Morning embers: The IRS, microtargeting and business tips from the campaign trail

1)  IRS looking for PR help (The Wall Street Journal) — The Internal Revenue Service, which ranks among the least favorable federal government agencies, is seeking PR help to promote its earned income tax credit and small business retirement plans.

2) Campaigns use ‘microtargeting’ to attract voters online (The New York Times) – Political campaigns, which have borrowed tricks from Madison Avenue for decades, are now fully engaged on the latest technological frontier in advertising: aiming specific ads at potential supporters based on where they live, the Web sites they visit and their voting records.

3) Five smartest business tips from the campaign trail (Inc.com) — Author Steve Cody says the 2012 campaign is not all Super PACs and mudslinging. In fact, every business executive can learn valuable lessons from inside the Beltway and on the campaign trail.

4) Industry groups join forces to start measuring public relations (PR Daily) – Five organizations are teaming up to create a set of standards for public relations measurement.  The goal is to create a common measuring stick that organizations can use to gauge the effectiveness – or lack thereof – of PR efforts.

Morning embers: The Girl Scouts, Cable TV, and Barack Obama’s Truth Teams

1) What the Girl Scouts can teach your business about marketing (Start Up Nation) – From the outside, the Girl Scouts may look like most other non-profit groups that set up outside the local Walmart to sell their wares.  But when it comes to marketing and sales, we can all learn a lot from the girls in green.

2) Cable leads the pack as campaign news source (Pew Research) – Cable news is now the top regular source for campaign news, with 36% of Americans saying they are regularly learning about the campaign on those networks.  Also, the long-term decline in the number of Americans who get campaign news from local and network TV has only gotten worse.

3) Obama campaign launches “Truth Teams” to combat misinformation (The Hill) – The Obama campaign on Monday launched a new effort to rally grassroots supporters to join “Truth Teams” by fighting what it considers word-of-mouth “misinformation” about President Obama.

4) Five elements of a successful media embargo (PR Daily) – Some claim the embargo is dead.  Others say it’s alive and well. This writer says the embargo still works if it’s executed properly and if it includes five key elements.

Marketers accelerate the migration to online ad spending

Here’s a prediction that’s been going under the radar: eMarketer is projecting that online ad spending will surpass print advertising this year for the first time ever, topping out near $40 billion.  Here’s a look at the respective trend lines through 2016:

Projected online ad spending vs. print ad spending

To make up for the lost revenue, expect print media to accelerate plans for online paywalls like those seen at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Baltimore Sun.

The news isn’t all bad for traditional media. Television ad spending is projected to remain strong and will remain top dog over online ad spending, at least through 2016. You can read more by clicking here.

Morning embers: Aneesh Chopra, verbal gaffes, and how to run an effective meeting

1.) How to recover from a verbal gaffe (The Washington Post) — Paul Farhi explores how political campaigns respond to the inevitable gaffes of their candidates.

2) The exit interview: Aneesh Chopra (The Atlantic) — America’s first Chief Technology Officers discusses how the Obama Administration hopes to crowdsource ideas from the American people to solve national problems.

3) What the web thinks about your brand (Inc. Magazine) — Check out nine free tools to measure ‘social media sentiment’ around your company, your brand, or even your own name.

4) How to run an effective meeting (Open Forum) — Like or not, workplace meetings aren’t going anywhere. So here are 10 tips to keep them productive and effective for all participants.

Morning embers: Rupert Murdoch, Martha Stewart, and negative online reputations

1) Inside Rupert Murdoch’s mind, courtesy of Twitter (New York Times Magazine) — David Carr writes that the modern chief executive lives behind a wall of communications operatives, and therefore offers little in the way of public candor. But  he also writes that Rupert Murdoch’s decision to join Twitter shows that the social networking site can help tear down walls between executives and the public.

2) Online social networking spills over into real world (The Baltimore Sun) —  Gus Sentementes documents how Baltimore’s loosely affiliated tech entrepreneurs are using social networking to organize real world meet-ups that may not have happened just a few years ago.

3) The Martha Stewart guide to Facebook contests (PR Daily) — The folks at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia weren’t content to float by on name recognition when “The Martha Stewart Show” had its season premiere on the Hallmark Channel in the fall. The company turned to its Facebook fans to spread the word.

4) Negative online reputations hurt companies looking to hire (Corporate Executive Board) — A new study from the Corporate Executive Board shows that 66% of respondents lost interest in a potential employer because of something they learned online.

Obama’s State of the Union – and Republican response – as word clouds

Here’s a quick way to measure the themes in last night’s State of the Union speech from President Obama and the Republican response from Indiana Governor Daniels. A word cloud lets anyone – presidents, communications pros, speechwriters, etc. – measure in visual form the words and themes that stand out most in your product, whether it’s a speech, an op-ed, or a press release.

Here’s President Obama’s speech:

Word cloud of President Obama's State of the Union remarks

Here’s Governor Daniels’ response:

Word cloud of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels' response

What themes emerge for you?

Morning embers: The Keystone pipeline, Carnival Cruises, and Vanguard’s social CEO

1) White House rushes to define Keystone message ahead of GOP (The Hill) – The White House is working to prevent President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline from becoming a political liability in an election year that will be dominated by jobs and the economy.

2) Vanguard CEO takes over company’s social media (Vaguard.com) — In a company first, Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb takes over the company’s Facebook and Twitter accounts today.  Company followers can expect a behind-the-scenes look  at the $1.6 trillion investment management firm.

3) What influences consumers about companies (Reputation Exchange) — A new Weber Shandwick study pinpoints what types of communications help influence consumers to buy from a company.  Among them: word-of-mouth, leadership communications, and awards/recognition.

4) Carnival CEO lays low after tragedy (The Wall Street Journal) — Micky Arison, CEO, chairman and part owner of Carnival Corp. has largely kept himself and Carnival out of the spotlight since one of the company’s ships struck rocks off the Italian coast ten days ago.  The Wall Street Journal says that’s in keeping with Mr. Arison’s management style, which is less hands-on than many chief executives.

In SOPA fight, new media and old media have two very different communications strategies

Dance with one that brung ya.

That’s clearly the mindset guiding new media and old media alike as they seek to out-communicate one another over online piracy legislation, known commonly as SOPA.

Consider the contrast in communications styles:  New media companies – like Google, Wikipedia, etc – are relying heavily on the web to raise opposition to SOPA.  Old media – like Hollywood studios, directors, film companies, etc – are influencing public opinion through more traditional means of advertising.

Visitors to new media companies like Google and Wikipedia were greeted on Wednesday by messages like this:

Wikipedia shut its site down for 24 hours to protest online piracy legislation.

Likewise, if you did some searching online to learn more about SOPA, you were likely met by an ad like this from Google on its own Adwords network:

Now for the other side of the debate: Old media – working through the coalition group Creative America – relied  on old media to fight back. Here’s the ad they ran in The Wall Street Journal’s Thursday edition:

Creative America ran this ad in Thursday's Wall Street Journal

You could also find SOPA supporters running ads on another reliable old media platform – the outdoor billboard:

So far, new media is winning the fight. Members of Congress who previously supported SOPA are quickly withdrawing their support.

How this ends won’t be clear for weeks if not months, but what is clear is the stark contrast between how new media and old media seek to influence public opinion.

FedEx falls victim to citizen journalist video

FedEx is the latest in a long line of companies to get dinged by a citizen journalist.  A customer videotaped a FedEx carrier’s treatment of his package and posted the footage online.  See below.

The video earned 2.4 million views and 10,000 comments in its first 48 hours online.  FedEx quickly addressed the video online and in the press.  Here’s their response on Twitter (read from the bottom up…)

FedEx deserves credit for its quick response. We can quibble with the execution (no reminders of their customer service number or references to their good customer satisfaction rates), but FedEx clearly understands that speed kills in an online world. By responding quickly, they’ve kept an embarrassing mishap from exposing a broader indifference to public perception that plagues so many other companies.

Ron Smith: 1941-2011

Ron Smith

Baltimore lost one of its most endearing news personalities last night when WBAL Radio’s Ron Smith succumbed to cancer.

I first heard the name Ron Smith in 2000 while working for then-Congressman Bob Ehrlich in the U.S. House of Representatives. Another congressman had severely mischaracterized Ehrlich’s position on an immigration reform bill. Ehrlich sought to set the record straight in interviews with journalists in his metropolitan Baltimore district.

That Ron Smith was the first news figure he called was no coincidence. Smith possessed a rare combination of strong ratings, right-of-center audience, and credibility in the broader community.

While he and Ehrlich agreed on much, he was no party apologist. As I learned working in the Governor’s Office for 4 years, he had too much respect for his listeners to carry the water of any particular candidate or party. Few conservative commentators spoke out early and regularly against the War in Iraq like Smith did.

As an occasional guest on his show, I learned the hard way that he wouldn’t hesitate to criticize Ehrlich Administration policy when he thought conservative principles were at stake. To this day, I can recall my heart rate rising in the minutes before joining his show, wondering what curve ball might come my way.

At a time when the line between political parties and news personalities is blurring, I will miss the clear bright line drawn in Baltimore by Ron Smith.