I agree with my colleague Charlie who runs our digital business in Asia/Pacific who responded to the FT with letter detailing some of the challenges, opportunities, and skills required to navigate the web. Now, admittedly I run the digital business for a PR firm, but whether or not clients pick us, I’d hate for them to go it alone. The Internet is still in very early stages, a digital wild wild west of sorts, and I don’t understand why any company want to risk figuring all of this out for themselves. PR advisers bring unique perspective to digital challenges, just like other professionals do within their respective fields.

From a public relations perspective, think about context - in the era of open communications facilitated by the Internet, your consumer messaging will affect corporate reputation, and vice versa. It is not possible to say one thing to one audience and something completely different to another, at least not without them hearing both sides of your story. PR advisers are uniquely situated to provide context and help guide messaging that creates dialogue with stakeholders while building and protecting a company’s position. Next, think about content. There are so many options for where to participate. Are companies really prepared to figure out what messages are appropriate for different types of sites on their own? What about community, which gives companies the opportunity to build loyalty around their brands based on shared values. Then, think about control. Companies are used to completely controlling their communications messages, but the Internet prohibits that. Instead, companies need to figure out what their most important messages are, and then figure out where they can control them, and where they can influence them, and then participate accordingly. Lastly, there is the very important fact that online chatter dramatically influences offline communications. Having a qualified PR adviser is one sure way to straddle all of these, and many other critical elements of navigating digital media.
Companies may be able to figure all of this out on their own, but why wouldn’t they want a communications adviser who can share broad-based experiences that cut across sectors, stakeholders, and platforms to help clients make the right choices the first time around?

I read on CNN yesterday about Yahoo and Google planning to offer social networking applications through their email page functions. Both companies have already made significant strides in allowing users to customize their home pages and aggregate content and functionality from various sites into a personal portal page.  However, I think that email is at odds with social networking given that email is inherently a personal communication.  Sure, I can block content from being seen by the world on social networking sites, but content is largely available to people I’ve marked as friends. Email is often more transactional then social, and that is a significant difference. I get the point about my email contacts being the genesis of my social graph, but no offense, there are some folks in my contacts database that I prefer to communicate with only on an as necessary and transactional basis.  Now, having widgets that tie my social networking information into my Google home page would be something I’d really go for. I’m all for the idea of a centralized home page that is aggregated, and eventually curated, just for and by me.  But leave my email account alone.

We launched two new websites a few weeks ago for one of our most important clients, Hormel Foods. The two sites are significant because they represent a fundamental shift in how the company is committed to listening to stakeholders to learn what THEY want, and are truly using digital to create an experience as opposed to just deliver information.
The sites, HormelFoods.com and HormelFoodsRecipes.com used to be part of one big jumbled corporate site that included all of the corporate stakeholder content along with all of the brand information and a recipes library for consumers. This was probably fine in 1999, but the company is growing quickly and aggressively expanding in many different directions under the leadership of CEO Jeff Ettinger. Hormel Foods conducted research to learn what all of their stakeholders wanted in a company web presence, which was very instructive but not necessarily surprising. (Corporate audiences don’t want to be bogged down with all of the consumer “fluff” but they do want to know it exists. Consumers want to access corporate content on request, but are far more interested in recipes, etc.) I love all of my clients (I know, insert kissy noise here), but I am especially proud of Hormel for this effort because it represented more work, more time, more money, and more maintenance into the future - but they did it anyway.
These two websites are in their infancy as the company has big plans to evolve them and add numerous features over the coming months, but I think they represent a tremendous step forward for Hormel Foods and a significantly improved experience for the many people they need to talk with. It took a lot of dedicated people at Hormel Foods, under the guidance of Corporate Communications VP Julie Craven, and a lot of talent from my agency led by Bryan Oakley and Steve Alberts, but it was well worth the effort. I can’t wait to see what comes next. Congratulations team!