Insights for Leaders Navigating
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.
The past couple of times I’ve given presentations on social media, I have received questions from members of the audience about the best Twitter tools. Given the high-level of interest in this topic, I decided to do additional research, test out some of the most highly-recommended tools and publish my findings on the Communiqué PR blog.
Here are my favorite four tools:
Tweet Deck. This is my favorite tool because you can so easily filter information. I use it to follow keywords, handles and news. It makes it easy to customize your Twitter experience with columns, groups, saved searches and updates.
Social Oomph. I use Social Oomph to schedule tweets. This can be helpful if you have news to share at a particular time, but cannot be in front of your computer. I will admit I found the interface to be a bit confusing. It is not as easy or intuitive as Tweet Deck. However, once I got the hang of it I found it valuable for setting up a series of tweets, vetting followers and much more. I am using the free version of this tool, so I have not explored all of the functionality available in the paid version, but I really love the ability to schedule my tweets for an entire day. It allows me to share the information I want and frees up my time to respond and engage with people later in the day.
CoTweet – In conducting my research, I found many positive reviews of CoTweet. I knew I had to try it. The benefit of CoTweet is that it allows businesses to manage up to six accounts through one login, assign tweets to colleagues and share the responsibility of being the one on Twitter duty. With CoTweet, you can assign tweets to different customer service or marketing folks. For companies, such as Alaska Airlines and Starbucks, which are monitoring a lot of conversations and providing customer service via Twitter this tool is valuable. Colleen and I are still in the process of coming up to spend on this tool this for Communiqué. Once we have more direct experience with it, we’ll update the blog.
Bit.ly – Finally, I want to mention Bit.ly. This is a wonderful tool for shortening, sharing and tracking links. With this tool, one can track real-time traffic and get a sense of how many clicks your links are receiving (referrer data). Tracking is available after users shorten their long links with bit.ly by clicking on the “Info+” link on bit.ly, or just adding a “+” sign to the end of any bit.ly link (for example, http://bit.ly/n0og+).
What tools are you using to manage Twitter and other social networks? We would love to hear from you, if there is a particular solution that is helping you achieve your business and communications objectives.
I recently participated in a webinar hosted by PRWeek surrounding the new rules of media relations.
We all know that the media landscape has changed with publications shutting down or moving to online formats. But interestingly, the rise of social media, namely Twitter, has really changed the playing field in how media source their content for stories and interact with PR professionals.
Moderated by Rose Gordon, news editor for PRWeek, the webinar featured journalists including Chloe Albanesius, news reporter for PCMag.com, Kevin McCormally, editorial director at Kiplinger and Ivan Oransky, executive editor for Reuters Health, to lend their insight on how PR professionals can build better relationships and partner with them on stories.
From what I learned during the webinar and in my own personal opinion, the rules for meaningfully engaging with media haven’t changed much. It’s still important to:
- Do your research on the publication and journalist before pitching a story to ensure it’s relevant.
- Keep your pitch succinct; get to the point of what you’re pitching and clearly outline the call to action.
- Offer resources whenever possible (i.e. analysts, customers, data, experts, etc.)
- Understand what the journalists’ needs are so you can better position yourself and your company or client as a resource.
While these rules are still tried and true, more and more journalists are using social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs to source content for their stories. The way journalists are coming up with story ideas or finding sources today is much different than in previous years.
The panelists across the board said social media tools are critical in helping them track particular industries and companies, as well as gaining immediate insight into public sentiment on a particular product, service or issue. This reinforces the importance for companies and brands to engage via social media not only to reach their target audiences, but to raise awareness with relevant media.
The panelists also mentioned that engaging with them via Twitter or other social media networks is often a great way to reach them to build a relationship or pitch a story. Since many of these reporters are on calls or in editorial meetings most of the day, social media platforms are a place they’re always tracking no matter where they are.
It’s certainly an interesting time for PR professionals as we continue to evolve how we build relationships with media and counsel our clients on how to leverage social media. While the basic rules of engaging with media haven’t changed, social media is definitely adding another interesting element.
Attachmate Corporation, a leading provider of host connectivity solutions including terminal emulation, legacy integration and secure communications, today announced the availability of FileXpress. FileXpress is a family of products targeted at the managed file transfer (MFT) software market, and offers broad and powerful solutions for the electronic delivery of large files to anyone and anywhere, regardless of platform or applications.
Businesses are increasingly faced with the challenge of confidently exchanging files over the Internet, while at the same time needing to support a broad range of protocols, file transfer clients and security controls. FileXpress not only supports the transfer of files over the Internet, it also offers organizations a strategic solution capable of unifying the way that files are moved between the varied enterprise systems residing in the data center.
In preparation for the announcement, we coordinated embargoed briefings on behalf of our client and spoke with leading industry analyst Maureen Fleming of IDC to secure third-party support as well as a press reference. We believe FileXpress is poised to make a great contribution to the fast-growing MFT market and provide organizations with the security and reliability needed to transfer sensitive files of any size to partners, vendors, suppliers and customers.
To learn more about FileXpress, visit http://www.attachmate.com/Evals/filexpress/fx-eval.htm.
In the past we have written about the importance of working with industry analysts. Recently, we arranged and facilitated nine conference calls with analysts so Dennis Brestovansky, president and CEO of Aveso Displays, could share information about his company’s technology and the company vision.
The calls were very helpful for Aveso. In addition to educating this audience, we were also able to glean insight into the analysts’ perspective on the growth of the industry, competition and other dynamics influencing the market.
After the calls, we helped our client develop an “Analyst Reference Sheet.” This document includes quotes from several of the people we spoke with along with their phone numbers and e-mail addresses. When journalists are writing articles about Aveso and want a third-party perspective, we will send this reference sheet to them so they have a list of analyst experts to contact.
To learn more about securing analyst references and quote policies, please send us an e-mail. We enjoy working with these individuals and often help our clients build relationships with them.
As organizations continue to experience budget constraints due to the existing economic conditions, you may be tasked with re-evaluating your PR team as you plan for 2010. One of the most daunting questions you may encounter is whether to go with an in-house PR team, an external PR agency or a combination of the two. As you embark on making a decision about the type of PR team your company should employ, it’s important to understand the pros and cons of each approach before making a final decision.
Pros of an In-House Approach
One of the biggest advantages of having an in-house PR professional is that it can be more cost-effective. It’s very likely your company could hire a talented PR person for far less than the cost of paying an outside PR agency. Some of the other benefits include:
An in-house PR professional can wear multiple hats; perhaps handle marketing responsibilities in addition to PR.
An in-house PR professional can forge a close working relationship with employees within the organizations. Say you work for a high-profile company that receives a large volume of requests from the media. Because of the close relationship they’ve developed, in-house PR professionals know which experts to approach for each particular information request, making it easy for them to quickly respond to reporters’ questions.
Advantages of an Outside PR Agency
While hiring an internal PR person is critical in some cases, one of the major advantages of working with an outside PR agency is the bank of knowledge it allows you to tap into. For example:
With a PR agency, you don’t just get an individual; you get an entire team which collectively brings years of experience working on multiple accounts and a variety of media.
An agency team has the ability to brainstorm creative ideas, collectively address problems, and review each other’s materials, all of which help to ensure that your company strategically utilizes PR as effectively as possible.
The Hybrid Approach
While both the in-house and out-of-house approaches have their advantages, we believe that, if your organization can afford it, a hybrid approach – in which a company has an internal PR staff that works together with an outside agency – is the best solution for the following reasons:
A partnership between an internal PR team and an external PR agency helps to push PR efforts forward more seamlessly.
An internal staff that really understands PR enables organizations to manage their external PR agency more effectively.
Companies can accomplish their business objectives more quickly and nimbly than with either of the other two approaches.
Whether your organization hires an internal PR professional, a PR agency or uses a hybrid approach will depend largely on the size of your PR budget, the needs of your company and the degree of media interest in your organization. To learn more about how and what to evaluate when choosing a PR team, look for the next book excerpt blog post, which will provide more insight on what you should consider when evaluating prospective PR teams.
Excerpt from “Strategic Public Relations,” written by Jennifer Gehrt & Colleen Moffitt with Andrea Carlos
Are you struggling with how to help employees leverage Twitter for the benefit of your company? We have all heard stories of how employees have damaged a company’s brand via social media. However, marketing and communications executives have a tremendous opportunity to harness the power of social media to significantly benefit their organizations by enlisting the help of employees.
Consider Zillow. The provider of free real estate information is leveraging the power of Twitter to share trend information with consumers, report on celebrity home purchases and drive additional traffic to its Web site. Just do a search on Twitter and look at all the content about Zillow and you will see what I mean.
After looking at Zillow’s Twitter presence, we began thinking and researching best practices to motivate employees to tweet on behalf of the company. We came up with some interesting findings. Below you’ll find our five tips on how to harness the power of your employees on Twitter and other social media networks. After all, shouldn’t your employees all play a role in delivering the right messages about your company?
1. Establish some ground rules. Make sure employees know to only share information that is public. Ask employees to check in with you if they are uncertain about whether the information they want to share via Twitter or any other social networking platform is okay for public dissemination.
2. Provide your employees with education around best practices. Make sure your employees are familiar with best practices surrounding the use of Twitter. For instance, they should not be spamming followers with company marketing messages, but instead engaging with key audiences. Additionally, they shouldn’t use hash tags in an inappropriate manner and should also avoid slamming competitors, co-workers, etc.
3. Consider setting up consistent handles on Twitter. The Conway, Arkansas area Chamber of Commerce has set up consistent user names or handles on Twitter for 10 of its employees and it has been very effective. Jamie Gates, who is in charge of the Chamber’s social media effort TheChamberLife.com explains, “Our employees all have consistent Twitter usernames. For example, I am @chambergates. Other employees use @chambermary and @chamberbertj. We then encourage these employees to tweet positive updates about community events, services, special offers and other benefits that come from membership to the Chamber. We have had a great deal of success from this effort.”
4. Help your employees be effective. Each week, compile and send a note to your employees outlining five to 10 relevant stats or fun facts they can share about your company via Twitter. You can highlight informative articles about your company and ask your employees to share the links with their followers. Again, let them know that this content is for public dissemination and if they have other information that they want to share, they should get your approval first.
5. Remember you have to make it easy and fun. Lastly, if your employees are going to use Twitter on your company’s behalf you need to make it fun and easy for them. You also need to have faith that with the proper education and training your employees will make smart choices about what to share on social media networks. It is your job as the vice president of communications or marketing to help them understand the ground rules, arm them with content and monitor what is being said about your brand.
Clearly, before implementing any activity around social media the heads of communications departments need to consider their company’s business and communication needs carefully. It is also important to seek legal counsel to ensure all social media activity being asked of employees is in compliance with the law and your company’s policies.
We hope these tips are helpful as you look at leveraging the power of Twitter, Facebook and other social networks for your organization.