Ten Thoughts for Merging Social Media with PR

18 Aug Ten Thoughts for Merging Social Media with PR

Here’s the best definition I’ve come across to define what organizations need to do to get visibility in the age of social media, from Hubspot:

Get Found by creating great content, optimizing that content for search and promoting that content in social media and then convert these website visitors into leads and customers.

It’s very easy to find yourself putting the cart before the horse when embarking on the journey to merge social social media with PR and marketing efforts.

Here are ten considerations to help you avoid the potholes.

#1 – Companies often approach social media as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a community there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.  Then select the best SM platforms to add to your marketing mix.

#2 – What are the benefits of social media for organizations?

• the potential for your news to be distributed immediately to concentric circles of readers (your supporters’/contacts’ friends, then their friends, then their friends…);
• the strong credibility your news has when it is forwarded to people from friends within social networks;
• the very low cost of such electronic connection; and
• the ability to precisely and easily track results at very low cost.

#3 – 78% of people care about what their friends think, and only 14% care what advertisers think. Soon we’ll be making the majority of our purchase decisions by considering what our friends say online.

#4 – The three steps to engaging in social media effectively are: listen, interact and react. Many people forget the last step and don’t respond when someone says something negative about their products or services. Use both negative and positive comments as feedback to improve your business.

#5 – Social media are not a campaign—they are a relationship.  They are about interaction and knowledge sharing, about building a network of influencers who will amplify your message/outreach/web content/emailer promotion, etc.

#6 – Focusing only on your own message — our product this, our company that — is as boorish as talking only about yourself at a business mixer or cocktail party. Of course, you can link to your own blog posts or other content on occasion, but these should be mixed in with links to external content, and in the context of answering a question or providing helpful information to solve a problem.

#7 – A hard-sell approach is not only ineffective, it can damage a firm’s brand.  Social media are not like an advertising or email blast campaign designed to produce immediate results; it takes time to develop relationships, build significant blog readership or attract a large Twitter following.

#8 – The best marketing content on social media is discoverable, interactive and shareable.

#9 – Social media are evolving quickly, with new forms of communicating online rising and falling by the day.

#10 – Organizations need to spend the time to keep connected and keep up.

What have I missed?

Sources:
Moore Creative www.merryannmoore.com
Convince & Convert http://bit.ly/9JkFOY
Webbiquity http://bit.ly/aMWS71
HubSpot  http://bit.ly/dfgHoA
Erik Qualman, http://bit.ly/dAXPmU
Forrester, http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html