It’s a great idea –albeit an homage to HARO — attempting to connect the PR community with employers. The folks behind it have planned a one-day event coming up on Feb 19.  Details here.

Maybe someone from Phoenix should get in touch with them, since they only have representation in Atlanta, Boston, NY, Washington (DC), Kansas City, Minneapolis, Toronto, Ohio, Dallas,  and Southern California.

Oh, and they are looking for an idea for a logo. If you’re up to it, help the HAPPO out, will you?

It had nothing to do with these two familiar faces. Most of the 400 + attendees at the Social Media for Business event –a..k.a SMAZ –about all things digital, indulged in one of the oldest communication tools, business cards.

I loved how, despite seeing a Twitter handle on the last statutory slide of every preso, this tiny cardboard rectangle still works. It probably illustrates how social practices like this will not go away despite the attention we give to trackbacks, Tweetdeck or Posterous.

In between working the floors wearing that funny hat, I sat in on some great sessions. The panel on Building Brand Evangelists with Social Media, moderated by Kevin Gawthrope (@gawthrok), was very enlightening.

Then there was our very own Linda Vandrede moderating Social Media 101 a panel that included Amanda Vega, Chris Hewitt, Scott Andrew and Sheila Kloefkorn. Talk about heavyweights! If you’d been to last year’s SMAZ, you would have notices how the audience had changed, even at a 101 level. One of the sticky topics that came up was about outsourcing content. There were two schools of thought here, but both maintained that content creators have to be transparent and committed. Blogola and astroturfing won’t cut it.

As I mentioned on my blog, the tone was set by Sitewire president, Greg (“I am not a social media expert”) Chapman but having said that, there was plenty to glean from. Especially in the hallways!

My takeaways:

• Be the message, don’t just post the message!
• Don’t treat Facebook like the Yellow Pages.
• Listen first, tweet, post later. Use Social Media as a listening post.
• Be cognizant of the ‘channel agnostic customer.’
• Google handles hyphens better than underscores, so be watchful when you write headlines, tags.
• “Social media is free” is a huge misconception. There’s a human resource cost attached to it.
• Social media is not a strategy – it is what you embed into your Comms strategy, marketing strategy, PR strategy.
• Google’s new search engine, Caffeine, will knock your socks off.
• Think less about the platform, more about the content.
• Content isn’t king. Optimized content is king!
• Start with small things. If your boss or client wants to start tweeting, facebooking, start with small goals before the big-hairy-audacious ones
• There’s a difference between a News Feed and a Live Feed on Facebook.
• Train others freely. Give away secrets. The rising tide lifts all boats.
• Differentiate between Goals and Tactics. People mix these up.
• Just like the way they confuse Strategies and Tactics, I suppose.

If you read other takes on SMAZ , you’ll see that there’s a lot of tech stuff to wrap your head around. But for all the talk about ‘matchbacks’ and Seesmic, Tweetie and Flowtown, I came away with three things:

• “Social Media is an ingredient, not an entre.” – Jason Baer
• “Hang out where your customers hang out” – Sheila Kloefkorn

And …

• Bring a lot of business cards, next time, dammit!

Magazines know this so well, that people ought not be shocked at these choices. A photo by itself is not so powerful unless the accompanying headline draws it out. In this case, alluding to The Sound of Music, brings up rich images of controversy:  a flibbertijibbet, a will-o’-the wisp,  a clown!

Of course the running shorts is aimed at raising hackles, because it is so inappropriate. Running? Or is it a nod to the not-so-hidden agenda of Ms. Palin’s future run? As columnist Susan Estrich notes (by the way the original headline in the article, See Sarah Run, is more apt than the one the subs created in the Arizona Republic) the unlikeliest people will come to her defense. Newsweek, which has nicely seeded that controversy, will benefit from this ‘mistake.’

Maybe it learned from some real mistakes in the past, running such boring covers, and trying to use that word Palin-tology. Newsweek’s editor’s defense, covers the expected points: “We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard.”

Palin shot back, and was well situated to do so, on her book tour. With the social media side as well, in a statement on Facebook that garnered 3,176 comments. I don’t think even Newsweek gets so many comments.

The perfect moonbeam in their ink-stained hands.

• Do journalists need PR – by Jeremy Porter
• And to get the opposite pov, read What journalists should know about PR people – by Rohit Bahargava

So I thought these two examples were enlightening. One a government institution, and the other a big brand.

Exhibit One: “TSA Agents took my son.”

A woman going through an airport complained that she had been ’separated’ from her child at a security checkpoint. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) must face hundreds of complaints like this, from people losing their whatevers, to the indignity of being patted down.

So I thought this use of video in their blog  to quickly respond to the lady’s complaint, was a perfect way to diffuse the situation. In fact they posted nine videos to support their response -and these were also posted to YouTube.

Exhibit 2: “Yahoo hired lap dancers!”

Nothing is more toxic to a brand than a story that involves sex being used to motivate or influence others. That’s what happened to Yahoo this week. I don’t think the story got much play here (read about it here).

Without attempting to dance around the facts, Chris Yeh, the head of the group addressed it head on in their developer blog, saying: “I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend.”

If you Google Yahoo (or Yahoo them for that matter) you’ll see that most of it is about the apology, not the dumb move. (And in case your mind is going in this direction no,they didn’t post videos in this case!)

I received several of these, and promptly contacted the senders, certain that this was some robotic message. ($384 was enough of a red flag for me.)

But apparently there has been more to this, with another message not involving money and the worm passed around the Twittersphere faster than you could say Phish! Which brings us to question:

• How reliable is microblogging that’s totally dependent on one provider?
• How vulnerable (and dumb) are we who click on links from  a trusted source?
• Is it a signal that we may be abusing shortened URLs?
• Could we ‘publishers’ quickly become unreliable curators/middlemen?

I have to say I am a big user of URL shorteners, not just in tweets but in documents and posts. So I will have to pay closer attention to how I use them in future.  URL shorteners are not just risky business but some have said they defeat the very architecture of the web.

This recent bit’o phishing (as the folks at Twitter put it) did not make any money rich, but creditability poor.

Explain to me some of the reasons you believe that is is necessary for those who post responses to blogs or add their opinion to comment threads should to be anonymous. Or, rather, why you choose to do so, since it isn’t mandatory.

Writing under the cover of the nom de plume, UnclePat commented that the main bad reason for someone to remain anonymous online was it gave the person the freedom to be a ‘mindless jerk.’

I can’t argue with that when I read some of the comments online at AZCentral.com

Except for the fact that there are some others who have no problem with calling out something or someone and putting their name to it. Just look at yesterday’s Arizona Republic, where Steve Kirk of Phoenix calls Rush Limbaugh a rude bore. Montini concludes in his column the same day that fear is the main reason for this trend to hide behind fake names.

But there are other types of fear, and not just fear of wackos and lawsuits. I recently conducted a remote workshop for media professionals in Sri Lanka, on  looking ‘beyond the blog’ –at new modes of communications and interaction with audiences. There was a mixed group representing traditional and new media. Apparently some bloggers who wished to be not identified, were in the audience as well.

Toward the end of the session, one question came up that seemed more important than the rest. How to remain anonymous, and if it was a sensible thing. I wrestled with the question for several reasons. One was that we take our freedom of speech for granted, UnclePat’s point, notwithstanding. I know it’s different in countries where the government can beat you up or throw you into prison for random reasons. The other, of course, was credibility. I maintain that unless you have a compelling point of view or reason to stay behind the curtain, no one will take you seriously since the blogosphere is quite capable doing its own fact-checking. Just ask Dan Rather.

I am sure you face similar questions, especially related ones about whether you recommend moderating –and deleting– comments by blog readers who don’t validate who they are.

Digging deeper into this I noticed  plenty of advice on how to go about it, and many reasons why this is so . Take a look, and let me know your thoughts about this touchy topic.

• How to blog safely — Electronic Frontier Foundation
• PR Director found blogging anonymously
• The law against anonymous blogging in the US
• Yahoo and MSN sign deal with China to prevent anonymous bloggers
• Bloggers beware: what you write can get you sued

I’ve been experimenting with both long and short posts, long podcasts and short versions etc. So I raised this question yesterday with an editor-friend: Was long form journalism and publishing really dying, or, were we unwittinglydriving a stake into the heart of something we ought to preserve.  (Yes, there’s a very long post about this here!)

I came across this today,   a view that countered mine. Diane Ravitch at Hoover Digest holds that the decay of a literary culture, which ranges from a big drop of reviews to an increased appetite for ‘reading’ tweets and Facebook updates, is hastening the demise of reading.

So my point is: are we trying to solve the “people don’t read” problem by happily serving up content that lacks depth? In taking everything digital are we making a dangerous assumption that people just might read our stuff just because we throw it online? 

I am a big believer that for effective communciation and PR, there needs to be both short-form and long-form content. Reducing everything to an FAQ or tweet is not the answer. 

Lest I cross my self-imposed 200-word limit, I will stop now!

Al Maag, Chief comms officer of Avnet set the scene with a keynote on a topic that almost everyone there has wrestled with: How to tell your bosses it’s time to get embrace social media.

He spoke  of not just the successes, but the mistakes along the way. A refreshing thing, once you’ve heard a lot of great case studies,  often leaving you with the feeling there’s no tolerance for error. His main approach to the C-Suite was to tell them the train has left the station.

Some great quotes and highlights:

• “LinkedIn is the new Rolodex, videos are vital, Twitter is not for everyone” – Al Maag

• “In social media, do you want to measure the media, or the social?” – Ed Brice

• “Don’t sweat the metrics question too much. The ultimate metric is trust.” – Jay Baer

• “There is money for social media –it often peels out of different buckets such as SEO, marketing, advertising…” Sheila Kloefkorn

• “Tap into the expertise of your organization, and create a ‘content stew” – Pam Slim

• “Humanize your company” – Jay Baer

• “Focus on the bottom of the marketing funnel” -  Chris Hewitt

• “Segment your audience before forming tactics.” – Michael Corak

• “Social media doesn’t scale.  It’s a commitment.” -Ed Brice

• “Sales and leads are not the objective.  People don’t want to be sold to.  Conversations are not about ROI.” – Ed Brice

Incidentally, here are some of the presentations:

• The anatomy of a social media plan – Mike Corak & Chris Sietsema

• The Seven-Step Program – Jay Baer

• Cutting through the social media noise – Moderated by Kathy Sachs, the panel included Jay Baer, Chris Johnson, Cindy Kim and Tiffany Winman
  Note: there are just two slides, but it captured the whole audio

• The ROI of Social Media – Ed Brice

• Amp up the Personal in your Brand – Pam Slim

Since I wear two hats at ASU, as a social media activist, and Comms manager at Decision Theater, I get to see the problem (shrinking quality media outlets) and opportunities (reporters monitor stories closer than we give them credit for.) But I also see why the noise of tweeting and friending can make it seem like there is too much obsession with the tools and not enough attention to giving the story context.

So with that long preamble, I want to say that Journchat looks like an event whose time has come. Its mission, to keep better lines of communications between journalists, bloggers and PR folk.

As Aaron Baer introduced Journchaphx (yes, do follow the event using the hash-tag #Journchaphx) the Q&A type Twitter sessions will be collaborative, and synchronized with several cities.

First question: Who owns the fan experience at College stadia?  As Aaron Baer framed it slightly differently. How do schools teach this stuff?

This turns into: How do media liked being pitched, contacted? Most say via social media. Adamkress notes that it is a mixed bag.

Back to the right-to-tweet vs sponsor’s rights to to stadia: Alison Bailin of HMA observes rightly that ‘companies fear social media as the new DVR.’

Question on Social Media Press Release. How relevant! JoePRGuy says press releases are not dead.

To the audience question whether media companies are seeing the light and hiring social media savvy reporters, Tiffany Jarratt responded, “no one is hiring, all of us use social media. I use Twitter  all the time to source stories, people, products…”

Great quotes:

• “Forget what you think you know and go learn from some mentors.”  - Joe Cockrell

• “Don’t lose the romance of the language. That’s just as important as the content in a press release.” – Adam Kress, Phoenix Business Journal
  

• “I work for an agency, and I write about fertilizer all day.” - Emily Butler, Canyon Communications. (She was responding to a question about advice tio new grads, and how to develop writing skills.)  “It’s very technical and it can be somewhat dry, so I need a creative outlet for my writing and I turn to personal writing and blogging about b2b marketing to get this.”
• “My boss doesn’t get social media –until someone sends him an article  about it.” – Anonymous
• “I have become  a better writer, now that I use Twitter. It forces us to be more concise.” – ??