Social media should be a component of a wider approach to communication, says Stuart Bruce.
So how do you develop a communication strategy? Start by understanding the difference between strategy and tactics:
The best way to learn is through case studies: what have other people done before?
Notes from a session led by Stuart Bruce
We used to operate in a broadcast model, but now search is becoming increasingly personalised. When we search we are at our most attentive and receptive.
New job titles being created for this data-rich world: eg community manager, chief listening officer, chief influence officer. PR people now need to get to grips with numbers and data.
SEO: ‘Organic’ search – the results found by search engines based on web content. Free – but time consuming. Search by keywords: so which words to focus on (optimise)? Google AdWords tool can help you to refine your keywords based on what people are really using. Search ranking: On-page factors (eg frequency of keywords, tags) and off-page factors (eg quality of inbound links).
SEM: Paid search advertising. Easy – but costly. Important to PR people in a crisis.
‘There’s going to be a merger of PR and SEO’. PR people can win – but the current PR agency model may not necessarily be fit for purpose.
Write for people first – not for machines. Images and videos need to be tagged with words if they’re to be found.
Traditional PR (eg media relations) still has an important place in the new world of search.
Social media newsrooms: News and news releases are no longer exclusive to journalists. Social media news release is an improved version of what went before. It adds in social media / multimedia and share buttons.
Good examples: hsbc, First Direct, Cisco.
Managing a newsroom:
A New and Simple Way to Measure Social Media ROI (Forbes via Malina Istatkova)
9 Revealing Numbers about SEO and Google Page Rank (SocialTurns via Sophie Thomas)
12 Social Media Monitoring Tools Reviewed (Six Revisions via Sophie Thomas)
The Art of Landing New Clients via Social Media (Andrew Worob via Sophie Thomas)
The Adele app has been a success on Apple and Android, with 1.5 million downloads reports The Guardian. (Spotted by Olga Akin-Dina Abassi).
Emery [David Emery is head of marketing at Beggars Group, parent company of Adele's record label] says the aim was less about selling more music and tickets, than to provide “another communication platform” for Adele’s fans, sitting alongside her own website, Facebook and Twitter.
The social aspect has been incredibly popular: there’s a whole set of people that use the app on an hourly basis,” says Emery, citing stats from the app’s leaderboard, which ranks fans according to their in-app activity.
In class we’ll be looking at Marketing Leeds. What is the purpose of this organisation? What does it say about the city?
Then we’ll be looking at what others say about Leeds. Let’s take a look on Twitter and on SocialMention. (How do we separate out mentions of the football team from mentions of the city?)
How Coca-Cola monitors social media (SmartBlog via Grace Omondi @OmondiGrace)
What do you focus on? Which conversations matter? Who’s influencing the conversation? How do you get this information to the people who can do something about it? And what tools can help you do all this?
Here’s a good summary of the legal implications of using social media for public relations from a practitioner working in the public sector. The five sensible lessons are:
