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TYPO – San Francisco
A couple weeks ago Europe’s premium design event, “TYPO” took place in San Francisco at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) and was open to the public. The two-day event made its U.S. debut on April 5 and was centered around the theme “Connect.”
The event had a wide range of speakers including the beautiful free form lettering of Jessica Hische, and the very technical and precise work of Kutlu Çanlıoğlu, who is responsible for the user experience and design of 27 different language services for BBC World services.
The opening speech from Tina Roth Eisenberg, a Swiss designer, was about side projects and how sometimes we can get side tracked from what we really love to do. Joshua Davis, had a more over the top stage presence, but defended the idea that work and play are synonyms, instead of antonyms, and we lose the enjoyment of work as we grow up. Çanlıoğlu showed complexity and uniqueness of the different cultures around the world and how research and small details can affect the success of a project.
As day one came to a close, I felt that the speakers focused on spreading the message of enjoy what you do and do what you enjoy because in the end it will all pay off.
Good design is good design, it doesn’t matter what media is being used
With the advance and popularization of digital media for mobile platform, lots of people are complaining about the difficulty to create in restricted spaces. As the German Typographer guru Erik Spiekermann explains, if you can create good design for print you can also design for mobile. You have to focus on the hierarchy of the content and highlight what is important.
Check out more from Spiekermann in the video below – “Typographic Design in the Digital Domain with Erik Spiekermann & Elliot Jay Stocks “
How to read graphic design
With digital democratization, design, photography and other creative professions have been vandalized and misjudged as a simple action to press buttons on a machine. Everybody today has been overexposed to visual stimuli; people tend to think they are experts in visual aesthetics. However, just because you see logos, magazines, billboards and posters everyday doesn’t make you an expert. Read the rest of this entry
Who Owns Social Media?
This is one of the most contested questions here at KRT. In one corner, our PR Director believes it’s closely aligned with PR and it makes sense, until the specialty grows, for PR to be the keeper. In the opposite corner, our Director of Online Marketing doesn’t think PR should have any ownership and, as an entirely new entity, social media should have its own department from the start.
To call social media ownership a hot topic for debate in the industry, is an understatement. Without doubt, the debates between our co-workers are repeated at agencies and in marketing departments across the country. But, no matter which corner you’re in, the fact remains: PR is pulling ahead.
Recently, our PR Director felt vindicated when her alma mater, USC Annenberg, issued its sixth Communication and Public Relations Generally Accepted Practices Report that seemed to definitively support her position. According to USC’s GAP report:
- More than 25 percent of companies placed between 81 to 100 percent of budgetary control over social media with PR, compared to only 12.6 percent going to marketing.
- Another 25 percent stated PR held strategic control over social media as a whole within their organizations, as opposed to only nine percent trusting it to marketing.
- Just over 25 percent of respondents said marketing held zero budgetary control, and 22 percent said marketing maintained no strategic control whatsoever.
Reading industry blogs and articles, it seems these facts ring true. More and more PR positions are requiring employees to be knowledgeable about social media and, at most companies, it’s PR’s job to run social media campaigns.
Perhaps this is due to the fact that, when it comes down to it, client-ready social media plans are eerily reminiscent of PR plans: goals and objectives, strategy, tactics and evaluation, which is now measured by analytics. Social Media guru, Aliza Sherman (@alizasherman), who we heard speak at Web 2.0, blogged about the social media strategy struggle. The entry discussed how to set up a strategic plan for the use of social media, which the KRT PR team found quite similar, if not identical, to a PR plan.
Of course, there are those in PR who think this isn’t the best practice. A recent blog post from Lonn Johnston, founder of Page One Public Relations in Silicon Valley said creative services agencies “understood a good idea and could create compelling content,” indicating a willingness to let them run social media. By Johnston’s estimation, PR is limited to understanding the creation of a social media strategy, but lacks the knowledge to most effectively budget or use it. Johnston asserts PR and marketing should work together to create content and effectively communicate through social media. In other words, it’s a team effort.
And this team approach is exactly what we’re doing at KRT. Despite good-natured bickering, our integrated team is pooling expertise, sometimes spearheaded by PR, sometimes not, to deliver the most comprehensive social media strategies to our clients. We think it works, how about you?
Who do you think should control social media? PR? Marketing? A social media specialist? Or, is the team approach best?
#PR Lessons Learned from the #BP Oil Spill
Many of us in the PR profession were baffled when it took BP nearly a month to attack one of the most damaging oil spills in history with public relations. Even more baffling, when statements came, they lacked solutions, urgency or sincerity for the damage the company had caused. 
By dragging its heels BP broke rule no. 1 when it comes to crisis management: deal with it head-on. The company’s response has been so bad, the Huffington Post ran a story citing 5 PR nightmares handled better than BP, which positioned notorious names like Exxon Valdez and Bhopal as examples of how to do things right.
So, what can we learn from BP’s mishandling of the situation?
1. Always have a PR plan in place during a crisis. Have a strong team prepared to work together with the common goal of keeping the company together during a crisis.
2. Remember to tell your story, not have someone like Twitter’s “Leroy Stick,” who runs @BPGlobalPR, make a mockery of what your company is doing, or not doing.
3. Humanize the problem and sympathize with the public while being honest much like Johnson & Johnson’s then-CEO James Burke in 1982 with the Tylenol cyanide scare. Don’t make foot-in-mouth comments like BP CEO Tony Hayward’s, “I just want my life back.”
BP let others control the conversation and, as a result, negative media coverage and satirical PR messages from a fake Twitter account shaped public perception of the company as aloof and uncaring. As oil laps up on the Gulf Coast, the clean-up of their image may prove more difficult than that on the ground.
Do you agree? What lessons would you add?
UPDATE: This viral video, BP Spills Coffee, is making the rounds on the Internet today and perfectly underscores the absurdity of BP’s crisis response and the negative public perception that has resulted. This video and a tidal wave of social media commentary, not BP, are telling the company’s story amid the crisis. Your laughter will bring tears to your eyes, literally!
Video link:
The Today Show Takes a Fantastic Voyage on Airship Ventures Zeppelin
KRT Bits readers saw real-time photos as our client Airship Ventures’ Zeppelin attempted to break the modern distance record for an airship on May 25. On board the Farmers Airship Eureka with our PR team that day was Jenna Wolfe from the Today Show. A fabulous clip of her record-breaking 10-hour journey along the California Coast between the Bay Area and San Diego aired today. Check it out here, but be warned, you’ll want to book a flight after seeing the spectacular scenery!
http://www.hulu.com/embed/9qefLDQ9b_u_xZ7nF4CaCg
If you’re having trouble viewing the embedded video, here’s a link to the Today Show clip: http://bit.ly/bjsYoE
The airship flying high above Malibu and the Colony
I think I see Tom Hanks and Jennifer Aniston playing golf. 
The Farmers Airship flying by Malibu, with the Pacific Ocean in the background
2-3 ft fair surf conditions today at The Bu for you surfers out there.
KRT celebrity superstar!
Our PR Director, Rachel Loya (2nd from the left), taking a moment on the airship to smile for the camera.
Passing the Airship Ventures ground crew
People always say, “but doesn’t it take a long time to travel by Zeppelin to Southern California?” On average, not much longer than driving. In fact, we caught up and passed our ground crew. You can see our blue mast truck (circled in red) in the photos below, sandwiched by white maintenance vehicles driving down 101 north of Santa Barbara.
