Obviously…

“Kanye West To Perform At 2010 MTV VMAs”

Wait…didn’t he get kicked out last year?

But what about the host, don’t we usually have a host by now?

As promo videos started rolling out, I wondered what wacky, outspoken, memorable (or not) host would be the ring leader of the musical circus known at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Just when I started to assume they would have Russell Brand host for the third year in a row, the tweet arrived: “@MTV: BREAKING: Introducing your 2010 MTV #VMA host…the hilarious @ChelseaHandler!!!” And the Twitterverse goes wild! “Chelsea Handler” shot to the top of the trending charts in a matter of minutes. Well played MTV, well played.

Chelsea Handler makes sense for so many reasons. Her late-night cable show keeps you adults up way past their bed times and her top-selling books, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang and Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, can be found in beach bags and on e-readers from coast to coast.

But besides being snarky and hilarious, Chelsea’s a great fit to host because her social media presence is sure to help amplify to conversation around the show – a PR team’s dream.

Handler has more than 900,000 fans on Facebook and more than 2 million followers on Twitter (@chelseahandler). Then you have her personal website, MySpace profile, E! Online page, on top of dozens of fan pages that can be found with one simple Google search. Her social media fans will be louder than  the VMA host from the past two years, Russell Brand a.k.a @rustyrockets, who comes in with 1,327,038 followers and a mere 24,630 fans on Facebook.

The VMA host pick got me thinking beyond glitzy award shows to the events additional Text 100 clients’ host. Ranging from panel discussions to product launches, typically our clients will select well-known talent or third-party voices to add a different perspective or create a unique draw. However, when selecting talent, a candidate’s social media presence is often overlooked when determining the right fit.  Most often my clients look for talent that will grab traditional media attention or fill seats. Rarely are there social media activities examined to see how conversations could be sparked online. This is surprising since many speakers charge for their time and you’ll see a stronger ROI by taking the time to choose someone with a concrete social media presence.

Value and Evaluate

What should you look for next time you are looking to book talent for an upcoming event?

• Check out their Twitter following and fans on Facebook:  Take a look at the numbers to understand their reach but also look at who’s following them? Does it map to your target audience?
• What do they tweet about or post? : Do they tweet only about the minutia of their day or night club stops? Or do they talk about the events they participate in and the topics they’re passionate about or interested in? You’ll want to be comfortable with what they’re talking about because anything they say – positive or negative – during their releationship with you can affect your brand.
• Who’s in their inner circle? : Who do they commonly engage with? Are there influencers that can be reached through their social media circle? Are there people you wouldn’t want associated with your brand that could be too close for comfort online?

An award-worthy example of using social media to the max was at this year’s Emmy awards. Tech-savvy host, Jimmy Fallon, gave viewers at home a chance to be a part of the live event using their Twitter accounts. Fallon asked Twitter users to submit tweets about celebrity presenters for the chance to have them read as part of his introduction for those presenters. The day after the event he was responding to Twitter feedback about his performance and sharing links to the online video of his opening monologue.

The Double Edged Sword

But be warned. A social media presence can be a double edged sword — making it even more important that you aren’t turning a blind eye to it.

Anyone remember this year’s TED conference?

To attract the attention of the younger generation, TED conference organizers decided to book Sarah Silverman to perform. Unfortunately, her raucous presentation shocked the audience and organizers (who must not have been familiar with Silverman’s style and catalogue of work).

In an attempt to do some damage control, TED Organizer Chris Anderson took to Twitter: “I know I shouldn’t say this about one of my own speakers but I thought Sarah Silverman was god-awful.” Anderson tried to recall the tweet, but it was too late. Silverman, who is an active Twitter user with a massive following and sometimes aggressive tweets (something the organizers might have overlooked), responded by calling him a “barnacle of mediocrity….” Soon a Twitter flame war started with CEO if AOL trashing Silverman on Twitter as well. She responded: “You should be nicer to the last person on earth with an AOL account.”

Before you knew it, TED’s novel idea turned into THE news story from the conference. Anderson’s damage control tweet did just the opposite – it ignited the story and brought more attention to Silverman’s performance. In fact, a quick look at Google blogs shows that 85 % of the 33,000 posts about Sarah Silverman and TED mention the Twitter war. One has to wonder if this would have gotten the media attention at all if Anderson didn’t push send on that one tweet.

So next time you’re about to book a big-time speaker for an event, remember that it’s perfectly acceptable to do a little stalking of the candidates on Facebook and Twitter before the papers are signed.

I’ll leave you with a one final client plug:  if you’re a fan Chelsea (or perhaps Justin Bieber?!), make sure to tune-in September 12^th at 9pm/8pm CT for the always entertaining MTV VMA event. Rumor has it there may be a Kanye West/Taylor Swift reunion not to be missed.

In the spirit of Football Friday, on Friday, 09 April, dressed in their Bafana Bafana supporter T-shirts, the Text 100 Jozi team put on their walking shoes and traversed the newly built Soccer City stadium. It was a good thing that we wore comfortable shoes as the tour was close to two hours long and covered all four levels of the stadium – all on foot.

As tiring as it was – and trust me it was – the experience left every single one of us in awe at what the builders and engineers had accomplished. From sitting 70,000 spectators before the renovations, the stadium has been transformed to a 94,000 sitter, world class facility, similar to what you would see if you watched Manchester United play at Old Trafford. We were even allowed into the media conference room from where the world will be fed with news from the tournament, and this is just as splendid. The media conference room will sit 200 journalists, with Ethernet ports available to each journalist as well as the panel, to enable instantaneous transfer of news updates via news sites as well as the numerous social networking sites and blogs. For all the Tweet heads out there, you can follow 2010saworldcup for World Cup news updates.

Talking about feeding, the stadium is shaped like a calabash – inspired by the traditional African pot. Surrounding the stadium is a ring of orange lights called “the ring of fire”, which our tour guide said was meant to keep the visitors warm during the cold June/July months. By the way, for all those who will be visiting South Africa for the World Cup, June and July happen to fall square in the middle of the winter season in the southern hemisphere, so pack your beanies and mittens when you come down here – even though our winter will probably feel like a not so warm Autumn/Fall night to some of you. But if the cold really gets to you, you can always pop in at the Text 100 Jozi office for a warm cup of coffee or soup.

By the end of the tour, everyone was revved up and eagerly awaiting the kick off whistle to sound.

Construction at the nine other World Cup stadiums is at an advanced stage with some of the stadiums already hosting high profile local matches. If what we saw is anything to go by, South Africa is ready to dish out a successful and memorable World Cup, and as South Africans, we look forward to welcoming all the soccer lovers to our beautiful shores.

A big crowd gathered for the May Social Media Club Boston event on integrating social media into traditional campaigns

I had the opportunity to sit on a panel a little while back put on by the Social Media Club Boston on the topic of “Integrating Social Media Across the Big Brand.”  It was a really good discussion with a big crowd, and the host Hill Holiday did a terrific job of putting on a first class event.

But the topic and location – a major ad firm – underscored something that’s brewing in social media right now. There’s a huge land grab taking place between advertising and PR for the “heart and mind” of social media in business.  PR Week took a look at this topic earlier this week.  We are in the midst of the most exciting communications evolution of our time, and the owner hasn’t been defined as of yet.

One of the questions that was thrown at me at the event was whether companies should turn to “integrated marketing firms or social media specialists” for counsel on social media.  I found the question interesting because it left out PR entirely.  But in fairness, if Text 100 had been hosting the event instead of Hill Holiday and I had asked a similar question, I’d bet I would have left out advertising entirely.

It’s one of the things that is fascinating about social media – everyone thinks they should have a role.  Advertising sees a highly visual medium and a chance to finally be able to interact directly with the audiences they’re trying to reach.  PR sees a medium based on creating dialogue with key contituencies directly to individuals or indirectly through blogs and other platforms.  The same battle is taking place inside enterprises.  Who has the last word on social media?  PR? Marketing? Advertising? Customer service? Legal (yikes)?

To me, the “right” answer is that everyone has a role and social media will be more effective with all elements of the enterprise playing together in a seamless way.   But in terms of thinking about who should provide counsel and guidence on social media, the key consideration to me is the question of authentic dialogue.  It’s what PR fosters every day.

Hill Holiday showed a teriffic integrated campaign the other night that they’ve done for Chili’s.  You’ve probably seen the ads for PJ Bland’s – the mock restaurant with the cardboard food.  The campaign is really well done and the integration is great.  They’ve even got a Twitter feed for the CEO of PJ Bland, which is hysterical. A great campaign?  Yes. Real dialogue?  No.  PJ Bland is a character – the kind of character that the advertising industry is great at developing.

What PR is great at is creating actual dialogue between your company and the audiences you’re trying to reach – remember, the ‘P’ stands for public.  There’s a role for everyone in social media and it should be in the toolkit of just about any business leader, whether in marketing, sales, customer service or HR.   But the nature of social media involves two-way dialogue over very public channels.  That to me puts it squarely in PR’s domain.

Who ‘owns’ social media at your organization?  If its not anyone yet, who do you think should?  Let me know your thoughts on the land grab between PR and advertising in social media campaigns.

If it’s hard for him, it’s hard for anyone. And, of course, the still evolving media landscape bears witness to this fact. No need to rehash the lowlights of the last half decade in news, but the lack of a frontrunner for a sustainable business model for the news industry is evidence that more turmoil is still to come.

In thinking more about Scoble’s and others’ comments made during last week’s panel discussion on the future of communications (see initial post here), an underlying current throughout it all was the quest to add value for whatever audience you’re speaking with.

Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee acknowledged that what she was doing wasn’t much different from what newspaper columnists have traditionally done and Chris O’Brien of the San Jose Mercury News and the Next Newsroom Project acknowledged that the printed paper likely won’t be the core of what the Merc eventually becomes (he also made an interesting observation that the radio remains the place where Bay Area commuters consume most of their media yet radio is frequently omitted from these sorts of discussions).

On the hunt for value...

Remove the delivery vehicle (the paper, a blog, the radio, TV, etc) from the conversation and what remains of news is the information itself (which you could argue is as it should be). And with no barriers to entry and general information overload, the information needs to add value. Anything less and relevancy will wane, no matter who you write for.

Richard Brewer-Hay, principal blogger for eBay over at eBay Ink, said to me afterward he’s most intrigued how newer communications channels have enabled two-way dialogues (or even many-to-many) rather than the traditional one-to-many. That, he said, fundamentally changes the value proposition for journalists and audiences. This works great for Richard because he’s able to leverage his role into a true dialogue with eBay’s community. Letters to the editor just don’t cut it anymore. The letter to the editor presents a voice, but it’s a voice that isn’t replied back to and doesn’t spawn other conversations. It’s the tree falling in the forest and no one is quite sure if anyone else is around to hear it.

Post into any story and you’ve now contributed to a “live” conversation, and impacted the rest of what’s to come and can see how it all plays out. Likewise, fully formed conversations can get built up through many voices all riffing on whatever original content gets posted to the Internet.

But this doesn’t necessarily equate to value. Wading through a hundred comments on a story is rarely fruitful. I would rather have Seymour Hersh writing his stories for the print New Yorker in a 1-to-many conversation as there is absolutely no value I can add to his content. I am in listen-only mode when he’s talking.

Indeed, the construct of news doesn’t need to change. Journalists still need to be able do what they’ve always done best: Find the facts, find the viewpoints, and distill them down for the audience in a compelling manner. But a journalist who can’t add value beyond a press release essentially becomes commoditized by the press release itself.

Journalism today can be as biting as any time in the past, but the amount of information currently accessible and the number of viewpoints being thrown at us from experts and non-experts alike has had the effect of shortening our collective attention spans and reducing our tolerance for status-quo deliveries. The voices who have the greatest impact and can cut through the noise with impactful analysis – no matter whom they write for – will be the ones we seek out. Everyone else will just fade into the background as white noise.

Somewhat unfortunately, the tolerance for any slippage in this area will be minimal. If Robert Scoble is not adding value to the conversation, the collective public will banish him immediately and without remorse. Someone else will be ready and waiting to take his place, and we’ll be ready too. It’s a vicious turn, but it’s the world we live in currently. Here’s hoping that the people who deserve to be heard find their audiences and financially-viable platforms to support them.

Photo credit: Paul Keleher