GillespieHall (GH) was awarded gold for its social media campaign with Healthy Air Pennsylvania and for the American Lung Association of the Mid-Atlantic Mini-Grant annual report, delivering GH its seventh gold award in the last three years. GH also received a silver award for its outdoor underage drinking awareness ad campaign for the Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, and a bronze award for its social media campaign with the Delaware Prevention Coalition, Hollywood Invades Delaware. In addition to the four medal awards, GillespieHall received two merit awards: one for a logo designed for an anti-tobacco youth movement campaign , “WAKE UP,” and another for the Brandywine Counseling and Community Services’ Needle Exchange Program printed literature. Nearly 3,000 entries were received in this year’s SIAA competition. Entries were submitted from corporate giants such as AAA, Independence Blue Cross, the Washington Post, and Vanguard, as well as 1,000 other corporations and at least 600 agencies from across the country. GH’s work was evaluated by a national panel of judges.

SIAA is the only advertising awards to specifically recognize communication excellence in the service industry. Many other advertising awards are dominated by consumer goods, packaged goods and other tangible products. SIAA recognizes the creativity and communication accomplishments of organizations influencing positive behaviors.
GillespieHall, a minority-owned social marketing and public relations firm based in Hockessin, Delaware, is an award-winning business with an unusual history. Global public relations practitioner Bridget Gillespie Paverd and Harvard-trained physician Neal Hall head-up a dynamic communications team. With a long-standing history of producing distinctive public awareness and publicity campaigns, GH is best known for elevating reputations and causes through powerful and diverse communication programs, especially social media. This year GH won two top MarCom Awards for two entirely different social media campaigns: Healthy Air PA for the American Lung Association in Pennsylvania, and Hollywood Invades Delaware for the Delaware Prevention Coalition, both of which received SIAA awards.

“This is just tremendous,” says GillespieHall’s founding partner, Bridget Gillespie Paverd. “We celebrate the fact that our social media initiatives have once again received national recognition. The SIAA are the “Oscars” of service industry marketing. Everyone at GillespieHall is very proud and delighted about winning for our clients – the American Lung Association of the Mid-Atlantic, Brandywine Counseling & Community Services, the Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, and the Delaware Prevention Coalition. Our clients know at GillespieHall, we live and breathe their respective visions.”
Paverd’s partner Dr. Neal Hall is equally pleased. “We know the panel of SIAA judges is made up of tough professionals who appreciate out-of-the-box thinking and how challenging it is for agencies like ours to produce national award-winning campaigns on conservative budgets.”
“Our clients trust us to spread their message using every means at our disposal,” says Paverd. “Changing behaviors is a big goal to go after. We fuse commercial marketing techniques with social science – the results are convincing.”

GH was one of the first businesses in the region to have a totally dedicated social media team. “We are one of the only firms in the northeast with a medical doctor and a sociologist on our full time social media team,” says Paverd. “We have to understand behaviors first before we change them,” says Hall. “We comprehend that it takes time and know-how to build an authentic social media community. It is not all about “likes” – it is about engagement and influence.”

Steve Groft, Director of Client Services, displays proudly one of GH’s 7 Gold Winner Service Industry Advertising Awards.

As Valentine’s Day approaches, couples everywhere will celebrate their relationships. For some, it’s only been a few months. For others, it’s been years. Some will buy flowers, some will buy chocolates and some will go on expensive dates, all to declare their love.

But the most successful couples don’t just nurture their relationship on one day – they nurture it always.

Professionals that specialize in media relations must understand that they too are responsible for creating relationships, primarily with reporters and editors.  Here are some tips for successful relationship-building in media relations:

1. Get to know the reporters/editors who are relevant.

Just like in everyday relationships, media relations pros should get to know reporters and editors as much as possible. Read newspapers and publications to identify reporters to pitch to, read specific columns and determine a reporter’s specialization, and follow reporters on Twitter – it is a great place to make relationships. Retweet content from reporters to your followers.

2. Communicate newsworthiness.

The core of the word “news” is “new.” Media relations professionals first must understand that not everything is news and they must communicate newsworthy stories to journalists when news exists. It’s fine to say “I think your readers will find this interesting” or “this piece of news will affect your audience because…”

3. Provide reporters with as many resources as possible.

Make it easy for reporters to get access to documents, pictures and interviews with newsmakers. Part of a media relations strategy must include anticipating questions from a reporter as well as lining up individuals to speak on behalf of or about the organization.

If media relations professionals follow these simple tips, pitching will be much easier. The reporter will see that the PR professional put in time and effort to create a relationship, and mutual respect will form. After creating relationships, pitches become much more targeted and relevant.

Looking to foster relationships with the media? Contact GillespieHall. We can help you put together a comprehensive public relations and media strategy that will get you results.

What do you remember about the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing? Was it watching Michael Phelps make Olympic history by demolishing the world record for the number of gold medals won in a single Olympics games? Or was it watching USA’s Nastia Luikin and Shawn Johnson dominate women’s gymnastics by taking gold and silver in the all-around competition?

Whatever your favorite moment was, I doubt you could predict it. Let alone, read about it, hours before on spoiler sites everywhere, including Twitter and Facebook.

I doubt many of you even knew what Twitter was in 2008.

Social media usage has surged since the last summer games. According to The Washington Post, Twitter had about 300,000 tweets per day in 2008. Now, it has over 400 million. Sure, you’re thinking Facebook was more popular back then. Well yes, Facebook had about 100 million active users in the summer of 2008 but now? Even more popular… with 900 million fans!

Do you remember receiving hourly updates from your favorite athletes themselves? You wished you could in 2008.

Now, in 2012 you can practically stalk an athlete from the time they wake up to the time they finish their dinner and head to bed. Oh wait, athletes’ lives are more exciting than that, right? Right. We know because we read all about it on Twitter.

For the first time, athletes are using social media, and are actually encouraged to, by the International Olympic Committee.

Minutes after 17-year-old Missy Franklin won gold in the 100 Backstroke, we were crying all over again, reading her heartfelt tweets, thanking her coach and parents.

Social media is adding an extra level of excitement to the Olympics. It’s shaking up the way we experience the Olympics.

But it isn’t all good.

Social media is the big, bad monster in the eyes of Voula Papachristo and Michel Morganella, two athletes whose Olympic performances were determined by 140 characters.

Papachristo, a Greek triple jumper was expelled from her first chance at a medal when she posted a racist comment.

Her Olympic doom was repeated by the Morganella, the Swiss soccer player, when he too tweeted an offensive comment about the South Korean soccer team.

Although both Olympians apologized for their explicit behavior on the internet, explaining that the comments were made in the heat of defeat or in Papachristo’s case, as a joke, their dreams of competing in the Olympics were cut short.

And yes, what about the rest of us? The ones whose dreams of actually watching our favorite athletes achieve Olympic history are ripped away from us as we innocently skim Twitter, only to see hours before Franklin’s event was televised, “OMG she did it! Her first GOLD.”

Or for those select few who went a whole day without checking the Internet, avoiding spoilers, only to be disappointed. As we anxiously waited until a few minutes before Franklin’s televised race, only to see a 30-second Today Show promo commercial of Franklin hugging her parents with a gold medal in hand.

A 30-second clip was all it took to ruin the moment.

Just like in every Olympics, there is triumph and victory, but there’s also defeat.

Does your company have a social media policy? If not, contact GillespieHall and we can help you create one!

What do you think of the 2012 Social Media Olympics? Have you been enthusiastically following your favorite athlete on Twitter? Or have you experienced defeat when your favorite moment was taken away by spoilers? Let us know!

Ever since word got out that Instagram was purchased by Facebook for a whopping $1 billion, the countdown began for when Facebook would take over the world.

Based on an article by ABC, it seems that day may be close.

Executives like Ari Emanuel, co-CEO of the William Morris Endeavor Agency, are already being influenced by Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team. According to Emanuel, movie production can now be financed solely through the king of social media, Facebook.

But what movie could have a fan base large enough to generate enough cash to cover its total production cost? Movies aren’t cheap to make: according to a recent article in the HuffingtonPost, the production budget for an average film in 2011 was $78 million.

Based on that statistic, if $100 dollars were collected from each Facebook fan, an average movie would need 780,000 avid and loyal fans to contribute to the pot.

Emanuel believes that is entirely possible. Social metrics show that between the television show and movie, “Friday Night Lights” has over a million fans or “Likes” on Facebook. Is this a large enough fan base to fund the entire movie’s budget?

Emanuel even threw the new kid on the social media block, Pinterest, into the social media world-takeover team, stating “those that donated could have access to the script or storyboards on Pinterest.”

If Emanuel is right and the world is in fact being taken over by Facebook and other social media, contact GillespieHall and we can get you started on understanding or better understanding social media.

Happy Independence Day, from  GillespieHall!

If you don’t have plans, celebrate July Fourth with our friends and neighbors in beautiful Hockessin. There will be a parade, fireworks and relay races. The parade starts at 3 p.m. and all the events are sponsored by the Hockessin-Greenville Rotary Club.

Their emotions are so pure and honest, whether they’re eliminated after getting the vowels wrong at the end of “schwarmerei” (which means to be enthusiastic) or celebrating their victory by shouting out the letters in “euonym.”

And so GillespieHall congratulates Snigdha Nandipati of San Diego, the 14-year-old winner of the 2012 Scripps National Spelling Bee. The word she spelled correctly to win? “Guetapens,” which means an ambush or a trap.

Spelling is one of those things that should get easier as you get older, because of spell check programs that are very good at identifying errors and because, outside of spelling bees, how often does anyone have to spell “ericeticolous?”

But yet, adult life has its own guetapens, and there’s not much that’s more embarrassing (with two ‘R’s) than making a spelling mistake in a business document.

Headline News put together a list of 11 words that many adults stumble over. How many of these would you admit to misspelling (with two ‘S’s)?

Never forget that a good dictionary is a writer’s best friend. A writer’s second-best friend? A tasty daiquiri (with 3 ‘I’s), as long as the writer is at least 21.

 Are there any words that always trip you up? Be brave and admit to them in the comments – we’re all friends here.

One of the characters in the film, a criminal named Vizzini, frequently uses the word “Inconceivable.” He uses it so often that another character says to him, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

PR Daily uses the example of Vizzini and “Inconceivable!” to introduce its list of 8 words that may not mean what you think they mean.

Which brings us to another confession – we admit that we have misused some of these words ourselves.

For instance, the first word on the list is “comprise,” which PR Daily points out, “is used in the active voice; therefore, ‘comprised of’ is not correct.” If we had a dollar for every time we’ve typed out “comprised of,” we’d treat all of Hockessin to lunch next week.

We’re also guilty of using “poisonous” when we mean “venomous.” However, it is correct to say that iocane powder is poisonous, if you disregard the inconvenient fact that iocane powder also is fictional.

Finally, don’t forget “literally,” the favorite word of Chris Traeger, Rob Lowe’s character on the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation. Watch here as he almost uses it correctly. This clip is also a great example of PR/political spin.

Have you ever misused a word? Leave your confession in the comments.

I met Christine Brader at an event in Harrisburg, Pa.  The American Lung Association was sponsoring Advocacy Day, a legislative push for every single Pennsylvanian to be protected from secondhand smoke.  Ms. Brader was quiet and unassuming.  She was small in size, but full of an all-encompassing grace.  Most of her jaw was missing, but she kept a smile on her face the entire time.  “I almost left my children orphans,” she said.

Christine was a survivor of oral cancer.  Now a CDC spokesperson for its tobacco prevention and control campaign, she spoke of her journey with humility.  “I’m very, very happy to be alive and talking to you today, because not so long ago, I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be alive,” she said before describing surgery that left half of her jaw gone and an intense, lengthy recovery after a third diagnosis of cancer.  She had been a smoker most of her life.  At the close of her speech, everyone stood with applause.

High school students were among the backdrop with huge signs that read “Clean Indoor Air. No Exemptions,” and legislators spoke on clean indoor air with drive and passion, but no one left more of an impact on Advocacy Day than Christine Brader. She was the personal story behind the cause. 

Christine Brader, with GH's Nicole Crawford (ALA Account Executive) and Clara Swanson (ALA/Healthy Air Social Media Behaviorist)

The good news? There has been great progress in cleaning up air pollution across the U.S., thanks to the Clean Air Act. Twenty two of the 25 cities with the most ozone pollution improved their air quality over the past year’s report. And all but two cities with the most year-round particle pollution (sometimes called soot) improved over the previous report.

The bad news? More than 127 million people—41 percent of the nation—live in counties with air pollution levels that are too often dangerous to breathe.

You can check the air pollution levels in your county with this widget. Just enter your zip code in the box.

GillespieHall does a lot of work with the American Lung Association of the Mid-Atlantic. Many ALA staffers have very personal reasons for the work they do. And many of us here at GH have friends and family members whose lives have been affected by lung disease.

Breathing is one of those things that you take for granted, until you or someone you’re close to struggles to breathe.

Join the American Lung Association in its fight for clean air. Contact your members of Congress and ask them to support the Clean Air Act—including standing up against any actions to weaken, block or delay full implementation of this lifesaving law.