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Wal-Mart Blog Gets 600,000 Monthly Views, Richard Edelman Tells Beet.TV -- PR Pros Gather at PRWeek's Annual Awards Gala as New Media Changes the Biz

Select interviews from the 2007 PRWeek Awards

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[Start of Audio]

Julia Hood: This is the PRWeek Awards, our annual celebration of the best campaigns, companies and individuals in the industry. I think we had about 800 campaigns this year and campaigns that have entries this year. And nobody knows, and nobody knows except PRWeek staff, who the winners are until tonight. So the excitement is actually real.

Andy Plesser: I have very, very, very simple rules. Say who you are. Say what company you’re representing. Tell ’em why you’re there, what your interest is. Are you being paid? Is there a third party, and is that person being paid? Just say why you’re participating, and if that’s the case you have every bit as much of a right to be there as anybody else. Tell us about some of the new media that you guys are using and what’s been successful for you now?

Richard Edelman: Well, I think partnership with social networks has been very positive. The time with MySpace and Trojan, MySpace again with Unilever and Ax, Ax promotion at 80,000 friends for a Gamekillers promotion. That’s been great. I think also the outreach to bloggers for companies like Nissan when they’re introducing new products, been very positive. Also for some of our tech clients, Adobe, Microsoft, others, and also on corporate reputation for companies like GE, when they had a big trade show on innovation, we talked to technology bloggers and that worked very well.

Andy Plesser: So are you sort of joining the conversation or are you really creating new media?

Richard Edelman: I think we’re creating new media, but we’re also looking at what environmental bloggers and others are talking about and trying to join the conversation, and I would say in terms of my own blog this last year, the thing that has interested me is that when we have issues that are relevant in the world, for instance, I just blogged the other day about Senator Obama and compared him to a CEO, I think people really want PR people now to participate in this discussion. We’re no longer on the outside looking in.

Andy Plesser: Tell us a little bit about the Wal Mart situation. You guys have done a great job. You’ve taken some knocks. It’s been sort of an interesting year. Tell us sort of the ______ for your – you and how you see that.

Aedhmar Hynes: I think that our work on Wal Mart has been terrific. I think that we had 150,000 people going to Wal MartFacts.com every week. It’s a serious central source of information that’s credible. It’s constantly updated. Also, I think that the blogger outreach that we’ve done on environmental issues has been very important. The CFL bulb, for instance, also on the $4.00 prescription. Social media is just part of Wal Mart being in this horizontal conversation and I’m very proud of what we do for that client.

Julia Hood: Companies are under fire and under more scrutiny now than they have been in the past. Every single misstep that any one company has, it’s a direct implication for other companies, so we’re all being looked at in the same light. So certainly the challenge for PR is to keep putting the good news out there about what their company is doing to benefit the greater society, and so the challenge for us is to keep telling those very good, very positive stories, in an environment of criticism, scrutiny and distrust. Certainly there is the opportunity nowadays to use all of the different media vehicles and tools available to you to tell your story in ways that you’ve never been able to tell it before.

And the interesting thing is that audiences are there to hear it. So you don’t – you’re not forced to only work with the traditional media sources, with newspapers, with broadcast outlets, but you really can use all of the tools available to you from an online perspective to get your story out there, and we are definitely doing that as much as possible.

Mary Stutts: What I tell clients is the fundamentals of communications and public relations does not change. So you go back to the basics of saying what’s your objective? What do you want to achieve? What do you want to communicate, and who do you want to communicate with? And that – so that sounds really simple and basic, but I think that’s possibly one of the mistakes that can be made right now is the leaping into these different forms of communications without truly taking the time to understand what it is you want to achieve, because a viral video may be the perfect thing for you to do.

But on the other hand, it may be a disaster, and unless you’ve actually figured out what it is you’re trying to achieve, who you’re trying to communicate with, then once you’ve established that, which is the fundamentals of communications anyway, then you back up and say, “Well, is a viral video, is a corporate blog, or is an entrance into second life, a way of doing that?” If it’s not, then don’t do it. Don’t lose sight of why we communicate in the first place, and don’t lose sight of the fact that these are just new forms of tools and new ways to get to your audience, unless you understand why you’re getting to your audience and what you want to communicate with them, then actually you may waste an awful lot of time and resource doing things that will never be effective.

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Wal-Mart, Richard Edelman, Edelman , PRWeek, Julia Hood, Genentech, Text 100

YouTube's Success is its "Pass Along" Power, Declare MIT's Henry Jenkins and Forrester's Brian Haven

Henry Jenkins, Professor, MIT and Brian Haven, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

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[Start of Audio]

Henry Jenkins: I’m utterly fascinated with YouTube. I mean it’s the one phenomenon that’s come out since I wrote Convergence Culture that I most wanted to see included in the book. But one of the things I’ve argued in my blog is that YouTube represents the modern vaudeville, that vaudeville at the turn of the last century or the turn of the century before the last century was a space where all kinds of different things in the culture were brought together in short, highly sensational acts that they were designed so that you left them and wanted to applaud very vigorously because you saw something that blew you away. You hit a wild climax.

The YouTube stuff is every bit as eclectic, every bit as mixed in its content. It comes from everywhere. Everything in our culture is sucked through YouTube, but the stuff that gets passed along, that gets shared is stuff that just absolutely wows us and we immediately want to pass it along to someone else. And YouTube would not have function without MySpace and Blogger as ways of sharing that media. And so the aesthetics of YouTube right now are being shaped by what will people want to pass along.

Brian Haven: What I think made YouTube successful, there’s a couple elements. One is timing. There were sites that offered video before YouTube came along, but the real key thing you have to look at is broadband penetration and it really hit a critical mass in the 2004, 2005 timeframe and that’s right when YouTube came on board. One of the other key parts is that it fit into the social computing ecosystem. And what I mean by that is that you can actually post a video from YouTube on your blog, on your MySpace profile.

Rather than maintain ownership and control over the content posted on that site, which a lot of mainstream companies would have done in that same scenario, YouTube set it free and said, “Put it anywhere you want.” And I think that really created this really open grassroots environment that made it so successful.

Henry Jenkins: The social network on YouTube itself is mostly for flaming. The social network that matters is where that YouTube gets imbedded in someone’s blog, when it gets put on a MySpace page, when it gets passed along as a link. All kinds of social networking takes place around YouTube. YouTube would be a – would not work the way it does without social networks.

But I would say the least interesting social network, per se, is the one that’s through YouTube’s site where the content is often homophobic, racist, sexist, mean spirited. It doesn’t – it’s not a community. It’s a place where people go to bash each other. But the richness comes when communities take that stuff off and use it in other contexts, in other spaces.

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YouTube, Henry Jenkins, Forrester Research, Brian Haven

MIT's Henry Jenkins: New Users will Render MySpace "So Twenty Minutes Ago:" New Report Finds 10 Percent Drop in MySpace Video Sessions since December

Henry Jenkins, Professor, MIT

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[Start  of Audio]

Andy Plesser: So where do you think things are going now in terms if user generated video and sharing and what am I gonna see in terms of the way those are shared, the environments that are shared, the content we’re gonna be seeing?

Henry Jenkins: Now, it comes back to a point that I’ve been asking a lot about, Time Magazine’s You as the person of the year, whether that’s singular or collective, whether the model is personalized media or socialized media. And my bet is that what matters in YouTube is content, it already has a community in place. A community of interest emerges around this. So whether it’s skateboarders, whether it’s fans of popular music, whether it’s political activists, whether it’s students, it’s the content that travels, is stuff that appeals on a very deep level to very specific communities of practice.

And so I do think it’s a communal space even though it’s often described as voyeurism, exhibitionism, as if it’s about individual self-display, individual expression. Most of the content that matters is actually content relevant to a much larger community of people that are watched because they recognize something of themselves in it. And they feel some stakes in its circulation.

Social networking is here to stay. Social networking is operating at every level from small children, you know, there’s experiments now in the developments of social networks that are safe for small children to do, through teenagers, through middle-aged business people into senior citizens. Social networking is gonna be part of the way the web works for the foreseeable future. Now in that space, those companies that appeal to young people are gonna be the most volatile because no one wants to be in their older brother’s social network. They want to have their own community.

And so MySpace will rapidly become oh so 20 minutes ago, to cite, to quote the movie Clueless. It’s gonna be surpassed by the next youth site and you just see this constant proliferation of alternative social networks. To some degree it’ll survive ‘cause it’s the best known. To some degree, it’s become the lightening rod for criticism of both those concerned about commercialization and those concerned about sexual predation, it’s the lightening rod. And whether it weathers those two storms remains to be seen. But something like MySpace will be part of how the web works for a very long time to come.

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YouTube, Henry Jenkins

Beware of Hype and Stay Focused and Learn to Be Creative, Says Dance Great Twyla Tharp

Twyla Tharp, Choreographer

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[Start of Audio]

Twyla Tharp: The word “creative” can be very general. And I can’t just say to a dancer, “Okay, that part is boring. Be more creative.” I have to say to that dancer, “That part is boring. You’re phrasing is off, you’re on the fours instead of the sixes. Try that.” Or I have to say, “Your image is wrong. What are you thinking about there? Okay, try this thought instead.” You have to be very, very specific.

Andy Plesser: The issue of failure is something we all go through and it’s something that we can really learn from. Tell us what failure means and how people use failure to their advantage.

Twyla Tharp: Failure means, often, that you’ve tried something that didn’t work. And so you have some lessons to gain here. Success means you tried possibly the same old thing and guess what. It still works. That’s nice too. It’s a choice to be made. But if it’s seen as you took a chance, it didn’t pan out this time, character tells you to try, try again and you’re intellect tells you what did not go “right”, what should go differently.

Andy Plesser: Creative people do their thing because they’re motivated to create and they also want acknowledgement and then it becomes kind of a tricky thing about wanting acknowledgement, wanting to be liked, wanting the reviews, wanting to be admired and sometimes wanting to be admired so much and be an impediment to the creative process. So it’s like, in a way you have to be creative alone.

Twyla Tharp: Right.

Andy Plesser: But you also have to be aware of the crowd or of the world. But it’s a kind of a slippery slope isn’t it?

Twyla Tharp: It is a slippery slope and I think that it’s correct that those who are too aware or anyone who is at the time when they’re too aware of going after something because they want something else from it. They want recognition. They want reputation. They want glamour. They want money. They want success.

Instead of just doing the job at hand and seeing whether these things come along with it, it’s about making the dance, in my case, that you’re really curious about and trusting that people will – others will be interested in it and that if it has a sincerity and a truthfulness to it and if you really tried something in it and guess what, you guessed right. And it’s – it has a really wonderful feel to it. People will sense that and all this other stuff will come, but if you were working in a studio for the notion that it’s going to engender X dollars, X dollars have nothing to do with making a dance. They do, however, have to do with paying for the studio, trying to afford the dancers, some kind of income paying your own bills. So yes, it’s a problem.

I, you know, I’ve always – I was lucky. In the beginning I began to work simply to make the dances. I never though I was gonna make an income. I never thought I was gonna earn a living doing it. I just was curious about doing it and figured, you know, hey, my mother also gave me lessons in stenography. We can type, we can do other things and we did. We did other things and we did dance ‘cause that’s what we were really challenged to do, but we didn’t work at dance to pay the bills in the beginning.

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Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit