Photo by Keith Ellison on www.flickr.com

Last Friday, a Google search of  “LeBron James Media” produced 108,000,000 links and 1160 related articles. On Yahoo.com there were 10,857 stories posted.

If, during the past two weeks, you lived in the forest with no phone, internet, television or interaction with other human beings, you might have missed the story. Here’s what happened: James dominated the 24-hour news-cycle with his impending free agent decision. When it was all said and done (after a well-publicized hour-long special on ESPN), James’ career decision had been given the attention of a world-changing event rather than the simple business process it began as.

What are the lessons behind the LeBron James PR show?

Steve Buckley, at the Boston Herald, drew on lessons from Vince McMahon of WWE fame, to help explain James’ media mastery.

McMahon, an impresario who turned a regional dog-and-pony pro wrestling circuit into what today is known as World Wrestling Entertainment, has known for years that it’s easy to bypass the meddling media middle men and bring your product/message directly to the public. All you need to do is set up your own network, and then use it as a stage on which to play out all your story lines, plot twists, interviews and “breaking news.”

While nonprofits can’t set up their own media outlets, they can deliver their stories and issues to the public directly through available technology. By using social media applications, nonprofits cut out the “middle man,” taking the heart of an issue to a local (or worldwide) audience.  Rather than waiting for a press conference to be covered, nonprofits, like James, can take control and tell their own stories by tying them to a timely news peg.  Write your press releases with flair. Know your story, conflicts involved, and be transparent. Know who your sources are and be prepared to rise to the occasion when pitching reporters or when they come looking for you.

It’s true that James owns a PR company that’s focused on creating an iconic image of James, and it’s also true that most nonprofits will never have the star power of a famous pro basketball player to entice the media. But, nonprofits can tell their own stories and be clever and creative about using the range of tools now available to talk directly to their audiences.

Lesson: First, control the issue. Don’t allow the issue to control you.

James’ media strategy did have its critics. Phil Rosenthal at the Chicago Tribune wrote the outcome would have been better if James’ communications team had seized control from the start.

If James and company had been on top of this, his Web site would have tracked his whole courtship process. He could have kept an ad-supported video diary, including behind-the-scenes video of meetings with franchises.

Of more importance from a business standpoint, fans would have been invited to register to vote for their team and receive updates through e-mail and Twitter, creating a valuable marketing database.

Just one problem: James has owned the domain LeBronJames.com since 2002 but hasn’t done much with it until recently. Until Tuesday, James also had not used Twitter to address the public directly. So much for a New Media offensive.

Do any of these missteps sound familiar? Has your organization attempted to use social media tools in the past, only to fail to put the necessary time into the endeavor because of busy schedules? Perhaps constant Twitter, Facebook, and blog updates are just too much to juggle when you’re already swamped trying to provide services to a community or support to your colleagues.

But don’t underestimate the importance of tending these tools. Posting regular online updates about your organization’s journey, creating a digital archive of past articles on your website, or asking clients for input could give you a powerful platform to engage your audience and keep them coming back.  In other words, use your work to create brand recognition.

Lesson: When given an opportunity to connect, don’t hesitate.

LeBron’s decision to wait to give his answer until his ESPN event was also seen as a big public relations failure by some.  Michael Flood McNulty of OpposingView.com wrote:

LeBron James created a publicity circus unlike any other Thursday night — this was his choosing, not the media’s so don’t blame the messenger — and he humiliated his hometown fans in the most public way possible…

LeBron James alienated a lot of people tonight. Actually, alienated is the wrong word. He stunned and hurt a lot of people tonight.

What’s one of the first rules of communications? Who’s your audience and how can you reach them? Whether you’re trying to educate a specific group about an issue you’re working on or you’re trying to get people to take action, how you say it and when you say it and the channel you use to convey it are so important.

Lesson: Don’t forget your audience. Be thoughtful of what they need to hear your message.

Raymond Guyton, right, of Hold Up the Light, showed off his unique light bulbs as he pitched a story on National Prayer Day to WBEZ culture reporter Lynette Kalsnes during the Workshop's Professional Media Relations training in February.

Been meaning to post this list for about a month now, ever since the final session of Professional Media Relations, our core annual “soup-to-nuts” training for nonprofit communicators. After five weeks of the class, the participants have found an idea, honed it, practiced it,and in the final session, they pitch it to journalists from around the area.

For years now area reporters have been gracious enough to join us for three hours on a Friday morning to share some thoughts about what kinds of stories they are looking for and how they like to get information. When it works well, they get good story ideas from the session.

This actually seemed like our best year yet in terms of folks in the session finding the best stories coming out of their organizations and getting to tell them to journalists, then journalists finding stories that worked out for them. Another highlight from this year’s session was a list of tips that WBEZ Reporter Lynette Kalsnes offered. Here they are:

1. What is the news element? A newspeg [can you believe there's no Wikipedia entry for news peg? We'll get to work on that, meanwhile hit the link for a decent definition--essentially the peg is what makes this story news, now] makes it more likely your story will get covered.
2. What is unique about the story? If there’s something new or interesting, that makes coverage more likely. Spell it out. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re on a marketing kick at Community Media Workshop in between the waves of calls we’re getting from all size nonprofits seeking to adjust to changing circumstances in how we tell our stories (e.g. doing more of the work ourselves, but still relying on journalists when we can get ‘em).

The challenge of nonprofit marketing, I’ve been finding, is to uncover authoritative and accessible sources for learning how to market our nonprofit services better. Of course we’re kind of guided by what’s most available … and what’s most available at the moment is Seth Godin.

Godin's books inspire, entertain

It’s good, it’s good! (more specifics on Seth in a moment) The problem is, even a “meatball sundae” is still just dessert. From Seth I get conceptual thinking and a grounding in living my work on the Web. But Seth alone won’t teach me to incorporate effective marketing principles into my efforts to spread the good word about how Community Media Workshop is helping ’save the world.’

Enter Tim Calkins, a Northwestern University marketing professor, and author of my favorite new-to-me book,  (it came out in 2008) Breakthrough Marketing Plans. An acquaintance introduced me to the book.

“The goal of this book is to be very practical and effective, and to help people write plans that are clear and supported and get great results in the market,” Calkins says in a 2008 Northwestern University article on the book. Calkins crystallizes some basic concepts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Robyn is a marketing and communications consultant for nonprofits and can be reached at stein.robyn @gmail.com

Robyn and I met a few years ago at the TrueSpin conference, Jason Salzman’s biennial gathering of nonprofit communicators in Denver (more about that at the bottom). In October over NYC-diner toasted corn muffins and coffee we discussed that the basic rules of communications adapt well to the online world–as Robyn demonstrates in thinking about audience, and how to segment or subdivide those we seek to reach into smaller groups, the better to connect with them.

How do you identify and then reach the audiences, niches, microgroups you are trying to attract to your campaign, your issue, your organization?”

It used to be formulaic. You could buy a list of 25-35 year olds, send a prospect mailing to a specific zipcode, target the readership of a local, regional or national media outlet, buy an ad in an appropriate publication. Not any more. Now there’s a dizzying array of techniques available enabling us to reach an exponentially larger audience. When did it become so complicated?

The quick answer is it happened when our inner audience screamed out for attention individually and collectively. It happened comparatively slowly during the dotcom surge; it sped up when palm pilots were the thing. It hit lightning speed [literally] when our Blackberrys and iPhones could load 100,000 apps including the ubiquitous Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Today, real time is actually real time and quick is an understatement. So how do we connect to the audiences we want to engage? Read the rest of this entry »

Ingrid Gonçalves, communications director at Center for Labor and Community Research from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

When Ingrid Gonçalves said during a round of introductions that she had five Web sites to create or update, I knew I had to try out the flip camera to get her story. It turns out to be a great story, not so much for how unusual it is, but for how typical it is, I think you’ll agree! (Apologies, this time the wrist is really shaky–I’m still learning!)

Ingrid was one of about 20 folks at this morning’s search engine optimization workshop this morning, led by
Tim Frick from Mightybytes. Tim delivered a workshop highlighting how to get found online, drawing on info from his forthcoming book tentatively titled Return on Engagement from Focal Press.

Below the fold here you will find, in the somewhat unlikely event that anyone finds it useful, my more or less complete notes on Tim’s presentation, which I found useful in charting some benchmarks for SEO. In a nutshell, here’s the Tim Frick program (of course it makes more sense when you see him lay it out, but still, it’s a good one):

1. Content, content, content–Have a content strategy and implement
2. Install an analytics package so you know what your Web visitors are doing when, etc.
3. Use alerts to see who is talking about you
4. Track user behavior and adjust your approach as appropriate
5. Rinse, lather, repeat (in other words, go back to step one, fine tune your site–”it’s never done” Tim says)

What do you think– is this an accurate description of what you do right now? Or what you aspire to be doing? Let me know in the comments or by email! Meantime enjoy Ingrid’s story and if you want more, click to see some notes in the rest of this (phew) looong post (hopefully, doing justice to Tim’s presentation): Read the rest of this entry »

Elizabeth Simpson of Champaign's do Good Consulting and Pamela Salela of the Central Illinois Nonprofit Resource Center in Springfield were among attendees who put messages in balloons, tossed them around the room to others, then popped the balloons to reveal resources wanted or to share at the Downstate Illinois Nonprofit conference.

Frankly, I was a little nervous when I got to the Lumpkin Foundation-sponsored Downstate Illinois Nonprofit Conference in Champaign. Always a little nervewracking to go somewhere that you know in advance you probably will not know most of the people!

Anyway, during the afternoon table-talk conversation I had planned to go over to the social media or marketing/communications topic tables but somehow it seemed like an even better fit when I ended up at a table where the discussion centered on reaching out to new audiences. Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting program, cute video, cool combination of players involved! (Nice to see volunteers who do not take themselves too seriously). Seems to be a lot of moving parts to this program, and it might be worth checking out if you want a video but do not want to invest massive funds (buyer beware!).

Wouldn’t you love to see Mayor Daley squirm as John Callaway asked him about Olympic budget cost guarantees he never shared with the voters? Or what about a one-on-one with Oprah? Or an unscripted half-hour with our latest political celebrity Patti Blagojevich (”What advice did your dad, Ald. Dick Mell, give you on which defense attorney to hire?”)?

Photo by Karen Kring. John Callaway, Thom Clark & Geoff Dougherty at 2/22/09 “Future of Journalism” Town Hall Meeting

Master interviewer John Callaway died Tuesday evening of a heart attack at 72. I find myself already missing some of the interviews I wish he’d completed. The long-time host of WTTW Channel 11’s “Chicago Tonight,” Callaway gained a deserved reputation as one of the region’s premier interviewers. Like Workshop mentor Studs Terkel, Callaway could push his subjects beyond their prepared sound bites to probe a celebrity’s motives, question a politician’s manevuers, or help illuminate an author’s tome. Ironically, Callaway was the only nominee to ever turn down a Studs Terkel Community Media Award, believing a younger person should fill the slot.

John was always well-read and well-prepared for his interviews, but his intellectual prowess didn’t overwhelm or overtake his subjects. His wonderment and curiosity informed so much of his work, as displayed in a one-man show of his life produced for a week or two at Pegasus Theatre in 2001. My last encounter with him was sharing the panel at last February’s Town Hall Meeting on the future of journalism, a somewhat bleak afternoon for traditional journalism, where John was typically inciteful about a city without daily newspapers and bloggers who steal content.

Now I don’t how public television’s digital signal will pick this up, but I understand John’s next interview will be with St. Peter to explore who paid for the pearly gates.

Thom Clark

A friend, Sharon Carney of the Michigan Suburbs Alliance, writes of what I suspect is a common, more advanced communications dilemma:

I’ve been struggling with some messaging issues lately for a project I’m working on and thought CMW might have some tools available for help. Basically, my challenge is that the project is complex — it’s a multi-layered response to a number of inter-connected issues, and I’m finding it difficult to package in a pithy way. I have no trouble skewing to the different aspects depending on the audience, but it’s that general, pull-it-all-together kind of message that I’m unsatisfied with.

Ideally, I’d love to sit down with someone like myself who generally understands the issues but isn’t waist-deep in the day-to-day and can lend some outside perspective (why can’t I have a clone?); but in the absence of that kind of assistance, I’m hoping for some other kind of resource.

Do you have a template or toolbox of some sort that might help? Or suggestions for “pulling myself out” of the project enough to achieve that outside perspective? I also thought there might be an upcoming workshop opportunity focused on streamlining messages for complex stories, but I didn’t see anything that seemed feasible considering my location.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you get email from Minnesota’s Fieldstone Alliance?

The tips from the agency, a publisher and training provider and home of Kellogg Action Lab, are on point (full disclosure, we are a “college of consultants” member of the Lab, not that anyone has ever contacted us about training through it or anything).

Fieldstone staff put some work into their enewsletter, “News You Can Use,” and it shows. Good links, good advice, not like “go do this” but “here’s something to think about” and you think, “yes, I should think about that.” I know, we all have a lot of those, but more ideas is better, no? 

Today, editor Rebecca Post riffs on Facebook to write “25 Random Things that Make the Nonprofit Sector Great.” Print and put in wallet for next time Uncle Ted or whoever asks what the hell you do and why you think it’s so special or whatever, or you’re asked with whatever level of politeness why you don’t get a real job. Check the links if you don’t know the groups she cites. And pat yourself on the back, you deserve it. Oh, and if you want to get more tips on nonprofit management, you can sign up for the email list here.