Interview with Bad Pitch Blog Co-Founder, Kevin Dugan, Part I

Since you guys seemed to really like the interview with Don, I figured that I would continue with the tradition of interviewing people who know much more than me. Ergo, here is my two-part interview with The Bad Pitch Blog co-founder and social media strategist, Kevin Dugan.

Some background: Kevin Dugan is a veteran marketer who’s been in the business for 17 years, advising clients like General Electric and Xerox. He’s a social media strategist whose PR efforts have garnered six national awards in the last seven years. His blogs Strategic Public Relations and The Bad Pitch Blog have been singled out for awards, including a 2007 Award of Commendation from the Public Relations Society of America. Both blogs are ranked by Advertising Age magazine’s Power 150 — a ranking of the top marketing blogs in the world, something which causes Social Media Novice much envy.

He’s also super-nice in person and did not think me creepy when I introduced myself at the Bad Pitch Blog party in January as a fan and Twitter stalker. And to me, that’s what really counts.

Anyhow, onto the questions!

What would you say to people who are skeptical about the importance of social media in marketing and PR?

I’d suggest they take a look at reports about the significance of mybarackobama.com in the election of President Obama. One key item of note from the online campaign is that only 25 percent of his online support came through that site. The other 75 percent came through various social networks like Facebook where he had established official profiles. If he had not relied on social media, his online campaign would have been one fourth as successful.

On the other end of the spectrum, some say that the traditional press release is dead and that social media releases have taken over – what do you make of it?

When anyone says anything is dead, they are oversimplifying an argument for a good headline. Whether it’s an old school release or a social media release is irrelevant. Got news? We tend to focus so much on format of the news that we push non-news into the marketplace. PR Newswire and Businesswire together put about 2,000 news releases out each day. How many of those are actually newsworthy?

If you had to choose one underrated social media tool or application, what would it be?

Everyone is understandably enamored with video and YouTube. But they’re missing out on photo-sharing sites like Flickr. If we make our communications more visual, they’re bound to be more engaging and more easily understood.

What does your story look like? Go to Flickr and do a search on topics like bailout and AIG. You’ll start to see the momentum that images can bring to a story. And if you have all of them deposited in one spot online, hyperlinked back to you, you’ll have more content on a topic which in turn brings more relevance for search engines.

That’s it for now. Kevin clearly knows his stuff, so stay tuned for Part II, which I’ll be posting in a couple of days.