Social Media and Media Relations: Like PR’s Peanut Butter and Jelly

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How many times did you check your favorite social media channels today? I’m willing to bet it’s definitely more than one, and if you’re anything like the average person, it’s probably more around 14 – and that’s just Facebook. Even if you haven’t reached the point of constant connection, social media is a big part of everyday life.

In the professional world, social media is a great resource for info gathering. Most of us are on at least a network or two, and given the time we spend on said networks, we leave a trail of facts and tidbits about ourselves that can be useful for taking care of business. Competitors can suss each other out, business development pros can track and connect with leads, fashion influencers can gauge the style tendencies of the season – the list goes on. It’s stalking, really. I don’t mean this in the literal, creepy sense, of course; it’s a jargon-y terms that explains how we employ Twitter and the like to learn about the people around us.

In PR specifically, social media is an invaluable tool when it comes to connecting with members of the media and building strong relationships. While excellent for tracking down specific contacts, media databases like Vocus and Cision don’t always give us the robust and ongoing information on journalists their own social channels can. Social media is also a fantastic way to talk with consumers and efficiently manage communications – any good PR strategy should include social media presence, after all. Social Media Today reports that between 2012 and 2013, brands using social media to respond to customers increased by 143%, and 71% of consumers are likely to view a brand in a positive light and recommend it to peers when they receive satisfactory communication through social media. With that in mind, platforms like Twitter – definitely the holy grail of making media connections – are indispensable resources in a successful PR pro’s box of tricks. Here are a few key best practices to keep in mind:

  • Spot trends: Twitter has easy trends to follow on its sidebars, which can be tailored to your city, the location of key influencers– wherever you’d like. However, that’s just the beginning when it comes to your ability to track trends and current events on the network – plus, the “suggested” trends are often dominated by non sequitur topics. Follow news organizations from hyperlocal to international, sync up with journalists you’ve worked with or have collaborated with in the past, connect with fellow publicists and look to movers in shakers in industries relevant to your clients  – these people will be on their game when it comes to current events that matter to you.

Once armed with this information, think about how you can pull together a creative and impactful pitch that piggybacks on current events and will be all the more likely to catch a journalist’s eye. Is a writer at a big fitness publication talking about gluten-free foods that actually taste great? Did the health food brand you work with just roll out a new line of GF treats? Bingo.

  • Make friends: Journalists are people, and people are more likely to work with others they know and trust. So, use Twitter to “make friends” with media people you’d like to collaborate with. Understand who they are, what interests them both inside and outside of work, what they like to write about, and even their “voice.” Engage with their content and ask questions – genuinely, of course. Don’t pretend you’re an expert on nuclear fusion because you want a writer to cover something in Scientific America.
  • Do your research: Continuing on the trend spotting component of Twitter, it’s important for PR pros to have a handle on what’s going on in the world. However, PR being an extremely busy profession by nature, it can be hard to stay on top of news. Twitter is perfect for quick updates – its snackable content gets to the point, and if something piques your interest, you can choose to take additional time to read more.
  • “Listen” and learn: Targeted “social listening,” or monitoring social channels for topics that relate to your industry, is a great way to track sentiment. Social listening can help you out when:
  1. You’re dealing with a cool launch, a big announcement or a crisis comms situation. It’s a quick and direct path to connecting with the consumers talking about your brand or product. Simply type a search term, or better yet, a hashtag, in your Twitter search box and voila – hundreds of conversations at your fingertips. From there, you can plan responses and next steps, build a social sentiment report, or plan for a follow-up campaign.
  2. You’re running a social media campaign or contest with a special hashtag, this will give you an easy rundown of how quickly the Twitterverse is picking up on your content.
  3. You’re trying to build a quality follower base. Use social listening to find conversations that make sense to become engaged in – give opinions, retweet good points, and ask your community for their input. As like-minded users see you sharing their content, it’s likely they’ll return the favor somewhere down the line and earn you a new follower. For more advanced brands, this is a great way to find brand advocates – bloggers, industry leaders, and the like. If a conversation takes off or they tweet something that indicates they’re the perfect match for a brand or product, a publicist can take that cue and make a connection outside of social media.

PR pros, how else do you use Twitter and other social networks to enhance your skills and effectiveness?

Top Marketing and Communications Trends for 2014: Part Two

 

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Curious about what new marketing and communication trends 2014 will bring? In part one of this post, we identified three key trends for the New Year: social media becoming pay-for-play, branded journalism, and wearable technology and the Internet of Things. Today, we’ll discuss three more trends.

Collaborative economy:  Crowd sourcing, crowd funding, crowd storming: Fab, AirBnB, Uber, TaskRabbit. These are all examples of the collaborative economy. Recent advances in technology like mobile, social, 3D printers and the Internet of Things are empowering people and businesses to share existing resources with each other rather than buy anew or reinvent the wheel. It’s a simple, but revolutionary concept. The collaborative economy was a huge trend in 2013, but is likely to grow in 2014 and marketers should challenge themselves to think about how they can leverage it. ‘My Starbucks Idea’ is a good example of how a brand creatively harnessed the power of crowdsourcing, not only for marketing, but to innovate their business.

Anticipatory computing – This is the act of serving up information a person wants before they even know to ask for it. Mobile users have been checking into their locations, listening to music on their phones, and updating ical events for years. Now, companies like Foursquare and Circle are using the data from these mobile interactions to tailor suggestions specific to the user, which effectively means that your smartphone could dictate your preferences and purchases.

For example, Foursquare is rolling out push notification recommendations to help users find what’s happening in their area. People who opt-in to the push notifications will get suggestions on where to eat or what to do in their neighborhoods. I predict that this idea will proliferate in 2014, and will have a significant impact on advertising and marketing.

Super fans as marketers: The idea of engaging an audience that is already passionate about your brand isn’t new, but social media makes ‘super fans’ even more valuable. It’s easier than ever before to find and reach super fans, and they have a menagerie of tools at their fingertips to evangelize their brand affinities.

A recent Mashable article stated that a Facebook friend is now worth about $174, which 28% higher than 2012, and that figure is expected to increase. Online friends are clearly valuable, but if recommendations from Facebook friends are worth almost $200, what’s the value of a recommendation from a real-live friend? Super fans can be a brand’s secret weapon, not only because of their power online, but also offline.

As we progress through the age of the ‘super fan,’ marketers will enlist these ‘assets’ to market and sell for them, both online and in-person. Here’s an example: Pepsi rewarded selected Beyoncé fans who created videos based on the singer’s latest commercial with the chance to appear in a video made with her choreographer, as well as a trip to her concert in Brooklyn. Smart.

What do you think will be the major marketing trends in 2014? Tell us in the comments.

Why You Should Use Infographics to Communicate Visually

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For a business, it is important to send the right message to your audience, but it is equally important that the audience can understand your message. After all, not everyone is an expert. Today, any individual can access the Internet and find very specific answers to very specific questions, but if their questions involve you or your message, how do you know that they’ll remember that information?

Information graphs or “infographs” are visual tools that communicate information simply and aesthetically. They take profuse and in-depth knowledge and present it clearly and concisely through visual representation. Infographs typically contain statistical information about a specific topic or field of work, but have also been adapted to communicate themes and ideas as well.

The value of infographics as a communication tool can be attributed to the way our brain processes information. For instance, right now you’re reading this article, line by line, taking in everything in the chronological order it was written. Because we read in a linear pattern, our brain cannot process information faster than we can supply it. The brain can process visual information up to 60,000 times faster than text, however. When you look at a picture of, let’s say a beach, every element of the photo is interpreted simultaneously, so you know the image is of a beach. Even when viewed separately, say separate images of palm trees, sand, or waves, you can infer that a beach is connected to these themes. However, after just describing a beach to you, you had to process that information linearly (e.g. palm trees -> sand -> waves = probably a beach).

Infographics are a valuable communication tool. When communicating with your audience, as a business or otherwise, an infograph brings a level of professionalism and expertise in a given topic through your ability to clearly convey complex data or information. Additionally, people want more visual content. In fact, there has been an 800 percent increase in “infographic” searches on Google throughout the past two years. The viral potential for visual content is at its highest. Who knows, maybe your next infographic could be your breakout in Internet immortality.

Hospitality Marketing: Going Mobile in the Digital Age

Hotel management consultant Robert A. Rauch of R.A. Rauch & Associates recently hosted his second annual Hotel Forecast and Digital Marketing Conference with additional presentation by e-marketer Adam Brownstein. Brownstein is co-founder of buuteeq, a firm that provides a digital marketing system for hotels. Both presentations offered great food for thought for hospitality marketers.

In his opening, Rauch boldly stated that the information age is over and that we have entered a “digital tsunami age.” He explained that the hospitality landscape is evolving quickly as customers increasingly turn to online and mobile platforms for all forms of communication, sharing, planning and booking. But, now more than ever, the digital landscape is also driving all aspects of customer service and engagement, before, during and after a trip.

Brownstein later noted that while mobile traffic makes up 15 percent of current hotel website traffic volumes, smartphone activity has tripled in the last year alone. Approximately 30 percent of website traffic and 65 percent of same-day hotel reservations now come via mobile phones. He also noted that 57 percent of mobile users will not recommend a hotel with a bad mobile site.

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What makes a good mobile site? In a nutshell, it should automatically deliver a tailored experience. A few ways to accomplish this include:

  • Resizing and compressing images and enlarging text
  • Displaying contact information prominently
  • Linking seamlessly to maps
  • Not using outdated flash technology
  • Using a mobile optimized booking engine
  • Running mobile-only promotions to target on-the-go travelers with last-minute deals

But having a mobile site is only one piece of the puzzle. Both Rauch and Brownstein agreed that in today’s instantaneous speed of ingesting information, a hotel’s main site and mobile site also should:

  • Not skimp on high-quality photos! Photos sell a hotel even before marketing copy, with nearly 73 percent of users clicking on photos of rooms after visiting the homepage.
  • Keep things simple. As soon as a guest decides a site requires too much focus, effort, or time to find what they need, they will likely move on with without booking a room.

More advice for hoteliers included making sure their brand is on social media, and providing guests the opportunity to book through every applicable platform, such as the hotel’s Facebook page. Rauch also recommended that hotels integrate their TripAdvisor feed on their website. His reasoning? TripAdvisor is a great driver of bookings but also a leak. When potential guests are forced to leave a hotel’s site to read reviews of the property, they end up also reading the competitions’. Lastly, while TripAdvisor is still the leading trusted source of travel reviews, Rauch said to keep an eye on Google. The relentless competitor has made strong forays in hospitality and therefore hotels should at the very least have a presence on Google+ and Google Places.

The lessons imparted by Rauch and Brownstein can be applied to just about any business. Is yours effectively capturing today’s digital generation?

Hashtags: You’re Doing it Wrong

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You just wrote a solid 115-character quip on your deeper analysis of a common observation that you’re sure will get at least five retweets and a handful of favorites from your followers. But you have 140 characters worth of space. You can’t just waste 25 characters, but the current draft already reflects perfect wording. What do you do? Of course! Add a hashtag!

That seems to be the thought process behind many of the tweets I see stream across my somewhat-cluttered Twitter stream. As a professional communicator, it’s bothersome that these tweeters don’t have the courtesy to ask themselves, “How does this add value to my message for my followers?” Meaningless hashtags are so prevalent that I considered whether or not the majority of tweeters understand what a hashtag is and its purpose. It’s not as absurd a question as I thought, made apparent when lifelong broadcaster and Emmy Award recipient Vin Scully asked “What is hashtag?” on live TV.

The simple answer to Scully’s question, of course, is a search indexing tool for Twitter that allows the site to more easily sort messages focused on a specific topic. The hashtag allows for a collective discussion around a single topic, whether it be a conference or trade show, current event of interest to masses of people, or an informational theme such as “dailymotivation” or “fitnesstips.” This helps the Twitter community build their social network with people who provide content they’d enjoy.

But just how the use of texting has evolved from its initial purpose as it’s been adopted, so too has the hashtag.

We’ve seen the “hashtag as the punch line of a joke” tweets. Ending a message about a trip to Dog Beach might be #Wetdogsmellairfreshener. Capping off a confession of love for Nutella we could expect #NoreallyIcouldeatNutellaateverymeal. Or concluding an observation of road workers sitting down on their lunch break someone might announce #Mytaxdollarsarepayingforyoutoeatasandwich. I’m not convinced others will search any of those hashtags with interest in joining the conversation.

Then there are hashtags that were invented specifically so that anyone interested can join the conversation and offer an opinion. These are hashtags like #WeCan’tDateIfYou and #ThingsshorterthanKimKardasiansmarriage. Rather than being a reactionary product to something else, there is no reasoning for these hashtags to exist beyond the fact that they can exist.

The variations of hashtags are so vast that, in their quest for constant irony as a counter culture, hipsters adopted the hashtag #hashtag. Is it ironic? More like self defeating.

So are hashtags a trend? Will they go the way of Ed Hardy T-shirts and Von Dutch trucker hats?

Essentially, as online conversing continues to become the status quo, the hashtag is showing characteristics of natural language. People are manipulating, misusing and experimenting with it. They’re the opposite of a trend because they’re not one thing and are constantly evolving. In that sense, I guess, explaining the “right” way to use a hashtag is like explaining the right way to deliver a joke or what facial expression is correct for the subject of discussion. You can’t define what’s “right.” In the same way you can’t stop that one co-worker from winking after each sarcastic statement he makes, you can’t stop tweeters from hashtagging every other word in their message. But you can unfollow them. #Winning

Four PR Trends

trendsLooking at past trends in an evolving industry can be a poor predictor of future trends—whether you’re talking about the stock market or the PR field.

Witness Facebook (a 9-year-old), Twitter (a 7-year-old), Instagram and Tout (both 2 year olds). These are among only a few of the game changers that disrupted the publishing industry. Each is a relative toddler by traditional business standards, and not that many years before their existence I don’t recall anyone predicting them. But their global impact on the human condition is already established.

The trend impacting the PR industry, therefore, is not which new social tool will take off, but that game changers are now the norm. Expect and anticipate them.

Here are four things (among many) I see near through long term impacting PR.

The Story Stays

We like a good yarn. Stories have been told throughout human history and they’re not going away anytime soon. So while the delivery method may continue to break speed records in the unprecedented data age we’re now in, if there isn’t a compelling story to whatever the communication is, it won’t leave the station.

In creating your communications, think about your story. How compelling is it or could it be, and why should others care? And if you don’t have one, then either create one or rethink your communication strategy for most effective resource use.

Multimedia Explosion

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We are a sensorial species, and with the written word there’s a terrible lack of engagement of the senses. True, imagination can help make up for that. However, the way I imagine Utopia and you do can be very different, meaning there’s a significant control loss of the intended message. But what if I could not only tell you a story, but also engage you in it by your five senses? Instant communication around the planet is now possible with video covering sight and sound that will only increase. But I think it’s only a matter of time before technology allows for an online cook ‘book’ to not only convey with what and how something’s made, but also how it should look, feel and even smell and taste.

Additive Manufacturing

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…aka 3-D Printing will change everything, and this means for PR too.  I think 3-D printing is trul yRoddenberry’s Star Trek replicator come to life like the cell phone, and why I see it profoundly impacting PR is that currently the world’s societies are built largely around traditionally manufactured goods and related services – shoes manufactured in China are consumed in the USA; medical implants created in New York are used in Canada; an airplane is created and assembled from many different places; etc. Things today are still made for us and we don’t make things for ourselves. PR supports all of this ‘traditional’ world commerce that in the next decade will dramatically change with the advent of 3-D printing for the masses. Like intangibles such as information value decreasing with increased accessibility, so will the value of physical goods change. As it does, PR will change as well, becoming less about conveying a compelling call to action to buy consumer products, say, and more about strategically helping communicate things like B2B opportunities, services expertise, key events, experience opportunities, and political and societal agendas.

Local & Smaller

It’s well established doctrine for good communication to know thy audience, and reach them where they are. With billions of us now having our heads buried in our smartphones more than we’d like to admit, guess where audiences are? Sure, we’re still driving down the freeway ready to notice a billboard, pouring over that quaint thing called a newspaper at Starbucks occasionally, and watching commercials whip by as we watch our favorite DVR’d show.  But increasingly we’re more interested in our immediate environs – our local neighborhood – than otherwise. So as opposed to a broad shotgun approach, PR will increasingly need a precise rifle approach tailored to local geography and interests. And in doing so rely less on large real estate like a full magazine, in-depth television reporting or a regional newspaper spread, but instead plan for consumption to be increasingly on a screen just four or five inches wide—that if it’s showing a picture of a rose, soon enough will probably smell just as sweet.