It sounds an awful lot like social media PR to me.

It’s something I have to get off my chest. I run a social media marketing firm, sure. But many of the skills that I use, either in advising clients or in using the various channels, reads like what you should do when you’re being a responsible public relations representative who’s reaching out to a journalist to pitch a story.  Everyone’s a potential source of a sudden massive Twitter revolt, so you need to treat everyone you encounter online as if they had the potential to direct the attention of a hundred thousand potential clients at your brand. With that thought in mind, here’s a quick primer on how to convert those traditional PR skills into social media marketing ones.

• Participate in the dialog: Don’t try to hijack it.  In the social media world, you can’t try the old “interruption marketing” techniques.
  • Think of it like: Don’t be the guy who tries to pitch how your company has a useful slant on every story that’s trending.  When you’re using social media monitoring tools, only enter in conversations that your brand can be expected to engage in.
• Be useful: Posting the same link a dozen times a day? Not useful. Posting a dozen links a day to insightful articles & commentary? Useful. Just make sure that you know what your following considers “useful.”
  • Think of it like: Don’t pitch off-topic. Journalists hate it and the general public hates it, too.
• Be respectful: Everything you say on social media channels can be read, quite possibly, for the rest of your brand’s life. Make sure that you’re not saying things that you might regret in a week, a month, a decade, or even later.
  • Think of it like: Being respectful.
• Nurture relationships: There are thousands of people out there who are crucial nexuses in the ebb and flow of your industry’s conversation. Find them. Friend / follow / verb them. Nurture the relationship, because you never know when you’ll need it.
  • Think of it like: How you develop relationships with a good reporter. Citizen journalism is where a lot of the conversation’s moving to, so be prepared.
• Establish authority: Your brand needs a single voice that everyone knows that they can go to when there’s an urgent question. Social media is a slippery beast, and you can easily have eight different employees all messaging on your brand from different sources. Make sure that it’s obvious which outlet is the official one, and let your employees know when they should feel free to answer questions about the brand and when they should refer the questions to you.
  • Think of it like: Every company that’s large enough needs a communications policy. This is just an extension of that. Think long and hard about limiting all communications on social media channels; they’re rapidly becoming as essential to whole swathes of the population as email is, and surely you don’t think that employees shouldn’t have email?

Compared to someone with a background in broadcast media advertising or in outdoor sales, a PR pro has a huge leg up when a client or member of your business is looking for someone to ride herd on social media. Make use of your people skills, communications expertise, and dive right in!

Related articles by Zemanta

• G5 Social Media Best Practices (slideshare.net)
• How to measure your social media marketing campaign ROI (mediapress.co.za)
• Social media advertising comes of age, gets regulated (thenextweb.com)
• The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing (slideshare.net)
• Time and ROI are the greatest social media marketing concerns (smartblogs.com)
• Racepoint Labs Sets New Standard for Integrating Social Media into PR Programs (eon.businesswire.com)
• StrongMail Takes a Measurable Approach to Social Media Marketing with Industry’s Most Comprehensive Solution (eon.businesswire.com)

Since the holidays, I’ve been on the South Beach diet to lose some of those 20 extra pounds that magically appeared on my midsection this year (wonder how that happened!). That’s inspired me to start providing my social media clients with a lean, mean regimen for their social media program. It’s worked for them, and you can use it, too. While this is a post that’s more appropriate on my social media business blog (where it will get to eventually), it’s valuable PR strategy, too. It is lean, mean, and anyone can do it to get more out of their social media efforts.

Here’s your new social media workout plan:

• Hit up your social media services 3x a day for about 10 minutes each time. Identify which services are most effective for you and use those more often. I generally say 10 minutes before work, 10 at lunch, and 10 minutes after the day is done.
• If you’re using an analytics program like Google Analytics, use your natural search queries to tell you what phrases people are finding you for. Are those phrases you want to be found for? Then use them in your social media. Is your audience coming from keywords that don’t convert? Use better keywords in your social media.
• If you aren’t measuring analytics, go to Google.com/analytics and do so.
• Basic morning routine for Twitter:
  • Identify two or three twitter personalities that always have something interesting to say. Each morning, retweet something they’ve posted.
  • Find a blog or two that writes in your space. Tweet links to the interesting articles that they’ve written
  • Write a blog yourself? Make sure that you put your content in your tweets.
  • Look over your replies and DM’s and answer all appropriately
  • Finally, using a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop, set up searches for words or phrases that are pertinent to what you do. Reply to other twitter posters who post using those terms.
  • This should take 10 – 15 minutes every day, once you get it to a system.
• Basic afternoon routine for Facebook;
  • Check out your wall. Have you gotten new fans? Welcome them with a quick message.
  • Have you had any kind of event recently? Post pictures / video / whatever on it.
  • Run Facebook searches for terms that are pertinent to your organization. Have your fan page become a fan of other organizations that have similar interests.
  • Look over your wall for comments and reply; empty out inbox and reply as well
  • Post 2 -3 links to interesting information that is related to your organization
  • This takes 10 – 15 minutes when it’s done
• LinkedIn Evening routine
  • Look for questions on the groups that you belong to. Answer two that you can legitimately offer an interesting and informed opinion on.
  • Been to a networking event? Run searches on people who’s cards you have. Find them on LinkedIn and follow ‘em.
  • Has anyone in your network changed job positions or posted another important status update? Drop ‘em a note commenting on it.
  • This is 5 – 10 minutes of work.
• Blogging / Internet Evening routine
  • Set up Google Alerts on keywords that are pertinent to your interests. Get emails daily and check the links that Google sends you out. Generally, I recommend an alert on your brand, on your market, and on yourself as well.  Read the alerts for links / ideas for the other social media outlets and click through on the interesting ones.
  • Leave comments on any blog post that you actually read. Yes, every single one. They have to have something interesting to say, but don’t need to be Shakespeare.
  • This takes 10 minutes or so.

There’s your daily workout. Stick to it for 3 months and come back for a checkup.

In “The Right and Wrong of PR Pitches“, he discusses what is probably the perfect example of what good PR should be from the journalists perspective. Since it’s Yelp that did the PR work (and they get social media) it doesn’t shock me to hear that they impressed John. He talks about what he liked from the PR outreach side, there, but let me go into a little detail one of the points that he quickly sketches over because he probably assumes that you know what he’s talking about:

First PR lesson – track, filter, and engage brand mentions.

In my articles on the sidebar, I go into using Google Alerts to track mentions of your brand (and that’s a great start), but you should also look into using some other services on top of that now.

• TweetBeep or TweetAlarm are both  good services for keeping on top of Twitter mentions of specific phrases or words, but I’m personally fond of the Seesmic Desktop to keep running searches of the phrases and words that matter to me.
• If you’re like me and follow roughly a hojillion different blogs, a service like FeedRinse can be invaluable, letting you search and organize your feeds so that you only read what interests you.
• Filtrbox is an excellent paid solution for someone who’s looking to maximize his or her brand engagement across blogs, Twitter, and other social media.

That said, I promised you 5 ways to use these tools to slow pitch to the media as John Jantsch recommends. Here you go:

1. Keyword-Based Searching: Pick out keywords that your brand (or yourself!) can speak on with authority. When people write about those words or phrases, respond to ‘em. (That’s more or less what John Jantsch recounts in the above blog article)
2. Brand-Based Searching: Not quite the same as “keyword based”, since you’re looking for any instance of your brand being mentioned on the ‘Net, instead of people writing about a topic. Whether they’re rants or raves, you should make sure to engage the consumer when they talk about you; it will frequently turn an unhappy customer into a happy one, and a happy customer into a thrilled one. Just knowing that someone’s listening is a big help for many consumers.
3. Information Gathering: Once you’ve found media outlets who write about what it is that you have to say, you should still make a point to contact them with more information as you gather it. Keep it timely, of course, but if you find out something about a new product or initiative that’s launched recently and which is applicable to a recently-covered topic, then go ahead and pass it on.
4. Trending Topics: Through Twitter and Technorati, it’s easy to keep on top of what’s breaking on the ‘Net. If your brand has a legitimate stake in a trending topic, sending out a friendly note to journalists & bloggers with whom you’ve previously corresponded with both an overview of information as well as a note on what it is that your brand has to offer as commentary will help you get ahead of trends and keep your brand in the news.  (Note that your brand needs to have a valid opinion on a trending topic lest you find yourself mocked on something like the Bad Pitch Blog)
5. Identify New Influencers: Using your keyword and brand-based alerts, you’ll obviously see who’s talking about you. Something you should be taking notice of, though, is how often you’re seeing a particular blog or twitter profile posting about your subject or brand. Notice who’s got a growing following (which you can check on Twitterholic or Technorati, depending on whether you want to see someone’s twitter following or blog reach, respectively) and cultivate them as a contact. When they’re looking for a new quote or a topic idea, they’ll turn to you. And that’s really what the slow pitch is about achieving: a relationship with journalists and bloggers where they come to view you as a source for information and a person whose emails or calls they know will e valuable to them.

The “slow pitch” builds over time and increases your reputation and reliability with news outlets until they are happy to hear from you. It takes time, but ask yourself this question after reading John’s article: the next time Yelp sends John Jantsch an email, what do you think the chances are that he’ll open & read it? Pretty good, I imagine.

Now go out and find the people who are having conversations you care about and start a dialog.

Further reading:

• Ten Free Tools To Kick Your Social Media Cynicism to the Ground (nettiehartsock.com)
• Three Best Ways to Use Social Media (online.wsj.com)
• What’s In Your Twitter Toolbox? (twitterrati.com)
• Managing Your Reputation Online: 5 Essential Tools (computerworld.com)

(13 July 2009) ORLANDO, FL – Doterati, (www.doterati.com) an Orlando-based organization dedicated to advancing the interactive media community, is hosting an event on Thursday, July 16 2009 that will help explain to advertising agencies and small businesses alike to benefit from the differences between online and traditional media marketing.

As budgets for advertising and marketing decrease, it is increasingly crucial that businesses make the most of their advertising dollar and use the natural advantages of interactive and offline advertising and marketing to mutual advantage. As more and more marketing and advertising move online where results are more measurable, everyone who advertises needs to learn how to use it effectively, and doterati’s luncheon is designed to help.

Featured speakers Bob Klomp and Lindsey Lawson are both digital marketers for WESH.COM/ CW18TV.COM. They will be presenting a keynote on core objectives they use to ensure client success with their traditional and online advertising packages ad services. This event will include lunch and offer a Q & A session for our speakers and audience.

Event Details:

Who: doterati
When: Thursday, July16th, 2008 11am – 1pm
Where: Crowne Plaza Orlando – Downtown
304 W Colonial Dr
Orlando, FL
Free Parking and Free WiFi at the Crowne Plaza
Register Here – http://interactivegap.eventbrite.com/

Event Pricing:

Pre-Registration: Members $20 (with Member Code); Non-Members $25
At Door: Members $25 (with ID), Non-Members $30

Contact Info

VP Marketing Greg Rollett
marketing@doterati.com
doterati.com
321.438.4442

About doterati

doterati is a 501(c)6 organization from Orlando, FL whose mission is to advance the interactive marketing, media and technology community by serving as an association for professional development, education, community networking and overall inspiration for our digital society.

Become a member and expand your personal and professional network, accelerate your knowledge and embed yourself in the layers of our growing interactive community. Volunteer and gain access to front-row action at events, planning and organizational think tanking. Our radar sweeps for digital brand marketers, Web developers, agencies, creatives, students, entrepreneurs, consultants, start-ups, big-thinkers and everyone in between. Learn more at doterati.com.