I was talking to someone on Saturday who had been thinking about starting a podcast, but for whatever reason hadn’t reached a point where he was ready to pull the trigger. He did mention that he thought podcasting would be more comfortable for him, because he had tried writing a regular blog, and he was very self-concious about his writing ability, and he eventually lost steam on blogging due to his self-consciousness about his writing abilities. I can relate to that feeling of self-consciousness – not necessarily about my writing ability but more about revealing myself to anyone who should stumble across my blog online.

There have been numerous articles, including my blog posts ironically, about the importance for companies to participate in social media. It’s not all that hard to participate in Twitter – responding to people’s tweets, forwarding or retweeting other tweets, and posting links to interesting stories. In many ways, Twitter is akin to a high-volume broadcast version of truncated emails. And, ever since I got into PR in 1997 or so, I’ve lived and breathed email every day.

And, It’s not all that hard to participate in Facebook either. Posting photos, commenting on other people’s photos, posting links to interesting news articles, commenting on other people’s posts, and, of course, deleting over and over and over again people’s weird icons, sheep, mafia wars updates that come my way[this is not a sentence – I would reword this to make it into a sentence].

However, blogging, for me has been different. Over the years, I’ve often avoided writing a regular blog. Sure, I have had plenty of thoughts and opinions about public relations, technology, the impact of digital media on book publishing, etc., but for some reason a crippling modesty – or even shyness -– has kept me from blogging about my ideas. I’m certainly confident about my professional abilities – working with companies to identify the stories that they want to tell about their business and products, then distilling that information into timely, news worthy announcements designed to garner news coverage. And, I’ve always felt very comfortable stating my opinions to clients, giving them unvarnished feedback about their PR ideas and campaigns.

Yet, despite that confidence in my professional abilities, blogging felt foreign to me. I would try, and it would never feel “right” to me. The self-revealation aspect, posted online so that any one in the world could read what I’d written, constantly inhibited me.

Possibly it’s generational. I’ll be the first to admit that I consider myself on the cutting edge of technology and gadgets. I waited in line for an Xbox 360, a Wii, an iPhone, and other brand-new gadgets. Yet, the first computer I ever owned was a Radio Shack color computer – hooked up to an old television for a monitor.

While I’ve always embraced technology, the self-revalatory nature of blogging – while natural for digital natives – has felt awkward and presumptive to me.

Finally though, I realized I needed to join the online conversation more overtly by blogging on a regular basis. I can’t remember a specific watershed moment for my decision. It has been more of a gradual change and a constant process of reminding myself that I do have ideas to contribute (not to sound too much like Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley character on Saturday Night Live).

With all this personal background and info, I think it’s something to definitely think about as social media grows – some people for whatever reason are self-conscious about their social media participation.

Christopher S. Penn, one of the co-founders of Podcamp Boston, just blogged about a somewhat similar issue – breaking the shackles of your potential. It’s a great blog post that I recommend you take a look at.

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Here’s the TechCrunch article – Hey, Where’s The Twitter For Families – that I mention in the video.

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Bernays often indulged in PR “stunts,” a strategy that I’ve vociferously warned clients not to do. How hard is it to get a PR stunt on the Fox 5 Minute? What long-term value do you get out of that? How many people are going to think about your product or company from a 15-second blip on TV and radio, and maybe a photo online and in the next day’s newspaper.

Yet, like my recent post considering what Thomas Edison would be doing if he were alive and inventing today, I love playing “what if” and thinking about how various historical figures would act/react in modern situations.

Without further ado, here’s what I think Bernays would be doing.

1. Social media – Duh, you knew I was going to say that. Bernays would have loved Ashton Kucher’s race to 1 million followers. Because, regardless of what you think of Kutchner, he now has a media platform. An extremely valuable platform as detailed by Jason Calacanis.

I wager that Bernays would have cheered Moonfruit’s Macbook giveaway that made it to the top of Twitter trending topics.

2. Influencer marketing – whether it’s P&G pitching mommy blogs, or software companies targeting key vertical bloggers, Bernays would recognize the impact of influencer marketing on publicizing a product or shifting the conversation both online and off.

3. Politics – Unfortunately, Bernays used his skills at shifting public opinion for some questionable political causes, namely the United States – in conjunction with the United Fruit Company – overthrowing the democratically elected government of Guatemala. I think Bernays would be fascinated and a participant in today’s fast-paced political news cycle.

What do you think Edward Bernays would be doing if he were practicing PR now?

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However, within hours of launching the promotion, the producers of a new documentary accusing Starbucks of union busting, decided to hijack Starbuck’s own promotional campaign. They encouraged people to take photos of themselves with posters or other signs with negative messages about Starbucks’ anti-union activities and post them on Twitter using the same hash tags as the promotional contest. I’m sure there were some furious emails flying back and forth around Starbucks that day.

Here’s what companies need to realize about social media, and here’s what I would have advised Starbucks to do.

1. Don’t be surprised. Many people have been saying this for quite a while now. The era of one-direction messaging and marketing is gone. Gone forever. It’s not coming back. Your customers have a megaphone. Yep, those pain-in-the-ass, never-please customers can now shout their displeasure to the world. And, they no longer have to wait until they get back to their PC at home or the office. Now, they can grab their smartphone and start ranting seconds later.

This type of brand and promotional hijacking is going to happen – over and over and over. And companies need to anticipate and be prepared figure to respond – or ignore – those complaints.

2. Respond. You’ve heard pundit after pundit say that social media is a conversation, and you’ve heard them say too, “Join the conversation.” Well if someone has hijacked your contest, promotion, or new product launch, now’s the time to start talking.

I’m sure that somewhere within Starbucks (probably HR and Legal), they’ve already developed talking points about the benefits of Starbucks employment (better-than-average wages, healthcare from day one for part-time employees, etc.) Why not use those facts and talking points to respond to the people posting on Twitter?

And, just because the talking points came from HR or Legal, you don’t have to be stiff and corporate with your responses. Why not something like, “Our customers are passionate about coffee. @Starbucksunionbusters doesn’t think we’re doing a good job w/ our employees. Starbucks pays better-than-average wages, according to latest employment stats link – for more info.

3. Ignore them. What? We shouldn’t say anything? Yes, I’m saying that’s one potential strategy. Have you noticed one of Obama’s strategies thus far? He doesn’t often engage with his critics. He gives an exaggerated (what a nutcase) eye-roll, or he shrugs his shoulders. A one-sided argument or shoutfest will usually lose steam pretty quickly.

If you were sitting in Starbucks HQ watching those Twitter messages, what would you have done?

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What?

This just reeks of elitism, and is something I simply can’t understand. I’m sure there were plenty of people in 1993-1994 who were happily accessing text links online, and were horrified by the first graphical Web browsers.

Twitter is a fun, useful communications tool that has already proven its usefulness as a mass medium (many people were updating Twitter during the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November 2008).

And, despite what some early adopters may think, I think more Twitter users will only enrich the Twitter conversation. In fact, if Twitter’s demographics explode, you’ll most likely see Twitter search reflect that changed demographic – tweets re: the new Tweetie for Mac app will be far outweighed by people Twittering about American Idol or Dancing With The Stars.

Regardless of what the dominant conversations on Twitter are, you’ll still be able to find people you’re interested in, talking about things that interest you. And, if you’re getting bombarded with @replies that you’d rather not deal with, you can always block. And, I think Twitter’s features for following, building, and controlling your groups of friends will only grow as the service matures.

If Twitter does continue to grow, will instantaneous customer service from Comcast, Zappos, and others be able to scale? There’s a huge emphasis right now on close-to-immediate responses from some large companies via Twitter. Will that be able to continue as the user-base grows?

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So, I was certainly surprised to check Twitter while waiting for a table at a sushi restaurant late Sunday afternoon and see post after post re: AmazonFail (lots of background info here, here, and here). If you’re not in the loop, Amazon began removing sales rankings from a wide variety of books over the weekends. And, surprise, surprise, almost 100% of the titles affected were books dealing with gay, lesbian, and transgender issues. Sales rankings can impact whether or not a book shows up on Amazon’s various bestseller lists and in customer searches on the site.

Regardless of what actually happened, a) Amazon made the egregious decision to delist numerous gay, lesbian, and transgender books, or b) there was a genuine backend computer glitch that resulted in the delisting, Amazon compounded their mistakes by not using social media to deal with this PR crisis.

I just checked out Amazon’s twitter account. As of 1:40 p.m. ET on Monday, April 13th, more than 24 hours after this PR crisis started, Amazon’s latest twitter message reads, “Amazon Daily: The Bldg Blog Book: The Blog Made Flesh http://bit.ly/uK5babout 16 hours ago from Perl Net::Twitter.”

I’m sure there were panicked conference calls yesterday among various Amazon.com execs. But the company’s PR response was to give the same exact statement/quote to multiple journalists reporting the story, ““We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed.  We’re working to correct the problem as quickly as possible.”

Why didn’t Amazon.com use Twitter to respond to the crisis – a crisis that could have an impact on their revenue/sales since many of the Twitter posters were threatening boycotts?

Here’s what I would have recommended.

1. Figure out what the hell happened, and figure out what we’re going to do to correct the mistake. And, let’s figure out how we want to communicate ASAP what happened to our customers and the press.

2. Communicate what happened to reporters proactively – call the top 25-30 reporters who routinely cover Amazon.com – and respond quickly to any incoming calls from reporters.

3. Communicate what happened via Amazon.com’s twitter account. I would recommend hourly updates too – either repost the same basic explanation or add any additional info that surfaces.

4. Respond to #amazonfail posts on Twitter with explanation of what happened. This could get tedious – and wouldn’t scale. However, if Amazon.com’s corporate communications team had responded to 25-30 complaints per hour yesterday afternoon, they would have gone a long way in turning the conversation around.

How would you use Twitter and other Social Media tools to deal with a PR crisis?

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