Social media could drive a public relations renaissance
So you’re all up to speed on the new rules of engagement for marketing and public relations and how important it is to abandon control of the ‘message’ and engage with your various audiences (the people formerly categorized as ’stakeholders’ although this term is now out of favour as well, I’m not quite sure why) and the importance of ‘transparency’ and the fact that you’d better get on the social media bandwagon because at the rate things are going, there won’t be many mainstream media outlets left to whom you can tell your corporate story.
That static Web 1.0 web site you spent so much money on two or three years ago is sneered at and in order to maintain your search engine rankings you feel under increasing pressure to add a blog and feed it with content. Then you have to master Twitter to promote your blog and no one will read your media release unless it’s a social media release which means you’ve got to start shooting amateur video you can post on YouTube and you haven’t mastered Facebook and now you’re being told you need to create a Facebook group page and instead of ever being done with this whole business of communicating so you can get on with growing and running your business, you end up feeling like you’re even farther behind than when you started. Read more »
Spacelocker: The social media train wreck
I signed up for Spacelocker last October because I’m naturally curious and because I’ve been involved in social media and social networking for years now. The site didn’t make a lot of sense to me and I think I logged on to it once after joining. Had I remembered my password, I would have closed my account, because its juvenile graphics and navigational difficulties combined with no immediately clear explanation of its value add made it just another site, and one that didn’t seem intended for – or useful to – me.
I’d had the occasional email from them and ignored it. But I was extremely startled the first week in June to suddenly start getting replies to emails I hadn’t sent, from people I’ve never formally added as contacts to my Gmail account (and people I certainly never added to my Spacelocker account as contacts; I don’t think I added anyone there), asking me where they’d met me or politely declining my invitation to join me on Spacelocker. Ahem. An invitation I hadn’t sent.
My first response was to conclude that my Gmail account had been hacked, but that seemed unlikely. I had an appointment, so I quickly dashed off an email via the contact form (the only way you can contact Spacelocker other than by snail mail in London, England), saying I wanted to close my account but that I was quite sure it had been hacked, because everybody and his uncle and their cat and dog had received an ‘invitation’ from me. Read more »
Social media as continuum rather than ladder
Love this post and the explanations as a follow-on to the previous post querying the directionality of the ladder of social media engagement. What makes it particularly good is the correlation of the newly coined terms to the Forrester/Charlene Li Groundswell terms.
Some nice thinking and writing going on here. Kudos to Leigh Duncan-Durst and Live Path.
Using PitchEngine to create your own ‘agency newsroom’
Since the debut of the social media press release (SMPR) in May 2006, I’ve been exploring various options for tapping into the media-rich potential of templated releases.
No Spin PR has been working on a variety of projects since its unlaunch in November 2008, and has been looking at PR 2.0 press release distribution methods as well as the creation of various kinds of social media press releases (SMPRs). Distribution can be an expensive process, especially if clients’ target stakeholders are global.
While the PR Squared template linked to above may represent the industry gold standard, it’s unusable for me as it comes in PDF format. It also doesn’t address the distribution issue.
Enter Pitch Engine. Not only does it supply all the functionality and features of the SMPR template, it makes distribution a snap. With a single click you’ve sent the shortened URL for your hosted release out via Twitter. With another click you’ve shared it with your Facebook friends. One more click and it’s gone out via Friend Feed as well.
Pitch Engine allows you to post your releases either categorized by brand or in simple chronological order. Releases stay live on the site for 30 days. You can also create a newsroom for the individual brands you manage, although that service isn’t free (it’s currently US$50 a month or US$550/year for this feature).
One of the things I like best about the SMPR is its “News Facts” section. I first encountered these when working with UK companies, who used to put them at the bottom of their releases under a “Notes for Editors” heading, sort of the press release equivalent of a footnote. I’m a bit of a demon about citing my sources (except when I forget and think I’ve found something all on my own, which does occasionally happen, but not often) and still write the occasional research paper, so I love this feature. And I’m enjoying the repackaging of a tradition I’ve always found charmingly quaint.
For me the biggest bonus is the ability to create a media newsroom for my company and add my own branding to that portion of the site. It also means potential clients interested in working with No Spin PR can see samples of my work and get a sense of other clients and whether we’d be a good fit. So welcome to the No Spin PR Media Newsroom. Stop by from time to time. There’s a whole lot more where that came from.
Oh – Pitch Engine also tracks the number of times your press release has been viewed. (Although I hope it doesn’t track my own viewing of the releases because I’ve been rather lost in admiration of my own handiwork and would hate to skew the stats.) And you can subscribe to an RSS feed for an individual ‘brand’ or all the releases from a particular newsroom.
Starting at the top of the social media ladder
While the info in this diagram is old (Q2 2007) and it specifically tracks European social media participation rather than global (and it would be nice to see North American figures at least, and then I always like a breakdown between Canada and the US because – well – I don’t like feeling like the overlooked middle child in a large family), the use of the ladder is an interesting visual metaphor. Some of us, myself included, confidently seem to have started at the top of the ladder and are busily running down it now.
Rearranging the information in percentage terms would actually give you a far more accurate visual representation of the progression of social media usage, I think. I know I had been blogging for a good two years before I ever set up a feed reader system for myself, and since I’m considered an alpha flickr user, I was creating content from the very beginning of my involvement with social media. I’d also argue that social media has been in existence for well over a decade now, and that Twitter has its roots in chat, but I’ve already talked about that elsewhere.
I’d be interested to know in the comments if you started blogging before you started seriously reading other blogs or not. I have been known to try to operate machinery without reading the instruction manual too.
Hat tip to United BIT for the diagram and its post on the subject.
Northern Voice 09 – afterglow?
What’s the difference between a love-in and an orgy? While I haven’t looked it up on Wikipedia, I suspect the difference is that a love-in involves friends and friends of friends, while an orgy involves interaction with total strangers.
I’m not using these sexual analogies merely to be provocative (saucy, for my friends in the UK), but because – well – if the shoe fits, you really are Cinderella, aren’t you?
Even allowing for my widely varying moods while attending the last three Northern Voices, it’s been interesting to watch it evolve as a conference. Sadly, however, its evolution is incremental, and there was, for me anyway, a certain sense of going through the paces this year rather than genuine excitement. Read more »
Northern Voice 09: the love-in
From Stewart Butterfield’s keynote, The Internet 1992-2009, A Love Story through Chris Heuer’s Death of Advertising, the official presenters’ track at NV09 is a paean to what the internet can do for you and your business. Read more »
Crimes against Twitter: how mainstream media and marketers are messing up
The bewildered who aren’t yet tweeting may well be puzzled by the plethora of articles they’re suddenly reading in publications as far flung as the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, The Guardian, The Spectator, Business Week…. Certainly the English-speaking world is suddenly all atwitter about Twitter (or at least the portion of it who still read either real or virtual newspapers and magazines). Read more »
Social media lets you listen to your customers
I’m working on a media release (honest!), but came across this blog post from James Dickey, reporting on one of the presentations made at Blogwell on January 22, 2009. Eight organizations (Procter & Gamble, Home Depot, the Mayo Clinic, the US Coast Guard, H&R Block, Sharpie, Walmart, and Allstate) presented case studies on their use of social media in a single afternoon in Chicago.
I would have loved to attend, but Chicago’s a long way to go for an afternoon, and given the uncertainties of winter travel from YVR, I decided to live vicariously and hope the presentations were filmed for future consumption
I really like the goal-oriented approach outlined by Stan Joosten, Director of Holistic Consumer Communications for Proctor & Gamble. It’s a classic example of strategy-in-action, as opposed to a tactics-based approach to communications.
His presentation focused on three key points:
- know your brand
- empower your brand fans
- replace or augment market research.
Organizations that have been around as long as P&G have been on the branding treadmill for decades now. They’ve devoted incredible human and monetary resources to creating and promoting their brands. In fact, P&G became the US’s largest advertiser in 2005. Imagine having revenues of $4.61 billion, let alone that kind of money to spend on advertising – it’s rather mind-boggling.
Regardless of where you land on the PR versus advertising spectrum though, it’s important to recognize that traditional advertising accomplishes none of the goals Joosten has outlined. I will contend that all market research is skewed, in one way or another – and I don’t think you need to be a statistical expert to know that instinctively. I’ve done market research myself on a couple of occasions, on the phone and in person. After less than 10 hours you start to realize there’s a particular type of person who consents to participate – with or without inducements – in focus groups and surveys. (They tend to be the same sort of people who hold doors open and who still say ‘excuse me’ before pushing past people at the grocery store.) But all the folks who refuse to answer surveys and are unwilling to be part of focus groups still use soap, wash their clothes, clean their bathtubs – and make purchasing decisions each and every day.
So in order to know your brand, you have to listen not only to the branding experts who’ve created the brand and listed what they hope its attributes will be, you have to listen – and be willing to hear – what your brand really is.
That can sometimes be a painful experience when you’re in a highly competitive market. The former market leader in radios probably doesn’t want to hear the cellphones it’s poured millions into creating and marketing are considered clunky, ugly, expensive, and totally unhip – but when it ends up a distant third in the cellphone manufacturing market, not listening to the message would be a big mistake – as would failing to do some course correction so it can compete on at least one front.
But of the three goals Joosten outlined, perhaps the most revolutionary – and the most necessary – is the middle one: empower your brand fans. People listen to other people. They listen especially hard to other people they trust. Whether those people are mainstream media (who can at least be trusted to be familiar with the competition), media 2.0 (the bloggers who rarely have anything to gain by waxing enthusiastic about the products they like), or Mrs. McGillicuddy down the block who has three boys all in soccer and has a deeply vested interest in getting grass stains out of clothing, doesn’t matter. And by empowering your brand champions, you can exponentially increase the audience you reach.
How do you empower them? Connect with them. Ask for feedback. Make it easy for them to get in touch with you. Use social media as well as more traditional forms of communication. Think of Twitter, Facebook, and your corporate blog as other versions of the toll-free phone line, and be every bit as human and as genuine in your interactions via social media as your customer service reps are trained to be. And then reap the corporate rewards (including the savings in market research and advertising spend!).
Three Metro Vancouver events you shouldn’t miss
Three upcoming events Metro Vancouver entrepreneurs (with a 2/3 emphasis on females, that sounds about right, doesn’t it, sisters?) should consider attending.
First, there’s the Canadian Women in Communications Social Media Event on Wednesday, February 11, 2009, from 5-8PM. Details and links here on the Outsmarts blog. I’m looking forward to the presentations by Telus on their bloggers and from CBC on how to create an affordable podcast. Here’s hoping they mean ‘affordable’ and ‘acceptable quality.’
Next is Northern Voice 09, Vancouver’s social media and blogging ‘unconference’ on February 19 and 20, 2009. The event is pretty much sold out, but if you’re struggling with either the concept or the benefits of implementing a social media strategy, you can still win a ticket to the conference by posting a comment here (with links to the conference itself). There are (at least) two great things about Northern Voice: the fact that it’s held on a Friday and Saturday so it means losing only one work day, and the fact that it has continued to provide content for the newbie as well as the social media evangelist.
Third (and this one too sells out quickly – I have yet to register myself but I’m going to get on it right away), is the Dare to Thrive! Women in Business conference put on by Valley Womens Network, Friday, March 27, 2009. Well worth the drive to Coquitlam. I managed to miss this last year and have regretted it ever since – I’ve heard nothing but good things about the calibre of speakers and the appropriateness of topics. Looking at the seminar lineup this year, I’m already biting my nails trying to figure out how I can attend Mhairi Petrovic’s ‘How to Use Social Media Effectively for Business’ at the same time as Isabelle Mercier of LeapZone’s ‘Branding from the Inside Out.’ Cloning’s not an option – the world can’t take two of me. Perhaps they’ll be in adjoining rooms and I can run back and forth from one to the other. Or perhaps I’ll take a video camera and record one for my first adventure in vlogging.
Looking forward to meeting some of you there, and to saying hello to others who are presenting, including Fiona Walsh.
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