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Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
Mashable has a regularly occurring series on its website called “The Social PR Guide Series.” One of the most recent contributions to this series focuses on YouTube, and how PR professionals can successfully implement and manage the solution within their companies. While many companies are becoming quite savvy at using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, YouTube remains somewhat of a mystery. Therefore, I thought I’d share a few points from we gleaned from their article titled, “The PR Pro’s Guide to YouTube.”
According to Mashable, video sharing sites, such as YouTube, Vimeo or VEVO, are “an excellent way to break the ice because nothing online is as personal and human as video.” They also note that in February, there were more than 139 million unique online video viewers in the U.S. that spend an average of four and a half hours watching the videos. That’s a huge potential audience for PR pros and marketers to tap into.
Here are a few ways that Mashable recommends using YouTube:
- Launching a Campaign – Videos offer a great way to raise awareness of news and other announcements. They are easy to digest and are easy to share. By enabling this ease of use, PR pros are making it more likely that the news will spread by word of mouth.
- Crisis Communication – According to Mashable, “video is one effective way to respond to questions and help calm fears.” Videos are also relatively quick to produce, which allows companies the flexibility to respond in a timely manner.
- Discover New Audiences – This is the core of what we do as PR and marketing professionals. We help our clients discover and engage with target audiences that are brand appropriate. By allowing people to comment on your videos, you’re enabling a community of like-minded individuals to connect and discuss the issues you bring up. As an example of this, read our earlier post about Major League Baseball’s unwillingness to allow videos to be posted to YouTube, and the potential audience connection they are missing out on.
- “Extend Your Brand” – Mashable suggests that companies “integrate the look of [its] profile page with [its] website homepage or other online communications channels. Creating consistency and connections to other channels makes it easier for visitors to get more information from your online resources.”
- Enhance Media Relationships – Just as PR pros are discovering that videos are a great way to connect with consumers, journalists are also discovering that videos are a good way to connect with readers. By sharing high-quality videos on a company’s YouTube site, companies can make it easy for journalists to get the content they want and need, quickly and easily.
The article also outlines a few considerations for measuring the reach of your online videos. YouTube’s “video statistics” feature allows companies to see how many viewers each video received, the total number of commenters and their geographic location, and whether or not people viewed the videos from a mobile device. As PR pros, measurement is important and it’s helpful that YouTube makes it so easy to report back.
Finally, Mashable notes that not all videos will receive the same amount of attention. Hey, we can’t all launch a successful “Old Spice Guy” campaign every day. If you are considering implementing a YouTube channel or other video aspect to your communication plan, consider the following questions:
- “How does the use of video fit within our larger communications strategy?”
- “What is the story we would like to tell? Is video the best way to share that story?”
- “What does success look like?”
- “How will we respond if our video receives little or negative attention?”
Have you successfully utilized YouTube or videos in your communication plan? Have you seen any good video campaigns that you can share? We’d love to hear your stories and tips for others reading this post, so feel free to share in the comments below.
So you’ve got a Facebook page, a Twitter handle and a corporate blog, now what? Many organizations have realized the value social media can bring including increased brand awareness, improved customer relationships and thought leadership.
While leveraging these platforms to educate and engage with key audiences is critical, oftentimes companies have several different handles, fan pages and owners and processes which can create a fragmented social media program. It’s important that social media programs are tightly integrated to ensure they are easy to manage and poised to positively impact a company.
Consider the following tips if you’re thinking about formalizing your social media program:
- Develop Social Media Policy – Many organizations have a social media policy in place. If you don’t, you need one. According to an article in Inc. , “A social media policy outlines for employees the corporate guidelines or principles of communicating in the online world.” Social media policies guides employees about confidentiality, mitigates potential legal issues and protects trade secrets and other proprietary information.
- Educate Employees – With the lines between personal and professional use on Twitter and Facebook and blogs blurring, ensuring that employees understand your organization’s social media vision, policy and best practices is essential. We recently outlined some ideas for how to educate employees on your company’s expectations when it comes to leveraging social media. The goal is to ensure all employees have a good sense of what is appropriate and what is not with regard to the use of social media.
- Formalize Social Media Activity – Taking the time to formalize social media activity can be worthwhile as it ensures consistency, continuity and establishes a clear line of ownership. In order to effectively formalize your social media program it’s important to identify channel owner(s), refine messaging for each Twitter handle or Facebook page as well as develop a process for generating ongoing content.
- Designate handle/page owners – It’s important to identify who will own each of the company’s Twitter handles or Facebook pages. This could be the product manager, or a marketing or PR person.
- Refine messaging –The look, feel and messaging within each Twitter handle or Facebook page will need to be consistent to ensure continuity. For example, you want to make sure how you describe the company is consistent and tailored to each channel. Additionally you’ll want to ensure there is some continuity in company logos or images that are used across multiple Twitter handles or Facebook.
- Develop and ongoing editorial calendar – Successful social media programs include consistent engagement with key audiences. This incorporates a balance of posting content and responding to discussions within the Twittersphere and Facebook. Developing a fluid, ongoing editorial calendar is an easy way manage this process and could include content such as highlighting new blog posts, press releases, key media coverage, videos, company and product updates and events.
Establishing a presence on social media platforms is an ongoing initiative. It takes consistent engagement with key audiences and compelling content. By developing a framework for your social media program, you’ll be in a much better position to develop and maintain your presence on these platforms and garner all the benefits of social media.
On Sunday night, we were reminded once again how prevalent social media is in today’s communications landscape and how quickly information is disseminated through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Prompted by President Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed, Twitter recorded the “highest sustained rate of Tweets ever,” an average of 3,440 tweets per second were sent between 10:45PM EST and 12:30 AM EST.
It was impossible for anyone on Facebook or Twitter on Sunday night not to hear the news. The widespread use of social media is undeniable, but its role in business has yet to be defined. Social media is recognized as an important tool, but the exact ROI is hard to track.
Mashable recently published an article on “9 Digital Marketing Lessons From Top Social Brands,” which examines how MTV, American Express, Xbox, NBA and AT&T have learned to use social media to get results.
The nine lessons are fairly standard, like understanding your audience and choosing the right platform. However, the one lesson that I believe deserves some attention is “be human.” Take into consideration why people follow celebrities on Twitter. Fans want to feel connected to the individual and know this person’s thoughts, feelings or whereabouts. It is quite possible that most celebrities have a whole team carefully crafting their tweets, but a follower wants to believe they are gaining insight into the celebrity’s life.
The same connection is true for any consumer following a business on social media. Consider the following points when crafting a tweet.
- Be Conversational. Developing a consistent tone that resonates with your audience will help establish credibility and make your followers feel a part of your business. “Nailing a tone that resonates with your audience is of paramount importance,” says Tom Fishman, manager of social media and community at MTV. The article says the goal of MTV is “to sound human and conversational and not be the voice of some corporate overload.”
- Use “We” or “I”. Writing tweets in “we” or “I” helps to convey there are “hearts and faces behind the computer screen.” Using “I” makes the tweet personal and whoever is tweeting should identify themselves. Using “we” makes the message sound as if it is coming from the whole company. This helps people establish a personal connection.
- Don’t Sound Like a Press Release. Brands should use social media to promote their message, but it’s important to avoid sounding like a press release. If you are tweeting about a press release, make sure to add a message instead of tweeting the headline.
- Admit Your Mistakes. An important part of being human is making mistakes. While we strive to be vigilant, errors happen. If there is a spelling error or factual mistake in a tweet, don’t delete it and “sweep the mistake under the rug.” Followers prefer to see the human side of a company by admitting their mistake and correcting it.
At the heart, social media is another avenue to disseminate information, but people often forget the human element can go a long way. Infuse a little personality into messages and start making a personal connection with your fans.
As we’ve mentioned previously on this blog, analogies often help make complex topics more digestible for a broader audience. While this normally happens more often in business-to-consumer scenarios, the same principle can be useful for learning lessons in any context.
Earlier this week, Ragan’s PR Daily writer Arik Hanson posted an article about the “4 PR Lessons from Saved by the Bell,” the pop culture TV hit from the ‘90’s. While naturally light-hearted, due to the characters and subject matter, Arik makes some great correlations from the show, which are completely applicable to PR and marketing.
Consider these four PR lessons which Arik notes in his article:
- “Persistence Doesn’t Always Pay Off” –Screech was very persistent in his pursuit of the lovely Lisa Turtle. He tried many angles and approaches, but never achieved the desired results. The same goes for media pitching. When pitching media, it’s tempting to continue to follow-up via phone, email, Twitter, and any other mode possible, but sometimes it’s better to re-evaluate your strategies than continue to force the issue.
- “When Everyone is Zigging, Try Zagging” – Screech is perhaps one of the most recognizable characters from the show. His quirky personality and clothing positioned him as unique, making him memorable. Arik points out that when launching new products or services, it’s good to identify and promote the features or aspects that set it apart from competitors. Ultimately, this is the way that consumers are going to remember why they should choose one product over another.
- “Success Is Never As Easy As It Seems” – One of the most talked about episodes of the entire series was when Jessie Spano decided to take caffeine pills to help keep herself awake for an all-night studying binge. This is a great reminder that it takes a lot of hard work behind the scenes for launches and announcements to run smoothly and, “make it look easy.” It can be tempting to take short cuts or the easy way out, but keep in mind that this may not be the best strategy to keep up momentum in the future.
- “Regular Communication Is Key To Productive Relationships” – Remember how Zack always seemed to be in Principal Belding’s office? Arik opines that maybe this was Belding’s way of keeping in close contact with Zack in the hopes of helping him realize his full potential. The same strategy applies for the relationship between PR and marketing teams – both in-house and agency. When all members of the communications team are in sync and in the loop, it makes for smoother sailing through the entire process of a launch or media announcement.
These four lessons serve as a great reminder that education comes in many forms, and it’s good to think critically about lessons of all shapes and forms can be applied to our professional endeavors. Have you learned any great lessons or utilized strategies that you gleaned from an unexpected place?
Jeanne Miller, communications manager with Tecplot, Inc., recently forwarded me an interesting article from BtoB magazine about how changes in the discipline of marketing are driving organizational changes.
The article focuses on how business-to-business marketing teams at Intel Corp., Sybase and Xerox Corp. are “rethinking the organizational structures and even their cultures” so they can generate more content. According to BtoB magazine, to make content development easier, b-to-b marketers with these companies are hiring former journalists and creating editorial calendars to govern what is used in advertising, on websites or in social media campaigns.
The April 4 article, entitled “Content needs to drive organizational changes,” is an interesting read, but generating content and the need to rethink the structures of marketing departments is an issue consumer companies and nonprofit organizations are facing as well. This is not a challenge unique to b-to-b marketers.
From our work with Seattle Children’s hospital I know that the marketing, public relations and social media teams confront many similar challenges as the companies mentioned in the BtoB magazine article.
Zillow, the practical website that helps individuals understand real estate values or find rental property, is also using content to drive consumer awareness via its blog, news coverage (Zillow is a source of content for Fox News, for example) and social media. Consider these two blog posts.
- 80K the Non-Distressed Way: See Homes for Sale for $80,000
- Whack! Nicolas Cage Sells Rhode Island Estate at 60 Percent Loss
These were both incredibly popular with a large number of Facebook shares, tweets and comments on each. This new practice of creating so much original content is a huge departure from the marketing activities of yester years. It is no wonder that it is causing organizations to rethink the structure of marketing departments and teams. What will be interesting is to track going forward is which companies and organizations get this market-department restructuring right and how it impacts their marketing campaigns and subsequent results.
With more than 500 million active users on Facebook and nearly 200 million registered accounts on Twitter (as last reported on Jan. 29, 2011 in Forbes), it is likely that your company is one of the many to have a presence on either one or both of these social media platforms. And it is even more likely that the majority of your colleagues are also actively participating on these platforms – for personal or professional purposes or both.
With more and more people are using social media (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flicker, Twitter, etc.) every day in their personal lives, the line is blurring between what is public and private, personal and professional. And while most may appear to be using these tools appropriately, others may be unknowingly posting information about your company that is inappropriate and has the potential to quickly damage your company’s brand and reputation. If you don’t think anything bad can happen to your company from an innocent tweet of Facebook post, think again. Take a look at this chronology of brands who were “blind-sided by the Internet and social media” as captured by Industry Analyst Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group on his website, Web Strategy.
We have been collaborating with a number of our clients in the development of their social media strategy, identifying best practices and the appropriate channels to engage with their key audiences. For some, we are partnering with them and other departments to modify their existing social media policy to help employees use social media in a respectful and responsible way.
However, simply having this policy in place does not always mean that employees will understand them or incorporate them into their daily jobs or lives. It is important to develop a social media training program that helps to socialize your policy and provides your staff a foundation to help them make the right choices at work and at home when it comes to using social media.
Below are just few ideas to consider when developing your social media training program:
- “Engaging” Training Materials. If social media is about engaging with your community, why not make your training session interactive and engaging with your employees as well? You could create a PowerPoint presentation to share your social media policy and best practices. Consider including real life examples of appropriate and inappropriate uses in social media to create an interactive discussion. You can also develop a quiz that tests employees’ knowledge and comprehension throughout the presentation, and offer a prize at the end. In addition, you could also create a fun introductory video that opens the session with employees sharing what “social media means to them.” By engaging staff in these interviews in advance of the training session, it may help to drive buzz and excitement among other staff members who will be curious to see their peers in this video.
- Leverage Other Employees as “Trainers.” Depending upon the number of employees and office locations, it may not be practical or efficient for any one team to attempt to directly educate all of your company’s employees. Consider training a well-respected leader in each office location who will then train the employees in their office. Spend time with them in a ‘train the trainer’ session to review the social media policy in-depth, ensure they understand the need for the training and the social media do’s and don’ts. By doing so, they will be able to accurately communicate your new policy during their training sessions to their staff.
- New Hire Orientation. Now that your employees understand your social media policy, consider developing information for your HR team to present to any new employees as part of your on-boarding or orientation process. Whether it is a single PowerPoint slide or simple one-page handout, share a high-level overview of your social media policy with directions on where they can find more information and who to contact if they have questions. HR can also make this information available on your corporate intranet to serve as a helpful reminder for employees.
- Leverage Internal Communication Channels. Partner with your company’s internal communications team to help build excitement by featuring some of the key takeaways employees will learn at the training session and potential prizes they can win from their participation.
Afterwards, create a brief story to share in your employee newsletter to reinforce the key messages provided during training and remind staff of best practices when engaging in their personal social media channels. If your company has an intranet, consider creating a dedicated page to host the training materials, your social media policy and contact information if employees have questions or concerns.
Regardless of the methods you develop to train your staff, if it is done well, your employees will end up with a much better understanding of how to manage their personal social media activity, ultimately helping you to avoid future potential issues for the company.
If you have provided social media training at your company, what methods or tactics worked well for you.