By Alexandra Reid
Rebranding using social media is a new and fascinating subject. Part of my job is to keep on top of the latest social media best practices, but after an extensive amount of research, I’ve found that there is very little comprehensive and applicable content offered on the subject of social media rebranding.
To help our clients and others currently going through this process, I’ve decided to share all of the information I have gathered on the subject, which includes how to change a company’s name, image and “voice” across accounts and how to spread the word of the change using the “big three,” Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This is part one of a three-part series and will cover company name changes. Over the next two weeks, I will explain how to reflect and support your rebranding by changing your image and voice through social media.
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This the first in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from September 2007. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
When I started this little tech PR agency, the world of online media outlets was still very much in its infancy. And an early fiction we had to deal with was a widely held belief that online media were some kind of a different beast from their print or broadcast brethren, and that only a PR agency that specialized in online media could reach these brave new e-journalists.
Our conviction was that these outlets might well be new but that there was nothing at all novel about a time-tested best-practices approach to pitching them, one based on pegging the natural news value of a client’s story and then pitching it only to those who would see that value. And we were right; from Day 1, our clients enjoyed the same widespread coverage online as they did in other media formats.
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By Alexandra Reid
I watched a mesmerizing documentary the night before last called Future Intelligence that examined how smart technology will eventually be embedded everywhere, including our clothing, furniture, cars and even our contact lenses. Futurists, including Ray Kurzeil, predicted that within 50 years, entire cities will be connected to the web and things will communicate with each other with their own artificial intelligence. Yesterday, as reported by ReadWriteWeb, Cisco stated that by 2020, there will be 50 billion “things” connected to the Internet, including everything from your body, car and alarm clock to cows.
We are already inventing technology that is smarter, stronger and faster than us, and giving it the power to communicate. Cisco is currently developing connected city buses that will communicate with the Internet to give passengers information on location, estimated time of arrival and the ability to surf the web through touch screens. Soon, the buses will be equipped with smart technology to reduce collisions and emissions and help drivers avoid congestion, locate points of interest and contact emergency services.
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By Linda Forrest
Does everyone remember the game broken telephone? There’s a brilliant example of it from the Simpsons that added the phrase “Purple monkey dishwasher” to the lexicon of some circles.
What does this have to do with B2B marketing? When it comes to the media, quite a bit, as it turns out.
As Francis wrote last week, while media coverage is more credible than paid advertising, the message is hard to control:
Media relations practitioners have no say over how much space their story will get, where or when it will run, or what other messages — even opposing messages — might also run in the same story. You can mitigate this lack of control and vastly increase your chances of achieving your desired outcome, however, through the effective and strategic planning of your media relations efforts along with a sharp tactical understanding of how newsrooms operate.
In today’s age of media aggregation, it becomes even more challenging to control the message as media coverage that could be incorrect, misleading, or otherwise wrong can mutate and propagate well beyond the initial piece.
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By Alexandra Reid
Google Plus is all the rave, but will it eventually experience the same outcome as Wave? Bloggers and social media enthusiasts are clearly excited about the new platform, dissecting, praising and criticizing its features and debating whether it will ever seek to compete with Facebook or if it will flounder like Google’s other attempts to penetrate the social media marketplace.
It is estimated that Google Plus will grow to 20 million users by the end of the weekend and that the current user base has already surpassed the 10 million mark. It has also grown at an astonishing rate, with a 350-percent increase in users in just six days.
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