Last month I had the chance to visit the Emarketing Summit at the Oregon Convention Center. It was part of Innotech, a regional conference for the technology industry.

The highlight of the event was the lunch keynote speaker at the Emarketing Summit. Rahaf Harfoush, an Obama campaign volunteer and social media strategist, discussed valuable lessons from the social media campaign that changed politics. At just 25, she is one to watch in the flourishing social media space. Here are some useful insights she learned on the campaign about making social media work for you:

• Create Incentives within the community – encourage more social media community participation by rewarding the most prolific contributors. For example, the Obama team gave access to key campaign officials for top volunteers, not just the big donors.
•  Roll with the unexpected – if people unassociated with your brand share brand-related content they created themselves, embrace it. Utilize their enthusiasm to create awareness and build loyalty with their peers.
• Redefine Engagement – Be wary of arbitrary metrics (like web site hits) and focus on quality. Social media is all about relationships and providing value; having a core group of evangelists may be better than having 1,000 followers on Twitter.
• Personalize the mission – create bonds by making people feel invested in participating with your brand in social media.

I have stated before that I like technology and the people who are driving its future.   I like their vision, their tenacity and their ability to think outside the box.  Technology is one of the more inspiring industries today.   However, as a marketing person and a communicator, there is some cause for concern. 

I am concerned about the explosion of social media sites and web tools.  It seems to be “build it and they will come” to the ninth degree.  How much money is involved in the development of these sites?   Where are the solid revenue models?  How much overlap is there?  Which sites will gain traction and see pleased investors and which will not?  This reminds me a lot of the late 1990s where the goal was to gain market share at all costs and the revenues would come later.   We all know what happened when that bubble imploded. 

Lately, I have also been exposed to a rash of new, small, well-funded technology companies with innovative products but no ability to sell them.  The first job of a technology CEO is to sell the product.  Once sales are established then the focus can shift to growing the company.  I started my career in retail in the 1970s with another truism:  nothing happens until someone sells something.      

I have an ulterior motive for my concerns and complaints.  I am counting on technology and innovation to catapult the world out of the current recession.  Please listen up.

Public relations used to be the practice of approaching the traditional media to garner third party endorsements for our clients.  These endorsements were valued by our client’s customers and their sales rose as a result.

Today, with many traditional media shutting down or moving to the internet, public relations messages placed on the web have the ability to drive a client’s sales as well as attract articles.  This is an amazing leap forward in the value of public relations. 

Driving a client’s sales on the web means pushing the client’s name up to the number one or two slot on search engines.  At LANE PR we are now as focused on a client’s search results as we are on the quantity of clips that we garner for them. 

We implement social media campaigns and drive search rankings by optimizing all of the usual public relations tools - press releases, white papers, media kits, etc.  Additionally, we are now responsible for our client’s news rooms and monitoring their search rankings and Google Analytics accounts.  Bringing these tools under our responsibility allows us to effectively monitor the results of our public relations efforts.   Public relations can now accomplish organically what pay-for-click attempts to do.  

I started LANE PR in 1990 as a public relations agency with the belief that PR was the most cost effective tool to increase sales and grow value for our clients.  Now with the advent of new media, this statement holds more weight than ever.

This is my first blog about technology and truly, my first blog ever.  I would like to talk about technology and business from a historical 10,000-foot level.  As a public relations practitioner, I remember when key client messages were delivered by snail mail and the telephone.  My children will tell you that they remember stuffing envelopes full of press releases in front of Sesame Street.  

I was at another advertising and public relations firm in the 1980s.  I attended a KPMG breakfast that featured Regis McKenna.  Regis was the person who used public relations to launch Apple.  He told our morning audience that the future was bright.  In 10 years we would all have amazing computing ability that would allow us more free time.  Regis was a very bright guy, however, I don’t think that he understood human nature and could envision how much more people would allow those computers to cram into their 24/7 days.

Also in the 1980s, Waggener Edstrom hired our firm to help launch Microsoft Windows at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.  They told me that Windows was the equivalent of a new typewriter and wanted to portray the influence of the typewriter through the ages on business as one walked up the curved galleries at the museum.  It was a big, visual idea.

Around that time came the age of the fax, and fax machines initially couldn’t talk to fax machines from other brands.  This seemed a complete waste of time as no fax brand rose to gain the majority market share.  Fortunately, technology that allowed cross-branded fax machines to talk to each other came on the market.

In the early 1990s I attended an Internet conference in Los Angeles.  There were over 500 people in the room and the Internet on the screen was black and white, no picture, and plain text.   A marketing fellow from a national beer brand stood up to demonstrate the first Internet sales promotions that I ever saw.  It was pretty rough.

But Web sites were growing in importance and programmers seemed to be making their development as mysterious and expensive as possible. My firm had a rather large client who wanted a Web site.  We obtained three price quotes and the best one was for $200,000.  Obviously, the client decided not to be first to market with this new technology avenue.

Starting my company, LANE PR, in the 1990s, I made the personal commitment to spend any cash reserves on high quality talent and the latest technology.  As Web sites and e-mail became important, my spending on technology increased.  Then we started to attract technology companies as clients.

It was the late 1990s heyday.  Public relations firms became totally focused on technology.  VC firms referred their favorite public relations firms to their portfolio companies.  The average public relations retainers in Silicon Valley were $60,000 per month.  Advertising was growing as well, so the technology and business magazines became two inches thick.  The entire strategy was to launch a company, gain market share through public relations and advertising in an 18 month period (18 months was deemed the viable business window for most technology ideas), and sell or go public.

I liked technology clients.  They were smart, visionary and confidant.  Unfortunately, March 2001 came around with a technology-based recession.  The technology companies whose only business model was market share tanked.  The media was roundly blamed for not understanding traditional business models and drinking the Kool-Aid with these confident technology CEOs. 

That brings us to the post-technology recession period.  I will talk about that in my next blog.

Wendy Lane

I was on the road for two weeks in February, with a client talking to media, and was able to gain some firsthand insight into how the media is changing and what it’s like to be a reporter or editor these days.

A few takeaways:
• Video is essential. A number of editors strongly encouraged me to work with my clients on embedding video into press releases.  Video is a critical component of keeping readers on news Web sites. The media want press releases to be more visual and engaging than the standard text format with a quote from the company.

Videos must be short in length. How-to demonstrations accompanying new products or services are well received.

• Print is still alive. While the shift to online news consumption is very real, a number of media I spoke with (note most of these media are trade/vertical focused serving engineers and the electronics industry) believe while frequency of their print editions may lessen, the print magazine will continue to be what keeps readers coming back. Specifically, technical papers and in-depth features continue to be in high demand.

• Content is king – and media needs our help with it. They want fresh content that is brief and informative. Tutorials, how-tos, instruction and never-before-seen information that will keep readers coming back for more. Also, articles authored by industry leaders provide unique viewpoints to readers and take the burden off of the typically lean editorial staff.