One of the most interesting developments has been the creation of a fake BP Twitter feed, BPGlobalPR, now with more than 163,000 followers and retweets galore thanks to its dry wit (“Investing a lot of time & money into cleaning up our image, but the beaches are next on the to-do list for sure.”) and tweets dripping with sarcasm (“Adopt a BP oil plume! $25 makes you 100% responsible for an oil plume and a ‘bpcares’ shirt!”).

And don’t forget YouTube, home of videos taking BP to task for its reaction to the oil spill. My favorite: BP Spills Coffee.

But BP certainly isn’t the first company to take a beating for its missteps. Lest we not forget Toyota just a few months ago and a bevy of auto executives from Detroit taking a private jet to Washington, D.C., to ask for a government bailout.

Unfortunately, these recent examples won’t be the last. But, today a reputation is destroyed in the time it took me to type this paragraph. (140 characters)

Before your company barely has a chance to catch its breath and craft a statement, blogs are buzzing, Twitter is tweeting and Flip cameras are rolling for a satirical YouTube video. Truly, your only course of action is to be as ahead of the game as you can be. This isn’t the time to say “no comment,” buying a couple hours for the staff to set up a Twitter account and a Facebook page.

In this day of social media and the instantaneous news cycle, you have to stay one – better make that two – steps ahead. If these events teach PR people anything, it’s to cover all your bases and that includes social media.

Sure, most of us have a grammar rule that gives us pause (think affect vs. effect), and everyone has at least a couple of words they struggle to spell (think canceled). But writing is so much of what we do, it deserves our focus. On any given day, I read an e-mail with an error (think it’s vs. its). And that’s simply unprofessional.

As a longtime newspaper reporter and editor and having taught some classes on writing, I have become well versed in Associated Press style. Those in the journalism industry abide by the AP Stylebook and its guidelines on punctuation, abbreviations and spelling. It gives a standard for consistency.

Public relations professionals should abide by AP style rules so they are in line with what journalists are doing and are writing their news releases in a journalist-friendly way.

Yes, some of the items in the stylebook are a little obscure (proper spelling for “shepherd’s pie”), but most are incredibly useful. Here’s a list of some common spelling, grammar and style errors. Keep this list handy and start checking your work.

Dates: When a date is used with the month, abbreviate all months except March, April, May, June, July. (Example: The program launched on Dec. 10, 2009.) But when the month is used alone, spell it out. (Example: The rebate will extend through the end of December 2010.) Do not use: “th,” “st” or “rd” as in “Let’s meet on March 11^th.”

Times: Lowercase a.m. and p.m. and use periods and a space between the time. Do not write times with “:00” (such as 8:00). Spell out “noon” for 12 p.m. and “midnight” for 12 a.m.

Addresses: When using the specific street address, abbreviate: boulevard (blvd.), street (st.) and avenue (ave.). (Example: The office is at 123 Main St.). When the street name stands alone, spell out. (Example: The office is located somewhere on Washington Boulevard.)

Numbers: Spell out numbers zero through nine; use numerals for 10 and above. There are some exceptions to this rule such as always use figures for ages.

Capitalization: Capitalize formal titles when used immediately before a name. (Example:  XYZ Inc. President Jane Smith is chairing the committee.). If you’re unsure, just don’t capitalize.

A final few tips:

• It’s – it is; its – the possessive
• Use website, Web page and Internet
• No “s” at the end of backward, forward, toward and afterward.
• Use “more than” instead of “over” when referring to an amount (Example: I ran more than 10 miles.).
• Between is for two items/people; among is for three or more.

In the more than 10 years I spent in newsrooms across this country, there’s always been a distinct line between editorial and advertising – “separation of church and state” as it’s often called. Unfortunately, that line is blurring as newspapers look for any way they can to make up lost revenue.

A perfect example of this was splashed across the front page of the Los Angeles Times on March 5. The LA Times worked with The Walt Disney Co. to create a fake front page promoting Disney’s new “Alice in Wonderland” movie. A large photo of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter covered a fake front page with the real front page pushed back to Page 2.

This incident makes my stomach churn. What it says to me is that advertising is more important than the news. It says news should take a back seat – in this case second page – to the almighty dollar.

I’m sure the PR professionals for Disney and the movie loved this concept. It was great exposure for the movie and the controversy surrounding it simply created more buzz about the film. But any self-respecting public relations professional – particularly those of us whose roots are in journalism – should value the sanctity of editorial content. There’s a reason you can’t buy coverage like a front page news story. At least that’s the way it used to be. This incident shows us apparently you can buy the front page.

Some may argue newspapers have to do what they can to survive.  Some may suggest that these sorts of promotions will keep more journalists from losing their jobs. That may be true, but at what cost? And do these journalists really want to work for a newspaper that values money over news? Newspapers should think twice before selling the front page – and PR folks should think twice before asking them to.

Well, Domino’s did respond, but a little too late to repair the damage done. They created a Twitter account to answer people’s questions and also put up a video of the CEO on YouTube apologizing for the incident, noting the employees had been fired and explaining that is not what goes on behind the doors of Domino’s.

Fast forward about 8 months later. Domino’s has taken a hard look at itself in light of what happened last year. They’ve decided to be honest about their failings and are trying to regain consumer confidence in their established brand.

So when you think of Domino’s pizza, do you think yuck or yum? Turns out most people think yuck J. Domino’s took a look at what people were saying about their pizza offline and online and heard things like “your crust tastes like cardboard” and “your sauce tastes like ketchup.” And what do you know, Domino’s actually listened!

They’ve put together a new campaign courtesy of the creative folks at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky (of Burger King’s “king” ads and other very innovative and different campaigns) called “The Pizza Turnaround”. The campaign acknowledges their criticism and shows how they’ve reacted: creating an entirely new pizza from scratch.

The Pizza Turnaround

They’ve put together two great little YouTube videos, one showing the company listening in to focus groups and coming up with a new pizza, and the second, my favorite, with the head chef showing up at the doors of some of the harsher focus group participants and inviting them to try the new pizza. Bold and real.

At the Door of Our Harshest Critics

I LOVE it! I wish I could get more companies to follow in their footsteps. They’ve turned a really negative incident with the employee video into a catalyst for change for the company. People can always identify with you when you acknowledge failings (we all have them) and try to fix them. I think this will be a turnaround for Domino’s … well, so long as the pizza is actually good. I haven’t tried it yet.

Oh, and by the way, I am one of the few people who genuinely liked Domino’s pizza the way it was . Yea ketchup sauce!

What do you think of Domino’s tactics? Smart or stupid?

I wrote this post after doing a media interview on the site of a local shopping center. The “PR person” for the center sauntered up during the middle of the interview to inform the journalist that she was “supposed” to check in with them and that no footage of the shopping center was to be used. Hello? You don’t want publicity about your shopping center? Isn’t that your job?

Let me say that I do understand that media isn’t always nice, so we do have to be cautious about what they do, but to say that under no circumstances was video of the shopping center to be used seems ridiculous to me. She could have stood there and listened to the interview to know it was completely innocuous. I come from the camp of thinking of media as friends rather than always assuming the worst. I think an attitude of constant mistrust will not get you far when working with media.

Here’s what else I don’t like about (some) PR people:

1) Not getting back to journalists in a timely fashion.

2) Charging an arm and a leg and not getting anything besides a local TV talk show appearance for a client.

3) Being overly controlling about every word said about your company or client. For example, insisting you be a part of every interview your client has with the media. Here’s a tip: Journalists don’t like that and most will not want to work with you again if they can avoid it.

4) PR Speak – Please, no subjective language (unique, very, excellent, truly) in a press release. It’s up to the reader (the journalist) to make a judgement about what we’re saying based on the facts we present.

5) A lack of news judgement. Don’t pitch a journalist on something that is not newsworthy! They will forever not pay attention to you, whereas if you bring them something newsworthy every time, when you call, they will answer and better yet — listen. Isn’t that our goal?

I’ve certainly made some of these mistakes in my career, but I learned from them and changed my behavior. I wrote this post in the hopes that more of us will do the same. What bugs you about PR people? How can we improve to better represent our industry? What makes for a good PR person?

For example, I was talking with a client recently whose company generally does not target women, yet she had a booth at a major women’s event targeting business owners. I was completely perplexed. 

When I asked her “Why would you participate in this event when you aren’t looking for female customers?” her answer was obvious, but I’d totally missed it. As a woman business owner, she felt it was important to support and assist other women just starting out. Of course. It was just the right thing to do.

Another example is traditional advertising. I am forever harping on the decline of the effectiveness of advertising in traditional media. But, here’s a point we often miss: if you love your local paper, be it a community weekly, your local business journal or your alternative newsweekly, then advertise in it. Help it out in these trying times! If you don’t want it to go away, support it, even if it’s not the best bang for your buck.

Does your child’s sports team need a sponsor for uniforms? Sure, you may not be targeting parents of 8 year olds, but won’t that feel good to help?

And the real clencher here is that even if you make some decisions based on your heart and not the numbers, I bet you’ll find that you will have endeared yourself to your target audience even more. It shows you’re a good company who supports its community and important causes, and that might go even further than any dollars you could spend.

If you haven’t yet visited skittles.com, do so now. They have replaced a traditional website with a small navigation box which overlays a search for #skittles on Twitter, the Facebook Fan page, Flickr-hosted photos and a Youtube channel. The Social Web’s dream, right? Well, maybe.

I first came across it on Saturday evening and thought it was pretty cool, and more than a little daring too. Giving over complete control to the world? Huge potential for that to backfire. Still, a fun idea, and a lot more interesting than most product websites.

Well, as with so much on the internet, it didn’t take long for the backlash to begin.

• Many pointed out that the concept was kinda-sorta ‘borrowed’ (wholesale) from Modernista, an advertising agency in Boston who had done the same thing last March.
• Others complained about having to be an adult to see the site, as Tim Allick puts it, “Can’t believe that #skittles website bans KIDS! Doesn’t send them to a safe page, just tells ‘em to go away. How is this smart marketing?”. (He does have a point. It’s a kids candy after all. )
• The Wall St Journal chimed in with a round-up of comments, most of them negative.
• Joanne Jacobs wrote  a blog condemning the whole exercise as a failure – just one day after the site launch – ‘Why the Skittles social media campaign failed’: ” Skittles has failed in its social media campaign because all it has done is hold a mirror up to conversations, without providing any content of its own, any context for remotely valuable conversation, and any rationale for productive engagement.”
• A poll by PR Sarah Evans, shows that 60% of respondents wouldn’t be swayed by the new site to buy more Skittles.
• Etc, etc, and etc

Sigh. Sometimes it all seems so predictable. The constant flow of negativity. The need to show that ‘I’m not taken in by their sneaky advertising’. Jumping on the ‘this is just a rip-off’ and ‘besides, it doesn’t work anyway’-bandwagons.

Come on people! Where’s the joy? Where’s the ‘Yes, we can’-spirit we keep reading about!?

My 6 year old has recently begun spotting website addresses on things that I ignore – mcdonalds.com, orville.com, quakerkidsdoinggood.com – pretty much *everything* has a website now, and they’re all the same. A nice Flash intro. Maybe a game or something. A code you can enter to unlock the hidden area. Yawn.

At least Skittles.com didn’t do that.

So, personally, I’m sticking with my initial reaction, “It’s kind of cool”.

They may not have been first, but they were the first Big Name Brand to do it, and that’s something. It may not convince 60% of people to buy more, but that still leaves a lot that might. It has generated a ton of publicity, and got them over half a million fans on Facebook. And it’s different and interesting.

Unlike so much of the commentary around it.

The percentage of leads from each source was broken down as:

Other (including public relations and print and online display advertising) 25%
SEO 16%
Email Marketing 14%
Pay Per Click 13%
Telemarketing 9%
Blogs+Social Media 8%
Trade Shows 8%
Direct Mail 7%

I find this very encouraging – particularly as we offer services for PR, SEO, email, PPC and Social Media, that’s 76% of the leads right there! – it’s certainly good to know that more and more businesses are trying a variety of methods to generate leads, rather than sticking to whatever they have done in the past. That has certainly been my feeling from talking to clients in all kinds of businesses lately.

However, I’m also slightly skeptical of the accuracy, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you’re in are a small or medium sized business yourself, you know the difficulty in pinning down exactly how a lead found you.

If they remember you from a trade show, but Google* you to find your contact info, does that count as SEO or a trade show?

If you send offers via both email and direct mail, as many of our clients do, which one gets the credit for the sale?

And Mike Volpe, Hubspot’s VP of marketing, even goes on to say that there are additional benefits to blogging,

“Not only are you creating a community around blog articles, but all those articles get indexed by search engines, so blogging has elements of search engine optimization (SEO) as well”

So how can we accurately claim that SEO is 16% vs Blogging’s 8%?  I don’t feel that we can. But I also don’t see that as a problem.

One thing we try to stress here at Step Ahead is that your marketing efforts, particularly onlne, will help each other. Being active on Twitter can drive traffic to your blog, which can help with your SEO, which can get people to sign up for your email marketing, which can inform people about your trade show appearances, which, well, you get the idea.

One final thing which jumped out at me from this was this statistic:

Companies with less than 50 employees earmarked more than three times as much of spending on blogging and social media than larger ones, and 36% more on SEO.

On the Internet, there is no reason the small companies can’t compete with the Big Boys. In fact, the lack of barriers to getting things accomplished, which plague many a large corporation, can be to your advantage. If you aren’t already blogging, tweeting, facebook-ing, etc, you can start right now. You don’t need to organize all the different departments, have a bunch of strategy meetings, get the lawyers to overlook things, and waste months of everybody’s time. Just sign up for an account and jump in.

So, what are you waiting for?

*I really don’t like using Google as a verb, but everyone else does it!

If you’ve visited us in the past, you’ll notice we’ve undergone a complete overhaul here at Step Ahead. Gone is the old, static thing of the past, in comes the all-singing, all-dancing thing you see before you.

Why change?

Well, a few reasons. We’re very active on various forms of social media (Lyn & Simon on Twitter especially, but also Facebook, Youtube and more – see buttons on the top right), and our website just didn’t reflect that. Even the blog just linked out to a blogspot hosted account.

Secondly, maintaining the site was a real pain. All files had to be FTP’d and changed manually. That’s way more time-consuming than I realised.

Basically, we were stuck in the past while trying to live in the future (deep, eh!?).

Although we had planned on upgrading once we were up and running, there just never seemed to be enough time. But we have big plans for this year (more to come on that), so – with a little nudge from a few friends - we decided now’s the time.

How did we do it?

Well, we kind of cheated. A one-click WordPress (2.7 no less!) install with the good people at Dreamhost. A lovely new version of the Revolution 2 theme from Brian Gardner, and we were basically ready to go. Well, a couple of days importing old posts, fiddling with CSS and PHP, but nothing too heavy.

So, what do you think?

One is TheDigitel, a site that is local to Charleston, and produces its own content, as well as highlighting the best of news from other sources across the area. They describe themselves as “a Web outlet that ‘gets it,’ [that] provides the Web integration and savviness that is demanded by young adults who grew up during the Internet revolution.”

TheDigitel.com strives to have good relationships with local media outlets. “We know that only through working together on the local level can we achieve the goal that we’ve set for ourselves: a comprehensive view of the community for everyone,” they say.

I had the privilege of meeting the founders Ken Hawkins and Chris Gigante at an event I helped organize for the Charleston Parks Conservancy and these are smart guys who I think have done something the Post & Courier should have along time ago. If traditional media don’t “get it” soon, they’re done for in the not too distant future, I fear.

Here’s what TheDigitel does right:

• Focuses completely on local content and on doing it right
• Has multimedia components; shoot their own video or use others’ video when appropriate
• Has a most popular stories category
• Allows you to search by topic and location
• Provides links to related coverage at other media outlets — TV, newspapers, radio, etc — and related stories on their site, making it a true resource for ALL Charleston news
• Allows for comments
• Very clean site, easy to read

What else it could do:

• Offer ability to share articles on popular social media sites with one click
• Allow others to embed video so long as it credits TheDigitel
• Add RSS feeds by topic

This is a fairly new site, however, and I’m betting these things are in the works.

Now, let’s compare to the Charleston Post & Courier site, the local paper of Charleston, S.C. Here’s what the Post & Courier does right:

• Ability to share stories on social media sites with one click
• Ability to post comments
• Starting to include some video with stories
• Offers some RSS feeds
• Offer some audio clips

Here’s what else it needs to do:

• Unclutter the pages; very distracting and difficult to read
• Add reporter blogs
• Improve search function; very clunky right now

In looking at these two lists, it appears the Post & Courier is not too far off TheDigitel, but visit the two sites and I think you’ll see the difference. I believe the key here is for traditional media to incorporate social media in a way that is unintrusive and helps organize the news experience instead of adding to the clutter. TheDigitel gets this right.

Any other suggestions out there for how traditional media can “digitize” itself into maintaining an existence?