The next stop in our series of conversations with agency leadership is Weber Shandwick. In this week’s program you’ll hear from JoDee George and David Krejci. Since our theme is all about “what’s new” you’ll hear them answer – Farm and Food Advocacy Practice. It’s a timely focus and one they’ve been working on for some time. As they told me, “Advocacy Starts Here.”

Social media takes up a good portion of our conversation. No surprise there. Since it is a specialty of David’s I asked him to talk about how they measure social media use in terms of results for their clients. He makes some excellent points about not only looking at numbers but creating bench marks to gauge effectiveness. JoDee adds that they also like to take that kind of information and integrate it with the overall campaign for a client that still needs to include traditional media components. David also mentions a very new program the agency has created for their clients called Firebell. It basically puts their client through a simulated real time social media crisis. Practice makes perfect, eh?

I’ve mentioned many times recently how dairy farmers seem to have really jump started social media advocacy and pointed to a Weber Shandwick client, Dairy Management, Inc and their MyDairy program. You can still listen to an interview about that from a recent World Dairy Expo that Cindy did that included Polly Ligon O’Grady, also part of the leadership team at Weber Shandwick.

This week’s program ends with some music from Music Alley. It’s called “Can I” by MSU Orchestra.

Thanks to our ZimmCast sponsors, Novus International, and Leica Geosytems for their support.

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