Keynote Remote: Technology For Killer Presentations

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keynote remote app logoKeynote Remote is no joke! It’s been years since I’ve had to give a presentation to a group of people. I mean, we give pitches to clients from time to time, but those are often jovial encounters or protracted discussion with handouts and friendly conversation.

However, earlier this year I set up an event at a local venue to talk about a subject of interest to me and I needed a way to share photographs and slides to create a dynamic and engaging presentation. A lot has changed since the last time I did this, but when it comes to presentation software, the changes have been for the better. My favorite advancement is the Keynote Remote. (the photo at the left shows my iPhone with my slides displayed, and supported by a Brefffo Spiderpodium)

iphone and spider podium displaying keynote app

To give you a little background, this presentation was my first opportunity to delve into the world of Keynote, Apple’s answer to the presentation dilemma. Keynote is a cool program, and here is why:

  1. Keynote provides easily customizable slides
  2. Keynote has a drag and drop features and fun/cheesy animations
  3. It works like other Apple programs, such as Pages, so the buttons and features such as the “inspector” are familiar to Mac users

“Keynote Remote” is an app that I downloaded onto my iPhone, and it allows me to control my presentation slides directly from my phone. No more running awkwardly back and forth from stage to computer like Marco Rubio lusting for a sip of water … the Keynote remote shows me which slides are coming up next, so I can perfectly align my talk towards the slides that best represent my most poignant moments and clever witticisms. It’s easy to set up too – I did it all by myself with very little sobbing – which is a major accomplishment for a non-tech guy like me.

Pat McCormick with daughter Molly and granddaughter Meagan

AM:PM PR Public Relations Professionals Off The Clock: Pat McCormick

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This is part 4/4 in our series sharing more information about our team of Portland-based public relations professionals. The last post is from our Ring Master, Pat McCormick.

 

Name:

Pat McCormick

Currently Reading:

 “Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World,” by Bill Carter. Mike Phillips shared the book with me before Bill came to speak at a special event in our office. I read about a third of the book and then left in the back seat of my car. I found it last week and I’m hoping to finish it soon.

Currently Listening To:

Les Misérables – Love the soundtrack as much as I love the story. I think “I Dreamed a Dream” is the saddest non-Irish song I’ve ever heard.

News Your Are Following:

New Apple products. I’m anxious that it seems so long since the last iPhone, iPad innovations. The new OS announcements are promising, but I need new toys. And a new Apple TV would do wonders to help my mood.

Plans for the Summer:

No big plans. I’ll be down in Florence in July for Granddaughter Kaylee’s Power of Florence day of community service. I’m also toying with the idea of getting a better bike so I can get back and forth to downtown more quickly.

Favorite Restaurant Experience In Recent Weeks:

Several weeks ago I took three grandchildren – Daniel, Ian and Meagan – to lunch at a Red Robin. The food and the place aren’t that special, but the experience was wonderful. Meagan and I were just a few weeks back from our Disneyland adventure. Ian and I had our Disneyland trip last September, and Daniel and I were there in September 2010. The purpose was for Meagan to share about her trip and compare notes with her cousins. We went through hundreds of pictures recalling the fun things each got to do there. It was amazing to listen to their recollections and realize I’d gotten to share those special times with each of them.

 

Allison McCormick with her family in Florence, OR

AM:PM PR Public Relations Professionals Off The Clock: Allison McCormick

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This is post number four in our series, pulling back the curtain on the Portland public relations professionals working at AM:PM PR.

 

Name:

Allison McCormick

Role On-the-Clock:

Co-Founder, Partner, Fortune Teller

Role Off-the-Clock:

Mom (actually on and off-the-clock), adventurer, critic

Currently Reading:

Too many emails every day, Gawker as my go-to news source and “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” at night with my daughter.

Currently Listening To: 

NPR, my favorite weekly NPR podcasts – Snap Judgement and This American Life, my stream on Soundcloud.

News You Are Following:

Marriage equality and gay rights, the recovery of the Boston bombing victims, #FloridaMan and, of course, everything to do with our clients.

Plans for the Summer:

Adventures with the kids at the beach, crabbing, going to the Mt. Hood Adventure Park, camping and lots of paella, sangria and gazpacho.

Favorite Restaurant Experiences in Recent Weeks:

Sanborns on SE 13th, one block off Powell. The service was somewhat slow, but the food was remarkable. Tennessee Red’s on SE 11th was also pretty amazing and I don’t normally choose BBQ fare. You can also never go wrong with Double Dragon. I love the Ramen, but Juan always gets the Bahn Mi. Both are fantastic.

 

Public Relations Professionals Off The Clock: Alexis Dane

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For part three in our campaign to introduce you to the Portland public relations professionals working at AM:PM PR, we’d like to introduce you to Alexis Dane.

2013-06-08 11.19.47Name: Alexis Dane

Currently Reading: I just finished a beautifully written memoir by a Seattle-based author called “Clearly Now the Rain: A Memoir of Love & Other Trips,” and am restarting Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.

Currently Listening To: The Dictators. My love for this band was reignited last week when I met the lead singer at his NYC bar, Manitoba’s.

News You Are Following: The protests in Turkey.

Plans for the Summer: Though I just got back from a week visiting a friend in NYC, I’m afraid I may spend most of the rest of summer working. I’ll be sure to get some weekend hikes and beach trips in, though.

Favorite Restaurant Experience In Recent Weeks: I adore SE Division’s Portobello Vegan Trattoria.

 

AM:PM PR Public Relations Professionals Off The Clock: Mike Phillips

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At AM:PM PR we take our work seriously – but ourselves – not so much. When we’re not working, we’re people with personalities, or so we believe. We thought it might be fun to take a step back from our public relations work to share a little more about ourselves: what we’re reading, what we’re listening to, the news we’re following, how we’re preparing to enjoy the summer, and we wouldn’t be using social media properly if we didn’t talk about what we’ve been eating!

This is the first blog in our five part profile series.

Name: Mike Phillips

Currently Reading: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges & Joe Sacco. I became a big fan of both of these individuals after seeing their appearances on Moyers & Co. and Democracy Now! but I haven’t found time to read their actual work. This book allows me to kill two birds with one stone!

 

mike in the columbia gorge

During a recent trip to the gorge

Currently Listening To: Thanks to Pandora, I rediscovered David Bazan from 90’s Seattle-based group “Pedro the Lion.” He’s continuing to produce music, and I’m finding some of it to be quite interesting. This is a particularly great track.

News You Are Following: I’ve been following the so-called Baby Revolution in Bosnia. No, babies aren’t taking to the streets. In a nutshell, babies born after February 2013 have been denied I.D. numbers due to partisan political gridlock, so their parents cannot travel with them outside of Bosnia. This came to a head earlier this month when a Bosnian couple was unable to travel to Germany to seek medical treatment for their infant. The root of the cause is that vapid Bosnian Serb lawmakers from the predominantly Bosnian Serb part of the country (Republika Srpska) are demanding that Bosnian Serbs have separate I.D.’s from their fellow Bosnian and Croatian countrymen. This gridlock, despite being driven from disappointing political partisanship, has inspired a positive and optimistic display of post-war unity in a country that has been politically deadlocked along ethnic divisions for far too many years. Hopefully this is now changing!

Plans for the Summer: Enjoying the bounty of the Pacific Northwest, and planning a trip to Macinac Island later this summer.

Favorite Restaurant Experience In Recent Weeks: The other day I went to Olé Olé off 21st and East Burnside. It was a refreshingly un-pretentious restaurant experience with friendly staff and the most affordable prices in town. Shockingly affordable.

* * *

We invite you to share your stories too! What we need from you:

Name
Currently Reading
Currently Listening To
News You Are Following
Plans for the Summer
Favorite Restaurant Experience In Recent Weeks

Excellent post for PR Grads to ponder: Measuring PR Value

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Borrowed from KDPaine & Partners

Posted May 28, 2013

So, how much have you really learned over that four-or-so-years you spent in higher education? Below are 13 questions every new PR or communications school graduate should be able to answer. At least if you want to get a decent job in PR, social media, research or communications. (Does not apply to those who consider being a greeter at Wal-Mart a career.) 

Those of you who have been out of college for a while might want to test yourselves, too. Don’t worry if you are stumped, we’ve included the answers below.

1. What is the formula for the calculation of ROI?

2. What’s the difference between reach and impressions?

3. Define a SMART objective.

4. How do you accurately measure public awareness of a topic?

5. What are Grunig’s six components of a relationship?

6. What’s the difference between causation and correlation?

7. What’s the difference between owned, earned, and paid media?

8. What is a LIkert Scale and how is it used?

9. What are Katie Paine’s 7 steps to a perfect measurement program?

10.  What are the three requirements of influence in social media?

11.  What’s the difference between outputs, outtakes and outcomes?

12. What does HITS stand for?

13. Name two methods of measuring the value of PR.

Bonus question: Who is your favorite character on NCIS?

Answers:

1. ROI = (Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment)/(Cost of Investment)

2. Impressions are  the total eyeballs that have possibly been exposed to a story or a post – more accurately described as opportunities to see (OTS). Reach is the extent to which you have reached your specific targeted audience group. For example, if your target audiences is young men between the ages of 15 and 25, you may generate 100 million opportunities to see your messages in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week and the Financial Times, but you have only reached about .0001% of the U.S. population that are boys between the ages of 15 and 25.

3. SMART is: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

4. Awareness is measured with a survey.

5. The six Grunig components of relationships are Trust, Commitment, Satisfaction, Control Mutuality, Exchange, and Communal.

6. Correlation is a statistical test that examines the relationships between variables. Causation is a relationship between variables in which a change in one variable forces, produces, or brings about a change in another variable.

7. Owned media are promotion channels that you control, such as your website, Facebook page, or Twitter account. Earned media is exposure gained through promotional efforts other than advertising. Paid media is exposure generated by advertising.

8. A Likert Scale is a standard response to a question on a survey in which the respondent is offered a five- or seven-point scale to express how much they agree or disagree with a particular statement.

9. Katie Paine’s 7 steps to a perfect measurement program are:

      1. Define the goal
      2. Define the audience
      3. Define your investment
      4. Define your benchmark
      5. Pick your Kick Butt Index
      6. Select a tool
      7. Analyze and repeat

10. Influence in social media requires engagement around an individual, relevance to a topic, and frequency of posts around the topic.

11. Outputs are the products of a PR or communications program, like press releases. Outtakesare the changes in awareness or attitude that the outputs produce. Outcomes are the actions that people take as a result of the outputs.

12. How Idiots Track Success

13. Cost benefit analysis and cost efficiency ratio.

*** This is a post on measuring PR value. this is a bullet point to boost SEO.

I couldn’t have said it better myself – lessons for anyone online

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Lessons for Anyone Online: Borrowed from the Washington Post Blog, ComPost:

ComPost logo

Amy’s Baking Company vs. The Entire Internet

By Alexandra Petri, Published: May 16, 2013 at 1:28 pmE-mail the writer

If you were, for some bizarre reason, to gather children at my knee and ask me to impart to them the hard-earned wisdom of my years, I know exactly what I would say:

“If you do something stupid on the Internet, children, never, under any circumstances, try to pass it off as a hacking. This just makes you look like someone who has done something stupid on the Internet AND who does not understand how the Internet actually works.”

I would go on to point out that seldom in history has any self-respecting hacker come dashing in and made you look stupider than you were to begin with. Sure, hackers take over news accounts from time to time and release startling tweets about assassinations and cause the stock market to fluctuate. But when it comes to private individuals, no hacker of note has ever gone waltzing in to your account and started firing off sexual innuendos, CAPITALIZED TIRADES or emailed Images You Would Just As Soon Did Not Reach The Public Eye to the more nubile of your followers.

The children would probably have wandered off by this time to seek sandwiches, but they would know I was right.  venn diagram

Well, if the Anthony Weiner scandal didn’t do it for the hacking excuse, the Amy’s Baking Company meltdown certainly has.

For anyone not familiar with Amy’s Baking Company, this is the most amazing non-news story that has happened all week.

In Scottsdale, Ariz., there is a restaurant so far gone that even Gordon Ramsay’s shouting cannot save it. In fact, its owners so terrified the man behind “Kitchen Nightmares” that he decided to quit working with them rather than endure them any longer.

If you haven’t been in the nooks and corners of the Web where this has been bouncing around, you are missing out. It’s brilliant and unhinged, in the way all things that go truly viral are. First, the “Kitchen Nightmares” episode itself, which features the classic lines from Amy, “We have three little boys but they’re trapped inside cat bodies. They’re cats.” It shows the owners taking the waiters’ tips, berating the customers and insisting that they do not know the kind of food they want, firing the waitstaff, shouting at Gordon Ramsey and completely refusing to accept any criticism of any kind.

Then, if viewers had any nagging fear that this insanity was staged for the cameras, the Facebook page of Amy’s Baking Company lit up with insults, as co-owners Amy and Samy inveighed against all the Web sites where the “online bullies” had given them negative reviews. Most of them are unprintable, but some highlights include: “To all of the Yelpers and Reddits: Bring it on … Come to arizona. you are weaker than my wife, and weaker than me. come to my business. say it to my face. man to man. my wife is a jewel in the desert. you are just trash. reddits and yelpers just working together to bring us down. pathetic.”

“I AM NOT STUPID ALL OF YOU ARE. YOU JUST DO NOT KNOW GOOD FOOD. IT IS NOT UNCOMMON TO RESELL THINGS WALMART DOES NOT MAKE THEIR ELECTRONICS OR TOYS SO LAY OFF!!!!”

As a general rule, if you are the one typing in all caps insisting that everyone else is wrong, they are not wrong.

The couple has been doing this for some time, but suddenly they announced that “Obviously our Facebook, YELP, Twitter and Website have been hacked. We are working with the local authorities as well as the FBI computer crimes unit to ensure this does not happen again. We did not post those horrible things. Thank You Amy&Samy.”

If so, this hacker has an awful lot of spare time and an uncanny ear for dialogue.

The Amy & Samy story is essentially a master-class in How To Lose An Argument on the Internet. The basic steps, for anyone curious:

  • TYPE IN ALL CAPS
  • Explain that God is on your side.
  • Call the other person a rude four-letter, three-letter, five-letter, six-letter, ten-letter, or twelve-letter name.
  • Explain that you are right because the other person is an idiot, while misspelling something.
  • USE ERRATIC PUNCTUATION OR GRAMMAR WHILE CALLING THE OTHER PERSON STUPID ALSO DO THIS IN ALL CAPS.
  • Describe your cats as “little boys in cat bodies” or “little people in cat suits” or “children, but actually cats, but really children” or “non-human children.”
  • Refuse to stop arguing.
  • When the backlash starts, insist that you were hacked.

They manage to do all of these, in some cases in a single post. They do everything short of comparing someone to Hitler.

Naturally, this has been blowing up online. To call this kicking the hornet’s nest would be an understatement. They poked and poked and poked the hornet’s nest while making disparaging remarks about the hornets’ mothers. No wonder there’s a swarm.

Folks, it’s not the Internet. It’s you.

 

Destination Branding For Small Cities

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A review of Bill Baker’s latest book

At AM:PM PR we like to keep a pulse on trends and thought leadership related to the public relations industry, especially in subjects that we find interesting. To this end we hold weekly meetings we call “PR 3.0” where we invite PR professionals, job seekers and business executives to join us to talk about the latest developments in social media technologies.

However, we take this interest to all aspects of our work and last week I purchased a book by local Portland author Bill Baker titled “Destination Branding for Small Cities.” In this book Mr. Baker draws upon over 30 years experience working in over 25 countries helping communities with their branding and marketing. His book illustrates the case for the destination branding and marketing of small cities and towns.

Interestingly, the book arrived into my possession around the same time The Oregonian published an article saying Bicycling contributes $400 million to Oregon tourism. Do you think this isn’t destination branding? If anything, it’s a warning shot to all bike-related businesses in the region, telling them that they’d better rope themselves into the branding language if they want to take advantage of this large portion of the local economy.

The bike piece comes after a piece from CNN that says Portland is America’s top beer town. Then in the Huffington Post, Portland was cited in a study by Intuit as a top city for female entrepreneurs.

This could all be crazy coincidence, but in reality it’s the result of a successful destination branding campaign that has consciously (and sometimes, subconsciously) been part of the collective marketing efforts of cities and businesses in the region during the past decade. Bike lanes, pet friendly hotels, famous bands, beer tours, distillery row and words like “artisan”, “craft”, “eco” and even our food carts are all under the umbrella of a successful destination branding campaign. It’s successful because the campaign comes from the top down and is adopted by other businesses and organizations looking to take advantage of the media limelight. Further, our regional campaign is based upon an authenticity that builds when families move to the area seeking a quality of life that we foster and encourage in Portland.

I found the book to be thought-provoking and a must read for anyone sitting on the board of a chamber of commerce or related tourism organization – even if you aren’t directly involved in the marketing, public relations or branding committee. It’s important for people to have a better understanding of the principles presented in this book so they act as a resource, team player, or in the case of small businesses – identify the greater destination branding at play, and use it to their advantage.

For more: “Destination Branding for Small Cities.”

North St. Bags

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It’s no secret the AM:PM PR crew loves its neighborhood. While we typically talk up the local bars and eateries, there are other less calorically detrimental businesses that we think are equally neat. Just up Clinton St. from our offices, perfectly positioned just off one of SE Portland’s main bike boulevards on 23rd and SE Clinton, is the factory showroom of North St. Bags – a really cool bike bag and accessory company.

A well-made bike bag could come in handy for some of us, Pat: I’m looking at you. Others of us just drink coffee delivered by bike. If any of you saddle up frequently, just know that North St. is producing some solid bike gear. The company’s website makes it easy to choose your own custom bag color combos, including the base color, trim and lining. It’s these kind of details that I’m a real sucker for. A handful of bike shops in town carry the bags, but ordering online allows you to be the architect of your perfect pack.

While the waterproof designs are ideal for serious all-weather cyclists (ie. not me), I’m contemplating picking one up for use on hikes, and other upcoming summer adventures. Check ‘em out, and let us know what you think.

north-st-bag-dude

PR 3.0 gets all up in Linkedin

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linkedin logoThis platform has been adding new features and updates during the past month that may dramatically alter how PR professionals, small businesses and jobseekers use the platform.

At PR 3.0 on Thursday, May 9th we’ll discuss some of the latest developments including the new Facebook-style mention feature, visual portfolio feature – and discuss how they’re trying to corner the market for both job-hunters and established professionals.

For a primer, check out the following links. Feel free to share any additional links or comments that may facilitate further conversation.

LinkedIn Now Lets You Add a Visual Portfolio to Your Profile

LinkedIn Adds Facebook-Style Mentions Of People And Companies In Status Updates And Home-Page Comments

LinkedIn’s New Recruiter Homepage Gives Headhunters Better Search, Status And News

linkedin screenshot