Well hello there, Peter Shankman!

Robyn, Peter Shankman, and Mari: HKA's latest brush with celebrity

To anyone in the PR world, Peter Shankman is probably a familiar name, if only for the HARO emails he peppers our inboxes with each day. His Help A Reporter Out email venture, which provides the useful service of bringing an aggregation of reporter queries directly to PR people on a mass scale, is only the very tip of the Shankman iceberg. In fact, as Robyn and I learned yesterday, icebergs actually played a role in making Peter Shankman who he is today.

“It Sank. Get Over It.”

To those of us who were blubbering, emotional preteen girls at the time the epic film Titanic came out, this phrase might not have resonated so well. But to the rest of the world, especially the segment who was underwhelmed with the Titanic mania that engulfed the planet circa 1997, “It Sank, Get Over It” probably reflected their sentiments exactly. As a young guy living in New York City, Peter took his rent money and used it to print up 500 T-shirts emblazoned with this slogan. He sold out  in six hours. And as if that wasn’t great enough, after contacting a reporter from USA Today about his idea and building a super-primitive sales website, he sold over 5,000 of the shirts at $15 each, making $100,000 which he used to start his own PR firm, The Geek Factory.

Why didn’t I think of that.

What makes Peter Shankman such a wunderkind in the PR world today is precisely this, and a collection of experiences much like this, that mix innovative thinking with refreshing simplicity in a way that is nothing short of brilliant. His free HARO email service, which is subsidized by advertising and is said to be worth about $1 million per year in revenues, is the perfect illustration.

This is why Robyn and I, and hundreds of other PR professionals, gathered at the Hyatt Regency in Newport Beach yesterday to hear Peter Shankman’s insights into social media, which he quickly characterized a “way to screw up quicker and to  much larger scale.” In the midst of the fascinating stories and observations of this self-described ADD-boy, several particularly interesting insights emerged.

1) Transparency is key. Google has changed the tradition of a lack of transparency in big business with its ability to make fact-finding an everyman operation, and social media only compounds this. If you screw up, admit it and move on. And DON’T be like Motrin, who shockingly took 18 hours to respond to the flurry of negative Twitter activity it sparked by an ad that offended the massive online community of babywearing moms.

2) Listen to your audience. If you’re not distributing the information in the way they want to receive it, then they are not going to come out to you to get it. And don’t Tweet another Tweet until you’ve analyzed if what you’re saying is relevant to your audience. The job of the PR person has changed; it’s now our job to get other people to do our PR work for us. By utilizing social media in the proper way, we are convincing people that what we have is worth them talking about, and that is what creates the kind of buzz that we are constantly trying to achieve.

3) Lastly, brevity, something I have outright failed at in this particular post (too much good info to share!), is an important piece of communication today. The MTV generation has an attention span of about three minutes– about the time it took to watch a music video, back when music videos and MTV actually had something to do with each other. But today’s generation, and don’t laugh, has an attention span of about 140 characters, literally. That’s right, the 2.7 seconds it takes to read one 140-character Tweet on Twitter is about all we have to give as we filter the more than 16,000 hits of information that compete for our time today. For us PR-types, this means that in writing a pitch or a press release, or in trying to be persuasive over the phone, we’ve got about 2.7 second to hook the other party’s attention, or we’re done.

Although Robyn and I got our exercise for the day chasing Shankman down for this photo, it was definitely the cherry on top of the sundae that was the privilege of being there and hearing him speak.  Creative thinkers like him tend to inspire creativity in others, and while one of us HKA-ers may or may not have the next flash of genius for a T-shirt slogan, we will definitely be able to make better use of the online and social media resources that are at our disposal.