PAN Blog

We got the go ahead to put the agency on the new media map. We have identified a project plan, recruited a few key customers as advisors, identified long-term bloggers within the agency, and started a long training process - which will include encouraging employees to blog themselves and get first hand experiences with the new medium.

More later!

We identified the existing bloggers in the company and brought them into the project. We also asked if anyone else in the company would be interested in having a personal blog if we were to host it for them. Nine people signed up so far! What better way to have the company understand the opportunities and issues related to blogs, and be trusted guides to our customers and prospects than by having employees doing it themselves...

We built a "straw-person" proposal of the corporate blogging rules for employees to review and comment on - a real fun project! We did not make them up from scratch but rather used some of the rules and policies that were developed and documented by other companies (we will link to sources soon). The final rules and corporate policies will be posted as soon as we have them finalized.

After toying for months about the best way to get involved with blogs and other new media, we finally took the plunge. We decided on a three pronged approach to get through our learning curve as quickly as possible and to become trusted advisors to our clients in this field.

1) Get as many employees as possible to experiment with blogs and learn from it. Every team member was given the opportunity to have their own personal blog hosted on prSPEAK.com. Nine people signed up right away and formed a blog team to share best practices and develop things like the employee blogging policy (more on that later). We were also fortunate to have a few long-term bloggers in the company who decided to take an active role in helping others.

2) Surround ourselves with experts. First, we partnered with a consultant, Francois Gossieaux, a friend and former client (two times already) and an early adopter in the online world. Next, we created an advisory board consisting of clients who have deep domain expertise (we are lucky to have a few clients that market products in this space: PubSub, Lycos, Silkroad, KnowNow, etc...) as well as clients who don’t. Having clients who do not yet know how to capitalize on the new media opportunities is especially important to validate the type of guidance and services that they will be expecting from us in this area. We think of them as early beta testers for our upcoming services in that field.

3) Jump in and experiment firsthand as a company. That’s what you’re looking at – our new blog: prSPEAK.com. We hope to learn from doing this and also look forward to using this two-way channel as the agency’s mouth piece to participate in the broader PR conversation which is already well underway.

This whole project is exciting and scary at the same time. We’ve all seen what kind of reception one might get in this space if not properly prepared. I am thankful to my employees, clients and other advisors for their guidance in this exciting journey and I look forward to “prSPEAKING” with you in the near future.