The Access Point

Search Finds Twitter

The announcement from Google (and Microsoft) earlier this week to partner with Twitter was not a shocker – it’s about time. And, it makes sense. Here’s our take at @AccessPR on this newly incorporated offering, and how we plan to use it to help our clients.

Most importantly, this news is an acknowledgement that Twitter is truly the standard for real-time news. Now that tweets are Google and Bing searchable content, they will certainly reach a wider audience beyond Twitter and potentially be viewed side-by-side with traditional media, online media and blogs.

Second, this is a defining moment between mainstream search and social media. For communicators, it’s now more important than ever to stay on top of your brand and your messages, because search rankings mean greater reach and resonance for your company’s narrative. Where messaging was once staid and architected, it will now become more fluid and responsive to customers and communities. Living the brand and the message just took on a whole new dimension.

Finally, here at Access we will need to expand our measurement processes to evaluate the connection between search and Twitter. It remains to be seen whether tweet volume will impact search rankings, but suffice to say everyone will be paying more attention to the intersection of search, traditional media, social media and real-time news.

As a social media PR agency, we’ll be incorporating this new process into our existing proprietary measurement offering which tracks influence and engagement across social mediums. Hopefully Facebook will jump on the bandwagon next and make that trove of consumer content and behavior Google/Bing searchable.

Andrea Holland
Access Communications
@andreaholland

Access NY Happy Hour

Watch out for the changing of seasons in New York. The start of leaves turning on what trees you can glimpse between the skyscrapers summons the smell of pumpkin spice lattes, the sound of pencils sharpening and for some – the wincing memory of atomic wedgies.

For others, like us in the PR industry, fall isn't really about the plaid shirts and the corn mazes; it's all about dusting off our inner extrovert and sharpening our networking skills in order to build and strengthen our relationship with the media.

Late September not only brought thousands of students across the city already yearning for June, but also an epic happy hour hosted by Access Communications’ New York office. We took over one of NYU’s favorite hangouts, kicked out the freshmen and celebrated the end of summer in style – with a few cocktails, great company and lots of laughs.

Dow Jones, NBC News, New York Times, LAPTOP Magazine, Fast Company, Wall Street Journal, Techlicious, CBS Interactive, AOL Daily Finance, Accounting Technology, UGO and PR Week were among the media in attendance we were able to greet with bright, shiny apples – err, martinis. We touched base on trends, traded gossip, heard what was in their publication’s pipeline and got the chance to dish about what our client roster has planned for this fall. By the time we were through, they were untying the friendship bracelets their BFFs made them in summer camp, and dusting off a seat for us next to them on the bus.

We also had some great giveaways from our clients to share (no, not a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper or Handi-Snack for the ride home) but a basket of gin – including the new Beefeater 24 – and bottles from Plymouth – as well as a collection of video games from 2K.

All in all, we made teacher proud and started the school year off right. We set the bar for future events, strengthened some old relationships and started some new ones. We’re looking forward to a season full of cover stories and placements that elicit gold stars and a prime spot on the refrigerator. Let’s face it – at this rate, we’re headed to the front of the class…and hopefully avoiding any atomic wedgies along the way.

-- Yasmeen Salahuddin

Public Relations is a Full “Contact” Sport

Here at Access, we take the “relation” in public relations very seriously, and we’re lucky to call some of the most esteemed names in media friends. It comes from 17 years of being committed to our clients, their stories, and to the media that help us best tell those stories.

As you can imagine, 17 years in the business has allowed us to build some truly phenomenal relationships with print and broadcast contacts alike, and one of the most long-standing friends of Access is Gary Kaye of Fox Business. Formerly of ABC “World News Tonight,” Gary is a 40-year industry veteran whose career is seemingly one constant deadline. Most recently he was the power beyond the broadcast hot ticket "Three Days in the Valley"  an annual, multi-day series featuring the biggest names among the Silicon Valley elite.

Gary was gracious enough to spend an afternoon at the Access San Francisco Office, letting staffers pick his brain on what works and what should be banished from the playbook when it comes to pitching broadcast media. We talked “do’s” and “don’ts,” but we also got into the bigger picture of how journalists and PR professionals can continue to help each other do their jobs better. 

One of the lessons he imparted was that PR is one of the professions that definitely requires free and creative thinking, and you “don’t always have to be a square peg in a square hole.” Journalists are a creative bunch themselves, and they appreciate fresh thinking and ideas that sell and tell compelling stories. Failing to do this and committing the greatest PR sin of spam blasting media without any intelligence about why they cover and how they cover it will land you in the worst PR limbo – being told by a journalist to be added to a “do not call list.”  Also, with broadcast, a picture paints a thousand words. Remember to include them as part of the pitch and realize that in this day and age of broadcast cuts, b-roll is now more important than ever.

Smart TV is not just about the pitch however, it is also about making sure your spokesperson converts any broadcast opportunity into more than a propaganda piece. Kaye make it clear that it is time for companies to rethink the canned messaging that spokespeople look to communicate at all cost. The first obligation of any interviewee that wants to be booked again is to be relevant and interesting, and look to insert company messaging as part of a larger topical discussion rather than at the expense of it.

Working both smart and hard, being persistent to a point, keeping pitches brief and concise, and retaining a commitment to fostering exceptional relationships are Gary’s biggest “musts” for PR pros. When you picture the shrinking media world alongside the increasingly tough world of public relations, it’s evident that media relations is a full “contact” sport – meaning that who you know is everything, and the strongest currency an agency can have is relationships.

- Cristin Zweig

E3 2009 – Access Gaming Practice Mixer

The reborn E3 of 2009 marked a return to the booming, bustling style of the show’s heyday, and the spirit of the revitalized event was evident in the energy and enthusiasm of the 41,000 attendees. And while the hundreds of games on display in elaborate booths (often promoted by celebrities and attractive booth models) are the main focus of the week’s festivities, the chance to meet face-to-face and share a pint with distant colleagues, old friends and new contacts is surely one of the best parts of E3.

On Wednesday evening, June 3rd, the Access Gaming Practice hosted a mixer at the Moroccan-themed Hotel Figueroa, where top members of the gaming and consumer press rubbed elbows and reminisced with executives and game designers from some of the industry’s top publishers and development studios. Writers and editors from outlets like the New York Times, Kotaku and GamePro shared stories and enjoyed drinks and taquitos with the folks from Disney Interactive Studios, SEGA, 2K Games and 2K Boston (famed creators of the original BioShock) while the Access Gaming Practice team mingled with old friends and forged new relationships.

It’s hard to overestimate the value of these rare, casual, face-to-face meetings between press, publishers and PR professionals. Too often, busy schedules and crushing deadlines can cause the relationships between media and the PR people who pitch and assist them to devolve into cold, “just business” associations – which ultimately hamper the opportunities for inventive games journalism. Events like the Access Gaming Practice mixers offer a fun and informal way for people on both sides of games journalism to learn about the people they work with, but rarely get to see (mostly without the burden of media being pitched or PR folks being prodded for secret information). When media and PR people get to know each other (which games they are playing these day, what they’re looking forward to most, and even who they’re rooting for in the NBA finals) a professional bond is formed that allows both sides to be more creative and ambitious in their collaborations. 

The Access Gaming Practice will continue to host our media mixers at E3 and other industry events like GDC, so look for your invitation. We’re always eager to talk about games and enjoy making new friends – especially when food and drink are involved.

You can check out the invitation to the E3 mixer (featuring our trademark beer dispensing robot) here:  http://www.accesspr.com/acc/e309/

- Ryan Jones

  

Getting caught in the new vs. old media divide

From PRWeek Insider:

“Newspapers look like an endangered species,” announced Senator John Kerry at this week’s Senate subcommittee hearing on the serial demise of newspapers. Full of outrage and drama, traditional print media representatives furiously blamed aggregators such as Google for being parasites, “leeching” the work of professional journalists and putting it on their own sites. Meanwhile Arianna Huffington, a celeb-journalist famous for broadcasting a contrarian voice, argued that the future of journalism is not about the traditional print world, but instead is based on a link economy, search engines, online advertising, citizen journalism and foundation-supported investigative funds.

In the middle of all of this, there is the debate among PR professionals as to whether bloggers are the new journalists and if they are, do the old PR rules apply? In a remarkably short time, certain bloggers have built their own brand with increasing impact when they talk about a client’s brand or product.  Today, many blogs are a form of participatory journalism and many online journalists see blogging as a channel for communicating their views and opinions directly to the audience without editorial interference.  

For the PR world, this leads to the reasonable concern that the very lack of editorial interference that is so appealing to bloggers may also be at odds with the definition of objective journalism that we have come to rely on when it comes to pitching stories and making our executives available for comment. Whether it is viral videos, Facebook postings, tweets-on-the-run, or power bloggers, the new direct-to-consumer dialogue has less checks and balances with very visible and uncontrollable ramifications. So how do public relations professionals influence and manage content when the very DNA of the new social media world is more about opinion and less about facts? 

First, we educate our clients that it is less about broadcasting and more about participating. As brand proxies, it is now the communication person’s 24/7 role to penetrate deep into all the conversations happening about a client’s brand where ever they are taking place and help determine when a brand needs to listen, learn and act based on the conversation, or when it needs to just be comfortable letting the free-form dialogue happen. We also do what we always do: we monitor, evaluate and counsel, knowing that we are in the midst of a new media world that is changing in real-time.

- Susan Butenhoff, CEO/president, Access Communications