Baking with PR consultant of Baker Communication

Who: Glenn Rossman

Of: Baker Communications Group

Twitter: GlennRman

Background: I’m in my fourth year as a p.r. consultant at Baker Communications Group (www.bakercg.com) where we work with young technology companies. I’ve had many years experience working at technology giants IBM and HP, plus start-up StorageApps (which was acquired by HP), plus p.r. agency giant, Hill & Knowlton. Working with smaller companies, I get to see direct results and it keeps me fresh staying on top of things like emerging social networks.

How have you see social networking affect the industry? What tools have you used to keep up to date with target audiences? I’ll answer in the context of “the industry,” being p.r. and our clients in high tech. Right now, we’re all: 1- gaining experience with social media – like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (along with Plaxo, Xing, maybe even YouTube and blogs) – by signing up and using these ourselves; 2-learning by participating in seminars/webinars; 3- experimenting by trial and error. A good summary is something I picked up on one webinar: “How do you measure success? Try things. See if they work. Try again.” We’re really at the beginning of the wave here and that really says it all, I think.

 

In terms of “tools,” we have our own WordPress blog (www.bakercg.com/blog), plus I use TweetDeck and am looking at all kinds of programs like TweetLater (has keywords and reporting, identifies people to follow), Twellow (Yellow Pages of Twitter - classifies by industry), MrTweet.net (an agent that suggest “Follows” and helps link to others), along with wefollow.com. Also, I’ve been evaluating new offerings like “Social Media Metrics” from PR Newswire and VocusNews On-Demand, which has added social media tracking capabilities. These help us track what is being said in social media perform analytics to make sense of it all and do a better job of directing our messages.

Do you think it's becoming easier or harder to reach consumers? “Consumers” in my work are typically other businesses that purchase technology. I would say it is “easier” and “harder”. It is easier because we have many more ways to reach consumers (our target audience) and now we are better able to reach consumers directly – not only through media. That is also why it is harder because there are so many outlets and they are growing so fast. Before the emergence of social media (and blogs), there were a pretty finite number of media outlets and reporters. Now, the number of potential “influencers” is almost infinite (bloggers, Twitterers, etc.).

 Does Baker Communications use Twitter? Our agency and our clients are using Twitter. Why? There is no upfront cost and momentum has built to the point where it has proven to us to be another useful way to reach our target audiences.

What do you see for the future of social networking? We have one client (Open-Xchange) at the front of the social networking wave, which next week will introduce a trial that begins to assimilate information on the different social networks. For example, taking my LinkedIn contacts information and integrating that with my e-mail address book so that they are not two totally separate places with my contacts information. (As an example, Kelly, right now you are in my LinkedIn but if I want to send you an e-mail I have to manually add you to that address book.) Also, they’re working on sharing Profile information so that I maintain one bio/profile, which can be published to multiple sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, for example). The idea is that in both cases – integrating address books and maintaining profiles – are dynamic and continually update. In the future, we’ll see far more integration of social networks than the standalone, isolated islands we have today.

 

Do you think social networking sites are successful? Yes, and the proof is the number of users and vibrancy of each of those. I believe we’ll see maturing and maybe some go away or, more likely, they find their niche. MySpace is the best example where maybe its peak is past, but it is settling into a good niche (artists, musicians).

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