Social media is emotional. It's personal. It functions in real time.

In short, it runs counter to all forms of marketing regulated industries have used for years. The social media guidelines from most regulators (whether FTC, FDA, FINRA, etc.) are still in development. This leads to a lot of:

"The regulators won't let us."

"What if we interpret the guidelines incorrectly?"

"We

Scott Schwertly, who is the CEO of Ethos3, was my latest guest on the Atkinson Public Relations podcast. That's not him in the picture above. You'll understand if you visit the Ethos3 website.

Here is a recap of what Scott and I discussed.

PROCESS

Scott breaks a presentation into three elements: content, design, and delivery. The problem with most presentations is that people immediately begin focusing on the

As you know if you've read the case study or some of our other blog posts, we're working on the Red White and Food campaign, which advocates allowing retail food stores to sell wine. Our client is the Tennessee Grocers & Convenience Store Association.

We're in our third year of reaching out to the public, making sure they know about the issue, and encouraging them to participate by contacting their legislators,

Despite multiple uses of the word "social," Social Media Club Nashville's February event, an ice cream social at Tasti D-Lite, wasn't just a party. In addition to meeting other people who are working in social media, we heard from Tasti D-Lite's director of information and social technologies about how the New York-based frozen yogurt chain is using Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare to engage its loyal fan

BtoB magazine had an excellent Q&A in its Feb. 8 issue about the impact of emerging media on direct marketing. The panelists included Bruce Biegel, managing director, Winterberry Group; Adam Christensen, manager-social media, IBM Corp.; Michael Mendenhall, CMO, Hewlett-Packard Co.; Laura Ramos, VP-principal analyst, Forrester Research; and David Meerman Scott, marketing strategist and author of “The New Rules of Marketing and

Peter Shankman was the featured speaker at yesterday's NAMA/PRSA meeting in Nashville. Peter is the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO), an e-mail that goes out three times a day to 125,000 subscribers, filled with requests from reporters for sources on whatever story they're working at the moment. We use it to see if our clients would be a good fit for any of the stories and, if so, pitch them.

Peter shared his four rules

Atkinson Public Relations has had the good fortune during the last two years to work on a campaign advocating the sale of wine in Tennessee food stores.

To date, Red White and Food (we are all about consumer choice) has attracted more than 21,000 members, generated hundreds of positive media clips and blog stories, and secured favorable editorials from every major newspaper in the state.

Social media has been significant to our