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Celebrating 20 years!

This is a day to celebrate! 20 years ago, I hung out my own shingle with a goal to focus on public relations and media work. At that time, daily newspapers were still healthy and it was before Instagram, TikTok, Facebook ads, and the same year YouTube was launched.

I soon learned that my services were not about what I thought I wanted to do, but all about what the client needed. Some needed a marketing director for hire, some needed a seasoned pro to teach their new staffers, some needed content creation, some needed video work, some needed media buying, and of course many needed PR.

When I started in communications, I was a reporter editing film stories at WISC TV in Madison. The anchorman at the time taught me how to tell a story in the least amount of time and still grab a viewers’ attention. The news director and assignment editor were patient with me after I shot WAY too much film during floor debate in the state assembly.

After meeting my future husband, I got a job as a news producer at WLUK TV in Green Bay where the industry was transitioning from film to video. Producing a live TV newscast teaches you everything about teamwork, creativity, speed, accuracy, relationships, and when to fall back on the old ways because the new-fangled stuff didn’t work.

Over the next years I had jobs as a writer, reporter, editor, producer, media buyer, account manager, pr director, mar/comm director, managing in-house agencies, and working in ad agencies. The catalyst to opening my own business was getting fired—that’s when I decided that I knew as much about the business as the people who would hire me.

There are so many people to thank over the last two decades and in doing so I will certainly omit someone, but here goes. Huge thanks to Paula Wydeven who was then at The Boldt Company, Amy Pietsch with the entrepreneur training program at FVTC, Donna Gehl at Image Studios, Sara Timm, too many nonprofits to mention, and thanks to my husband for carrying the insurance and all those necessary, boring things!

Finally, thanks to my clients—I love working with all of you and I have no plans to retire. After transitioning from film to video to digital, one thing is certain–no matter the time or technology: Schmidt Happens.

Tik Tok Boom.

This is the day I shake my head and graduate to full-on old fogie. Read this report by Reuters (a trusted, legacy media source) about how a growing number of young people are turning to TikTok for news and information. The platform launched by the Chinese company Bytedance has graduated from dancing videos to delivering the news and, as one user reported, “…where it lacks in trustworthiness, it excels in presentation.”

Ok, all together now: face palm.

Why should you care? Because tomorrow’s voters and tomorrow’s wage earners are getting “news” that is increasingly created by individuals and organizations that have a high potential for dis- and misinformation. Never mind that venerable organizations like the BBC, the Washington Post, and the 4-Cs (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN) have all entered the fray, it’s the creators who are not journalists that should make you cringe.

“…others fear that the ‘TikTok-ification of news’ risks trivialising important stories as well as undermining business models that depend on referral traffic from social networks.”

Journalists are trained to present information in a vetted, objective format. There’s a certain trust that legacy media outlets are telling the truth and have checked their sources. Unfortunately, other producers on TikTok are masquerading as real, live reporters.

I’m not proposing that all journalists are trustworthy, but repeated surveys by Reuters, the Pew Center for Journalism, and other platforms regularly rate the bias of legacy news organizations. You’d be surprised to learn that most well-known outlets are ranked in the middle of the pack in terms of bias.

That’s why they’re looking for fresh, young content creators to bend the rules of journalism in a balance between objective reporting and humor-filled TikTok reels. Fifty years ago, television was the new medium hiring journalists who actually looked attractive to deliver news on the air. Broadcasters were criticized for hiring pretty people to deliver the news. Now hoodie-wearing millennials are cheerfully presenting information to attract the elusive younger market—a market that is increasingly more difficult to target.

TikTok as a news platform? Where’s that “freedom of the press thing” in China?

If you’re interested, find me at mkathrynschmidt@gmail.com.

Do this before you jump into social media

At the risk of getting flamed on my Twitter account, I’m going to utter social media blasphemy: I’m not completely convinced social media is the communications messiah for some businesses. I’ve worked with a lot of business-to-business clients over the years, and in the rush to set up a Twitter account, many forget to take care of the basics of communications.

If your business targets a consumer market, then Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube are must-haves. But if you are selling parts to a manufacturer, or if you’re selling services to an industrial client, first take a good, hard look at some communications basics.

For most industrial & manufacturing busineses, trade associations, trade magazines/websites, and professional organizations are still the basics of communications. Fundamental tools like sell sheets, case studies and testimonials are the first tools you need to tell your story.

So before you open up an Instagram account, consider these pointers for online communications in the B2B world.

Know how your customer consumes information. If your customer is like a normal professional, they have a full in-box, a full voice mail, and they spend their day putting out fires. There’s a stack of professional journals flagged for review on an airplane while they’re traveling to a customer location. Facebook is not on their agenda and, if they are checking websites, its likely on their smartphone.

Triage your website content. Assuming you have a website (and you should), review your content and make sure you’re communicating in an understandable voice. If your only customer is a materials engineer, I’ll give you a free pass to write on a professorial level. But if you’re communicating with a range of customers in an industry, be sure your message is clear—which means limiting jargon, abbreviations and acronyms. Clearly explain how your product/service is different from competitors and the benefits you will provide your customers.

Tell a story. We are bombarded by thousands of messages daily and the best way to grab someone’s attention is to tell a story about your business. Perhaps it’s a case study of how you solved a problem for a customer or why you started your business, but communicate something beyond listing your products.

Make your website mobile. Most industrial and manufacturing professionals are running their business off of their smart phones and if your website is not optimized for that platform, you’re losing business.

Use your website as a publishing platform. Your website should not be a static document—it should be a content hub. This means you need to update information regularly and the most common way to do that is through a blog. Once you develop topical blog content, you can drive target consumers and trade journalists to learn more about your company, products and services through a judicious use of social media.

If you do nothing else, do LinkedIn. I used to dismiss LinkedIn as a boring version of Facebook but changed my tune once I invested time into it. That’s the key—you only get out of LinkedIn what you put in. Individuals must participate and that means you or key team members in your organization must take the time to develop a robust profile, then start interacting on the platform. Many industries are surprised by the professional groups, alumni organizations, events and discussions that can be found on LinkedIn—but only if you participate.

One more reality of LinkedIn—this is a platform that is based on the individual, not an organization. People link to people first and through those personal connections build a network. Often the biggest hurdle is to convince your team members they need to take time for LinkedIn, but you don’t need to invest an hour a day; start with investing one hour a week.

Before you rush into social media because your competitor is tweeting, stop and consider if you’ve done the basic blocking & tackling of talking to your customers. If all of this gives you a massive headache, drop me a line at mkathrynschmidt@gmail.com and we’ll talk. Or tweet.

Really, it’s not all about you

This is for all you business people who are on the 16^th revision of a press release and are reworking the perfectly constructed corporate statement about a product introduction or a new project or an industry award. It really isn’t about you.

That press release with jargon or obtuse information is likely the first thing an experienced journalist will delete. Your first gatekeeper in getting any story out to the masses is the editor or reporter. This person likely gets a couple hundred emails and press releases a day. When they decide which stories will get a precious minute of air time or a few column inches, they’re taking many things into consideration. One of them is NOT your press release, your poetic phrases, or your schedule.

My client was able to get a feature story covered on a special award because the executives were flexible and available when the media needed them. A busy news weekend and conflicting logistics meant news crews had to compress coverage of an award event to get to another story an hour away.

The crews arrived early, they were able to finish interviews before the event, got the video they needed and were on the road in about 45 minutes.

The result? Coverage by the ABC and FOX networks in town, a feature story in an industry trade magazine and a feature story covered later by the daily paper.

When you think about hosting an event or creating a timeline, remember to plan in flexibility so your message is available when the media wants it—not when you need to deliver it.

If you’re interested, find me at mkathrynschmidt@gmail.com.

Copy. Paste. Now your info is mine.

So what do you do when a competitor uses your proprietary information?

Usually, I would tell a client to make sure information has a copyright © sign or they contact their attorneys. However, today everyone’s a publisher thanks to WordPress and everyone’s a journalist thanks to the internet. So “garage journalists” who don’t give a hoot about objectivity, attributing information to sources or vetting the facts will easily copy and paste your proprietary info into their blogs, Facebook pages or tweets.

Recently, we discussed exactly this situation at a business training program with entrepreneurs who have been in business 5-10 years. One businessman (we’ll call him Larry) publishes his own industry information and a competitor has been “borrowing” it liberally for his business without attributing it. Larry’s customers depend on his information and look forward to it in his emails and newsletters. Being a direct guy, Larry has personally asked the guy to stop taking his info.

Does he call a lawyer?

Perhaps. But our solution was to inform his customers and social networks of the situation and have the network get to work. Larry’s customers are fiercely loyal to him—because they are so deeply involved in his lifestyle, products and services they are likely to take this action personally. Larry’s a hard-working guy who lives and breathes his business—his passion attracts equally passionate customers.

You can do everything to protect your information, but often the best weapon is an engaged and committed customer base. Remember to involve your customer in your personal story so they become as dedicated to your product/business as you are. Get your customer involved by regularly communicating with them, presenting a compelling story and providing information that matters to their lifestyles.

I can’t wait to see what happens when his fans find out an interloper is falsely trading on Larry’s sweat-equity.

If you’re interested, find me at mkathrynschmidt@gmail.com.

I’ll give you a minute-15 for that story

A journalist friend and I were watching the TV news and after a chirpy, happy report the comment was, “Well, the plow doesn’t go into the ground very deep.” I snorted into my micro-brew and chewed on the evolution of news.

My first news director tossed the state budget at me and told me to find three good stories we could cover that week. These were the days before the internet, even before computers. We had to read through pages of coma-inducing text to find interesting nuggets, prepare a brief on the story with pro and con sources and propose visuals to film. Did you notice I said film instead of video? Look it up on Wikipedia.

My first producer had a rule: 1:15 for any story (including the anchor’s lead in). I would come back to the newsroom begging for an extra 10-seconds and he would look up at me from his manual typewriter and say “Did anyone die?” No I would answer. “Big. You have 1:15 and don’t go over.” It forced brevity.

When I started in TV news, all reporters needed to understand the legislative process, how the state house worked, how the city council proposed ordinances and how the county board intersected with the council. We needed a functional knowledge of the courts and an excellent knowledge of journalist’s rights in the courtroom.

Most of today’s local reporters don’t do a deep dive in civics—and I’m not certain it’s their fault. Local news departments are chasing content for a shrinking news hole. Cable stations tip the scale in the opposite direction airing mind-numbing interviews that present opinion as fact. And all of us want more news about the weather.

I’d like to blame “Entertainment Tonight.” We are bombed by celebrity news, live shots, and stories that don’t last longer than a sneeze. Our nation of terminally ADD citizens looks for clarity in 140 words, but some issues can’t be explained in a tweet. Budgets and legislation WILL affect your life, but do you blame the media then never search out the facts for yourself?

If you want an issue or an event covered, you may be working with a reporter who has done little research and has to cover multiple stories in one day.

With luck, one of those stories might get 1:30, but cut down to :40 for the late news. Can you communicate the benefit of your product or service in two minutes let alone 40 seconds? Think about how long a local news story will be when it’s in finished form and challenge yourself to communicate with brevity and impact. Oh yeah, and don’t forget to be creative.

If you’re interested, find me at mkathrynschmidt@gmail.com.

So how are those staff cuts working for ya?

My network of reporter/editor friends got some great chuckles out of recent gaffes in regional papers. Nothing entertains a bunch of journalists like implied (or actual) swear words in 36 point type. When you traffic in the printed or spoken word, mistakes are part of the landscape.

Usually an editor reviews final copy before it hits production or the air. Veteran journalists are fairly trustworthy when writing copy or headlines. But that’s just the problem—there aren’t many veteran journalists left.

In the last months, print newsrooms across the country have been slashed to the bone with budget cuts. Staffers with seniority and higher wages based on experience and ability have been trimmed from the balance sheet—along with their institutional knowledge. We can argue the failing business model of newspapers all day long and blame everything on the internet, but there’s a bigger issue here.

Trust me on this: you WANT experienced journalists on the job if only to perform their most important function as a watchdog. That’s an old-fashioned term that has a lot of modern implications.

In your busy life, will you ever attend a city council meeting? Do you have time to sit through floor debate at the legislature? Do you know your elected officials, your zoning committee or your school board personally?

You want a reporter at these meetings questioning why legislation is being proposed. You want a reporter asking why a zoning variance is being granted to a developer. You need a reporter following policy changes that could affect your childrens’ schools.

Journalists are trained to be the fourth estate—the unofficial branch of the government that monitors the political process to ensure the players don’t abuse the democratic process. That means they watch, they listen, they ask questions. But now there are fewer on the street asking those questions.

Journalists are also bound by a code of ethics in their newsroom and answer to editors who verify sources, strive for objectivity and hold them accountable. Sure, you can always find out more on the internet, but it’s caveat emptor. How do you know the author has checked sources or even if the author is a real person? And with a nod to history, most web-based content is only slightly better than the yellow journalism of 1900.

I never thought I would see the day when a local TV newsroom has more feet on the ground than the local paper. But that day is here.

If you’re interested, find me at mkathrynschmidt@gmail.com.

Why stormageddon is a bust

It’s tempting to blame the national weather hysteria on Al Gore or the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” but there’s a less fictional cause. Local news markets have been engulfed in the weather as news vortex for years, but now the national networks are catching up.

Why? Because when the companies that own local TV stations pay for expensive research, the results show one of the top reasons why people watch TV news is weather. They want to know if storms will disrupt the work week, vacation plans or the Friday golf game. So any weather event, no matter how insignificant, instantly becomes a live shot.

One of the best sources of credible information in the changing media landscape is the Pew Research Center on Journalism & the Media. Checking one of their most recent reports shows that between 2005 and 2013…

“…the airtime devoted to weather, traffic and sports had risen from 32% of the local newscast studied to 40% —a 25% increase. Indeed, Pew Research’s examination of 48 evening and morning newscasts in late 2012 and early 2013 found that 20 of them led with a weather report or story.”

Just another symptom of the nanny state—citizens can’t be trusted to source information on their own, so we will barrage them with the obvious. My favorite are the national morning “news” programs that feature a breathless, over-the-top reporter lamenting cars in a ditch, or zero visibility, or the chore of plowing. Obviously a reporter/producer team that has never been west of Philly.

The true tragedy is not that hyper reporters over-deliver the obvious—all of us have lost something far more dear. We have lost the opportunity to learn about stories that have more lasting impact in favor of 5 minutes of live shots from weather non-stories. Certainly proposed congressional legislation is “boring,” but truly creative journalists can find a way to make a budget or committee action compelling.

If you don’t like what you see, don’t remain silent and flip the channel. Send an email to your local news director or station manager/owner and tell him or her what you want to learn from their programs. If enough of you do that, you might save us from stormageddon.

What does that “www” thing mean?

Hi, my name is Mary and I’m addicted to social media. The first step toward recovery is to admit your problem and I should have seen this coming about 100 posts ago. At least once a week someone tells me social media is a pointless waste of time. Some clients can’t imagine why anyone would spend time on a screen. Spousal Unit moaned in disgust when he found out I was taking pictures of myself and posting them to Facebook and Twitter to stave off boredom in the deer stand during a hunting season. Now, my hunting posts on Facebook are eagerly anticipated by clients and friends alike. Here’s what I have to say to them.

My 75-year old father has a Facebook page. That either makes him a hip adaptor or it makes Facebook terminally un-cool, but you can’t ignore it.

I’m showing my age, but as a TV reporter in the 80s, we laughed at the idea of 24-hour news on a cable network. What would they cover? In the early days of the internet, employers and clients told me no one would ever get product information on a screen much less write and send letters over a computer.

The idea behind social media is to connect, participate, discuss. No restrictions and opinions interpreted as news. Is it perfect? Nothing is perfect and I’ve found that people who make questionable decisions in other parts of their lives will do the same thing on social media. But like they say, you can pick your friends.