By Alexandra Reid
There is no doubt that the digitization of business has put enormous pressure on professionals to do increasingly more work in far less time. Adding just one more task to your already busy workday is seemingly impossible so certainly undertaking something as demanding as new media is completely out of the question, right?
Although new media hits my sweet spot, I’m not about to sugarcoat it. New media takes a lot resourcing, especially the time required to create content.
However, being busy is also not an excuse to avoid new media anymore. Your community expects it and it is likely that your competitors are already in the game. Besides, the benefits of new media can be too compelling for you to dismiss considering it just because of time constraints. Brand promotion, SEO, on-the-spot customer service and feedback, networking and lead generation are just a handful of the advantages you will reap from being actively involved in new media. So why not give it a shot?
I am a firm believer that successful new media engagement is achievable by any business, no matter how busy, so long as there is a clear plan and a good support system in place. The beautiful thing here is that, as new media channels increase in popularity, support systems have been coming up roses specifically to help you fit new media into your busy work schedule. From advice offered in blogs and white papers to new tools, to teams of people who will literally do the work for you, businesses can now enjoy all the benefits of new media with far greater simplicity.
Here are five simple ways that any business can be successful in new media.
1) Employ a community manager
Community managers are employed specifically for their communication skills and their ability to provide a human voice for a company. With customers expecting more and more from companies regarding their willingness to listen and engage in conversation, it is becoming more valuable for companies to employ community managers to build and maintain long lasting relationships in this way. Community managers should understand the company’s vision and be well connected to company employees at all levels in order to direct messages of importance to the appropriate people and ensure these messages are answered. Once a community is established, community managers can be extremely valuable in brand building, customer service and damage control.
2) Hire an agency with new media abilities
Whether your community manager is internal or part of your external agency team, there are other services available from external agencies on an as-needed basis. Agencies can help you build and maintain an online community by crafting an overall strategy, crafting your new media accounts and content, monitoring your online conversations and engaging with your audience. Executing a successful social media program requires continuous engagement over the long haul, making it vital that a long-lasting agreement be established between any company and agency. Learn about inmedia‘s capabilities in this area in this post.
3) Allow your employees to have access to new media during work time
Blocking access does not keep employees off new media sites so why not steer their engagement to your advantage? Employees need to be trained and educated on the best practices of new media participation to both encourage them to endorse their businesses’ brand among their online communities and to avoid making damaging statements about their company. Staff using new media are also able monitor online conversations and deliver messages of importance to the right people. It is vital to know if negative comments are being said about your business or brand in order to develop a plan for damage control.
4) Optimize your new media engagement
If you are feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of new media and are running on a tight schedule, it is important that you optimize your engagement by determining your audience, your goal and your action plan. Agencies, such as inmedia, can help you through this process.
5) Use the tools available
There are a number of tools available to help you manage your new media engagement.
Google Reader: If you are going to use new media, it is important that you participate in the blogophere. Google Reader helps pull all your favourite blogs into one place, group them into categories and skim the headlines of the latest posts to ensure you don’t miss anything.
Hootsuite: Integrates several accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and allows you to update everything at once. It also allows you to view statistics from your tweets and send messages from the same area.
Tweetdeck: Is a desktop management application that allows you to update several sites at one time.
Tweepi: Is a web-based Twitter tool that sorts through your followers to see whose Twitter accounts have gone stale and allows you to easily un-follow these people.
Google Analytics: Allows you to analyze your web traffic. It reports how many people are coming to your site from various new media platforms and which search terms people are using to find your website.
Delicious: Lets you save all the website and articles online that you want to read later while it also allows you to see what other people are reading.
I am interested in hearing what you have to say. Why do you think businesses feel discouraged from using new media? Do you have any other suggestions for businesses on a tight schedule int
By Alexandra Reid
The challenge of incorporating exciting new-media and social-media channels into traditional PR practices has been the subject of a great deal of debate in the PR industry and the source of a lot of consternation among clients. It has left a lot of people lost, confused and scrambling. For many, it’s as if this new technology crept up and pounced on them in the middle of the night. If you’re feeling perplexed as you try to figure out just how new media should be strategically deployed for business, rest assured that you’ve now got support
inmedia recently hired me as its community manager specifically to help clients incorporate new media activities into their broader PR and marketing strategies.
Many businesses wonder why, despite all their efforts in new media, they still haven’t managed to turn followers and connections into customers. Many have also experienced those horrifying moments where harmful conversations develop about their brand while they don’t have any strategy in place to douse the flames.
That’s why it’s imperative that businesses have a well-thought-out plan before starting any new media endeavour.
As a PR agency with the capabilities of a new media agency, that’s where we can help.
inmedia has been modelling best practices in new media for more than a decade and we have the expertise to prepare and execute new media strategies. Not only can we develop strategies for our clients, we can also implement these strategies on behalf of clients.
We found the transition to new media to be rather easy because we didn’t have to alter our existing practices. Let me explain this point because it is exactly this transition that bedevils many PR agencies.
PR has always been about managing relations with various publics. Going a step further, true PR has always been about building bi-directional channels that require PR practitioners to listen, understand and respond to public concerns and viewpoints in order to forge meaningful relationships between businesses and consumers. It has always been part of our job to bring the public perspective to an organization to enable it to be responsive to public concerns.
inmedia has always taken a highly personal approach to PR and these skills naturally transferred over to new media. This was no stretch, but a seamless extension of what we were already doing. We adapted our existing skills as we saw new outlets become available.
For example, even before Peter Merholz coined the term “blog” in 1999, we were already using the highly personalized approach necessary to be successful in new media. Unlike a lot of PR agencies, we have always taken a highly targeted approach to media relations that places a premium on knowing the target journalist and why she or he would be interested in our client’s story. This approach seamlessly and effectively transferred to pitching bloggers.
Even before the term “social media release” was coined by new-media thought leaders Tom Foremski, Todd Defren, Chris Heuer and Shel Holtz, we were incorporating its elements into our media outreach. In 2007, for example, when we were managing the global launch of the world’s most advanced prosthetic hand, the i-LIMB Hand, for British client Touch Bionics, we uploaded a video onto YouTube that yielded 100,000 views within a month. We also uploaded a slew of photographs on Flickr, which developed into an active social site for the amputee patient community. Other elements, now seen as part of a complete social media release, were made available on the company’s website.
As larger numbers of useful new channels become available, we are incorporating them into our outreach efforts by sifting through social media and other sites to find the appropriate channels to which we can offer meaningful content and start a conversation.
Now we’re going one step further. After years of looking at the evolution of our PR agency’s use of new media, we are persuaded that there is a new role for us to play – to help clients build the capacity to effectively use social media.
For some time now, we have been researching and developing new media strategies to guide our clients in the building and management of their own social media sites and online communities. Increasingly, with clients that don’t have their own internal resources or know how to use social media sites, we now are also doing at least the heavy lifting of monitoring and identifying opportunities to engage, if not the whole job of also developing and posting content and responding to feedback.
As long as we are authentic and honest, we don’t feel that there’s much of a difference between writing an article for a trade publication under our client’s byline — something that PR agencies have been doing for decades — and representing our clients’ voices in new media or Tweeting on their behalf.
As I continue my work with inmedia in building out our social media practice, I’d love to hear your thoughts regarding PR agencies adopting new practices.
By Linda Forrest
I’m torn about Disney’s new “Let the Memories Begin” marketing initiative that utilizes real families’ photos and videos as a means to market their theme parks. Regular folk can upload their “memories” to be used royalty-free in any manner of marketing that Disney sees fit.
Full disclosure, I’m a Disney nut. By total coincidence, I may or may not be listening to the Walt Disney World soundtrack as I type this. My husband and I got married at Walt Disney World (no, Mickey didn’t perform the ceremony), and we travel to the Happiest Place on Earth as often as we can.
Like almost every other family that visits a Disney park, we come home with hundreds of vacation photos and videos of ourselves having a wonderful time, of our young son meeting his favourite characters, of the scenery and of events like the fireworks, parades and so on.
I definitely see the appeal from a consumer standpoint of having our pictures projected onto the castle, or to see our perfect wedding recognized as the ideal, to have our son’s beautiful smile as he met Mickey posted near and far for everyone to see. But from a professional standpoint, I fear the trend of “reality advertising” will not stand the marketing industry in good stead over the long term.
As a self-proclaimed casualty of the music industry, where copyright interests (read: revenue streams) in sound recordings fell by the wayside as illegal downloading became more pervasive, and as a watcher of all things media, where my television is filled with either unpaid or modestly rewarded people I could also likely see at the grocery store, I perceive this shift to a more “socialized” advertising approach setting a dangerous trend.
The fact that a large company with multi-billion dollar revenue has effectively found a way to circumvent spending money on creative content will, in my opinion, not bode well for the marketing companies that provide similar services to clients that most likely don’t have the same budgets as Disney.
This predicament reminds me of a fairly recent construct in the music business, that of the 360-degree contract that incorporates many of the revenue-generating activities of artists – artist management, recording, touring and merchandising – under one contract managed by one company. When the Madonnas and Robbie Williams’ of the world signed the first of these contracts, it scared the bejeezus out of me and I was convinced that the trickle down of this would negatively impact artists.
While I give full marks to the enterprising companies that came up with this approach, predominantly record companies that saw their revenues shrinking while artists continued to make money from live performances and t-shirt sales and discovered a way to get their hands into those pots, it’s the artists who suffer the financial repercussions. Who cares if Madonna’s giving up a percentage of her t-shirt sales when she’s got money to burn; it’s when the contract becomes the industry norm covering independent artists who rely on that t-shirt money to fill their gas tanks or their hungry bellies that the truly insidious nature of the agreement is realized. Williams himself later went on the record saying that his signing of this sort of agreement had been a bad idea that stifled him creatively. In fact, he compared his contractual obligations, ones that ran counter to his artistic integrity, to “slavery.” Harsh words indeed.
In the marketing and advertising realm, the internal teams at Disney or their multi-million dollar agency will not feel a pinch. But when mom-and-pop shops start to decide they can take these matters into their own hands rather than deal with professionals, our industry will suffer and we’ll have yet another obstruction to eliminate on our road to selling our services.
By Linda Forrest
Close to three years ago now (where does the time go?!?!?), we blogged about PR’s bad rap.
According to ADWEEK, results of a recent Gallup poll suggest that our stock has increased of late (at least in the eyes of those questioned.) An inherent flaw in the poll is that it lumps together advertising and PR, the differences between which warrant their own blog post, if not an entire blog altogether. But, despite that major criticism of the industry categorization, the numbers still indicate that our industry isn’t as hated as it has been in the past.
Yay?
One-third of respondents to the survey voiced a positive opinion of the advertising-PR industry. This over and above various industries whose reputations are dismal, according to the poll – oil and gas (thanks, BP!), banking (thank you, mortgage crisis!) and the airlines (where someone thinks this is a good idea.)
One commenter, Sven, clearly doesn’t have a good opinion of us, however: “The fact these dark witches try and spin the banking, airline, pharmaceutical and oil companies is worse than being a politician.”
This raises an interesting point: aren’t we PR practitioners in part responsible for how the public perceives these industries? Is their bad reputation our failing? Or is their bad behaviour or shoddy customer service their own business and PR has little to nothing to do with it?
By Linda Forrest
The headline “Gawker Media Now Bigger Than All Newspapers Online–Except One” caught my interest for a number of reasons. In addition to being interested in all things media, I’m a fan of Gawker Media; in my professional life for media gossip and Valley news delivered with a healthy dose of sarcasm and in my personal life for hilarious movie news and intelligent commentary on women’s issues and interests. And while I applaud its growing audience and great success for its individual websites, I feel that comparing the conglomerate that houses each of these properties with specific newspaper websites is a ridiculous exercise.
I was glad to see one of the commenters on the original story point out this very fact.
MikeBarthel wrote on the Awl: “It confused me that “Gawker Media” is bundled together but other newspaper conglomorates are not. Shouldn’t “USA Today” actually be the traffic of all the Gannett papers, if we’re comparing it to all the Gawker sites? Similarly NYT/Boston Globe, WSJ/NewsCorp, etc. Am I missing something?”
You’re not alone, Mike. Nick Denton himself, publisher of Gawker Media, recognizes that the newspapers are but one slice of his competition. In a letter to his staff, he called out additional sources of online news such as Huffington Post, Yahoo and AOL.
You’ll note the reasons that I listed for visiting Gawker Media entities were pretty soft and fluffy. Hard news or astute political opinions were not among them. If I want to read what I would consider to be real news, I’d most certainly visit one of the other sites against which Gawker Media was compared. “Online news” casts a very wide net and it’s important to define key terms if you want to be clear about your position in the marketplace and what readers can expect from your online properties.
Twitter’s traffic undeniably trounces that of all other ornithological sites on the web, if not combined, but just because they’re using the same language doesn’t mean they’re talking about the same thing. It’s an important distinction, and one that we as PR practitioners have to be extremely careful about. It’s for this very reason that we learn our clients’ whole story so that we have a holistic understanding of the company, its business, its technology and its market. A term that means one thing to one person can mean something quite different to someone else; we need to be able to draw that distinction and then pursue the opportunities that make the most sense for our clients knowing full well that we’re speaking the same language as the media outlet we’re pursuing.
If the media wants apples, don’t give them persimmons. They’re just likely to throw them at you for not knowing your apples from your persimmons. I would have assumed that the likes of Nick Denton would have been conscious of the distinction.
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When bad pitch meets sketchy software
September 07, 2010 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Thankfully, we don’t get many pitches to this blog from fellow PR types trying to get us to cover their stuff; it’s obvious to all but the most dense that this is a corporate blog that really isn’t a conduit for media relations or blogger relations activities. But such is the sad […]
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From local consultancy to global service provider in two weeks
August 09, 2010 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette Communications strategist Caroline Kealey has, over the past 10 years, marched to her own drum as the founder and chief executive of Ingenium Communications. Her consultancy has carved a niche for itself in the nation’s capital and across the country in the “art and science of communications and marketing strategy” providing, in […]
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Phone calls a poor connection, or are they?
August 06, 2010 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest It’s clear that we’re bad summertime bloggers. Sorry about that. Occasionally there have been topics that have crossed my path in the last month and a bit that I thought could be ruminated on in a blog post, but when the spirit struck, it was usually when I was unplugged completely for […]
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The day the earth shook
June 24, 2010 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest Well, yesterday was interesting. Ottawa was the major city nearest to the epicenter of a 5.0 (heavily disputed) magnitude earthquake. A friend who has traveled extensively was rolling his eyes at us meek Canucks, saying he felt quakes like this in Japan all the time. Suffice to say, I’d be a shaky […]
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New York Times decries “Tweet” is for the birds
June 10, 2010 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest Oh dear. The standards editor at the New York Times (@nytimes) has banned usage of the word Tweet, insisting that its use flies in the face of the paper’s general avoidance of “colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon.” His reasoning is that Twitter might be next year’s proverbial bird-cage liner and the Times will […]
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Canadian bacon sizzles in the Valley
May 26, 2010 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette Last night, I had the honour of attending the Canadian launch of the C100 in downtown Ottawa at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. What is the C100? It’s a group of those ex-pat Canadians who we refer to when we lament the “brain drain.” They have stepped up to put their time, money and […]
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I’d like to thank the Academy…
May 18, 2010 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest Many moons ago, we wrote a post that gave a general overview of how awards fit into an integrated PR program. All of this information still rings true. Awards can be a worthwhile part of your communications program, but make sure that the ROI is worth it if it’s something you have […]
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Twitter for marketing and PR
May 11, 2010 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran There’s a witty little joke that’s been running on Twitter for some time now. I don’t remember when I first saw it, but every so often it pops into my Twitter stream and I click through to the punchline again. The otherwise redoubtable @missrougue, Montreal-based Tara Hunt, hooked me this morning. The […]
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