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When Tom McFeeley started his public relations firm a year ago he had no idea how important social media would be to his business. Now his company is spending 75 percent of its time on Web sites like Twitter and Linkedin.

“Every business should be concerned about their reputation,” McFeeley said. “You can directly put yourself in front of people you care about and tell them your story.”

This is why the Stamford, Conn., resident’s company, Thomas J. McFeeley Communications, has put so much effort into social media. The results so far have been encouraging. Communication barriers have broken down allowing McFeeley’s clients to better connect with customers directly.

“Twitter is a virtual trade show every day and you don’t even have to leave your desk,” he said. McFeeley, who began his public relations career in 2001 as the press secretary for George Jepsen’s campaign for governor of Connecticut, gave the example of ticket reseller USTicketSearch.com’s recent effort to sell seats for the US Open through Twitter. A tennis equipment company picked up on the sales pitch and forwarded, or retweeted, it to their 1,300 followers greatly increasing USTicketSearch’s exposure among tennis fans.

USTicketSearch may have made a few extra sales but McFeeley said the real benefit in social networking is in a long term strategy that keeps customers coming back. He said the best way to foster this is by using Twitter as a conversational tool within an industry.

“If I follow you and you say something interesting then I’m going to retweet it to everyone,” he said. Retweeting exposes more potential customers to your message and product.

But it’s not something that just happens after signing up, McFeeley said. It took him time to figure out how to effectively promote through social networking.

“When I started on Twitter I didn’t see the value of it,” he said. “I didn’t have the vision of what it was capable of.”

Like many, McFeeley started off with no followers, no tweets and no idea what to do next. So he came up with a strategy. He figured out who he wanted to market himself to and what they were talking about. Then, instead of trying to control the conversation, he participated in what was already being written.

He likens this strategy to a cocktail party where everyone is talking about Michael Jackson. If someone  tries to change the conversation to Ted Kennedy they’re likely to be ignored. By jumping into the established discussion McFeeley found he was able to gain listeners and network. Now he’s just shy of 1,100 followers on his personal Twitter feed and has helped many others promote themselves online through workshops and his Web site, www.tommcfeeley.com.

“The role I have for any client is to help them craft a good message,” he said. “A short message but one that is going to help their bottom line.”

For McFeeley, helping the bottom line means more than dry updates. He wants to see personality, which he argues is a driving force behind successful social media campaigns. If he catches clients reposting the same Web site links over and over he threatens to change their passwords to lock them out. Instead, McFeeley encourages his clients to be colorful. Take, for example, his Twitter update from Aug. 27: “I guess if I’m working on the deck, I should skip over the Stephen Lynch songs when they come on my iPod for the sake of other unit owners.”

It’s a vastly different take on public relations from the press release — once the primary way for companies to get in touch with their customers.

“People do business with people they like,” he said. “They want to like the person they’re dealing with and they want to be confident in them. We should all show our personalities in everything we do if it’s appropriate.”

Still, he said that Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook are not the end all of public relations; simply tools that make up part of a larger strategy. There’s still a niche for the old-fashioned press release. After all, not every message can be conveyed in 140 characters.

Nonetheless, social networking isn’t going away and McFeeley said film and television are well suited to benefit. Already, fans have created huge buzz for TV shows like “Mad Men” and “24” by registering fake profiles for their favorite characters. Don Draper has more than 9,000 Twitter followers. Jack Bauer has 5,498.
It’s even gone beyond fan creations with some TV shows getting officially involved in social networking. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” has almost 142,000 fans on Facebook. “Lost” has 985,000.

McFeeley said soon every network and movie studio will have to be on board.

“Those properties really need to step up and put their flag down and represent something,” he said. “It’s really the way to create a brand, articulate it and put it in front of the people you care about.”

-Timothy O’Connor

STEM: The New American Dilemma

Kellye Whitney, 09-28-2009, Diversity Exective

American business and industry is operating from a seriously lacking position with regard to science and technology, and a key to turning the situation around may be found in promoting pre-engineering activity for traditionally underrepresented minority groups.

According to Irving McPhail, president and CEO of NACME Inc., the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, the deterioration of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education offerings and student participation is of primary concern to the business community because it directly impacts the state of American competitiveness and innovation.

“Some of the major national reports issued in recent years, such as ‘Rising Above the Gathering Storm,’ have described a crisis in America that the STEM business community needs to be concerned about. These issues include the decline in the state of our competitiveness and innovation in the global marketplace; the low performance of our nation’s middle and high school students, particularly in math and science, as compared to their peers in other developed countries; the shortage of native-born computer scientists and engineers that has led to an increasing need to import talent from foreign countries; concerns about reductions in research and development spending by the federal government, as well as industry; and a growing pattern of outsourcing and offshoring that is being pursued by American industry primarily for economic reasons,” McPhail said.

“When you take these factors and look at them as a whole, Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has described this current situation as a quiet crisis, which she defines as the inexorable erosion of our scientific and technological capacity at a time when science and technology are the major determinants of a nation’s ability to be competitive and economically strong.”

McPhail said the message to business and industry is clear — activate the hidden workforce of young men and women who have traditionally been underrepresented in STEM careers: African-Americans, American Indians and Latinos.

“It is in America’s best interest,” he said. “It affects the quality of life of our nation and assures that America will be able to maintain a cutting edge with regard to our global competitors in science, technology, engineering and math.”

NACME, one of the largest private providers of scholarship support for underrepresented minority students pursuing degrees in engineering, has supported more than 22,000 students and awarded more than $114 million in scholarship support in its 35-year history.

The organization actively partners with companies such as Qualcomm to promote pre-engineering activity. For instance, Qualcomm, in connection with the San Diego Community College District and the University of California at San Diego engineering school, funded a project to look at best practices when facilitating students moving from community colleges to engineering schools.

Right now, many organizations are looking for short-term wins. A natural response to the economic crisis is for leaders to seek out ways to illustrate that their efforts are creating bottom-line impact in restricted time frames. Diversity executives are no different. But McPhail said it’s imperative to look at this type of talent pipeline-building strategy with an eye on the long term.

“Building a diverse engineering workforce is a long-term commitment and requires a long-term value proposition,” he said. “Diversity executives need to realize this is in fact a journey and not a sprint. We need to be concerned about the quality of K-12 education. We need to be concerned about model schools [and] identifying best practices in educating underrepresented minority students. We need to be concerned about removing stereotypes that women and minorities are not good in STEM disciplines, and [we must] work hard in collaboration with K-12 to ensure that STEM is infused throughout the K-12 curriculum via project-based, hands-on learning pedagogies and approaches.

“Business and industry need to continually be involved with higher education. The focus needs to be on removing all of the systemic barriers that underrepresented minorities face attempting to participate in college, with a particular focus on issues related to financial aid and admissions policies, as well as using the political capital that business and industry bring to push government policies that open doors to post-secondary education for underrepresented minority students.”

“American demography is changing in some very significant ways,” McPhail explained. “And if our companies are going to be successful, more people need to be developed. Diversity executives can really become the lightning rods to reach out to all of the other sectors that need to be engaged to resolve this American dilemma.”