Immersion

im·merse [i-murs]–verb (used with object), -mersed, -mers·ing.

1. to involve deeply; absorb


2. to embed; bury

Two of my fellow interns and I spent this past Tuesday and Wednesday completely immersed in car design at GM's Design Center in Warren, Mich. It was an exhausting, but enlightening two days.

Our assignment was to spend time with this year's GM Design Interns. GM has enlisted 18 young designers from 14 design schools to design a future Chevrolet car for the Gen-Y driver in 2012. We spent a few hours in their design studio talking with the student designers, sculptors (they all have to sculpt a clay model of their car), mechanical engineers and graphic designers, as well as getting familiar with each of their projects.

One of the more difficult parts of the assignment was writing the bios on each intern. We had to interview each of the interns to get a feel for their experiences at GM so far and what their future plans are. The interviewing was the easy part, the hard part was taking each interns' wealth of knowledge and experience and condensing it down into three or four paragraphs. This helped me learn how to communicate a powerful message in as few words as possible.

We also had to write a press release on each of the six cars being designed. This was difficult because not only did we have to describe each project in detail, but also try to highlight what each team was trying to convey with their car. I also learned how to coach some of the interns along as they tried to come up with a good quote for the release.

Creating three to four key messages for each project was interesting because we really had to take everything we learned about the projects and boil it down into just a few words. We learned that when creating messages it's important to use everyday language and not corporate speak.

Finally, we created a comprehensive communications plan surrounding the unveiling of these vehicles if they are to appear as concept cars at an auto show. Since the cars are targeted to Gen-Y we focused heavily on social media as one of our primary channels of communication. Some ideas we came up with were hosting a virtual auto show on Second Life, creating a Facebook application that would allow consumers to vote on their favorite car and creating a series of podcasts to highlight the design process from start to finish. We also came up with ideas to use traditional media and face-to-face communication on college campuses.

Having spent the last four months completely focused on social media, it was nice to enhance some of my other PR skills. Being immersed in a project like this was a tough, but very rewarding experience.

Bob Lutz Responds to Bloggers' Questions

Making the transition from speaking "to" audiences to speaking "with" them

This post was inspired by a post I just read over at Force for Good.

I realize that the focus of this blog has shifted from general public relations thoughts to more about the use of social media in public relations. I can't stress enough the value I see in the traditional public relations practices. I'm not going to sit here and tell the world that we need to stop the traditional PR methods and focus all our efforts on social media. In terms of media relations, social media serves to enhance our efforts with traditional media, not replace print or broadcast media.

Social media, however, goes beyond simply getting our messages out there, it actually engages the publics we are trying to build relationships with. As Jon Harmon writes:

"The role of the corporate communications professional is rapidly changing, responding to the sea changes all around us: the rise of consumer-generated social media, globalization, the incredible personalization of information technology, greater expectations on corporations for transparency and social responsibility, and increasingly inter-connected stakeholder groups including often-adversarial activists."

Harmon goes on to say:

"Corporations need their PR professionals to move beyond helping them communicate to stakeholders (the traditional role of corporate mouthpiece); they need guidance on how to engage in fluid conversations (that means listening as well as talking, respectfully understanding the new rules of engagement)."

I could not agree more. This is why public relations is so important. We need to show management how to communicate with their audiences, rather than to them. Our audiences have a voice and our anxious for us to hear it.

This is something my team at GM has really been focused on. For example, one of top executives, Bob Lutz, took some time last month to sit down in front of a camera and answer some of the questions bloggers have posted in the comments of GM's Fastlane Blog. This is a great example of using social media to speak with our publics. The video is posted in the post above.

Jon Harmon's post is excellent and I highly recommend reading it in its entierety here.

Video: RSS in Plain English

I'll admit, RSS (really simple syndication) never was "really simple" for me to understand. I've started to understand more as I've used it, but this video does a great job explaining it. Take a look.

How to use social networks

Man, I've been a blogging fool this week! I normally don't get this many posts in during one week.

Anyway, it's always nice to have someone validate thoughts you thought were just your own. I had this experience after reading a post on PR Communications. The author made a number of interesting points about how to best utilize social networks in building an effective social media community. While I agree with all his points, the following stood out most to me:

"No more marketing promotion - the biggest turn off in this type of community is a marketing shill. Trust comes from credibility and authenticity. Let your own people, and your developers criticize your efforts, if the criticism is correct, agree with them and move on, if wrong argue your case reasonably, remember everyone's goal is to produce the best software, if not all you are trying to do is sell something."

I recently had a similar experience creating some dialogue for GM on Facebook. Most of those who participated in the discussion were passionate, but respectful. When they criticized the company I would readily admit where we were wrong or correct anything erroneous. It turned out to be a very positive experience and a great conversation.

It's for this reason that I believe that social media should be a PR function only. Marketing, in my opinion, has no place in social networks. We build the relationships, then marketing can take it from there.

Update to yesterday's Facebook/Media Relations Post

Check out an interesting follow-up to the post on Facebook and media relations that I linked to yesterday.

Here's the the follow-up.

Facebook and Media Relations

Whoa, two posts in one day! Crazy.

I just saw a great post on Strategic Public Relations on using Facebook in your media relations efforts. I echo the following from the post:

Don't sign in and start pitching. You can't anyway. But as you learn Facebook, you'll learn more about your editorial contacts (and their work) than the basic information provided by media databases.

Check out what the author has to say. It's quite interesting. Here's a video from the post.