“They can have any color Model T they want, as long as it’s black!” were the famous words of Henry Ford at the turn of the 20th century. Back then, the rules of the road were much simpler. Today’s options for ‘pimping your ride’ are much more numerous. The phrase comes from a television program produced by MTV during which a banged-up, saggy looking car is polished and pampered with body work that can include everything from providing a ball spinner in a bowler's trunk, to installing a clothes dryer in a surfer's bank.
Public Relations is, essentially, relating your story to your public. Five years ago it meant that you distributed press releases to representatives of the media and tried to persuade writers and editors to publicize your product, service or event. But today, companies are expected to ‘pimp their ride’ when it comes to using social media in their PR and marketing strategy. Corporations and entrepreneurs are using blogs, chat groups, forums and social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter to prompt one-on-one conversations directly with their customers. In an Internet-intense world, social media is an essential part of your PR and marketing plan. To help you roll out your new SoMe wheels, here are a few rules of the social media highway:
Rule of the Road #1 – Research, look and listen, before you leap.
Would you walk up to a group at a cocktail party and start announcing your company’s latest promotion? Hardly. Picture the chatter going on today on social networking platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn like huddles of attendees at a huge, public cocktail party. There’s an etiquette to follow that you’re only going to learn through observation and study. You’ll want to find out where your audience ‘hangs out,’ what they’re saying and how they’re accustomed to conversing.
How can you track the public conversation most efficiently? After all, your organization has finite resources. At the micro level, you can begin doing the research, yourself, by using free applications, such as Google Trends, Technorati, Serph and others. (Visit http://takemetoyourleader.com/2009/03/24/free-social-media-monitoring-tools/.) Once you identify the blogs, forums, chat groups and ‘centers’ where your audience is gathering regularly, you can subscribe to various RSS feeds of interest and plan to visit these sites regularly. Software and outsourcing for this kind of tracking is also available through companies such as Vocus, BurrellesLuce and Meltwater.
Rule of the Road #2 – Set priorities, goals and objectives.
Take it from one who has gotten irredeemably lost in the maze, tangle and morass of social media. You can find yourself walking aimlessly on a beach, somewhere, having a very pleasant time but going nowhere, very easily. Like taking a road trip, you need to know where you want to go and map your route, in advance. If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you’ve arrived?
Rule of the Road #3 – Be selective about your audience.
Target marketing is not a new concept, but you’d hardly know it if you followed the paths of many of today’s self-proclaimed social mediarites. Like shooting stars, they are destined to burn out. There are tweeters out there having contests to see who can amass the most followers. What a waste of time. They remind me of a T-shirt I saw recently that showed concentric circles representing narcissism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and stalking intersecting to form Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Tweetstalk. Tell me about it!
Time to take a deep breath, step away from the computer and nobody gets hurt.
I suggest you go for quality rather than quantity. Follow the classic PR and marketing strategy of studying your demographic, knowing where they meet, what their interests are and how they prefer to be addressed. Then you can start appearing in all the same places. “Oh! Fancy meeting you here!”
Rule of the Road #4 – Plan to commit the time and resources.
Once you’ve committed to a social media plan, you can begin to figure out how many man-hours are going to be involved in actuating that plan. Perhaps you have team members on staff who will be dedicated to distributing your articles, press releases and other traditional PR and marketing pieces, as well as producing your blogs, tweeting and interacting on the social networking platforms and carrying on the cross-pollination and one-on-one conversations that constitute today’s PR in the online world. On the other hand, maybe it’s up to just one person who has other responsibilities, in addition to the promotion of the company. That’s okay, too. It will take time to build a solid network and to leverage the various PR opportunities, regardless of how much attention you can give to it. If you can outsource the whole function to a proven PR and marketing company (our personal favorite), you’ll have that much more time to concentrate on your core competency and serve your customers.
Next time…Rules 5-8! Oh boy….
Reprinted, courtesy The Trades Publishing Company, July 2009
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