If you haven’t had a chance to check it out – head over to Google and play a rousing game of Pac-Man!  Today, Google unveiled its latest page celebrating Pac-Man’s 30^th anniversary.  The best part about this Google logo/page – you can actually play Pac-Man!  Just click on “insert coin” on the home page and use your keyboard arrow keys to control Pac-Man.  Hurry though, it’s only live for 48 hours.

What’s interesting from a PR / marketing perspective is that Google’s Pac-Man game is generating media interest.  We’re talking BusinessWeek, NetworkWorld, Washington Post and PC Magazine, to name just a few.  In my opinion, marketing and PR professionals should try to do more initiatives that focus on something fun like this.   It creates additional interest from consumers, increases page views/time spent on a page, enhances relationships with the media and shows the company’s personality in a new/positive way.

I realize not every company has real estate like the Google homepage, but this example shows how a company can develop cool and fun offerings that in turn generate media coverage.

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard about BP’s expanding oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.

With such a major disaster, PR is obviously a key issue for the company and there are plenty of PR industry experts weighing in on how BP is doing with respect to PR. Here’s a quick rundown:

• BP needed to take responsibility. In a statement, BP CEO Tony Hayward said, “It wasn’t our accident, but we are absolutely responsible for the oil, for cleaning it up.” While this may be true, the public doesn’t care – in a crisis, a company needs to accept responsibility immediately and work quickly to show how they are addressing the situation in a very proactive manner.

• BP’s social media communication efforts throughout the crisis are being applauded by some. BP created a new section of its site to share cleanup updates – on a daily basis, links to company statements, video responses and updates from company spokespeople. If there is one thing that everyone is looking for in the midst of a crisis it is updated information, all the time! BP’s site provides just that and offers one place for the public and the media to go to find the latest details on the spill.

• Get your messaging / facts straight before you talk. The Slate wrote:

“For example, the company initially told reporters that the rig was leaking 1,000 barrels of oil a day. The real figure turned out to be 5,000 barrels, after a new leak was discovered. Even then a BP spokesman downplayed the number as somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000. “That hurt their credibility early on,” says Timothy Coombs, who teaches public relations at Eastern Illinois University. “People wondered, How much can we trust you?” It also violated a rule that Larry Smith of the Institute for Crisis Management tells his clients: “Don’t speculate. If you know, say so. If you don’t know, say you don’t know.”

There’s plenty more out there regarding the BP story – 18K+ stories on Google News in fact – but that’s what bubbled to the top for me as a PR professional.

It was a lively discussion, covering everything from social media’s impact on customer service, how to engage audiences in a meaningful way and how PR and social media channels can and do work in harmony.  Only one attendee/tweeter thought the presentation was similar to “social media for kindergarteners,” so take a look and let us know if you agree….

How to Mix PR and Social Media

Here’s a glance at some of the highlights of the night:

Ken Myer, president and CEO of the WTIA, kicks off the awards

 

Federal Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra

TechFlash co-founder and executive editor John Cook

Service Provider of the Year, finalist video: Hubspan CEO Trisha Gross

Consumer Product or Service of the Year, finalist video: Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato

Congratulations to all of the finalists and winners!

Getting ready for the program to start...

The conversation, lead by Forbes magazine publisher Rich Karlgaard, touched upon an eclectic mix of topics one of which included her decision to immediately fire Larry Summers if she were ever to become President (which drew applause from the crowd.) However, Huffington also spent some time discussing sensationalism and the media in regards to the “Balloon Boy” phenomenon.  She admitted she did not allow the story to grace the top pages of The Huff Post in order to challenge the fundamental disconnect between real stories that matter and sensationalism.  “Wasn’t the boy found in the attic? Why are we still calling him the ‘Balloon Boy’ and not the ‘Attic Boy,” Huffington joked.

The Churchill Club, Microsoft Campus, Mountain View, CA

As PR professionals, it is often expected from us to create splashy headlines and generate hype for our clients – whether that means dumping a hundred body bags in front of a leading tobacco company or having Paris Hilton holding your product in a tiny black bikini. Let’s face it, fear and sex sells, right? Maybe not.  Sensationalism does not sell as many papers as it used to. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, all it takes is a few clicks between friend statuses to see through the cloud of sensationalist headlines to find the real stories that matter.

Alexander Bie and Arianna Huffington

And in the end, does sensationalism help or hurt our cause? When groups like PETA attack people with red paint or dump animal carcasses on cars, the question one must ask is, what message are they really getting across? Do these actions really benefit the ethical treatment of animals?

As PR pros, we need to know when sensational PR strategies will work for our clients and when they won’t. When they do work, they can be rather powerful, but most of the time, taking the sensational road causes more harm than good.

Hear that sound? Buzz doesn’t just describe the name of Google’s latest platform for social networking. “Buzz” also describes the angry, bee-like sound of a swarm of privacy complaints, a class-action lawsuit and the frantic revisions made by Google since the platform’s launch. But what is Buzz, why did Google release it and what does it mean for PR pros?

What is it?

Buzz is a social network tightly integrated with Google’s Gmail Web-based e-mail service. It provides the commenting, sharing and conversation-hosting features that have become commonplace on many social networks over the last two years. It also has a strong emphasis on mobile, location-aware features.

In order to understand Google Buzz in relation to other social networks, it helps to understand another site, FriendFeed. FriendFeed is a social network/aggregator with a strong emphasis on real-time results, search and hosting conversations around content from the Web. Buzz’s functionality very closely resembles FriendFeed (which was incidentally launched by two ex-Googlers and acquired by Facebook in August 2009). You can easily pull content from other Web properties such as your Twitter, Picasa, Google Reader and Flickr accounts so they are displayed in your Buzz feed. Your followers on Buzz can then comment or like the content, just like on Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. The site now includes @Replies, made famous by Twitter and incorporated into Facebook earlier this year.

What’s different about Buzz from previous social networks is that it benefits from Gmail’s massive user base and allows users to leverage their Google Contacts (launched in May of last year) and Google Profile (launched in 2007) to engage in a social experience not previously possible on any of Google’s Web platforms.

This isn’t the company’s first foray into social networking the company previously acquired Jaiku (a Twitter competitor) and Dodgeball (a location-aware social network in the vein of Foursquare) years ago. Those services were left to die quiet deaths, but the company still has Orkut, the biggest social network Brazil. Social features like IM were added to Gmail way back in 2005 and services such as Google Reader, YouTube and Google Docs have incorporated social features for years now. In fact, you could argue that most of Google’s online properties (even search) incorporate some form of social interaction.

How they screwed up.

Despite all of these exciting features, the response to Buzz has been a litany of concerns, critcisms, general backlash, bugs and lawsuits aimed at the service. These problems were unanticipated by Google, but should have been. It appears the company ignored the historical concerns which have long accompanied social networking Web sites.

Social networks run into their biggest PR problems whenever they make a change to their site, whether it is a change to privacy settings, features or even just a general redesign of how the site looks. Site redesigns are a fundamental PR headache for every social network or social communication platform out there, from Facebook to Twitter. What’s worse, some of these other sites provide good models of what works and what doesn’t. Many of the proposed ways to fix Google Buzz on the Google Moderator page are simply suggestions that Google adopt the same functionality found in these social networks. 

Google also failed to learn from past criticism. When you’re one of the world’s biggest companies that collects user data on hundreds of millions of people every day, people get worried about how you will protect their privacy. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was criticized in December for saying that privacy didn’t really exist online. Unfortunately, the company badly misjudged the public’s privacy concerns again with the launch of Buzz. When the network launched, Buzz automatically followed everyone in the user’s Google Contacts list. It also made this list public. This is very bad, when users expect this information to remain private. E-mail information is protected under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, in some cases. If they had launched Buzz as a standalone product, much of their problems could have been avoided.

Another possible problem may have come from the company’s internal testing. Google Buzz was tested internally, with no feedback from outside users. This was extremely odd, because many of Google’s best services or features have gone through the familiar, opt-in vetting that Google Labs provides. By relying on internal stakeholders only to vet their products rather than exposing to a subset of their public user base, the company missed an opportunity to avoid many of the problems they are now having.

What you need to know.

 If you haven’t used Buzz yet, go here for a quick feature overview and how to get started.

Buzz has immediate implications for reputation management and media monitoring. Buzz’s content is very searchable, and you can begin using it immediately as a supplement for daily monitoring tasks. Google Operating System shows how you can save Buzz searches to make the process easier. Buzz content is already incorporated into the Google Trends real-time search results feature. Radian6 and Viralheat have both added Buzz results to their respective analytics platforms.

As you can imagine, building a Google Profile for your brand might be a good idea, right about now.

But Buzz doesn’t have the same mature feature ecosystem for brands that Facebook does. It doesn’t have the history of rapid-reaction corporate response that you find on Twitter. It appears to be very under-utilized by Gmail users. It will not be the “next big thing” in corporate social media PR (for at least a few months).

The Google Buzz story is really the story of several long-term Web trends coming to a head. Just as Google has slowly added social features to all of its Web properties (including search), social networks continue to add “traditional” e-mail and IM features to their services, if they do not already have them. This makes sense, because e-mail is a social network. We already have MySpace e-mail, and we will soon have Facebook mail. Even Microsoft’s Outlook will soon incorporate basic social networking tools. With all this sharing, privacy concerns will continue to be a major headache for all of the above companies. Features like @Replies and “likes” will become standardized across platforms, which will lead to commoditization of microblogging services such as those provided by Twitter. Buzz is built on a framework for distributed social messaging, which will lead to less-centralized social networks and more fragmented audiences. This will magnify the need for better research and monitoring capabilities in public relations. It will also make it more difficult to cut through the noise and connect with your target audience.

We hope you’ve liked this guide to Google Buzz. Feel free to leave your feedback in the comments.

That said, it was still an interesting night to learn about other successful PR campaigns for companies such as Boeing and Starbucks, among others. 

Additionally, Suzanne Hartman, Director at Seattle City Light was the honored speaker of the evening.  She took the Totem’s theme “Celebrating the Impact PR Creates” to heart when she described a campaign she worked on in the 1980s with Seattle Public Utilities (SPU).  The campaign was focused on getting more Seattleites to recycle, before reducing your carbon footprint was all the rage.  The campaign truly showed what kind of impact PR can have on our communities.  For example, while SPU hoped for a noticeable increased adoption rate, even they were shocked when an astounding 80% of Seattleites signed on to recycle.  Even more interesting is that because of the success of this campaign, it was reused in communities throughout the U.S. for years to come.  The key takeaway here:  PR can make positive short and long-term impacts on our community – a pretty cool thing, considering we’re not neurosurgeons saving lives every day!

Also, the emcee even turned out to be a local celebrity, Pat Cashman, who is known for his Emmy award-winning skits on the comedy show “Almost Live,” which made the event quite entertaining!  

And a little pat on the back to some of our fellow MWW team members – in addition to a selection of internal PR teams and outside PR agencies, MWW took home Certificates of Excellence for our work, including:

• Fulton Innovation: “eCoupled Wireless Technology Takes Charge of CES 2009”
• Tetris Online “2008 Tetris Online Launch of Tetris Party for WiiWare”

Thank you to the Puget Sound PRSA for putting together a great evening and to Pat Cashman for the laughs!

The holiday gala traditionally marks the announcement of the PRSA “PR Professional of the Year” award. This year, not only were there two recipients of this award, but they are also both former strategic communication professors of mine, Soon Beng Yeap and Barry Mitzman, from my alma matter, Seattle University.

A pioneer of public relations higher-education, Soon Beng Yeap came to Seattle University in 2006 and took the communication department by storm. With much persistence, he established the first-ever undergraduate degree program in strategic communication in the State of Washington by Fall 2007.

If you’re noticing an influx in highly-qualified competition for public relations positions around town, at least you now know who to blame.