Calling all Winnipeg Twitterers! The time has come for a face to face tweet-up. Dooley Communications together with ICUC Moderation Services will host an informal gathering of Twitter.com users in the Winnipeg area on Tuesday, March 10 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Confusion Corner Bar and Grill.

Come out and enjoy a Twitterini and some live chatting with your virtual friends.

Follow us at www.twitter.com/adamdooley or www.twitter.com/k3ith. Follow news on the Tweet-up at #wpgtweetup.

I remember eating Campbell’s Soup when I was a kid. It was a staple of the North American diet. And while I didn’t really believe that the soups were ‘M’m! M’m! Good’, at least the company’s old commercials left me feeling pretty good about the brand.

But now the latest batch of Campbell’s Soup commercials have gone and destroyed that artifice. It turns out Campbell’s Soup was not only not ‘M’m! M’m! Good’, but it was also downright bad for us. I know this because the company is telling me so.

Say that again? Your rebranding campaign, which attempts to persuade us that your soups have less sodium and better ingredients, starts out by essentially saying the product has been awful for all these years. So bad, that employees won’t even buy it. One commercial shows an employee buried up to his torso in salt to illustrate how much salt has been removed from the soup. Another recent one showcased an employee who refused to serve Campbell’s Soup to her family. Who approved these ads?

Apparently, the campaign was partly a reaction to an internal survey of employees. Moya Brown, director of marketing at Campbell Canada (I guess she’s the one. Sorry that crack, Moya.), told Strategy Magazine they were startled by the results of the survey: “Quite a few of our employees had health concerns about our products. That was a real eye-opener for us, and a huge impetus for change.”

While I agree that should have led a charge for change, this campaign takes that information and uses it to ill effect. I would have called for the company to re-jig the recipes and rebrand too. But just because you’re making something ‘better’ doesn’t mean you have to say what came before was garbage! I also would have embarked on a major internal corporate communications push to let employees know their views were heard and changes were coming as a result. (Perhaps they did, I don’t know.)

The company could have had a campaign that built on the legacy of what was a very strong brand. But the campaign the company chose to follow has, in my opinion, done serious damage to the brand. It gives the new low sodium soups a position of weakness compared to their competitors. And entering a cutthroat competition from a position of weakness isn’t a good strategy.

And to add insult to injury, the company reported a 15 per cent drop in profit this week. Among the reasons cited for the decline was increased advertising costs.

Facebook backed down today to a storm of protest over its new terms of service that granted the social networking site ownership of all network content forever. Founder Mark Zuckerberg said in his blog that the site was going back to the drawing board and rewriting the terms. In the meantime, the old terms will prevail.

A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Discontent and complaints erupted over the weekend when Consumerist revealed the new terms of service and questioned whether Facebook should be able to own all the rights to all the content that users post on its site.

Part of the issue, I believe, is the way Facebook went about changing its terms of service. They did it very quietly, making no public mention of it other than updating the terms on its site. Nothing leads to a swarm of negative attention on the Internet like the appearance of deceipt and abuse of power.

Now Facebook seems to have learned that the old rules of public relations have plenty of application in social media. I’d argue they’re even more important. With Facebook, we’re dealing with the biggest community relations experiment in human history.The key is to win credibility by acting with consistency, integrity and honesty. You need to be prepared to consult broadly, which means you need to be prepared to not like what you hear.

The process can be messy. It can take longer. It might lead to imperfect solutions. But if done well, it should leave you with your organizational reputation (and market share) in tact or strengthened.

Facebook says today that it will consult with its users as it redrafts its terms of service. That process will be more difficult for it today than if they had started with that strategy two weeks ago before posting the new terms unilaterally.  Instead Zuckerberg and his posse violated one of the most sancrosanct rules of public communications: don’t bully communities.

If you haven’t checked out the line up for the national CPRS conference yet, you should. The organizers have developed what looks like a fantastic line up of presenters for their June 2009 On the Edge conference.

They’ve split the conference workshops into three themes: PR 2.o, Corporate Social Responsibility, and the Olympic track.

I’m helping the organizers promote the conference here in Manitoba. I’ve been to the last three conferences and recommend them to PR pros looking to learn new things, build national contacts and polish up their skills. Oh, and it’s damn fun too.

For the past couple of months, Dooley Communications has been working to help Manitoba’s newest beef plant get up and running with some branded materials including a new website (www.KeystoneProcessors.com). Keystone Processors Ltd. is in the process of renovating and upgrading the former Maple Leaf pork plant at 663 Marion St. By 2011, the company plans to become federally-inspected, which will give it access to growing export markets as well as to national grocery chains.

It will target the vast and promising Asian markets where rapid economic development in recent years has led to the creation of more affluent middle classes. That economic growth has spurred a surge in demand for more nutritious diets which include more meat.

At the same time, Keystone Processors will also work to process beef for kosher and halal markets in North America, Europe and the Middle East.

I’m very pleased to be working with Keystone Processors. It’s always exciting to develop public relations and marketing strategies for a start-up because the potential of a great idea extends in front of us with nearly limitless possibilities. The Manitoba cattle industry has been hurt badly in recent years. The U.S. border closed after BSE was discovered in Alberta; transportation and feed costs skyrocketed; and last year rains washed away farmers’ fields.

With a new beef plant closer to home, Manitoba cattle producers will have an option in the event out-of-province plants close to them again. More importantly, the new plant makes long term business sense because it will save both producers and Keystone Processors money on transportation. That will also leave a lasting environmental benefit as the carbon footprint of the industry will decrease.

But best of all… Manitobans will have a new source of quality, locally-raised beef to buy. I can’t wait to throw a steak on the barbeque this spring!

I spent part of yesterday afternoon talking about social media and public relations with the next graduating class of PR Creative Communications students at Red River College. It was a good group, full of great questions about how to make practical use of social media trends in public relations and corporate communications.

Some of the themes I reviewed included:

• If you own a website, consider yourself a publisher. Publish new content continuously that is relevant, that speaks to your key audiences and that demonstrates your authority in your niche.
• Where PR pros have always needed to understand how to put together things like print specs, or ad buys. Today, they also need to know how to get blogs noticed on Technorati, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. The web has become the core of communications programs.
• If you’re going to go down the social media road, you need to think ahead about how it will fit with your corporate culture.
• A decision to use social media also means you have to think about how to moderate user-generated content. Whether it’s text, photos, videos, mash-ups or whatever, consider how you’re going to monitor that content before you ever ask for it. (P.S. consider using our client: ICUC Moderation Services.)

Though the class I spoke to will be looking for jobs during the weakest economy in a generation, I strongly believe that they are entering a growth field. Organizations of all types will need competent communications pros to compete in the world of the 21st century. More than ever, corporate communications and public relations are vital for business, government and non-profits.