ELISE Heads to San Francisco for NCIIA’s March Madness for the Mind

Starting tomorrow, Team ELISE will be in San Francisco for the NCIIA’s annual March Madness for Mind, a showcase of collegiate invention and innovation held this year at the Exploratorium. During the event, Excellence and Entrepreneurship Teams (E-Teams)—collaborating groups of college students, faculty members and industry mentors who have received NCIIA grants—from all over the country will unveil their inventions to the public, many for the first time. This year, sixteen E-Teams from Brown (see above) to Stanford and all points in between will display their state-of-the-art medical, agricultural and environmental innovations during the exhibit.

The NCIIA has partnered with Inventors Digest, the nation’s longest running publication for the inventing culture, to host a video competition for participating E-Teams. Public voting ended last week, but the videos are still available on the Inventors Digest Web site. The winners of the competition will be announced at the event on Saturday March 27 after the top three videos are screened.

We’re excited to see which teams received the most votes and to get an up-close look at the work these dedicated and creative students and their professors have put in over the past year. More on our trip when we’re all back east!

Hives for Lives Competes in @15 Community Impact Challenge

When George Bernard Shaw said, “Youth is wasted on the young,” he couldn’t possibly have imagined the likes of Molly and Carly Houlalan, two teenage girls who are generating quite the buzz, literally. The Devon, Pennsylvania sisters are the masterminds behind Hives for Lives, a social enterprise that jars and sells honey and other bee products to raise money for cancer research. The girls founded Hives for Lives in 2004, in honor of their grandfather who lost a battle with esophageal cancer. Since then, they have remained dedicated to the cause and their work has paid off, as now we are happy to announce that Hives for Lives has been selected as one of fifteen finalists in the @15 Community Impact Challenge.

The national competition, sponsored by Ashoka’s Youth Venture and presented by the Best Buy Children’s Foundation, recognizes and supports youth-led organizations making a difference in their communities. The young social entrepreneur finalists were selected for their potential for community impact and long-term sustainability. Grants of up to $5,000 will be awarded to the finalists who receive the most votes on the challenges website. If it wins, Hives for Lives will use the prize money to build new hives at the Elmwood Park Zoo in Norristown, Pa., to help grow their business and educate children about bees.

To date, Molly, Carly and their “helper bees”—friends and classmates at their school—have donated over $160,000 to cancer research through their Local Honey Local Money program. Their honey is now carried in Whole Foods throughout the country, and has been sold in more than 30 states, England and Puerto Rico. Hives for Lives’ profits have gone to the Penn Abramson Cancer Center, the Fox Chase Center, Stanford Hospital and the Susan G. Komen for a Cure Foundation.

Voting for the competition will be open through April 2. To view Hives for Lives’ video profile or to vote, please visit the @15 Web site. Best of luck to Molly, Carly and the rest of the Hives for Lives team! You’ve got the ELISE vote locked down.

PR Tools: Social Media Press Releases

Image: Flickr user Ivan Walsh

Oh joy—another PR Tools discussion!  Last we spoke, I argued for the importance for the press release in the PR industry.  I still stand by my statement that “the press release is the foundation of any earned media campaign,” but just as one must adapt to live, one must also accept change to survive in the PR industry.

In the last eighteen months, Twitter and Facebook and other social networks, such as Chatroulette, have taken off.  In order to exceed the status quo we (and other PR professionals as well) have had to adapt our styles, techniques and tools to maintain our audiences’ attention.

So how long do we have to maintain someone’s attention?  According to Wikipedia, the average adult will only focus on something for eight seconds unless the person engages in a sustained focus—the act of actively concentrating on an object or task at hand for twenty minutes or more.  This means that we have less than ten seconds to seduce our readers into an uninterrupted focus on our press release.  Catchy headlines and sub-headers are nice and dandy but what better way to tempt our readers than to include pictures, slideshows, etc. in the press release?  Websites like PitchEngine (an ELISE favorite) allow for graphics and videos to stream while the viewer reads or skims the release.  Since publishing our NCIIA March Madness for the Mind 2010 release on PitchEngine it has been viewed over 300 times.

As society begins to rely more heavily on visual news rather than the written word, the PR industry must be malleable and willing to conform to new practices and techniques that will emotionally entice the reader and motivate them to read about the story.  It isn’t enough to have a well-written story any more; graphics and visuals are necessary.  How will you incorporate them into your next PR campaign?

Tweet Well (Part 1)

Flickr user jez`

I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter.

I’m logged into it all day for ELISE, and find it to be a fantastic resource. I’ve connected with other PR pros, found out who’s talking about our clients and reached out to journalists we couldn’t track down through more conventional means. Even on days when we’re not sending tweets, we all take some time over the course of the day to make sure we’re not missing out on any big news. (How do you think we learned of Michael Jackson’s untimely demise or the earthquake in Haiti?) And services like HootSuite and TweetDeck, both of which I use daily, allow users to filter out some static by monitoring key words in which they’re especially interested.

That’s when I love Twitter. But when I hate it, my animosity sometimes overshadows my love. It’s an animosity that I also feel for advertisers who run uninteresting Super Bowl commercials, bus passengers who talk too loudly on their cell phones and retailers who don’t honor competitors’ coupons: it’s a hatred of not understanding the power and reach of your chosen platform. Think about it:

• Super Bowl advertisers have a captive audience that wants to watch commercials almost as badly as they want to watch the game; if your commercial is boring, it could provide the 30 seconds your television audience needs to go open another beer.
• On the phone on a bus? Small metal spaces tend to make sound project, and now everyone knows about that nasty fungus you picked up at the gym.
• If you’re not honoring your competitors’ discounts, people will just go make that purchase—and the rest of their purchases—at your competitors’ stores, too.

So why would you provide bad information, share too much or ignore other people in your field, in your Twitter feed? These behaviors aren’t just bad practice; they’re downright rude. Not rude in the conventional sense—nasty or insulting—just rude in that they show utter disregard for the power and reach of Twitter as a platform and the engagement of people who use it.

There are approximately 75 million registered Twitter users worldwide. That’s a lot of content to sift through. People who provide good information or entertaining content or relevant news naturally get followers. People who send out pointless or self-promoting tweets, or who tweet out too much, too often, without showing that they’re listening to the conversations happening around (or about) them naturally lose followers. Being polite in your tweets by sharing carefully selected, useful or enjoyable information instead of flooding Twitter with a stream of posts nobody cares about will get you far.

And as to that content nobody cares about? You’ll have to tune in next time for some pointers on best practices for courtesy in the Twitterverse.