Airfoil Public Relations

Geolocation: Is it valuable or just another social media fad?

After attending a recent San Francisco Social Media Club event, I realized that geolocation has a place, and the technology is equally as exciting to consumers as it is to businesses.

For instance, remember thinking when you first started micro-blogging/using Facebook/using social status updates, who’s going to care that I’m headed to the grocery store to stock up on cookie dough? That thought can be dissected to identify all of the different people who will, in fact, care. 

First, your local grocery store is going to want to know where you’re going and what factors impacted your decision so they can entice you to keep coming back. Secondly, the corporate supermarkets want to know if the local grocery stores are offering a better price. Next, the cookie dough manufacturers are eager to learn if you have brand loyalty and which kind you plan to bake.  Lastly, how about your friend’s who want to know which book you consulted for the recipe? The list goes on and on…

The point is, lots of people are interested in your consumption patterns and most of them are offering incentives for you to divulge this information. Given the state of the economy, customer loyalty is more important now than ever before. Companies have turned to this feature to gather insights and offer incentives based on this newly acquired data, helping them to keep their existing customers and attract new ones.

To illustrate geo-location at its best, just this week Twitter announced that it is partnering with Foursquare and Gowalla on a new geolocation feature called “Places” which allows consumers to see messages from other users who have also visited that location.  This technology is redefining social networking by giving local businesses the opportunity to connect with consumers on a more intimate basis.  And the best part?  Your consumption patterns prove you’ll be interested in what they offer!  This same type of feature is found with tools like Google Tags and Yelp, which give consumers the ability to rate a business based on their services.

To jump into geolocation, take advice from Social Media Club panelist Louis Gray of Paladin Advisors Group: Spend five minutes with your favorite geo-location feature and search the terms “super swarms” and “Indonesia.”  You’ll be amazed at the possibilities.

-- Heather Arft

Redefining public relations through content creation

If there’s one lesson I learned during my trip to New Orleans last week, it was this: do not wear pants to Louisiana in June. Saying it was hot would be an understatement.

But if there’s another lesson to be learned from my time in the Big Easy, it’s that we are standing on the precipice of the future of public relations; a fundamental shift in how we will spend our budgets and manpower. Soon, our profession will rely more on the creation of our own content for consumption than it will pitching an interview to a reporter, crossing our fingers, and praying for the best result. (We see an example of this on Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference video page.)

It was for this reason alone that I hopped on a plane to spend some time with Microsoft’s newest IT Investigation unit: Point & Click.

Recently, we’ve been able to leverage a fantastic relationship with the New Orleans Hornets of the National Basketball Association due to their creative work in the IT space with Microsoft’s customer relationship management software, Dynamics CRM. Since the guys were already in New Orleans for TechEd, we figured we would be remiss if we didn’t at least ask the Hornets if we could shoot some video with their team to discuss how they’re using the CRM technology.  As we’ve come to find out, the team was more than willing to accommodate our request, even going so far as to give us access to the Hornets’ team locker room for the shoot. (Lesson #3: Before you discount an idea, ask. You’d be surprised how willing people are to help.)   

Now, learning that Chris Paul has three lockers to himself aside, the coolest part of the trip was digging in and gaining a working understanding of how this tactic is going to change the way we work in PR.  As I mentioned above, traditional PR has, for so long, relied on pitching stories to reporters, knowing full well that it’s ultimately not up to us how the story will turn out.  But what if we’re now able to control the entire message, and distribute that message on our branded sites, in exactly the way we want it to look? It certainly makes us more valuable to our stakeholders, does it not?

We are never going to stop doing PR in the traditional sense, of course. But as newsrooms shrink and our budgets get tighter, ultimately, it’s up to us to decide how to get the best bang for our buck. And whether it’s through pitching reporters our stories, or creating videocasts and podcasts that tell the same story, well, that’s up to you. But if it means spending half a day in an NBA locker room? Well, that’s one initiative I can support.

(Disclosure: Microsoft is an Airfoil client.)

-- Brad Marley