 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
In few professions has the emergence of social media been such a double-edged sword as public relations. On one hand, the “citizen journalism,” blogging, and content-sharing platforms for all types of media have fundamentally altered the traditional print-based business model of professional and trade publications. Information scarcity has been replace by information overload.
There are fewer professional reporters and editors, and they inundated with more noise: it’s estimated there are now four PR professionals for every full-time journalist in the US.
On the other, given their skills in relationship-building and content development, PR professionals (should at least) have a natural knack for social media success. And recent changes to Google’s search algorithm which place a premium value on earned links—the kind generated by effective PR and social media engagement—have increased the value PR professionals bring to maximizing overall brand visibility....
It’s all around us. We’re bombarded by content advice porn from the “experts.” It’s irresistible but like most instant gratification, it’s short-lived.
Content is king. Make your copy bite-size and scannable. Run it through your Buzzfeed detector.
Oh, and add visuals. They increase readership and response noticeably. After all, aren’t Pinterest and Instagram the next big thing?
While you’re at it, let’s produce some video. Got six seconds? Here’s a Vine. Need 15 seconds for your video? Instagram has you covered. Producing an epic? YouTube it...
After doing this awhile, you get to see the signs of the self-promoter and the quick name-for-themselves artists. You also – with more rarity – get to meet the real deal. So, I was very pleased when he agreed to sit down and chat on topics ranging from the new directions for marketing, listening and relationships, and why “lurking” in social is a good thing....
When Shane Atchison took the job of CEO at Possible Worldwide in April, he needed a way to get in sync with 1,100 people across 32 offices. ...How do you build a sense of community when you’ve got people from Poland and Budapest and Moscow connecting with people in Cincinnati or Seattle? “You can’t fly everyone around and say, let’s be friends," says Atchison....
The corporate intranet was okay for sharing templates and forms but terrible for sharing knowledge. Atchison figured he could kill both problems with a social network. Not Facebook, not LinkedIn, not Tumblr or National Field, but a brand new one, built specifically for them.... CoLab's Four Main Features The three main parts--library, people directory, and social--wound up becoming four, with the “social” component comprising two separate features. Now, the four main features of CoLab look like this: Pulse (a curated home page featuring internal posts and status updates)Perspectives (a full social feed of posts and status updates)People (a company directory complete with social profiles)Library (a knowledge sharing network)...
Social media duties are treated more as add-on job functions, and don’t often get a dedicated internal team, details a [download page] new Ragan/NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions survey. 65% of the survey respondents – the majority of whom hail from organizations that employ more than 100 people – said that social media tasks are assigned on top of current job responsibilities. 27% said they have an internal team that works exclusively on social media, while an additional 5% said they have both an internal department and use an outside agency or partner. Just 3% said they fully outsource all their social media efforts. That 3% figure reflects an apparent unwillingness to spend dollars – rather than time – on social media, a trend that was found by Reply! recently, in research examining SMB use of paid social media services.
The Ragan survey found that when it comes to tools used to measure social media, a 59% majority rely on free tools, while 35% use a combination of free and paid tools. Only 6% use only paid tools, the most popular of which are Hootsuite (31%), Radian6 (25%), and Vocus (17%). (Among free tools, Google Analytics and Google Alerts both easily lead all others.)...
The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), an arm of the Pew Research Center directed by Tom Rosenstiel, has a new report out on "How the Presidential Candidates Use the Web and Social Media." Let me save you some time, in case you just don't have the stamina for a 33-page report on the two campaigns' use of their website blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and the level of social media response that usage generated over a two week period in early June: Their use of these tools is highly controlled and generating a relatively weak response.... That is exactly right. Neither campaign is using the web and social media in a genuinely social way. The hope that two-way media would engender a two-way political conversation--which we saw start to flower in 2004 via blogs and then blossom in 2008 via social networks--is essentially dead for now....
...This is what hangs me up about titles like “social media strategist.” I think it’s narrow minded. I think those that pin their personal mantra on social are selling themselves short. Further, and I see this more and more, there are young folks, that all they’ve ever done is post to Twitter and Facebook and call themselves social media strategists. Social media is not strategy! It’s a tactic! Companies don’t need a social media strategy. They need a business strategy. They need a marketing strategy. Social media is one tool among many, with apologies to the handyman, with only a hammer in his belt, because every problem begins to look like a nail. (BTW, read this awesome article that elevates SEO to a branding level, which in part, was the catalyst for this post....
|
What if you brought together one the best-regarded thought leaders in communications and social media with one of the funniest cartoonists?
You'd get a very thoughtful little book with big ideas about people and relationships online and how PR plays a critical role in bringing the two together. And you’d be smiling while you read it and reflect on public relations in the digital age.
Welcome to “What if PR stood for people & relationships? A manifesto for building relationships in the digital era” written by Brian Solis and wonderfully illustrated by Hugh MacLeod. Sponsored by Vocus, the book captures PR’s dilemma today and where it needs to be tomorrow....
Amazing! Clever! Inspiring! Resourceful!
That’s just a sampling of the exclamations the judges uttered when reading through this year’s entries for the PR Daily Awards!
Companies from around the world, large and small, shared with us their best work from this past year in hopes of taking home the top prize. Each of the companies listed below showed us truly innovative and successful tactics.
It is with great joy that we share their work with you in this Special Edition of PR Daily!
...Unfortunately, many companies fail to take advantage of the benefits social media provides. If only using social media was like using a power tool; Set it up, push a button, and you get magical brand awareness and conversions! Social media still requires work, and most importantly an understanding of how to act online. Yesterday afternoon, Taco Bell showed it understands exactly how to use social media....
Too many businesses take social media a bit too seriously. Being serious all the time is not a great way to take advantage of followers and friends, plus it’s boring. There certainly is a place for serious responses to followers and fans, especially when it comes to customer service. But simple responses to funny requests or sarcastic remarks are just as important....
Every sports reporter likes to be the first to break the news about a big trade. But sometimes, they report it before the players have even been notified. The trade deadline is one of the busiest days of the season in hockey (or any sport) for management as they try and better their team for either a playoff run or the future. Players are on edge because they don’t know if they’ll be on the ice skating one moment and get pulled off the next to be informed that they’ve been dealt. Reporters are so connected to their smartphones that it has literally become a race to see who can tweet the information first. Who can write the better story about how BLANK player will fit in with the team or how this deal helps the future seems to have become secondary. The media are too fixated on tweeting the news first, as reporters want to be the one sourced in all the articles as “BLANK reporter (@BlankReporter) tweeted the news first.”...
Social can be — and in fact, already is — a lot more than media. ...Today, too many organizations that think their status as an "800-pound gorilla" gives them an edge are struggling to survive, let alone thrive. They underestimate social to their great detriment. They see it as the purview of two functions: marketing and service. It's either "Like us on Facebook!" or "We're so sorry you're having a problem." While a few have figured out that they can use social to listen to the market — sort of like putting a stethoscope to the market heartbeat — they have yet to figure out there is more to this Social thing. So before we can explore the Social Era, we need to disaggregate two words — social is not always attached to the word media. Social can be and is more than marketing or communications-related work. When we look at all the parts together, we can see how Social affects all parts of the business model: the way an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. They also shift the ethos by which we lead and work.... [interesting point of view by Nilofer Merchant in Harvard Business Review -JD]
Beth Kanter asks: How do you balance the spontaneity of social media with being strategic? ...One area of challenge: balancing strategic communications with spontaneity of social media. The spontaneous part is all the organic stuff, including relationship building, maintaining light touches and connections with your network until there is a moment of opportunity, being nimble and adaptable, and well, being social. However, these grantees also have to integrate the use of social media into a strategic communications effort that will help further their work towards policy change to support children’s health care coverage. The early results like learning or engagement - the spontaneous stuff as Allison Fine likes to call it — are not always valued. That’s because boards or senior management (or funders) don’t always understand these are part of a strategy that leads to the strategic results. Sometimes these early results are presented out of context and easily dismissed. Therefore it is very useful to show a logical path of results or describe in a logic model.... [Beth Kanter shares some great tactics from savvy nonprofits - JD]
One of the points I had hoped to emphasize in my last post was that Twitter, blogging, Facebook and Google+ offer an even more controlled communications environment than what a fastidiously prepped/messaged executive might face in a media interview.... This week, we're witness to another example of this "command(er) and control" approach to making one's POV heard in a less fettered manner. Our President participated in a Google+ Hangout....
|
Great social media resource from Tom Pick at Webbiquity.