A READER'S READER

I spoke on the topic of social media at a recent workshop. Don't laugh, I didn't promote myself as an expert. I might have been able to fool some of them, but I could never fool anybody who's been following this blog for the past six months. You guys would "out" me in a New York minute. But I digress.

Quite a few of the people at the workshop were unfamiliar with online "media aggregators," the tools that let you get material delivered directly to you instead of having to visit a dozen different websites every day. You can subscribe to most of these sites by email too, but sometimes the emails pile up, we don't have time to read them, and they take up valuable space on our mailboxes and servers.

That's why they created these media aggregators, or readers. The service allows you to subscribe to different blogs and news feeds via RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and get all those feeds in one place without utilizing email.

The two aggregators that are easiest to use for a beginner (like me) are Google Reader and Bloglines. They are both free, and simple to set up. Just choose one, open an account and then visit the sites you like to check every day. Most websites that offer syndication will show the RSS logo (shown above left) in a prominent spot.

When you click on the RSS logo, you'll see a screen or dialog box that asks you which reader you want to use. Just click on the reader you've chosen, and follow the instructions from there. You can add as many subscriptions as you like. I've set up about a dozen so far, ranging from news sites (MSNBC, Washington Post, New York Times) to blogs (NakedPR, The Fix, Talking Points, Huffington Post). I'm using Bloglines, which I find very user-friendly.

Then, when you have time to catch up on your reading, just go to your media reader site and you'll see all your feeds listed. Most readers show you if new pieces have come in since the last time you checked, and how many total pieces are waiting for review. You can set your reader up to show you headlines only, or to provide the entire story or blog.

Sometimes I can't figure out why everyone is so busy all the time, but I guess we are, so using a media aggregator is a great way to keep up with your favorite sites without having to mess with bookmarks, passwords, slow downloads, and the other aggravations associated with moving from site to site.

By the way, you can now sign up to get my blog updates this way. To the top right of the screen, you'll see a box that says "Subscribe To" and then two options: Posts and Comments. If you click on "Posts," you'll see a list of the readers you can use. Just pick the one you've signed up with, and follow the on-screen instructions. Then, you'll automatically get my new blogs when they appear.

Imagine the thrill.

TWITTER AND THE IRON HORSE

Earlier this week, I attended a conference in Milwaukee focusing on economic development for Indian tribes. It was a great session, and small enough so that participants had ample opportunity to ask questions and chat with the various speakers.

Most of us were housed at the Iron Horse, a terrific little boutique hotel (100 rooms) in the city's warehouse district. For the record, the Iron Horse is not my client and I'm not a shareholder, so I have no vested interest in promoting the place, but I'm going to anyway because I LOVED it! Very industrial-loft old-warehouse, but yet warm and cozy, very chic but still comfortable. And the food in the hotel restaurant ("Smyth") was absolutely excellent.

I was surprised to see that the hotel's owner and marketing guru were the final speakers at the conference. The owner had some interesting insights on financing development in disadvantaged areas, but it was the marketing guru who really got my attention.

Her name is Brigette Breitenbach, and she's the principal of Company B, a marketing and PR firm in the Brew City. The marketing program she designed for the Iron Horse relies very heavily on online communications and social media.

When the Iron Horse opened in September 2008, Brigette said her goal was to have 25% of all reservations come directly to the hotel. She wanted to avoid using sites like Travelocity and Expedia, which apparently take 30% of the revenue from the reservations they generate. So she began using Twitter and Facebook to drive traffic to the hotel's website, www.theironhorsehotel.com.

Now, a year later, nearly 75% of the hotel's reservations are coming directly to the hotel, either through the website or the hotel's call center, which means that the business gets 100% of the revenue from every room it sells. The Iron Horse now has 2,717 followers on Twitter and 1,566 Facebook fans. The hotel asks its friends and followers to post a review on Tripadvisor.com, one of the top websites for travelers. It gets consistently terrific reviews, and has emerged as the #1 most popular hotel in Milwaukee.

Brigette supplemented her online campaign with direct outreach to major travel publications such as Conde Naste Traveler, which has added the Iron Horse to its "hot list" of exceptional new properties. Since the hotel is located across the street from a new Harley-Davidson Museum, she also contacted motorcycle publications and reached out to motorcycle fans online through social networking. The "hogs" are very much a part of the hotel's interior design, so bike groups feel as welcome as business execs there.

The bottom line: after only one year of operation, the Iron Horse is operating in the black (unlike most new hotels), has gained a national reputation for excellence, and is regularly featured on international lists of the top boutique hotels in the world.

There's a cool irony here--the Iron Horse, of course, was the Indian way of describing trains, which were "cutting edge" technology 150 years ago. Now Milwaukee's Iron Horse is benefiting from a different kind of technology--one that the first passengers on those early steam trains never could have imagined. I love that.

THE INTERSECTION OF PR AND SOCIAL MEDIA

When I started this blog a while back, it was part of my decision to leap off the social media cliff into the swirling waters of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn et al. As you may recall, I was inspired to make the leap after attending a conference that explained how online resources and social media can be used as tools in the practice of public relations.

So here I am today--six months older, a whole lot smarter than when I started, but still looking uphill at all the stuff yet to be learned. That's one of the amazing things about this social media thing. New tools and resources spring up every day. New applications for making better use of existing tools appear overnight. You could spend 24/7 doing nothing but checking them all out.

As a public relations professional, you might say I've drunk the online/social media Kool-Aid. In fact, believe it or not, I've become such a missionary for integrating social media into a broader public relations effort that I'm now invited to speak at various client meetings on this subject. Obviously, I can't promote myself as a full-fledged expert because my social media knowledge base is still pretty limited. But I now have enough experience with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to know how valuable they can be as part of a comprehensive communications campaign.

One thing I've learned, and this is a principle that extends across virtually all of the social media tools. The art of "getting your message out" has changed in a profound way. In the old days, you'd send out a press release and hope for pick-up by mainstream media who usually had much more important news to cover. It was an impersonal, one-way process--hierarchical and, in retrospect, maybe even arrogant. We gathered information about our reputations or our corporate "images" through polls and surveys--rows and rows of tiny little numbers, cross-tabbed, requiring a magnifying glass and an advanced degree in statistics to comprehend.

Those days are long gone. Want to get your news out? Post it on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Wonder how your customers feel about you? Monitor key bloggers, and look at Twitter "hashtags" to see what people are talking about. It's a new world out there, for sure.

I'm off today to meetings in Wheeling, West Virginia, and later Santa Fe, New Mexico. I'll be speaking to my clients about how online communications and social media can help us reach our PR goals. I don't have all the answers, that's for sure, but I'm happy for the chance to share what I've learned.