So we thought we would help here, to get you started Bond-i has set up its new Bondcast service, driven by our very own Neville Hobson, who has got to be one of the most experienced podcasters on the planet, having presented a show called “For Immediate Release” for four years and also co-written the definitive book on Podcasting. Corporate podcasting should be an integral part of any organization’s PR mix, it’s a valuable medium for communicating your message to a targeted audience - whether that’s customers, prospective staff, media or other key influencers. So listen up, podcast your message……now, you may be heard and eventually seen by the people you want to influence.

So just take the “news” release for what it is, a release of news to everyone. Craft it carefully so your key words and phrases are included and get it out online. so when a real journalist or blogger is researching your field, they find you by hitting on the content you created. And don’t just do one release a month, write more short pieces, even very week, just updates on your company, comments on the market, agenda setting thoughts on your sector. Also make sure your international offices get them too so that it gives ideas they can adapt and amplify locally. But don’t send them unsolicited to journalists, just the online news sites, journalists deserve the personal approach. So create the buzz, then you may get the bang.

This is a new service for mobile phones that lets anyone do things like email and instant messaging on their phone.

What’s great about that? you may wonder: you can do that now on mobile phones.

What is neat about Message Optimizer is that you can do such things on mobile phones that wouldn’t usually support services like email and IM.

If you have a mobile phone that lets you do SMS – and that covers pretty much any phone, from the most basic type right through to sophisticated smart phones – you can use Message Optimiser.

In this first podcast, company co-founder Paul Roberts explains what Message Optimiser is and outline the major benefits for users and for mobile operators.

Listen below or download the MP3 file (5.4Mb, 11:40).

This podcast is a good example of a communication medium that’s easy to produce, at low cost, and which supports other communication activity.

Let us know what you think.

The 90-minute webinar How to Maximise Your PR Budget With Social Media is designed to introduce you to social media and give you some answers to topics like these:

• What ’social media’ is and where it fits alongside your traditional marketing and public relations
• How organizations large and small, public and private, are successfully leveraging social media for their communication programmes
• Engaging with online influencers: your route to your ‘new publics’
• Practical advice on monitoring and participating in online conversations: which tools to use and when to use them

The webinar comprises a 60-minute presentation followed by a discussion session of up to 30 minutes – the part where you can ask questions and offer your thoughts and perspectives related to your own organization and needs.

Sessions during the first quarter are planned for January 25, February 10 and March 10. In each case, we’re offering the webinar twice: the first at 11am GMT and the second at 11am PST, giving our clients and others interested a couple of options depending on their time zone.

There is no cost for participating and you can register your free place on the Bond-i website.

If you’d like to see what a Bond-i webinar is like, take a look at the video recording of one of the December sessions. It’s the full 90 minutes and you’ll hear the discussion that took place following the 60 minutes of presentation.

That video might be all you need in which case I hope you find it helpful. Let us know if so (and, equally, if not). But if you want to get real benefit, why not take part in one of the upcoming webinars? That way, you can raise issues specific to your organization, as I mentioned before.

And did I mention there’s no cost? So I hope you can join us.

During a 10-day period, a groundswell of commentary and opinion about Kryptonite locks spread from enthusiasts talking on bike forums to the mainstream media, to a product recall that ultimately cost parent Ingersoll Rand $10 million.

CNN Money has a good summary and created the graph that shows what happened in such a short time (click to see larger size in new window or tab)

What’s not factored into that dollar figure is the cost to reputation.

Wind forward four years to this past weekend and an online storm that has erupted over Motrin, an over-the-counter painkiller sold in the USA, and an advertising video produced by the brand owner McNeil that very quickly offended some mothers.

The storm of protest that has embraced so many different online communication channels – from blogs to video and especially to social networking micro-channels like Twitter – has already prompted an apology from McNeil on the Motrin website and the withdrawal of the video from that website.

And all this has happened in less than 48 hours.

So what’s this all about? Well, take a look for yourself – the pulled video is on YouTube and plenty of other places (including links from blog posts like this one).

What’s most compelling to me isn’t the video that McNeil produced. It’s not especially remarkable: it’s a good example of a marketing message in audio-visual form, nicely produced and quite watchable.

What’s really compelling is the content angry mothers have created themselves, using tools and channels that largely weren’t around four years ago – YouTube, for instance, and definitely Twitter – but today are accessible and easy to use by anyone with an internet connection.

It’s what we tend to label today with the impersonal phrase “user-generated content.”

For instance, check this video out:

I don’t know about you but I can’t help but feel almost overwhelmed by the emotion expressed in these images and the words shown in the various Twitter messages.

And look at what you get if you do a Google search on the brand name “motrin” as I did early today.

The first result is a link to a Google News page where this story has already made the mainstream media across the US and beyond.

You’d expect the brand website to be the first result in a Google search – and I’m sure it was before this storm broke out.

Remember Kryptonite’s 10 days? This has happened for Motrin in less than 2 days.

As with Kryptonite, this eruption of critical opinion hasn’t been formally organized: it’s happened spontaneously, enabled by technology that gives you the means to very quickly and easily articulate and share an opinion on a scale and with a speed that was unimaginable as recently as even a decade ago. Clay Shirky would be proud.

It’s the scale and speed that still takes many people in the PR business by surprise, used as we still generally are to things developing at a more leisurely pace (let’s call it “analogue speed”) attuned to the traditional news-gathering and reporting cycles of traditional print and broadcast media.

Those days are gone. We no longer have that luxury. As communicators, we must enable our attention all day every single day. And that includes the weekends, something it seems the Motrin communicators weren’t doing.

Of the many blog posts published by communicators and pundits with opinions, one of the best I’ve seen comes from Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang and lessons learned:

• Always test your campaign with a small segment first
• Always have staff on hand to be prepared to respond during the weekend
• Don’t launch a campaign right before the weekend unless you’re prepared to respond
• The participants have the power, so participate
• For better or for worse, more influencers are talking about Motrin than ever before

I’d add one in the middle:

• Ask yourself: what is our plan of action if a viral effect develops around our brand/product/service, especially out of our normal business hours?

But it’s the last two of Jeremiah’s bullet points that are especially important.

What these angry mums represent – and as this is America we’re talking about, it’s ‘moms’ of course; more specifically, MotrinMoms – is an enormous self-organized focus group, providing the brand owner with amazing feedback on their product.

My podcasting partner Shel Holtz and I discussed this Motrin storm in yesterday’s FIR #398 podcast. We’d love to know your opinion about this kerfuffle so do contribute a comment after you’ve listened to the show.

Meanwhile, I hope McNeil are paying very close attention to all the commentary out there. They’ve already apologized. Now they can grasp a golden opportunity to listen and engage.

But perhaps the most fascinating thing for us to study about Mr. Obama’s victory is how extremely well he used new media to motivate his supporters, convince his skeptics, educate, inform, parry criticisms, and raise money.

His official campaign website was universally hailed as being a next-generation model of the genre.

From it, supporters could easily download logos, printable posters, signs, flyers, website buddy icons, computer desktop backgrounds, and more. And much has already been written about his campaign’s record-smashing fundraising: Obama collected donations from some 3.2 million individuals via the Internet.

But beyond providing campaign tools and gathering money, Barack Obama was also incredibly savvy about using social media. His campaign used text messages and e-mails to communicate directly with voters. He had profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. He Twittered. He published photos — including personal “behind the scenes” shots of his family on election night — to Flickr . His campaign’s YouTube channel has had more than 19.5 million views. He even placed virtual billboard advertisements in popular X-box Live games.

And it doesn’t seem like Obama intends to stop this sort of Internet-based communication now that he’s been elected. Check out http://change.gov/, which is, in its own words “Your source for the latest news, events, and announcements so that you can follow the setting up of the Obama Administration.”

Smart money is on President Obama having a game-changing, highly interactive website, live and operational on January 20, 2009.

How do you think President 2.0 might change our world and our activities?

Circle the wagons, draw in your horns, focus on core business activities… pick your metaphor to describe what really is the least sensible business decision to make in a recession, looming or actual.

Think about it – why would any business stop talking about their products or services at the precise time when talking to people clearly is what you need to be doing?

Tom writes about the new age of responsibility and how we’re all in this together. He’s speaking specifically about the current financial crisis and banking system bailout, yet could equally be talking about PR.

One of the clearest responsibilities for a PR agency is to show its clients how to connect effectively with the people important to them, whether they’re customers, journalists or employees.

‘Effectively’ means an outcome you can measure and one that is achieved by intelligent and efficient use of your (probably decreasing) budget.

Earlier this year – long before we began to see the current effects of the meltdown in the world economy – IT industry analysts Forrester Research published Strategies For Interactive Marketing In A Recession, a research paper that addresses the question “If the recession is coming, where will you invest?”

Forrester highlights social media, an area that seems self-evident to me as it’s one I’ve spent a lot of time with in recent years. It’s self-evident, too, to an increasing number of companies who understand how social behaviour influences how people communicate and, therefore, how they wish to be communicated with (and see what Dell has to say in their view that social media represents strategic marketing).

I’d like to think that smart companies will begin to answer Forrester’s question by considering it in the context of their own specific business goals rather than a knee-jerk response to simply cut budgets.

And let’s be clear - we’re not talking about tactical things like press releases, websites, even blogs or podcasts: all means unto an end.

What we’re talking about is the strategic use of public relations to support business goals, one that embraces all avenues – the traditional as well as the new – in a concerted effort to connect with people more effectively and cost efficiently.

Adding social media into the communication mix is one way, recession or not. Don’t take my word for it, though - just ask Dell if you want a real-world and measurable example.

Finally, I did like a great post yesterday by Todd Defren in which he bullet-points five reasons why cutting your PR agency is the last thing you should do in a recession.

And in particular, Todd highlights this reminder from the Harvard Business Review:

It is well documented that brands that increase (marketing) during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times.

Are you up for it?

To win in the current climate, PR campaigns need to adapt to meet rapidly changing market needs, tight budgets and significant developments in media communications.  So at BondPR we have launched a range of online services and social media tools to ensure clients maximise and control their online presence in local and international markets, at the same time keeping costs under control.

So for brands/companies looking to raise their online profile, engage with their  markets and generate demand in order to increase revenue as well as build a sustainable profitable businesses, Bond-i is ready to help: 

And Bond-i is international in its approach, we have a multilingual team already in place in over 50 locations around the world

We want to know what you think, what help would you  like? where are your pain points? what is your wish list?  let’s have a conversation

According to research carried out this month by Opinion Research Corporation for the Boston-based Cone consulting firm, 93 percent of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, while 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media.

Cone’s study has more interesting numbers:

• 60 percent of Americans interact with companies on a social media website
• 25 percent interact more than once per week
• 56 percent of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment
• 43 percent believe companies should use social networks to solve consumers’ problems
• 41 percent think that companies should solicit feedback on their products and services

The researchers interviewed just over 1,000 men and women for the survey which suggests you have to stretch some beliefs as this small number is said to represent the views of the population at large, some 300 million people.

While the numbers are far higher than I’ve seen in any other research, I think this survey is useful as it supports some other views that suggest an increasing trend for consumers to use social engagement tools – which include blogs, podcasts, video sharing sites and social networks such as Facebook – in their interactions with companies and brands, and vice versa.

The only trouble with the survey, though, is that neither the researchers nor Cone clearly define what they mean by ‘social media.’ A definition from them would put the survey findings into better perspective. Plus, some detail on some of the metrics.

For instance, what types of social media do those surveyed prefer? Blogs? Social networks? Twitter? And ‘interact’ means what, exactly? A blog post with a means to comment? A Facebook group where you can become part of a community? Or what?

Still, it’s useful data.