New employees answer, "What did you learn during your first year at Gregory FCA?"

One of our 2011 goals was to formalize our commitment to ongoing training of our employees. To that end, we've grown our culture of knowledge sharing among our teams and ramped up our focus on mentoring and hands-on training, especially with our new employees.

We've also developed and instituted a training workshop program we call Gregory FCA University. Leaders in the firm present an interactive session every month about a given topic in public relations, social media, or investor relations.

The sessions are followed by quizzes to test employees' absorption of the information. We also video record all the sessions, and make them available in our digital library for employees to watch anytime they're looking for insight or advice from their peers on a particular subject.

A year now on the books, we wanted to see what our 12 new employees have learned so far from being embedded in the industry and engaging in our training initiatives. So we asked them, "What did you learn during your first year at Gregory FCA?" Here's some of what we heard.

Kate Ritinski

Kate Ritinski, Account Coordinator

It's hard to believe that less than a year ago, I was still a college student, enjoying my last semester of senior year and figuring out how to tackle the "real world." Now here I am, eight months later, as an Account Coordinator at Gregory FCA. Needless to say, these past several months have been quite a whirlwind.

Before I started, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what PR involved: having good time management, keeping clients happy, and securing media coverage. As I began my work at Gregory FCA, however, I quickly learned PR was much more than I ever thought it could be. Here's a sampling of what the last eight months have taught me:

Social media trends in 2012: Orchestrate this!

Over the past few days, we've been sharing our predictions for what we think will be the trends to watch in public relations and social media in 2012. Yesterday, we featured our Social Networking Manager, Kwan Morrow. The day before that, we heard from Mike Lizun, Senior Vice President of Public Relations.

Today, I'd like to share the thoughts of our Editor-in-Chief and Senior Vice President, Rich Levin. Rich has been in the content game since the mid-80s and he's been involved in social media for just as long -- long before the term social media became de rigueur.

Our crazy Editor-in-Chief
mugging for the camera

Here are his thoughts on what will be the important trends in content-driven social strategies in 2012. And although we promised 15 trends to watch, we always go above and beyond for our clients and readers. So in all, we are sharing 17 PR and social trends to be on the lookout for in 2012.

1. Orchestration will be the big challenge in 2012 for companies that got started with social within the past two years. They have built their basic platforms and skill sets, and are now realizing that, in order to scale and be fully engaged, they need to orchestrate their activities in real-time, yet remain authentic and transparent in their engagement with customers. This is a big challenge, and there are no easy answers. Companies will try and fail, but they must get back up and keep trying until they figure out the orchestration model that works best for their organization. PR agencies that have developed best practices in this area are the ones to lean on. Agencies that promise the moon via outsourcing should be avoided. Social media cannot be outsourced. Social media must be integrated with all communications activities. Orchestration will be the issue that breaks many client-agency relationships, because it demands a highly integrated relationship. The outsourced model won't fly.

2012 public relations trends you need to be ready for

In continuing with our predictions for the 2012 public relations trends that need to be on your radar, we turn to Kwan Morrow, our Social Networking Manager. Here are his four predictions for what will be hot on the social networking, content marketing, and content syndication fronts next year. (In my last post, I promised we'd share two predictions from Kwan. But what can I say -- the wheels kept turning after we published that statement, so here are two more.)

Gregory FCA's Kwan Morrow

1. Content kings will forge empires. In 2011, content was king. In 2012, the kings with the best content and syndication methods will consolidate empires -- meaning the companies that truly understand content marketing will become the go-to resources of their industry. They will benefit handsomely from this positioning because they understand that if you're not solving your audiences' problems, answering their questions, or providing just-in-time content that helps them make an educated purchasing decision, your content will remain unread, unclicked, unshared, unliked, and most importantly, unused.

15 PR trends in 2012 that need to be on your public relations radar

Gregory FCA's annual list confirms and uncovers what's in store for the new year

There's no shortage of predictions this time of year about the top public relations trends that PR firms need to be paying attention to. As with any annual outlook, some of these predictions are obvious, others not so much. Then again, "obvious" is in the eye of the beholder.

With that in mind, I asked some of our best and brightest minds within the firm to share with our blog audience what they consider to be the most important public relations trends in 2012. I'll be sharing them with you over my next three posts, starting with Mike Lizun, Senior Vice President of Public Relations, who looks at the world through a media lens.

Gregory FCA's Mike Lizun

1. Mobile, mobile, mobile, and news apps. News curation apps (Flipboard, Zite, Google Currents, Pulse) for mobile and tablets will continue to drive media consumption and become even more important as a means to distribute the news for news organizations. As more of the population adopts mobile and tablet reading as the preferred way to read news, those without a key curation partner or clear mobile strategy will become less relevant.

2. Second screen anyone? Mobile devices will increasingly be used as second screens while watching TV. What are consumers doing with these second screens? News and social media top the list of what people are viewing on mobile devices, which will lead to a shakeout among smaller, less-known social and news providers; and a rise in apps that partner with media, such as IntoNow (Yahoo!), Get Glue (Travel Channel), and others.

How to Occupy the hearts and souls of a nation

A word of public relations advice to our Occupiers

Any movement that gains the kind of national attention that Occupy Wall Street -- and now its attendant protests -- has generated deserves our attention and analysis. What started as a grassroots call to action by Canadian-based Adbusters Media Foundation, has in the last three weeks grown into a legitimate voice of discontent, which last week may have hit a critical tipping point, when online buzz of the endeavor increased a remarkable 250 percent from Sept. 28 until Oct. 5, 2011.

At least, that's according to my own internal analysis performed by Nielsen's BuzzMetrics, which can review more than 100 million online mentions and comments about a given movement, issue, or brand. Certainly, last week's union support of the movement hastened its visibility, giving it the first measure of credibility.

From my perspective, no one should dismiss Occupy. It's a growing and legitimate voice, particularly given the speed with which social movements in the Middle East came to power and toppled governments.

Facebook Timeline: Curating your digital life

At yesterday's f8 Developer Conference, Facebook unveiled the biggest update to its social networking platform since it launched in 2004. I'm not going to get into all the technical aspects of Timeline. And I'm not going to get into the Facebook versus Google debate or pontificate about which will win in the end (in this post at least). I can't predict that. I do know that Facebook has a huge lead in the space. It's becoming another Web, a second Web if you will.

Five ways to improve your content marketing strategy

Content is king, but it's also killer. It can be difficult to create, and time consuming to do well. But there are ways to transform information, data, and goings-on within any organization into authentic news and content, the kind that connects with digital and media audiences.

These approaches are increasingly important today as content drives more of our marketing initiatives. A recent study by the Custom Content Council found 35 percent of CMOs believe that custom content marketing is the future of marketing. This is compared to 19 percent in 2006.

This study also found 73 percent of consumers prefer to receive information as articles rather than blatant advertisements. What's more, 61 percent of consumers said they feel better about companies when they deliver content and are more likely to buy from them.

Virtually any company can publish content and see value for it. Here are five ways to creatively create and capture content that integrate with blogging, media relations, and corporate communications.

Be the media. Lansinoh Laboratories, a long-time Gregory FCA client, understands well the power of transforming everyday business events into news. When the company recently sponsored a red carpet event, The Concert for a Healthy Birth, it sent its own blogger to interview Ricki Lake about her newly released documentary, "The Business of Being Born." Flattered by the interest, Ricki gave a ringing endorsement of the Lansinoh products she's used in the past. The video interview transformed the event into news, gave Lansinoh authentic content for its blog, and secured a major celebrity endorsement by thinking content, rather than marketing hype.



UPDATE 7/29/11: This week Ricki favorited a tweet from Gregory FCA's Robyn Ungar, in which she included a link to this video. The favorite re-shared the video with Ricki's Twitterverse, again illustrating Ricki's support, as well as the long shelf life of digital content.

Transform one-and-done events into long-tail marketing opportunities. Events create gold mines of content that can be documented and repurposed across multiple channels. An example comes from Gregory FCA client ProtonMedia, which sponsored its own sold-out life sciences seminar. To get more from its investment, the company videoed, photographed, and live tweeted the entire event; posted the coverage in a series on its external blog; and integrated it into its sales efforts. The after-burn helped lead ProtonMedia to securing several new clients.

I want my Google+! Here's why.

Some of you remember the classic "I want my MTV!" ad campaign. In my view, it ranks with Apple's 1984 commercial as one of advertising's all-time classics. Both ads launched revolutions -- the music video age and the GUI age -- although I would argue that MTV's campaign outperformed Apple's in capturing the zeitgeist of a generation.

I'm thinking about this today because "I want my Google+!" And I'm not alone. Everywhere I turn, people are asking me if I have an invite. I don't. Like them (and probably you), I have been asking everyone I know if they have an invite, and to invite me.

Last week I received several invitations to Google Plus, but (BWAA!) Google won't let me in. Here's what I see:

Shades of the Fail Whale. But in truth, this is not a #FAIL or a problem with linear scalability. Google is rolling Plus out slowly, as it has done for other platforms in the past, notably Gmail, Wave, and Buzz.

It's a smart approach. It allows Google to test the platform in the real world, identify and address issues that arise, and also -- by virtue of its invitation-only publicity shtick -- generate hysteria that approaches the level of an iPhone launch or, back in the 80s, the launch of MTV.

Can Google Plus take on Facebook's installed base of 750 million users?

For me, it's already solved one of Facebook's most vexing problems

It's gonna get good. The Google/Facebook war. With the beta release of Google Plus, the online giant is coming after Facebook in a way it never succeeded with Wave. What's hinted at is a fully integrated product that will allow users -- both businesses and consumers -- to effortlessly hang out with customers and friends alike, video chat and conference through Gmail and Google Docs.

Facebook still wields the bigger and badder social club with some 750 million users worldwide. But Google is the ultimate brand, the first verb-ified company, a market cap of over $177 billion, and the nation's 12th largest corporation. And Google has already solved the #1 problem with Facebook -- the ability to know your audience.

What Anthony Weiner can teach us about online reputation management

If there is one thing that we have learned over the past couple of weeks, it’s that careless use of social media can damage your reputation within a matter of seconds. Whether you are a person or business, politician or average Joe, given the chance, social media can be an equal opportunity reputation destroyer. 

OK, so we didn’t just learn that over the past couple of weeks. We’ve learned it over and over again. So why do otherwise seemingly smart people seem to lose all traces of intelligence, or common sense for that matter, as soon as they log in to their favorite social media sites?

Could the false sense of security we get when we sit safely behind a computer make us fall victim to the “that only happens to someone else” syndrome?

Whether you’re a seven-term politician debating whether to send a college girl a shirtless picture of yourself in boxer briefs, or you are a business that understands the importance of proactively managing your reputation, there are a few things about online reputation management we can all learn from @RepWeiner.

Twitter vs. UberMedia: It's about time

UberMedia, a developer of applications and Web-based services, including various Twitter clients, said it might be interested in developing a product to directly compete with Twitter, a product that would allow for, among other things, the ability to write more than 140 characters.

I wondered, is the 140-character restriction on Twitter a limitation, or an advantage?

With more than 200 million registered Twitter accounts, will it take more than an extra character or two (or 100!) to convince people to switch and try a new platform?

So, just as many of us on Twitter do all the time when we are researching a topic or seeking opinions, I asked by tweeting it: Is Twitter’s 140-character UI a limitation or an advantage?

Is republishing The New York Times public relations?

Oh, those lazy PR agencies. You know the ones. They're out there embarking on social media campaigns by tweeting and blogging articles and stories already published in the media. It makes me wonder if you think I don't know how to read? Or maybe you just believe you're the only one with an online subscription to The New York Times.

It's ineffective and it's sophomoric. If the digital revolution has taught us anything, it's that authentic content -- original work that addresses issues of importance to specific audiences -- is the only real means of generating online visibility.

And yet it continues. Last week, it seems as if every PR agency in the country either retweeted or blogged about The New York Times paywall. I am proud that we reported the story nearly a year ago, direct from the mouth of the former New York Times Social Media Editor, Jennifer Preston, who attended our social media summit here in Philadelphia.

The top 10 public relations trends of 2011

What a time to be in public relations! The world keeps evolving faster and faster for those of us who revel in the media, and love technology and all that it unlocks. So with the start of 2011, it's always a good time to look ahead at the trends that will change our industry in the year to come.

1. Integration will be everything. No longer will traditional public relations and social media exist on islands. The two will meld together as part of a bigger, broader whole simply defined as public relations. We call this transformation the great move from "public relations to public relationships." And it's encompassing every aspect of corporate communications, including media buying and advertising, to lift the impact of entire communications campaigns. Essentially, integrated PR becomes a force multiplier for the universe of marketing.

Year-end planning yields tremendous insights into industry changes

I get pumped each year at this time, when I sit down with the top minds at Gregory FCA to review the past 12 months and set goals and objectives for the upcoming year. This year, 14 of us met with an outside facilitator to assess our strengths and weaknesses, and identify the key objectives for 2011.

And while the planning is unique to Gregory FCA, many of the conclusions are a simple reflection of broader industry issues. So we thought we would share some of our findings, if only to reduce them to writing which binds us to action.

1. Keep moving into mobile. The space is hot as a sector and as a PR offering. We're ramping up to develop more apps for clients and creating new ways to deliver their content to devices.

2. Formalize our commitment to training. The best way to learn public relations is from those who practice it. We see a huge opportunity to establish internal training protocols and certifications as a way to continue to attract high-level talent and sharpen it once in the door.

3. Feed off our big account successes. The recession came with opportunity in 2010, when a number of major brands sought our expertise as an alternative to large, high-cost, hollow New York firms. Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, Hearst, and Unisys availed themselves to Gregory FCA's value proposition in 2010, and are glad they made the switch in order to get more for less.

4. Celebrating excellence to motivate and inspire. In one major account win in 2010, we transformed what had been a lifeless campaign led by a major Chicago PR firm into vibrant media coverage. Some 230 articles and appearances in six months and an active social media campaign connected the client with thousands of customers. With it, came many small lessons learned that are now being shared throughout the firm as a way to educate, motivate, and inspire.

5. Attack and overcome instilled expectations. Are your expectations your greatest limitation? Too often, we set our own limits thinking that the media will never be interested in a story, even before we submit it. Or we look at the risks too closely and discount the benefits. In 2011, we're dedicated to challenging ourselves and our industry. The old model of PR as an exposure machine, while valid, now incorporates a new range of services -- everything from next-generation blogging, to SEO, to in-house news production, to digital newsrooms, to soup-to-nuts communications and investor relations products and initiatives.

We're going to be there in 2011, and I plan to keep you all abreast of these changes and advances right here at Gregarious.

Most-asked questions about PR & social media

I was talking to a B2B company that learned of Gregory FCA through this blog. We discussed how they can use traditional public relations and social media to reach their target audience, tell their story to the marketplace, and build recognition and awareness for their brand.

They sent me an e-mail with some of their questions in advance of our meeting, all of which we have heard many times before. So I thought I'd post our exchange here as a way to share our insights into how traditional media relations impacts social media, and vice versa.

---

Hi Greg!

Thanks for taking the time to talk with us later today. In advance of our meeting, I thought it might be helpful to send you a few questions to educate our management team.

Greg, how can a PR firm help with the launch of our new technology?

On a couple of fronts. Recognition is vital in the introduction of any new service or product, and certainly, as your sales team takes the message out to the marketplace, they will need air cover so prospects will have heard of the newly introduced technology. As the campaign matures, it needs to provide a direct link to your prospect base. That's where social media has taken on a significant role in the public relations equation.

How would you roll out a public relations campaign for our new technology?

That's hard to say without knowing more about your marketing plan, your target audiences, the technology, your advantages over competitive offerings, and so on.

But as a framework, I think you would want to announce the new technology offering you have developed through search-optimized press releases and personal one-to-one pitching of narratives presented to key industry trade media, business publications, influential bloggers, and other online news and information sources. You also will need to develop a way to use social and other digital media to communicate with influencers and targets, and your prospective clients.

I understand the traditional PR side of the equation. But how do you use social media to sell and isn't it best used to reach consumers?

The fact is that social media can be exceptionally effective in B2B marketing. It's highly targeted, and provides a great platform for subject-matter experts to share their knowledge and expertise directly with the audiences who are hungry for and can benefit from such knowledge.

Moreover, done well, B2B social media can become integral to the sales process, and provides a way to connect and engage your sales team with the ultimate decision maker. This is in addition to its effect as a force-multiplier for traditional PR efforts, and a driver of organic SEO.

We manage a number of successful B2B social media campaigns for companies large and small. For many of them, social media has become a crucial strategic weapon for delivering their narrative about a product, service, or technology; providing an on-demand repository of compelling collateral for the sales team; for publishing evidence to potential buyers; for feeding the mainstream and vertical media with storytelling resources; for supporting lead generation efforts; and for ranking well in search results.

So how does that work? Using social media to tell a story to the marketplace?

Well, it starts with research. We use a number of proprietary tools to monitor and measure the online conversation/buzz/coverage (call it what you will). We then determine where the conversation is taking place around topics of interest to clients and the market, and who the key influencers are.

Once we know that, we go to work figuring out how to get our clients and their messages into those conversations, while always remaining within the rules of online engagement.

Sometimes that's simple, and little removed from traditional public relations, where we build a relationship with a blogger or online media point, and introduce them to our client, their product, or whatever. That can result in an interview, a podcast, or a guest blog post from our clients on these sites. Or it could result in a guest appearance by the media point on our client's blog.

And then there's the strategy of helping our clients gain their own voice online. That might, for instance, take the form of a thought leadership blog that covers key topics of interest and importance to our client's targeted audience. The blog aligns to our client's business objectives, and can serve many purposes in addition to publicity and thought leadership, such as lead generation, presentations, media leverage, SEO, content syndication, sales collateral, customer evidence, newsletter support, and so on.

We publish a range of B2B blogs across a variety of industries, all designed to educate and inform prospective clients and the press, and/or have current clients upgrade or otherwise buy more because of what they learn from these publications.

But how do you gain attention? Right now, there are thousands and thousands of online conversations. Is anyone really reading these online forums or blogs?

And there are billions of offline conversations, too. That's always been the magic of PR and earned media: to separate the signal from the noise, and help clients cost-effectively reach their targeted audience amid a confusing and overpopulated media universe.

In fact, with online tools, it actually becomes easier and more cost-efficient for agencies such as ours to do this filtering and targeting. The real magic is gaining a following for your storytelling. That's a function, again, of using sophisticated monitoring and measurement tools to isolate the conversation and target the influencers, and of constantly working your content and leveraging it across the various spheres (Web media, blogosphere, Twitterverse, e-mail, etc.) to drive traffic back to your online properties.

Sometimes we accomplish that by developing white papers or articles and syndicating them throughout the Web. Sometimes we do this by placing stories in online media that links back to your blog. Sometimes we do this by strategically commenting in prime media points and, again, linking back to your blog.

There are all manner of tactics at our disposal -- too many to run down here. But all are optimized for search, which sometimes becomes the ultimate tactic. It surfaces your content on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, where prospects who are at the beginning of the sales process are looking for places to start, or looking for answers to questions or problems.

They see your content, click the link, and are then brought back to your blog where an array of convincing digital assets and resources are at their disposal. One of our key goals is to optimize your content for search around the semantics that define your business, and rank as much content as possible with your name and URL on page one of those results.

I noticed that you haven't mentioned Facebook or LinkedIn yet. How important are they, Greg?

They do have importance. But you have to think hard about which social networks are most appropriate for your story. Facebook, although it has 500 million members, is almost entirely a consumer network.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, is business focused and very strong with professionals. We use social networks primarily to drive interest and traffic to our clients' blogs and other digital channels. We integrate them with our client blogs where appropriate (for example, your blog posts could be automatically published on targeted LinkedIn subnetworks).

We also work with client sales forces to raise their personal visibility on these networks as a way of finding new opportunities, and leading the interested back to our client online media channel.

How do we determine the ROI?

For sheer exposure, we benchmark a client's share of awareness versus their competitors at the outset, and then test again as the campaign matures to see if our clients are gaining on their competitors or showing separation. We also provide a secure on-demand SaaS database of all media impressions, complete with copies of clips and audience reach.

We also monitor and measure other business metrics, such as traffic to the blog, impressions, SEO results, trends, e-mail subscribers, top stories, deltas, and a lot more.

Lastly, we use Nielsen BuzzMetrics to measure awareness across several dimensions, including around targeted terms and competitors, and sentiment.

In the end, our clients want meaningful exposure that leads to thought leadership and additional revenue. In the new world of public relations, where behavior is measurable online, that's what we aim to provide.

Anything else to add, Greg?

Just that we're looking forward to talking more with you.

If you see only one monster movie this year, make it "The Social Network"

Here at Gregory FCA, we decided last week to be among the first viewers in the country to see David Fincher's "The Social Network." So Friday, late in the day and hours before the film's general release, we bought out the house at the nearby Bryn Mawr Film Institute, where I serve on the board, and invited about 200 of our closest friends to join us for the free premier.

For communications professionals, the film is so much more than just a retelling of the story of Facebook. Rather it opens to public display many of the issues we grapple with daily in back of walls, away from clients and the public.

In deep relief and unflinching candor, "The Social Network" challenges us to examine whether social media draws us closer together, or if it drives us further apart, and whether social media, such as Facebook, is about community and sharing, or exclusivity and manipulation.

Drawing from three distinct points of view, the film recounts how Facebook rose from the obsession of an arrogant, insecure Harvard sophomore (or should I say asshole, as he is repeatedly called in the movie), to one of the most powerful communication mediums of our time with some 500 million members and a market value of $33 billion.

It lays bare a world where status trumps even money and a cold, calculating consciousness wins out over loyalty and human emotion. Mark Zuckerberg is drawn in dark, heartless ink, driven by his outsider status to embarrass and ostracize others through his sheer computing prowess.

In Zuckerberg's world, creating a site that humiliates Harvard co-eds, steals others' intellectual property, and crashes the computer network of the country's most elite college is all fair game and paybacks to those whom he believes are dismissive of his considerable intellectual capabilities. Victims include his first real love, his only real friend, and two blue-blood Olympic rowers who at first refuse to sue Zuckerberg due to a quaint, Havardian sense of civility.

Irony reigns as we serve witness to the birth of social media at the hands of a seemingly near-autistic, anti-social being. As consumers and professional communicators, we are left to ask ourselves whether Facebook's calculated Rosemary's Baby-like birth -- which represents the antithesis of its public persona -- is worthy of our patronage.

Now we know that every feature, including the status bar, was conceived from an adolescent drive to determine who is sleeping with whom, and cash in the sexual chits that come from being that kid. The one who hacked a site or raised some venture capital or made millions while still in college.

So what will be the public relations price paid for such a monstrous portrayal? It will be great, as testified by Zuckerberg's decision the other week to donate $100 million to the Newark Public School System. I guess Zuckerberg's PR people think that the best way to get out in front of this steamroller is to slow it with wads of $100 bills. But you can't flatten graphic storytelling.

Millions of those who love Facebook will now have to re-evaluate their need to post those vacation photos for the world to see -- particularly, as the movie suggests, because Zuckerberg's greatest gift is simply the ability to exploit the blind spots of others.

Just who owns those vacation photos and personal data we all post to Facebook anyway? After seeing the movie, you can't help but wonder how that data is already being exploited, for reasons much more hideous than the simple sin of greed. So whatever happened to Friendster anyway? Maybe I should renew my old account.

Media malpractice or more?

Was the Quran-burning story a result of media malfeasance or an example of a non-story made a story by the legitimacy of others? 

What started as a tweet in July gave way to one of the most unimportant and over-reported stories of the year. And only by analyzing the media's response to Pastor Terry Jones' threat to burn a copy of the Quran can we appreciate the more nuanced side of public opinion and reputation management.



How could an unknown, unimportant, fringe figure with only 30 followers come to dominate national headlines for nearly a week? And why, at a time of great national economic and political uncertainty, did the media invest so many resources in such a non-story, overlooking real news with true gravitas?

Certainly, it could have all been the lunacy of the situation, juxtaposed against the mosque-building controversy near Ground Zero. For those in the media who support the building of the mosque, the Quran burning provides further evidence of anti-Islam sentiment and ices an already slippery slope they believe America is headed down.

But dig deeper and you discover that the real fan of the flame had nothing to do with New York mosque-building or media bent left or right. Rather, the Quran story is a perfect example of how we as PR counsels have to advise our clients. Every day, we must remind our clients that every issue does not warrant a response, and commenting to or about lunatics is a surefire way of elevating a story best left untold.

I am reminded of a recent issue about an iron manufacturer that was facing allegations of hiring illegal immigrants. A distorted and heavily edited YouTube video suggested as much. But the issue itself was nothing more than a union trying to undermine an open-shop business. Enraged, the client wanted to go on the offensive and make public the union's dirty tricks.

The smarter tact, though, was to ignore a potentially inflammatory situation that if handled poorly, could have transformed the client into a central figure in a national debate over illegal workers. We urged them to relent. They listened. They went back to selling iron, no less the wear.

In the case of Pastor Terry Jones, the story became a story after Gen. David Petraeus, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and President Barack Obama either reached out or chimed in on the issue, thus elevating it to the status of news. Pastor Jones rode the coattails of other men's errors and gained weight and prominence. Once this standard was met, media were free to cover the issue with impunity as to their own wisdom. A non-news story became news because of another's mismanagement.

It's a common situation -- one we as PR practitioners increasingly face in a world where anyone can gain voice, no matter their legitimacy. The Internet provides the forum. But does it all require a response? The answer depends on:

1. Are you effectively monitoring? Averting self-triggered communication annihilation is often as easy as knowing what's being said about you, your company, and its brand. In the Quran case, media were monitoring the situation, and knew that Islamic media were covering it. But that wasn't enough to elevate the issue to a story domestically. Rather it required legitimate responses from legitimate sources -- Petraeus, Gates, and Obama -- to trigger coverage. If level heads had prevailed, they would have realized that Terry Jones did not warrant a response, and the risk of doing so was transforming it into a national media story.

2. Who is the source and is it legitimate? Terry Jones was only legitimized after national figures responded to him. Our military and political figures need to stay clear of the lunatic fringe, rather than invite them into the dialogue.

3. Who are the influencers? The hothouse of the Internet can incubate non-stories into stories. CNN's Rick Sanchez, who first covered this story stateside after seeing it on Twitter in July, did us all a disservice by not ignoring a tweeting moron.

4. Is there any way to respond short of a public forum? Political and military leaders have a full arsenal of tools to respond. Does it have to be public, in light of media scrutiny?

5. Who responds, if a response is required? The Terry Jones case is directly analogous to any number of comments that take place 24/7 online. Those that require a response can often be taken care of by service-level employees, not the CEO. By elevating the response to Terry Jones to the most powerful people in the world, a story was made, the die was cast, and the rest of the madness ensued.

Tablets will fundamentally change public relations

But most PR practitioners haven't even seen yet or used an iPad.

Apple is expected to sell 3.4 million iPads in Q3, while Barclays predicts that tablet PCs will sell 28 million units in 2011. All this spells tremendous opportunity for companies seeking to communicate with customers, investors, employees, and other audiences, as well as the public relations professionals responsible for building and relaying those messages.

The tipping point will occur at year-end, as an onslaught of manufacturers gear up to launch their own iPad-like devices, and marketers, such as Best Buy, make tablets the center point of their holiday retail strategy.

Yet, as the sands shift beneath our feet, I am reminded by Sam Whitmore of SWMS, one of the Gregory gang's favorite PR pundits, that few if any PR people have ever seen a tablet PC, let alone used one. Sam just completed a fact-finding mission with editors and agency heads, and discovered some pretty interesting trends.

Most poignantly is the media and how they are currently talking more about technology than stories and coverage. In an e-mail Sam sent to his subscribers, Sam made the point that to stay relevant, media are working hard to leverage technology to distribute content. He recently listened as one senior editor referred to his video content not as editorial, but as "product" he must distribute.

Which is exactly the same transition we at Gregory FCA have been planning and preparing for. I'll admit, I am a print guy from way back, having started my career as a magazine article writer, and think more in the editorial than the visual. (Thank God for my staff, who are more visually oriented and literate than me.)

Tablets will push us even further away from the written word and closer to the visual. As iPad users in my firm (including myself) have discovered, tablets are more about consumption than interaction. iPads lull us into passivity, allowing us to consume news and e-mails, absorb movies and YouTube, time- and place-shift TV programming, view slideshows, check apps, etc.

We don't interact with our tablets the way we do our desktops. Rather, we check them, use them for the mindless and mundane (they're great for checking your Fantasy Football team while watching your team live on your living room TV), gleefully engage in a game, or put our minds to rest as if anyone would possibly want or need us at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

This sea change means a lot for the practice of public relations. In order to manage the narrative of our clients, we now have to create stories that are cross platform, capable of being reported in words, or through a YouTube video, or a slideshow, or even an app.

As Mike Lizun here at Gregory FCA continually reminds our staff, you have to start by considering the ultimate placement of the story, be it in print, on a video, on the Web, or broadcast. Where will the story originate? Then populate and grow? And how can we ensure its mushrooming presence on everything from Flipboard to Mashable, Newser to blogs, and ultimately make an impact on Google against our clients' key search terms? More and more, those platform will include tablets.

In fact, app development, delivery, and penetration now represents the next great frontier of public relations. Apps take our audiences off the Web and into their own private viewing rooms where they can watch, read, and learn without the distractions of the Web.

At the same time, as more media become "appified" (that's an URL I just bought to articulate this phenomenon), we're left with the prospects of someday pitching app developers with news about our clients, because they might hold the most direct pipeline to the audience.

As a counterpoint to the tablet sea change argument, I recently had dinner with a Wharton professor who shared with me the school's apprehension about iPads. You can't easily print from them, the virtual keyboard makes entering numbers into Excel virtually impossible, and marked-up and annotated documents -- the kind MBAs prefer -- can't be easily shared on an iPad.

He suggested the iPad might be a 'tweener product -- 'tween a computer and a cell phone with no clearly delineated market. But I kind of didn't hear him. I was too busy checking my iPad.

So what becomes of the Old Spice Guy?

I guess our jobs just got a whole lot harder, and rightly so. The recent success of the Old Spice Guy's social media campaign illustrates just how much the world has changed, and how the integration of social media and advertising works to build impact and sales.

The numbers alone are awe-inspiring. Sales of Old Spice body wash products spiked 107 percent in the last month, and the customized video responses from our guy, actor Isaiah Mustafa, have now outreached traditional broadcast TV, becoming some of the fastest videos ever to go viral on the Internet.

Inspired was the campaign, which integrated advertising and social media, and sets the bar high indeed for future marketing efforts. Mustafa's bombast, coupled with personalized responses to tweets and YouTube comments, including one marriage proposal, gave the campaign just enough camp so as not to insult Internet sensibilities, while obviously reaching the product's target audience of young, college-age men.

Even before P&G announced its sales figures from the campaign, I still thought the campaign worked on many levels, and argued so here at Gregory FCA. Increased sales is always the objective. But even before the numbers were announced, the campaign was a winner as part of any effort to re-energize the brand, excite a stale sales effort, win more shelf space at retail, and excite buyers at major chains by demonstrating an ability to create awareness on a national basis.

But now comes the really tough part: extending the lifetime of the campaign so as not to be relegated to one-hit wonder status. No doubt the minds at P&G are already busy at work figuring out what to do with this gorilla who happily sits in their room.

Interestingly, there are already signs that the impact is waning, an all-too-real fact of life in the short-cycle world of social media. A quick study we conducted using the Nielsen BuzzMetrics brand monitoring and analytics platform shows that chattter about the campaign is falling faster than an anchor in choppy seas. Just take a look at the graphs below. (You can click to enlarge.)

Gregory FCA e-book: The Art of News and Storytelling in the Age of Social and Digital Media

Many of you attended our national media panel in April, "The Art of News and Storytelling in the Age of Social and Digital Media." We've provided you several resources as an outgrowth to it, including the podcast, video, and transcript from the event.

Now the last piece has fallen in place. We've published the complete transcript of the event as an e-book that you can enjoy and learn from at your leisure. There are a few ways you can read it.

• Scroll through it on Google Books.
• Download the PDF.
• Read it on your Kindle by right clicking this e-book link, and selecting "save link as." Connect your Kindle to your computer and drag and drop the file over to your Kindle.

We hope you enjoy the e-book and learn something from it. Feel free to share and print it as an educational resource.