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Pittsburgh Pirates: Social Media Swing and Miss

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Today’s article is authored by my dear friend and colleague JENN WHINNEM…thanks, Jenn, and enjoy!

Jenn Whinnem says:

The Pittsburgh Pirates (warning: autostart audio) recently missed out on a big opportunity to hit it out of the park. The customer service park, that is. And I don’t think they’re even aware of it.

First off, the facts:

The Pittsburgh Pirates are a Major League Baseball team who could use a little more love. According to Craig Calterra on msnbc.com, “You can’t give Pirates tickets away some days.” Possibly because they have lost for the last 18 seasons, the longest in North American history .

Enter my friend, Jason, who saw that the Pittsburgh Pirates were holding a ticket pre-sale for newsletter subscribers. Eagerly, he signed up for the newsletter – but received nothing. No code for the pre-sale arrived in his e-mail inbox. Old versions of the newsletter weren’t online. But what was online was information on where else you can find them online.

A sports team on Twitter and Facebook, not to mention their use of blogs and forums? Great! Jason tweeted at them. He asked me to retweet it for him, thinking that might encourage the Pirates to help him out. And the response? Nothing. Not only have they tweeted since, even retweeted other people, but have not responded to Jason’s tweet.

We both found this curious, to say the least. You’d think the worst baseball team would want to embrace their fans. So I started to dig into the Pirates’ Twitter feed and Facebook page. Here’s what I found:

• They tweet from Hootsuite, the web (meaning Twitter.com), and Twitterfeed.
• They don’t respond to tweets, but retweet other mentions of themselves.
• Once you like their Facebook page, you can respond to their posts, but not post on their wall.
• They don’t respond to comments from their fans.

Disappointing, to say the least. A review of their forums didn’t turn up interaction from a forum moderator, and I saw one response from a blog author with her e-mail address. That was it?

Let’s pull back for a moment and first recognize the Pirates for their efforts. It’s great to see them blogging, posting on Facebook and Twitter, and using forums to give their fans a place to convene and discuss the Pirates amongst themselves. The Pirates need to step up their game. It’s not enough to allow fans to talk to each other. Pirates, you need to help your fans love you MORE. Jason wants to go to a game and support you – yet you’re not helping him do that. Why would you pass up this opportunity, Pirates?

Your Digital Media Mash Up Opportunity

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The Washington Post recently announced Trove, a service to allow readers to build customized news sites based on personal interest. The New York Times has News.me, an app culled from Twitter followers’ reads.

Ongo is a paid service that organizes news by sources selected by subscribers. Paper.li has been out awhile on a smaller, individual reader scale doing much the same – customizing posts and content from RTs and hash tags on Twitter.

What does this mean?

  • It’s a goldmine for social media, media relations and public relations professionals. Those who have typically pitched vertically into trades may just have more opportunity for stories with customized or specialty content.
  • What does this mean for writers? More of a chance to niche and offer specialized content to one vertical.
  • How about marketers? When the first analytics start coming in they’ll scramble to feed product campaigns to push sales.
  • Advertisers? This may just be what the advertising industry needs to push it into higher profitability.

We are on the fringe of a huge content mash up; do you see your opportunity on the horizon?

Blogging With Design

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One thing’s certain when blogging — the design must be tweaked about every four months. If you want to keep it fresh and look stylin’ the only way to make that happen is to throw in the DIY towel (that’s do-it-yourself) and hire the big guns.

For this design, I provided the core, the color and this and that, but I owe the rest to Dwight Maskew of Carbon Based Media.

He made the template, changed the colors, moved things around, added the bells and whistles and generally made a great part of my team. I’m happy to share (although I hate to) because Dwight has been my IT back end for about five months.

If you need website or blogging IT help please consider Dwight. Just know that I come first and you’re second!

Now, let me clarify the first statement up top — blogging with design has to be top of mind. No one wants to come to a stale site, but everyone gives new bloggers the benefit of the learning curve. Since I’ve been blogging a few weeks shy of a year, my learning curve is over. It was time to lose the frustration and fear and just hire the help already!

There are thousands of templates and skins for blogs; invariably, something goes wrong. What you want is a reliable design you don’t need to worry about. Unless you have oodles of time to learn blog design, you definitely don’t want to be messing with widgets and plug-ins.

There’s rarely a plug in that is plug and play; and they often mess with your design. It’s cool to have badges, icons, share this and that and more; ultimately, I wanted a simple design with a focus on content.

I’m always up for comments and tweak tips, but do me a favor? Will you kindly wait six months before you tell me?

photo credit: SEOYourBlog.com

Momaraderie: Virtual Assistant, Bi-Lingual Mom

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At the beginning of the year, I promised that I would make a better effort to speak with people instead of this non-verbal life we’ve all created via social media. Recently, Ivonne Vazquez, whom I know on Twitter as @VIVAssistants, picked up the phone to make a live connection with me. I’m so glad Ivonne beat me to it, because she’s a person everyone ought to get to know…

Ivonne made herself known to me when she commented on a post I ran on virtual assistants on my other blog, The SMB Collective. Based on this comment, I coerced her into drafting a post for me there, too, and what a great writer she is! I’m slowly learning more about Ivonne and the services she offers via her own company VIVA (VIVA Virtual Assistants), which offers virtual assistant services to entrepreneurs and companies seeking to increase capacity by outsourcing or subcontracting administrative needs.

In addition to owning a small business, Ivonne is a single mom, with a 9-year-old son at home (and two older children away at college). She is head of household, bread winner, avid gardener (who wants to be an organic farmer when she grows up), mower of lawns and amateur photographer. Hailing from New York City, of Puertorican descent, she is now living in Maine. Ivonne has deep roots in her culture, is bi-lingual, and is doing more work with Hispanic marketing consulting for small businesses. Additionally, she was recently tapped on the shoulder to be Maine’s only Spanish/English bilingual and bicultural SCORE mentor.

She is one of the most supportive, engaging and lovely people I’ve met on Twitter. The other day I was having a hissy fit about my computer on Twitter, and Ivonne picked up the phone to call and help me. How amazing is that? It was such a delightful shock to me and a wonderful gift, too.

How she manages juggling her balls is a question for Ivonne:

First, thank you Jayme for being so wonderful and asking me to be part of this great concept that is Momaraderie!

As for juggling…I find that if you don’t think about how much has to get done, you don’t become overwhelmed and it gets done! Just like the old riddle “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time”; the same applies to life and business.

Organization, structure, a work schedule and self-discipline are all key in maintaining efficiency, productivity and your sanity both as a small business owner and working parent; more so if you also work from home. Adaptability and flexibility are also essential. While structure is good, being too rigid in a routine or schedule can also be overwhelming and an obstacle in accomplishing tasks and achieving goals.

I maintain business hours with VIVA, this is when I am available to the public.  This doesn’t mean that I’m not, on occasion working until 1:00 a.m. or up at 5:30 checking e-mail, etc.; having a schedule gives me the opportunity to dedicate a portion of my day to my clients while also attending to my family and personal life.

Mobility in my business is also critical, and one of the reasons why I can accomplish multiple tasks and projects efficiently.  As a virtual assistant, which by definition means that I can work from anywhere at any time, having a laptop, smartphone, portable hard drive, hosting plan with File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for secure file uploads/downloads, access to cloud applications and secure WiFi access allow me to work from my home office, co-working office space, local coffee shop or my car…without missing a beat.

Tumblr, Fashion Week and Tourism PR

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I have a confession. I love “America’s Next Top Model,” I subscribe to In Style and Vogue, and I relish the models’ make up, style, poses, photography, and settings – forget the clothes.  When I saw in the Wall Street Journal this story, “Fashion Week Tips Hat to Blog Site,” I eagerly scanned.

This week is New York Fashion Week, and guess who’s getting a seat to the party? Tumblr! Tumblr is a blogging platform, much like Blogger and WordPress. How it differentiates from the two latter is with its 13.4 million blogs, about 20 percent related to fashion. There are 24 Tumblr fashion bloggers (independent writers) attending Fashion Week because of their influence (there’s that subjective word again).

When you take a lens to more data, Tumblr is on to something. Tumblr had 1.6 billion U.S. page views in December 2010 only; whereas, Blogger had 697 million and WordPress had 141 million, according to comScore.

You can read the business story associated with Tumblr; what I’d like to offer up is the uncanny similarity with Tumblr’s public relations and the familiarization (fam) tours of yore in travel and tourism PR. I used to arrange these fam trips for travel media back in the day when I worked in Chicago’s agencies. These all-expense paid media getaways lavished everything imaginable on reporters in exchange for a story; you can imagine how popular these were, until the FCC swooped in and changed the gifting rules across industries.

So, here’s Tumblr, the publisher, if you will, inviting Joe and Jane “fashion” blogger (some with no experience at all) to attend Fashion Week with free hotel, tickets to events, and a rooftop party (will it be inside?).

You can bet the blog posts will flow freely, among other things.

(photo credit: NYDailyNews)