Heidi Sullivan VP of Media Research and Jay Krall Manager Global Product Management at Cision dissected the ins and outs of getting your brands out there through social networking. Public Relations professionals and solo business owners alike were taken through the guidelines and best practices for the rapidly growing media phenomenon.
Which Walls are coming down?
• Between Traditional media and social media
• Across types of social media
• Between your personal life and your professional life
• Between Public relations and the public
• Across job functions
1) Between Traditional Media and Social Media
“All media is social and all social is Media – Steve Rubel, Edelman Digital
90% of the blog sites are amateur, 10% professional journalists. Most bloggers don’t work for media professionally but that doesn’t mean that they are not passionate about their topic, or researching the proper information. Develop a relationship with anyone that has a bullhorn
There is more transparency in social media. People seek compelling content from social sources and journalistic sources equally as much instead of in the past where they got news content from journalistic sites only.
Facebook now drives more traffic to Perez Hilton and the Huffington Post than Google does. – WebProNews, May 2009
2) Social sites are increasingly interconnected between each other.
• Sites seek to be sources of content rather than destinations
• A variety of applications help users syndicate across multiple networks, but beware: this can look robotic and unsocial.
How do you measure success results in social networking across many outposts:
Is a Facebook friend worth as much as a Twitter follower? For measurement purposes, yes, a person you’ve reached with a message counts the same on every platform. Ask questions like…
• How sticky is my content
• What will make people come back?
• Does my content incite people to take action or share something rather than just read or watch?
• Can those reactions be counted?
3) Between Personal and Professional lives:
Be as different as you can be when it comes to social media” – Scott Kleinberg, Social Mediaologist and Buzzmaster, RedEye Chicago
• Best practices when engaging personally and professionally
• Pick the right representatives
• Keep it clean (and do it regularly) (like old high school friends vs. work colleagues, you can limit what each group sees, there are ways you can do that)
• Be careful with syndication (if all you’re doing is pushing your own content you will look like a robot and people will not come back and read you
• Group your friends
• Embody the personality of your brand
People don’t want to engage with a logo. People don’t want you to just spit info out to you and then not have responses or communication. Be a VOICE of the brand.
Once you start to communicate you will see people start to push your message out for you.
4) Between Public Relations and the Public
There is now a conversation shift. The traditional way of getting a brands message out there used to be (PR to the Media, Media to the Public)
Social Media is now looked at as “US” a community, where you basically take out the traditional roles of PR, Media etc. and just have a group of people discussing and commenting on like things. Which allows you to tap into consumers directly.
5) Social Media for Internal Communications
But I don’t work in…Customer/Client Services, Product Management, Marketing, Public Relations, Sales, Support yet I am in charge of the social networking for the company… What now?
• Integrated Engagement Best Practices
• Don’t be afraid to respond quickly and say “I don’t know” (remember to follow up though!)
• Communicate with other social media brand representatives
• Create a social media policy for your company
• Use others’ expertise to provide great customer service
• Open up internal communications to provide consistent messaging
For more information go to:
-Lynn Furge
