25 Social Media Tips

John Hope-Johnstone

 Buon giorno, ok I admit to being very very lazy this week on my blog post and I apologize. My excuse is jet lag (and I am sticking to it). So I have borrowed from the best. 25 social media tips from  a great blog from the UK, SEO Consult. I think SEO Consult have created a list of simple and unique tips that on the surface seem obvious but we often over look. Enjoy these tips while I go lie down and rest.

1. 1. Be objective. Start a campaign by asking yourself questions like: how do I measure success? Upon meeting the metrics, does the campaign stop or would it have further goals? Setting your goals beforehand avoids unnecessary guessing later on when you’re faced with two opposing decisions.
2. 2. Be on your best behavior. Everything you do gets recorded – sometimes permanently.
3. 3. Strive to be interesting. You want people to come back to your profile over and over.
4. 4. Maintain a lively discussion. Reply if people comment on your profile.
5. 5. Don’t make it difficult for people to give you feedback. Appreciate their feedback, be it positive or constructive.
6. 6. Interact with your fans. A contest or two every once in a while wouldn’t hurt. You can also try a few surveys.
7. Keep your profile current.
8. Choose a good username. Seriously.
9. Use services that will integrate all your social media applications together. For example, FaceBook can link with Twitter so that any status update on FaceBook reflects as a tweet.
10. Customize your landing pages. You don’t have to go with the drab default layouts. Many social media sites allow you to upload your own designs and layouts – take advantage of them.
11. Watch out for new entrants. You’ll never know what will be the next twitter or FaceBook.
12. Join many social media sites, but focus only on a few. Just like many things, it’s preferable to go for quality over quantity.
13. Organize your information. Company pictures, logos, portfolios, etc. should be in their proper places. You don’t want prospective clients getting lost in the employee pictures.
14. Don’t forget other Media.
15. Don’t forget to do website and search engine optimization.
16. Don’t overdo placing too many widgets and applications. You want them looking at your profile, not tickling yet another cute hamster.
17. Think about advertising with the social media site’s ad network.
18. Check – and recheck – your privacy settings.
19. Have a lot of patience. Your profile needs to build enough critical mass before it becomes profitable to maintain it.
20. Expand your network. Connect with peers and industry authorities.
21. Link to your social media site from your main company site, and vice versa.
22. You mean you don’t have a company site? Get one; social media sites are not a replacement for your main company site.
23. Make your social media site special by announcing exclusive deals and coupons only available there.
24. Profile your followers. See what your audience really consists of versus your expected target.
25. And lastly, remember the golden rule: do unto others what you want them done unto you. That means, don’t get all squeamish about following people – they need followers too just like you need them.

Next week, back to my own ideas. Thanks for reading, leave a comment.

Developing Community

John Hope-Johnstone

Bon jour, in past posts on this blog we have spoken about developing “community”  and its integral role for success of social media marketing.

 In marketing today we speak less about demographics and psychographics and more and more about “communities”. Communities have a common interest and that interest is usually coalesced through the action of “search’.

 ” A community is fundamentally an interdependent human system given form by the conversation it holds within itself.” (Peter Bloch).

In the past the term “community” has been relegated to forums and message boards. But with the rise of social media platforms such as facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Yelp and many many others the term community has become vague and loosely defined. These communities may exist only for a nana second

We have two choices with communities; to join an already established community (in the majority the is what we mostly do), or create a new community, either around a common interest or sharing of a particular bit of knowledge.

Today, we talk often about virtual communities and they exist dominantly for the sharing of knowledge. The Internet was formed for the sole purpose of the dissemination of knowledge and a majority of the communities of common interest are formed around a desire to discuss and disseminate certain knowledge. Fresh knowledge keeps the community growing and stable and so the community like a hungry beast must be kept fed with the fresh meat of knowledge.

Here are some of the types of communities people have enjoyed through these online connections. (Written by Sue Boetcher, Heather Duggan, Nancy White)

• Socialize – meeting people, playing around, sharing jokes, stories and just taking interest in each other. Communities like this often focus around bulletin boards and chat rooms. An example of such a community is Electric Minds at http://www.electricminds.org
• Work together (business) – Distributed work groups within companies and between companies use online community to build their team, keep in touch and even work on projects together. A very detailed description of how online work groups work can be found at http://www.awaken.com and http://www.bigbangworkshops.com .
• Work together (community – geographic) – Freenets (see the Freenet Directory) have offered local communities ways to communicate and work together. Some have even combined this with ISP service. Community groups such as soccer teams, school groups and others have used online community to provide forums for information and discussion, helping bring groups together.
• Work together (issues) – Virtual communities have been very important to people who share interests in issues and causes. Support groups for people dealing with certain diseases, causes such as politics or the environment, or people studying together, all can form a nucleus for an online community.
• Have topical conversations – Online salons and discussion forums such as the Well (http://www.well.com), Salon’s TableTalk (as of mid 2001 a paid subscription model) (http://www.salon.com), Cafe Utne (http://www.utne.com) and others have formed communities of people who enjoy conversations about topics and shared interests. ForumOne noted in 1999 that the top ten topics for forums registered at their site are around the topics of (in order): relationships (16%), “mega sites (diverse topics, aggregations of smaller conferences – 11%), business and finance (8%), health (5%), hobbies (4%), religion (3%), music (3%), international (3%). It would be interesting to revisit those stats at the start of 2002.

I want to add one more type of community and that is a social media community. Writing this post gave me pause to think about the communities in which I am involved. I don’t belong to a forum (I have in the past), I don’t belong to bulletin boards but I am involved with social media and social networking platforms. Here are some social media that I believe still should hold the title of community:

• Those who regularly follow my blog could be called a community (poor things)
• The Linkedin groups that I belong to and whose brains I pick religiously are a community.
• Although random, my facebook friends are a community.
• Twitter #Corvallis is a free flowing community looking for knowledge about the town of Corvallis. It ebbs and flows but none the less it is a community.

• I subscribe to various knowledge e-zines. I suppose all of my fellow subscribers are part of a community and we are asked to comment on the e-zine. It is a poor form of community but a community none the less. Then there are consumer

The key word for communities is a sense of “belonging” according to the author of the book The Art of Community by Jono Bacon. Part of that sense of belonging has to do with getting a tangible “reward” from the community. That reward can be entertainment, knowledge, friendship, support and even financial gain.

Communities are incredibly ethereal and tend to come and go at will. I believe that to try and overly structure them is a recipe for disaster, just let them be. Feed them and nourish them with knowledge but don’t try an control and over-structure them.

For the majority of us, we are going to find our community within the 800 pound guerillas of social media such as;  facebook and my space and linked in and Twitter. We tend to treat these communities rather casually when with a small amount of effort they can be powerful building tools for success.

There are two key elements about building your social media community that we often forget: 1) Build it with people who are key influencers in your world. 2) Be social: Introduce people, mentor people and help people get where they want to go. By doing this, you will build your own reputation and your community will prosper.

Well, this is a relatively short post as I am off to Rome. I will post again after I return. Thanks for reading and please add your comments.

Integrating Social Media Into Your Marketing Plan Pt.2

 

John Hope-Johnstone

Hello my friend, this post is part two about integrating social media into your overall marketing plan. In my first post regarding integrating social media,  I explained how and why social media fits under the heading of Public Relations. Today I would like to give some examples as to how it can all fit into one cohesive mess, (umm, I mean marketing plan). 

There are fundamentally two types of marketing: 1) Image. 2) Force. Image marketing builds a brand’s identity over a long period of time and provides a top of mind awareness for the brand. Force advertising requires that the consumer take some immediate action such as in a promotion or a sale. Public Relations and Social Media can be used effectively to drive both types of marketing. 

When used to support image marketing, social media would adopt and translate the main brand promise, (example) “We are a company that keeps children healthy” and delicately supports the message by having community managers use social media to give supporting messages showing that the company cares. This is done carefully and remembering that this is a SOCIAL conversation. The community must be behind and believe the concept that this company really does care about children. On top of this, the community must be searching on the Internet for things that “keep children healthy”. 

When using social media to support a ”force” marketing campaign, then the company is asking its consumers to take a specific action, right now!  In this case, PR & social media would take the promotional offer, find the community of common interest and the key search terms and have their community managers begin a conversation and create buzz that indicates that this promotion might have value to the community. Social media must also point to a response page on the brand’s Web site where the community can receive the value offered.

It is best to begin the social media promotion well in advance of the actual force advertising by a minimum of two weeks. Don’t forget that the term social media also includes your e-newsletters and as many of your suppliers e-newsletters as is possible. 

Think of your social media campaign as seeding the soil for the promotion. Getting the buzz started. Then add some more PR tools such as your e-newsletter or regular newsletter, giving them a link to the response mechanism for the promotion. Then use a Web media release tools such as PRWeb.com to get some good Internet and other media buzz going.

 To successfully integrate social media into a full spectrum marketing plan and not just be a “bolt on” as Kip Bodnar calls it, we must ask seven questions before completing the integrated marketing plan. I have liberally based them on work done by Kip Bodnar, with apologies to him for the additions by me: 

1: Are the psychographic profiles of the consumer being translated correctly and the same message being expounded by all the media in the marketing plan? 
2: Are these psychographic profiles being tested against popular search queries and modified where required? 
3: Are public relations, social media, direct marketing and advertising all working together to achieve the same search engine optimization goals?
4: Are social media platforms integrated into all sales materials, direct mail and advertising and the same base message being used by all?
5: Are future marketing strategies being developed and tested with all disciplines in mind?
6: Which marketing functions are “bolted on” and can they brought into the fold?
7: Is there one overriding measurement for success for the marketing plan? (Yes, I know there will be many little ones). 

Answer those seven questions and you will have gone a long way to integrating social media into your overall marketing strategy. I would love you hear about your examples or ideas on this topic, please leave a comment. Thanks for reading this post, there will be another post next week.

Monitoring Your Social Media

John Hope-Johnstone

Hello my friend, well here we are once again chatting about social media. I hope you had (or are having) a wonderful Holiday Season and that 2010 will be a great year for you!

Today I would like to talk with you about “monitoring” your social media efforts. A while back I wrote several well received posts about “measuring” your social media. Monitoring and measuring might seem to be the same but they are not. Monitoring reminds us, or warns us, about something that needs to be  corrected. Measuring allows us to estimate by comparison if we are getting ahead or not. So in this post we are going to chat about monitoring.

There are literally hundreds of social media monitoring programs out there. Basically they are task oriented search engines that present their information using different dashboards. Like so many monitoring devices, including our bathroom scales, it is not how perfectly the scale reports your weights’ gain or loss but the fact that you use the same scale to weigh yourself each time you step on it, so you know if you are going up or down.

The following list was compiled by one of my favorite sites with a few additional comments from moi. We have divided the monitoring platforms into:

1.Brand Monitoring
2.Macro Blog Monitoring
3.Micro Blog Monitoring
4.Buzz Monitoring
5.Message Board Monitoring
6.Multi-Media Search
7: Feed Aggregators

Brand Monitoring:

HowSociable? – A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics

Addict-o-matic – A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence

socialmention – A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms ( blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ’social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.

Macro Blog Monitoring

TECHNORATI Search – Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.

TECHNORATI Advanced – Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.

Google Blog Search – Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria.

IceRocket – Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!

BlogPulse – Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Micro Blog Monitoring: 

Digg – Social Bookmarking, mainly for news, images and videos

StumbleUpon – Social bookmarking – general cool stuff

Delicious – Social bookmarking

Twitter Search – Search keywords on Twitter which “self-refreshes”. See what’s happening — ‘right now’.

Twitter Advanced Search - I use this a great deal to finding tweets that are asking for help in social media and hence make new friends.

Twitstat – Twitter Tweitgeist – Tag cloud for last 500 Tweets

TweetScan – search for words on Twitter

Twit(url)y – see what people are talking about on Twitter

Hashtags – Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags

TweetBeep – Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time.

Twitrratr – Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative

TweetMeme – View the most popular Twitter threads occurring now.

TwitScoop – Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual and creates a tag cloud.

FriendorFollower - Find out who you are following but they are not following you, a useful growth monitor on Twitter.

Klout.com- Will rank your Twitter presence in a quadrant to show where you are. Fun but not serious.

Buzz Monitoring:

Google Trends – shows amount of searches and Google news stories

Trendpedia – Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs.

BlogPulse Trends – Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT)

Omgili Charts – Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums.

eKstreme – blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us.

Message Board Monitoring:

BoardTracker – tracks words in forums

BoardReader – Search multiple message boards and forums.

Omgili – Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on “many to many” user generated content platforms, such as, forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others. Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions.

Google Groups – Searches usenet groups.

Yahoo! Groups – Searches all Yahoo! Groups.

Trend Monitoring

Google Trends – Search trends and see search volume by country and region.

Wordtracker Keywords – Displays average daily search volume of a given keyword or phrase.

FACEBOOK LEXICON – Displays volume of wall postings for specific term(s). Similar to Google Trends. Not great with obscure terms.

Google Keyword Tool – Generate keyword ideas for related keywords and search volumes.

WebCEO – Keyword tracking, SEO tool and charting search phrase usage by month.

Multimedia Search

MetaCafe – High-traffic video search engine.

Google Advanced Video Search – Search for videos, what else?

Truveo – Aggregate video search engine. Search videos from YouTube, MySpace, and AOL.

Viral Video Chart – Displays top 20 most-viewed video (1, 7, 365 days). Includes view counts and charting.

Guardian’s Viral Video Chart – Weekly roundup of what’s excellent on the web

Feed Aggregator

Yahoo Pipes – Feed aggregator and manipulator. Set up pipes for news alerts and overviews.

Thank you for reading this post. There are many more monitoring platforms out there and if you have a favorite then please make a comment to this post and I would appreciate it very much. It is not the platform you use to monitor your social media work but how consistantly you track your progress and which tools you put together to read the results. Next week I will post on how to put some of these platforms together to get a good picture of your social media program. Thanks for reading!!

Integrating Social Media Into Your Marketing Plan

Social media does not stand alone as a marketing tool. To reach the consumer you must use all the marketing tools you can afford to be heard above all the noise. Advertising, Promotion, Direct Sales, Public Relations, Brand Management etc., all are particular channels used to reach the consumer’s brain. Social media is a sub-channel of Public Relations.

I call social media a “sub-channel” because it falls under the heading of Public Relations. Under Public Relations there should be a sub-heading entitled “communications plan”. In this section you might address the various touch points where your business comes into contact with the consumer and helps to define the message you are going to present. It is within the communications plan that “social media and social networking” must reside.

If your “communications plan” doesn’t exist right now, it might be a good idea to go and speak to the people that talk to you customers: Your sales team or your customer support team. Find out what they are hearing from your consumers and turn that into your communications plan. If you don’t have either of these departments then head on out and speak to the customers directly. Once you have developed the outline of a good communications plan and know the messages you want to deliver, then you are ready to integrate social media.

I define Public Relations in my book “How to Market Tourism in the 21^st Century” as being “the development of social, political and market capital through third party endorsements. The value of PR lies in capturing and reproducing it, so it lives forever!”

In the same book I define the seven “publics” of public relations as being:

1)    Press Relations

2)    Employee Relations

3)    Community Relations

4)    Educator Relations

5)    Consumer Relations

6)    Stakeholder Relations

7)    Management Relations

Social media and social networking still have as their key task to influence these seven publics although today we tend to speak more about “communities of common interest”. In the past these might have been also called “niche” markets. The only difference is that today there are millions more thanks to search.

Think of social networking as simply ordinary networking on steroids. Your CEO networks in his/her own way with the board and with the financial backers of the organization as well as many other groups. The VP of Sales belongs to civic clubs and professional organizations and various other entities where he/she can meet the consumer in a social setting. Social networking using social media is exactly the same as going to a Rotary lunch it is a part of the public relations tool of marketing.

In general, you have to consider social media as a commitment to creating content, communication, and interaction that keep your customers top of mind. It encourages them to reach out to you and each other.

For the Public Relations part of your marketing plan, ask yourself how each piece of outbound communication might create more inbound dialogue from your customers, buzz only exists if it is repeated three times. Is your email campaign opening the door to people joining your online community? Are your press releases telling a story about customer experience and encouraging people to find you online? Are your tweets gaining re-tweets and driving people to your Web site. Stop thinking in terms of start and end dates, and rather how to keep the cycle of communication feeding upon itself, outbound to inbound and back again.

At the end of this road is the goal of how many people are being driven to your Web site, which is the holy grail of the online marketing efforts.

As I have written in my post “How to Measure Social Media” that the key of social media is to drive people to your point of online sale which is your Web site. This can be gauged through any good analytic program on your Web site.

It sickens me when I hear management state “we are going to cut back on marketing because times are tough, and we will go with social media because it’s cheap” Or even more stupid; “We should really tack on some social media stuff to this campaign.” For many companies it is a big surprise to learn that implementing social media takes careful planning, dedication, and long term commitment. It’s not something you can just slap on the tail end of a marketing plan when the budget gets cut. Yes, the tools themselves might be less expensive but that can be an illusion, but done properly, social media requires a deep investment of time and personnel.

Marketing plans should be built on the backs of sound business goals, not social networking goals. If you look at social media as a tool to drive people to your Web site and place it properly under the heading of Public Relations then your marketing plan will be efficient, effective and will produce the results you desire from social media.

Social Media Writing VS Corp Speak

John Hope-Johnstone

 

Buonas tardes my friend, to be successful in social media writing you need to be more conversational in style. Good social media (aka conversational writing) is good journalistic writing with just a tad more personal approach added to it. 

A key would be to write as if the pyramid was inverted and always begin with the conclusion. 

One of the first things I learned about conversational writing came from Dr. Jakob Nielsen as quoted in a slide share by Lisa Forner. He indicated that the first thing to learn about conversational writing is your reader. You, my dear reader, are not sitting down with a good book (God knows), you are looking for something. So here is what Dr. Nielsen has to say about you: 

1. You have a short attention span (oops lost you)
2. You are interactive by nature (better put a link in)
3. You are a reader on a mission (you may have found me through a search query so I better put a lot of key words in my blog)

Having read this I now realize that my blogs (often over 1,000 words) are way beyond your limited time span. I write my blogs to be turned into books, so they do tend to be too long in nature (sorry). “A wall of text is deadly for an interactive reader and is intimidating, boring and painful to read” says Dr Nielsen, and I agree with him. 

A search about “conversational writing” brings up very little… but the search “social media writing” brings up many good tips:  Muhammad Saleem.  

1.  Start with the familiar: Introduce your article by drawing from a source that you think the social media audience will relate to and is interested in. Pop culture will often provide the perfect hook.
2. Introduce the unfamiliar: Once you’ve established a relationship with the reader by finding common ground, you can introduce your topic (i.e. the analysis or educational aspect of your article).
3. Connect the two: Once you have established common ground and introduced your insight, you need to connect the two. This makes your content easy to understand and digest for the readers, but also easy to remember, comment on and apply to their own lives.

Here is an excellent tip from Eric Brantner 

• Be Conversational- The key word in social media is “social.” Get rid of the stiff, boring content that lacks personality. Bring your readers into the conversation. Talk to the readers just like you would if you were sitting next to them face to face. An interactive, personal tone will generate buzz for your content.

I would like to add a few suggestions of my own (don’t moan): 

1. Where possible write in the first person and  speak directly to the reader (singular) 
2. This second point is very unpopular but I am going to say it anyway (heretic): Don’t dumb down your writing unless you want dumb followers. English is a vast and rich language, use it
3. I believe that Twitter and other micro blogs are making people précis their thoughts and this is very good (I know, I know, take my own advice)
4. A question is often more powerful than a statement
5. Précis, précis, précis (then shorten it)
6. What is your goal in writing the post? 
7. Have you filled it with key words and have you completed a key word analysis? 
8. Have you placed internal and external links in the article? 
9. Does your post grab the reader with short easy to remember content? 
10. Is your content easy to absorb on the computer or smart phone screen?  This could include:

• Bullet points
• Subheadings (search engines appreciate this to help with indexing as well as any reader being able to grasp the articles intention from an initial skim reading)
• Interesting quotes

Thanks for reading this post, please add any thoughts you may have on writing for social media.  I am off on a cruise (lucky me) and will post in a couple of weeks.

Losing The “Social” of Social Media

Bonjour my friend, I was asked today (and just about every day) to join some organization’s facebook fan page by someone I know. This presumes: A) I like the person making the suggestion. B) I like the organization that has the fan page. C) That joining the fan page has some benefit, which admittedly some do but many don’t.

I know there are some excellent and informative “fan” pages on face book but we often lose the “social” part of social media when we transfer over to a “fan” page.

I believe that the key to brand promotion on social media is making a connection and getting to know and respecting individuals who, by the way, happen to work for a particular brand. We are allowed to get to know these people with an “ambient intimacy”. With a profile page we learn to virtually know and respect that person and then we have a better chance of accepting the brand. Having only a “fan” page is just not going to do that for some of us, there is no virtual intimacy.

Many organizations that I know and respect (and some I have worked with) have fan pages on facebook. I have recommended to them that this was the safe way to go to avoid the facebook police closing their profile pages. Some of them are doing some interesting things such as events, polls and special announcements, all of which creates value when you go to their fan page. However, we have to ask, how will a fan page effect the brand Web site’s analytics? Will people get enough information from a well developed fan page so that they will not want to move onto a brand’s Web site?

 Here is what we suggest: If you are thinking of opening a face book fan page: 1) Make sure that there is value in the fan page 2) Keep your profile page and increase the number of brand angels that have profile pages and have them help people find the “fan” page by promoting the “value proposition” not the page. 3) : Make sure the fan page sells the brand’s Web site?

Here is what I recommend for brand managers: Maintain you brand’s personal profile pages for brand angels but limit the brand message and number of friends to under 1,000 and increase the social networking aspect of profile pages. When people like a person they are more likely to be receptive to the brand.

Yes, I am starting a brand page for HPR Public Relations & Social Media but I won’t give up my personal facebook page because that’s how people get to know me

Please let me know your thoughts and comments, thanks for reading.

Public Relations & Social Media..The Hook

Bom dia my friend. Today I want to seseseses you about the “Public Relations” aspect of social media and social networking.

As I have written in past posts, social media falls under the marketing category of “Public Relations”. In my book “How to Market Tourism in the 21st Century” (shameless plug), I define Public Relations as “the development of social, political and market capital through third party endorsements.”  I believe few other marketing tools are better equipped to accomplish this task than Social Media and Social Networking.

The direction of this post is concentrated on developing “hooks” in your writing whether it be blogs or tweets or a press releases.

Public Relations does not refer to one “public” but to at least seven:

1. Media relations
2. Employee relations
3. Community relations
4. Educator relations
5. Consumer relations
6. Stakeholder relations
7. Management relations

Let’s start this series of blogs by talking about media relations.

The rise of the Internet, and in particular the rise of “search” has effected all seven “publics” but perhaps none more than media relations. (It is strange that media has effected media). This is happening while traditional media is in serious decline. In the following few paragraphs I will be using a couple of slides from an excellent Webinar from PRWeb. 

There are more people getting their news from the Internet sources and bloggers than from newspapers and TV today as SEO guru Greg Jarboe demonstrated at a PRWeb Webinar in November with the following slides:

Circulation Dropping

Blogs vs Mainstream

As Greg Jarboe explained; a Web media release generates 3 times more Web site visits than the same report on ABC News.

You have to ask yourself, are you looking for interested eyeballs that actually “open” your release and read it or the possibility of an “impression” by someone who is interested in a magazine or a certain TV show but not necessarily your product.

Magazines don’t have staff writers any more (or very few), and the free-lance stringers will very rarely even interview you in person. In fact most questions are being asked and answered over Twitter.

However, obtaining media attention has not changed. What has changed in public relations are the platforms. In PR using social media, you still want to influence and engage the media and you still want to gain authenticity through third-party endorsements..this requires the use of “hooks”. 

Hooks:
I am going to quote from an excellent article about hooks by Pam Lontos regarding how can you differentiate yourself from your competitors in troubled economic times?

The best way, Pam claims,  to attract more clients and customers is to create a level of celebrity for your brand that only the media can bring, and because today’s media are more fragmented than ever before, you will need to reach out via many different platforms.

While each media do things a bit differently and cover different topics, one thing will remain consistent when it comes to you getting coverage: The hook.

Even though one publication may appeal to a narrow audience, or an Internet news site may focus on a single topic, or a radio talk show treat just one subject line – even with that reality, you can still appeal to them all if you have a great hook.

 What is a hook? It’s the angle, the concept that can be boiled down to a few words that make the reader or listener tingle with anticipation about what comes next. In a way, your hook is the bait, like a headline that makes someone want to read the whole story.

 You may adapt your hook when moving from one medium to the next, but its core essence will remain the same. Suppose, for instance, your expertise is in helping business and organization leaders produce better results through a focused, fired-up and capably led workforce.

For a press release about why business leaders should consider corporate culture and employees’ perspectives during mergers and acquisitions, the merger of Northwest and Delta became the hook. The release was successfully pitched as “Why Delta/Northwest Merger is a Bad Idea.” This hook resulted in two interviews with major city newspapers according to Pam Lontos .

 But that same hook could also be used to approach a syndicated how-to columnist or a general-interest magazine editor with a more consumer-oriented twist on the idea, such as “How to Reduce Your Pink-Slip Chances When Your Company Merges.” Or you could write a feature or op-ed article such as “The Delta/Northwest Merger: What They Didn’t See Coming.”

 You can get a lot of mileage from a single hook. Just remember to keep your hook angled to what the media are looking for.  (End of Pam’s excellent article).

I have used hooks for many key promotions over the years. Let’s face it, most products are basically boring, except to their owners, it’s the hook that makes it interesting. Sometimes I feel I should buy a stamp that says “boring” and bang it down on silly, boring products. The hook is what makes it sizzle.

The product when presented to the media either over the Internet or by old-time press releases needs to be presented with the angle of a hook.

Back in the day I had to promote the opening of a beautiful night club called “Darlings” at a Four Seasons Hotel. Now you would think that just letting the press know that a new night club was opening, especially at a Four Seasons Hotel, would bring the press out. Well, possibly but the article would come out after the event and the opening is what creates biz buzz.  Also, there were two other clubs opening almost at the same time hence diluting our story. What would our hook be?

Our hook was a pre-opening promotion playing on the name of the club “Darlings” that generated a lot of “buzz” and press all by itself.

 Three months prior to opening we created two mailing lists; first list consisted of upwardly mobile young men; the second, of upwardly mobile young women.

After creating the two lists we mailed what looked like hand written little notes (they were actually printed) to each sex, saying “I miss you Darling” and the next, “I want you Darling” and the next; “Meet me Darling”.  The final mailing was a beautiful invitation that said “Meet Me Tuesday Night for the opening of “Darlings”.

We didn’t have to generate press, the public flooded the post office to find out who was mailing these notes. Couples threatened to sue if they found out. Headlines read “Public Want’s to Know Who is Sending Love Notes?”

There were 2,700 people lined up to get into the Darlings night club on opening night (club only would hold 500). It was the hook that created the press and the buzz.

More on PR and Social Media next week. Thanks for reading the blog and please leave a comment of any great “hook” stories you might have.

Virtual Town Hall Meetings

Good day: I enjoy writing to you each week about social media at the 45,000 ft level, but I have to confess that I am not as comfortable writing about the day to day use of the social media platforms. I have wonderful people working with me who are far more knowledgeable about creating good facebook pages etc.

However, a friend of mine is trying to develop a town hall meeting format for his constituents and it made me wonder which social media platforms would work best for him?

Preaching to the masses:

People using social media for town hall gatherings sometimes consider that facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc., are mass media, which they are not! They are designed more for a rifle approach.

I am not speaking about your 2,000 friends on facebook or your 1,400 followers on Twitter. A shout-out about something like a town hall meeting would certainly hit a lot of people but you are preaching to the choir.

For most of our sermons, (to follow the preaching analogy), this is fine, but if we want to hit a bunch of folks we have never met before and have them join us in a one time conversation, it doesn’t work all that well.

I expect you have been doing social networking all your life. You most likely have belonged to a civic club or a young professional’s organization, something that allows you to meet new people and develop business contacts. These are great, but would you call them “mass marketing”? All that the new social media, powered by search technology, has done is placed your civic club on steroids, that’s all.

If you are going to want to reach the masses and ask them to have a dialogue, you are going to need to begin by using mass media, (TV, Newspaper, e-newsletters etc). You will use it to announce your intentions to have a town hall meeting and ask them if they would like to join you this Sunday at 3pm and to please send questions.

President Obama advanced the concept of virtual town hall meetings by using video streaming and perhaps it is one of the best ways to have a town hall.  A simple way of doing it is via http://www.ustream.tv/ using a simple Web cam and laptop and it can be shared on facebook and other social media platforms. Questions can come in via phone or via text (suggest text, easier to edit).

However, you still need to shout-out to the masses that you are going to be on- line, unless you just want the choir.

Preaching to the Choir:

If preaching to the choir is exactly what you want to do (and not the masses), how do you develop a reasonable number of followers?

I add 10-20 new friends or followers onto my social media platforms on a daily basis. How do I find these new people? I am madly in love with http://search.twitter.com/advanced  this is the advanced search engine for twitter and allows me to find tweets that related to social media strategy. I can even drill down and only find people who are asking questions about social media strategy, then I can help them.

If you know of someone and want to follow them, and have them eventually follow you, then Twellow Pages from Twitter is a great search tool for you.

After I give a speech, I will quite often search for key people at the conference via Twellow pages, or facebook’s search , or, although it’s rather unfriendly, facebook’s advanced search.

 I hope you have found this to be of some small use. Please leave a comment or a suggestion for a better way to reach the masses for a town hall or build you own critical number of followers.

Next week, Public Relations and Social Media. I really appreciate you reading this blog and hope you will come back again.

Measuring Social Media Performance Pt.2

John Hope-Johnstone

 

Hola my friend, in the last post we discussed “one way” of reporting the positive effects of your social media campaign. 

I suggested to you that to be effective with your social media campaign, the increased number of friends, followers or subscribers in social media should be affecting the number of unique users of your brand Web site, as recorded by your Web analytics. If this can’t be proved then I would suggest that the social media department will someday be in trouble. You must prove that you create a positive effect on the bottom line.

I recommended that your report could begin with a “Value Statement” that would read something like this:

September Value Statement:

“During the month of September 2009, the social media department increased social media (SM) followers by 43% compared to September 2008, which drove and additional 750 new SM users to the brand Web site compared to a year ago or a 35% increase in SM conversion to the Web site.

Using the standard 20% conversion rate for the site, this means that the social media department increased sales by a possible 150 units at an average of $720 per unit resulting in $108,000 in new revenue. 

Social Media Report

Ok, so you have a “Value Statement” and you have shown the increase (or decrease growth) in the numbers that drive people to the mother ship (brand Web site) to hopefully convert into a sale. Now you need to go into your Analytics and find the numbers for each of the SM platforms and show that you are not speaking incorrectly. The following “snap” does NOT relate to the above spread sheet but it will give you an idea of what I am speaking about, you just need to repeat it for the other SM platforms and you have got yourself a nice little report:

Facebook Stats

Now my friend, let me repeat, the numbers you see at the left snapshot from Google Analytics will not measure up to the Excel spreadsheet at the top. It is just offered as an example, so no comments about “bad math” etc.

Is this the definitive report for SM, nope, but it is a really good start. This is your bottom line report. This is the one that will keep the bean counters happy and upper management off your back.

Next week we need to talk about some of the softer reporting tools. Social media can do so much to enhance a reputation of a brand as being a great corporate and world citizen that this MUST be pursued and quantified. More next week.

If you would like a one on one coaching Webinar to help prepare a Social Media Strategy and develop a reporting tool for your organization then shoot me an email. It is very cost effective. johnhopejohnstone@gmail.com

 

 Many thanks for reading, please leave a comment or a suggestion. You are the best!!!

HPR