Happy Groundhog’s Day! The little groundhog, known affectionately as Punxsutawney Phil, did see his shadow this morning no thanks to overcast skies and a chance of showers. According to legend, this means six more weeks of winter. Even Potomac Phil, the DC counterpart, is predicting a month and a half more of cold and snow.

Both traditional media and social media are abuzz today with tidbits about these “whistle pigs.” These creatures require a good bit of tending to keep them in top weather-predicting shape. They need to hibernate each winter and eat a healthy, vegetable rich diet.  And a media monitoring account to track the groundhog chatter also requires a bit of regular maintenance to keep it running well.

Set up good keywords – When you open a media monitoring account, whether it is to gather traditional news clips, social media mentions, or both, it is worth a little extra time to plan out and implement your search criteria. A few that might track our small rodent friend might include mentions of himself, Gobblers Knob where the event takes place, and perhaps his counterparts in other parts of the country.

Tweak keywords as necessary – It’s best to get these key words and phrases entered before a big event in order to get a baseline for the volume of chatter and hone in on exactly what you are looking to track. If your search terms are not an exact match for the type of results you are looking for you may need to alter your keywords slightly. You may need to broaden the focus on some of your criteria or narrow others.  I might suggest that Phil exclude mentions of the 1993 movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, for instance.

Clean out false positives – If you get results that technically match your keywords but aren’t quite the type of coverage you are looking to track, then remove them from the account on a regular basis to ensure the best possible data is retained. If there is a lot of this type of clutter, you may consider narrowing your search criteria.

Analyze your results – Get into the account and look over the results to find common trends, report on numbers of clips, relative size of the sources, or overall tone of the reporting. Some media monitoring accounts offer charting and graphing features to help you visualize some of this information. Are people critical of Phil’s prognostication track record? What percentage of this year’s coverage also mentions climate change or the mild winter thus far?

Download the data – You have worked so hard to get the set of results you want, be sure to spread the information around and save off the results outside of the media monitoring account. For example, Phil might want to share his mainstream media coverage with his marketing team in an executive summary report, while emailing out a newsletter style report of blog coverage to his Facebook friends.

With more winter weather around the corner, you will have plenty of time to focus on your media monitoring account before the weather improves and flowers start blooming.

This week, I was joined by co-host Doug Haslam of Voce Communications, a Porter Novelli company. We talked about the social media issues brought up by the Social46 program in Indianapolis, McDonald’s sponsored Tweet problem (and how they recovered), and whether neutrality and objectivity are even possible in PR.

This week’s show is 26 minutes long.

• First, Doug and I discuss Jay Baer’s post about Klout and the bruised egos that surfaced after individuals were selected to participate in a social media program designed to build “buzz” on Indianapolis, site of the Super Bowl. Participants were selected using Klout, then the list was “augmented manually” with local bloggers. As with any other list that is established, feelings were injured. We talk about several points Baer brought up in his post, including using Klout for selecting “influencers” for an effort that is so localized, the disclosure requirements, and calls for transparency in the selection process.
• Next, we talk about the McDonald’s “sponsored Tweets” effort, which started out using the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers, to draw attention to suppliers, but later in the day used what a post on Business Insider referred to as the “dangerously vague” hashtag #McDStories. Soon, people were using that hashtag in ways the brand certainly hadn’t intended for it to be used. While a number of sites have referred to this as a social media “fail,” Doug points to a more balanced post on the Realtime Report, which noted that McDonald’s actually responded very quickly by reverting to the more specific hashtag when they realized what was happening. So, lesson learned: vague hashtags are probably not the best of an idea. Also, I butcher an Oscar Wilde quote, and Doug sets me straight.
• Finally, we talk about PR Studies’ post about PR and objectivity. Doug points out that PR doesn’t need to be totally objective, and being truly neutral on any topic is all but impossible. We all bring our biases to the proverbial table, and the best we can do is do our best for our clients while trying hard not to wander too far down the path of overly fluffy speech.

And, a short PSA about our fantastic co-host. Doug will be riding in the Pan-Mass challenge again this year, his fifth. Here’s some info about the ride: bit.ly/pmcdoug

The late House Speaker Tip O’Neill said “all politics is local.” It’s a mantra in politics, and is frequently at the core of Public Affairs programs. It makes sense: if you are appealing to a population that is defined by a geographical area (a voting district) you must keep the issues that are of importance to that specific area at top of mind when speaking to them.

But I think we’ve reached a point, because of the Internet, that candidates can no longer rely on this adage as gospel. We are so connected and it is so easy to share news items that while the need to appeal to voters on a local level remains, the ability to confine the messages directed at that local level is gone. And that has ramifications for candidates and elected leaders.

The Internet has, in many ways, facilitated and strengthened connections between districts and their representatives. It has made it easier to find out more about local issues. It’s dead easy to contact your legislators at any level–all you need is your zip code and address. (Back when I handled constituent queries, there were times when we need to consult complicated district maps to see in which district certain street addresses would fall.)

As always, there is another side to the coin. The very nature of the Internet means that we can get news and information from far-flung places. The local is still local–but the news of the local has global reach.

In the past, candidates running for president could carefully tailor their messages to appeal to certain demographics and audiences and then pack up and move on to the next state or audience. Now, they need to walk the tricky tightrope of appealing to a specific audience without alienating those who may be paying attention to the race elsewhere.

This balancing act has been on my mind for a while, particularly in the context of the discussion on earmarks. However, the issue that brought it front of mind for me today is a speech Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich gave yesterday in Florida. Florida’s “Space Coast” has been hard-hit by the loss of the space shuttle program, and Gingrich crafted a speech tailored to appeal to those highly paid engineers who are now unemployed. He proposed that by the end of his “[...] second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.” This drew cheers and applause from the audience–as it was designed to do.

There’s no crystal ball to look back and see how this issue would have played out before Internet connectivity was so common, but my guess is that: a) local press would have covered the speech and this committment to the space program extensively and Florida voters would remember his speech not only at the primary, but in the general election too; b) the three national nightly news programs *might* have mentioned it, either in passing or in a very short segment, soon to be forgotten by the general population; and c) it would be largely forgotten beyond Florida because the appeal of the story was so local. Candidates, to a certain extent, counted on this pattern.

Enter the Internet. This story is everywhere today, and the coverage ranges from “uh…what the heck?” to outright sarcasm. There are hashtags and the Tweets are flying. He is being called “Moon Base Newt.” Outside of Florida this…does not appear to be going over well.

Appeals to local communities are in many ways the lifeblood of politics, as Speaker O’Neill’s quote captures. But the audience is no longer local–and so politics is no longer “just” local either.

We don’t talk much about the celebrity endorsement/marketing side of PR here on Media Bullseye–mostly because I tend to think that celebrity endorsement, while presumably effective considering its widespread use, tends to play into a stereotype of PR that I generally don’t care to reinforce. (That PR=publicist.) It is also an area that I think may be overrated, when examining the benefits versus the possible risks–celebrity endorsers have on occasion made rather large splashes in the water during their falls from grace.

The use of the celebrity promoter persists, so I have to assume that the attention garnered must be demonstrating results in some real way. And by “real way” I’m talking dollars of products purchased, not fat clip books showing numbers of mentions, or help us all, definitely not AVEs.

Enter the most recent high-profile celebrity endorsement: Paula Deen. While most people I know are well aware of who Paula Deen is, for the uninitiated, she’s long been a fixture on the TV “Celebrity” cook scene. She has published several cookbooks and had her own Food Network TV specials, and the “trademark” of her dishes is that they are loaded–really loaded–with sugar, salt, and fat (usually butter). The woman deep-fries lasagna, and serves a “brunch burger” that is a burger topped with bacon (of course) and an egg served on two glazed donuts instead of a bun, for heaven’s sake. I’m not a fan (I’m Team Bourdain), but clearly she strikes a chord with people as she’s very popular and her cookbooks sell well. She’s also an American success story, as she was near-penniless at one point and has worked hard and achieved success.

She is also the new celebrity spokesperson for Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical manufacturer of diabetes medications, including Victoza, a medication to treat Type 2 diabetes. Deen disclosed last week that she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes three years ago.

And this is where I start wondering what Novo Nordisk was trying to achieve in selecting her as a celebrity endorser. Deen has, for years, been publicly unapologetic for the nutritional stats of the food she prepares, and apparently continued to promote the same cooking style after her diagnosis. She’s also admitted that she’s been a smoker for 50+ years (and made this announcement on Dr. Oz’s show, wherein she asks for his help to quit, so good for her on that point). If we look at the role of the celebrity endorser as an Influencer, who is their target audience? If we look at the role of the celebrity endorser as an Aspirational figure, does Deen match that role?

Thus far, the loudest criticism has surrounded her decision to disclose her condition only after she secured what we can guess was a fairly lucrative contract to promote a pharmaceutical product. I’m of the opinion that the diagnosis is hers and she has the right to disclose it or not.  I do think that there are ethics questions surrounding her decision to continue to promote unhealthy food after she was diagnosed–obesity is a risk factor for Type 2 diabetes–but more to the point of this post, there are PR ramifications for all of these decisions. I don’t think I’m alone in this, as Deen’s PR representative of the last six years has quit, allegedly over Deen’s decision to endorse the drug.

It just leaves me wondering, again, are celebrity endorsements really worth the trouble?

Do you remember the feeling of being a kid on the way to the nickel-and-dime store? Your pockets were heavy and rattling with all the change you could shake free from your bank, or find rolling around under the couch. You schemed about all of the various combinations of gummies, chocolates, and other sweets to get the biggest brown paper bag of penny candy you could afford with your treasure.

That upbeat feeling is how you can approach changes to your search criteria. In a media monitoring account, there are so many different ways you can approach tweaking your search terms to yield the results you want. Here are a few sugar-coated ways you can try:

The Swedish Fish Approach – These red-gummies were always among the most cost effective treats when I was young. It was all about quantity; you could literally get them a dime a dozen at our corner store. These were great if I wanted to share with friends or lord the big bag of 120 over my little sister for days after she scarfed down all her candy.  Similarly, if you want to gather as many clips on a topic as possible use broad search terms in your monitoring account. For instance, try “gummy bear” instead of “Haribo Gummy Bears” or “sour gummy” instead of “Sour Patch Kids.” This also gives you the added benefit of looking into what else may be going on in your industry.

The Chocolate Bar Method – If there is a press release or focused issue that you are looking to capture with your search terms, then you are looking at a situation that requires quality over quantity. You want the big chocolate bar; the one keyword or phrase that sets your media release apart from other similar items from competitors or general industry news. In this instance, a more targeted approach is better, such as brand names, legislation numbers, or very specific key phrases. You can also pair a case sensitive proper noun with a broader word to ratchet the focus in even narrower. Think “Scharffen Berger semi-sweet,” “Ghiradelli hot chocolate,” and “Lindt truffles” as opposed to the generic “chocolate.”

The Mini Chocolate Technique – These individually wrapped morsels are the happy medium, plenty to share, but satisfies that cocoa-craving. Again the brand names offer some ideas, with M&M or Reese’s being examples of an overarching term that may capture many more specific references. The little candy coated chocolate boasts a number of varieties these days, including milk chocolate, white chocolate, peanuts, almonds, peanut butter, pretzels, and numerous specialty flavors.  In terms of search criteria, you may need to brainstorm some “middle of the road” search criteria to hit this sweet spot. You can also try pairing some broader terms with qualifiers, such as “chocolate AND crisps” or “chocolate AND caramel.”

Now that you are salivating over all of the possibilities, dive into that media monitoring account and make some changes.  Focus your search criteria to just what you are looking for in terms of volume and specificity.

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jennifer Windrum, the driving force behind the WTF (Where’s The Funding) for lung cancer awareness. Windrum, whose mother has been battling lung cancer for several years (and no, she’s never smoked), continues her advocacy efforts with a seemingly bottomless supply of energy. In addition to continuing her work there, she’s taking the entrepreneurial plunge and will be launching a sock monkey line, called “SMAC”–Sock Monkeys Against Cancer–to raise funds and awareness for a range of different cancers.

As many of you know, Joe Paterno of Penn State lost his fight with lung cancer this weekend. Due to the stigma surrounding this disease, it doesn’t get nearly the attention or funding that other cancers do. I encourage you to listen to the interview and hear about Jennifer’s efforts on behalf of lung cancer patients.

Our talk is 18 minutes long.

The Q&A ranged from discussing the success of her efforts with WTF, how the sock monkey effort came to be, and how she–and her mom–are doing.

This week, Sarah Santucci and I discuss the PR and communications strategies and tactics surrounding the SOPA/PIPA blackout effort, Politico has teamed up with Facebook for campaign analysis, and Gawker highlights some bad PR pitches–will they ever run out of material?

This week’s show is 29 minutes long.

• First, we discuss the PR and communications lessons from the online “blackout” protest opposing the SOPA/PIPA bills. Sarah agrees with Neville’s headline that “Hollywood had Chris Dodd and a press release, Silicon Valley had Facebook.” The interests supporting the bills had a long history of lobbying efforts and a simple message on their side. The uphill battle on this issue was clearly on the part of the web companies that opposed the legislation. By using a combination of humor and a very attention-getting tactic of blacking out some popular sites, Silicon Valley was successful–extremely successful–in channeling opposition to the bills directly to Congress. I wonder if it’s a once-in-a-lifetime tactic. Clearly, coordinating the effort across multiple sites isn’t something that can happen often, but typically when one meets with this kind of success the desire to replicate it is strong.
• Next, we talk about Politico’s decision to team up with Facebook to provide analysis for the 2012 election cycle. We both agree that this is an interesting way to examine opinion data, but also agree that sentiment analysis of Facebook status updates probably isn’t going to yield much good information–there’s just too much sarcasm and irony present. Additionally, supporters of President Obama rooting for whomever they believe is the weakest candidate would be counted as positives–which is hardly accurate. Still, with opinion polling changing, it will be fascinating to watch and see what data this type of analysis will yield.
• Finally, we talk about Gawker’s post titled “Let us all come together to improve the PR industry through ridicule.” Sarah notes that bad pitches are hardly something new, after all the Bad Pitch blog has been around for…around six years or so? (Wow!) Still, the bad pitches, they keep on coming. The Gawker entry is barely a pitch at all, it really seems to be thrown together without much technique. Basically, Gawker was right to call out this bad pitch, but it’s notable that it certainly received far more play this way. Sarah wonders if the whole thing was staged. She’s a net-cynic like that.

At your Monday meeting, your boss says she wants you to start monitoring online media for your organization. You think “Great, I already have so many other projects on my plate! How am I going to fit this one into the mix, too?!?” Not to worry. I have some ideas to help you monitor traditional or social media with just 15 minutes a day.

Here are a few pointers on how you can get started:

Monday – Write down the top items that you need monitored most. Maybe it’s your company name, the CEO, and the name of your company’s spokesperson – these would get you most of the traditional media mentions with just three quick online searches. How many results do you get? Ten hits in the last month or maybe more like 1,000 results in the last 24 hours. If it is the former, you may be able to manage gathering the results on your own within the 15 minutes per day timeframe. If it is the latter, you may look into using a monitoring service to help you aggregate, organize, and disseminate the daily chatter.

Tuesday – If you only found a handful of clips in your initial search, then repeat your search and see if anything new has come up. Then you can record your findings for the day in an email and send it off to your colleagues. If you missed something, someone on your team is bound to tell you and you can revise your searches moving forward.

If you were flooded with clips, then today would be a great day to set up some sort of online tool to help you manage the monitoring. (CustomScoop offers a free two week trial or there are several other services you can contact. There are even free online tracking services like Google Alerts.) In your 15 minute window today, set up a trial with a monitoring company. Use the list you created yesterday as a springboard for search criteria and consider adding a few key issues for your industry or a competitor’s name just to see what sort of results you get for comparison.

Wednesday – Review your results thus far. Are you happy with what you’ve found? If not, try tweaking the search criteria you are using, such as alternate spellings for names or common misspellings. If you are getting flooded with results, try limiting the original search terms by adding a key phrase from a recent press release, or pairing the term with other more specific industry language.

Thursday – Take your 15 minutes today to review your results for the day and perhaps seek out the opinion of someone else on your team. They may suggest other items to track or ways you could search online. If you set up a media monitoring account, then you could contact customer service for help tightening up your keywords or utilizing their suite of tools to analyze the results in the dashboard.

Friday – In your 15 minutes today, compile what you have learned into an executive summary-style report. If you had a few clips per day then you can compile these into a newsletter format, perhaps providing the title, byline, and a brief summary or excerpt for each clip.

If your search criteria returned a large amount of clips, try using a bulleted list to touch on the top five trends you saw in the results and provide a volume chart with the daily totals. Alternately you could report on the most notable five to ten results in terms of size of the publication, tone of the article, or number of reprints of the story.

Saturday & Sunday – Enjoy your weekend!

Monday – Before the meeting with your boss, do a quick check to see what happened with your search terms over the weekend. Use part of your 15 minute window to jot down any changes to your Friday report. Then take your findings to the boss. Should you continue looking for the results the way you did last week or alter your approach? Maybe it’s time to widen your search criteria, or add in alternative sources like social media.

In a week, with just 15 minutes a day, you started a media monitoring regimen. With an hour and a half of your valuable time invested, you have compiled a baseline report and have a great head start on developing a robust monitoring program.

With so many screens and gadgets commanding our time and attention, sometimes it’s good to take a mental break from them, and let the mind rest a bit. I do this typically by reading (old school, paper) books. Gini Dietrich has a great post up today about how reading fiction can help your career–I agree whole-heartedly.

It’s also why I think I got such a chuckle out of another post I came across today, from the blog Pioneer Woman. Titled “Goodnight iPad,” it spotlights a book that is a parody to the wildly successful and much-loved children’s book “Goodnight Moon.” Written by Ann Droyd, it has delightful illustrations to go along with rhymes such as “And a BlackBerry ringing/With Eminem singing.” I think my favorite illustration and caption pairing is the one about a “viral clip of a cat doing flips.”

Such a funny and light-hearted way to present a gentle reminder that stepping away from the gadgets for a bit can be a good thing.

Within the last week, I’ve seen two instances of small business owners responding to bad Yelp! reviews in ways that, to put it mildly, are not helpful to the long-term success of the individual businesses. I can’t imagine the stress of running a consumer-focused business in this economy, and I’m sure that negative reviews are stinging–and perceived as potentially fatal–in this environment.

That said, when you are dealing with the public, you are bound to face some criticism. Some of it may be warranted, and some may be off-base. The way that you respond and manage such criticism could prove to have more of an impact on your business than the initial bad review itself. So, some tips to consider:

1. Step away from the computer. This could well be my most controversial tip, from the perspective of others who monitor social media who seem to believe that any delay in responding is too long. I stand by it though–especially if you are the owner, and especially if anyone has ever described you as “passionate” or “fervent” about your business. Cooler heads prevail. If you are at all tempted to lash out at the reviewer, you owe it to your business to allow yourself time to cool down.
2. Write out your response longhand, on a piece of paper. Then go for a walk, or do some yoga, or pet a puppy–anything to get your head cleared. After you’ve cooled off, look at your response, and then shred it. Seriously. This part of the exercise is to allow you to get things off your chest, so you can move to the next step.
3. Once you’ve cooled off, re-read the complaint. Did the customer make any salient points, or was it rant-y and completely negative? If it’s the former, concentrate on responding to the points in a concerned, but largely dispassionate manner. Channel your inner Mr. Spock. Reverse roles: how would you have felt had you been the customer? Empathy goes a long way.
4. If the review was totally negative, think carefully about your response. I’d be willing to bet that unless the bulk of the reviews are similar (in which case you have a more fundamental problem), others reading the review will be more objective than you may be giving them credit for. When I read Yelp! reviews, I have a tendency to throw out the most positive review and the most negative one(s).  The really positive ones sometimes sound too much like marketing-speak, making me think it’s friends or family members writing the review. The really negative ones could be anything from someone having a bad day, to competitors, to just unreasonable expectations.
5. Apologize. Even if you think you did nothing wrong, apologize to the customer for the negative experience. I’ve worked customer service at a retail store, and I’m not going to say the customer is always right–I’ve seen too much evidence to the contrary. Regardless, if the customer feels as though he or she has been wronged, apologize. And make it a real apology, not “I’m sorry you felt that way, but…” statement.
6. Offer to make things right, and/or commit to doing better in the future. If the customer is really angry, this might not make a difference–and that’s okay. Remember, your response has more than one function. In addition to responding to the customer, your response is also showing to others reading the review that you care about the business and your customers.
7. Do not, under any circumstances, get into a protracted debate about who was right and who was wrong. It doesn’t matter. Apologize, offer to make things right, and if you’re rebuffed, move on. It might be tough, but there is no benefit to dragging things out.
8. If you can’t be objective, consider tapping someone else to respond. Choose carefully, however. This person should be: a) cool-headed; b) trusted by you/the business owner, and c) high enough in the organization to be able to make real offers of assistance or compensation. Tasking an intern or low-level employee to respond, who then makes an offer of compensation that you aren’t willing to fulfill or stand behind will cause you more problems.

And finally, apparently it needs to be said: DO NOT lash out at the customer by posting his or her picture on your brand’s Facebook page with disparaging comments and DO NOT (allegedly) start a fictitious blog suggesting the customer has drug problems and has resorted to prostitution.