Archive for the ‘Reputation’ Category

3 Easy Ways to Engage Audiences on Facebook

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

These days, it seems like everyone and their mother has a Facebook page. (Side note: My mother literally has a Facebook page through which she enjoys sending me virtual soup when I’m sick. But I digress.) Thousands of brands have created their own hub on the social networking site, hoping to increase visibility and strengthen their social media reputation. But what many forget is that just creating the page itself isn’t enough. Maintaining a vibrant and interactive environment on your brand’s Facebook page is a full-time job that requires thought and ingenuity. Below are three ways to get you started.

1) Encourage discussion. You should make sure that there’s an open-ended component to the content you are posting. For instance, if you’re posting an interesting video, ask your fans to respond to it, or even post their own video responses. And be ready for real feedback—both good and bad. When your fans feel like they’re being heard, they’re more likely to speak up. Moreover, they may have suggestions or ideas on how to further improve your page or even your brand and products—and if you listen to them by making real changes, they’ll keep coming back for more.

2) Only post things that you’d want to see/read/hear. Though your initial instinct may be to post as much content as possible to your Facebook page, ask yourself—“Is this something that I would want to look at? Would it make me stop and pay attention?” If your content isn’t intriguing, it’s just wasting space—and alienating your audience, who’ll become more and more skeptical of your motives. Make sure your content is newsworthy, engaging, stimulating or just plain entertaining. If it isn’t, toss it.

3) Keep your content current. If your brand is coming out with a new product or announcement, don’t wait three days to post the information. Keep your audience abreast of any new developments (good or bad) as they happen. Similarly, if your company is being mentioned in the news, or your industry is getting national attention, make your page the destination for your audience to discuss the topic by starting a conversation in real-time. Your Facebook page can act as another channel through which you promote your own products and media coverage, but it should also act as an informative and dynamic setting where your audience can interact with each other and your brand.

Essentially, it’s important not to think of your Facebook page as a stand-alone entity. Integrate it with your other social media channels and with your brand’s messaging and platforms. Most importantly, pay attention to your fans by listening to them and rewarding them when they interact with you. They’ll become loyal brand activists as a result.

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Tweet it. Re-Tweet it. Digg it. Fark it…What?

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Although some people haven’t quite been able to wrap their heads around the social media lingo just yet, the fact is that social media is here to stay. Not only has social media fundamentally changed the way we as individuals communicate, it has without a doubt altered the way brands must communicate with their consumers, and in turn, monitor consumers’ reactions to their brands.

With user-generated content at our fingertips, consumers have more power than ever to influence a brand and leave a lasting impact on the reputation of a brand. Gone are the days when you had to be in one place to listen to, watch or read about breaking news or search for a product to purchase. Now, the news, and the product reviews and the conversations find us… No matter where we are and regardless of whether we were actually searching.

Case in point, news just “found” me via the Mashable application on my iPhone, which told me that Facebook traffic levels have hit another record high with more than 141 million unique visitors last month. That’s up 11 million from the previous month! This means that brands not only need to break into the realm of social media with things like ads and Facebook fan pages of their own, but they also must be alert as to what consumers are saying about their brand on these social media sites. In the amount of time it takes to read one newspaper article or watch the nightly news, abundant amounts of information are passed along via social media to millions of consumers. It’s as simple as this – one person posts something to his Facebook page; another person notices it and tweets it; then someone else re-tweets that to her followers who then have the opportunity to re-tweet it again, and again, and again… get it? Okay maybe not, but the point is that within minutes, I mean seconds, one comment from one person spreads virally to thousands of people all over the country and potentially across the globe.

Erick Qualman, author of Socialnomics said it perfectly, “We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media; the question is how well we do it.”

This couldn’t be truer. As a summer intern at MS&L Chicago, I’ve seen the importance of social media from an entirely different perspective – the consumer brand’s perspective. Before this summer, I only had the perspective of a consumer sharing my pleasant (and sometimes not so pleasant) experience with brands via my social media profiles.

Now, I see the true impact one person’s comments can make on a brand, and I understand how important it is that brands effectively listen and appropriately interact in social media.

So, what does all of this mean? It means that ready or not, brands have no choice but to get social media savvy, and pay attention to how their brands are being talked about in the world of social media.

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Brand Reinvention (or not) of the Month

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

How much does a full-page ad go for in a publication like the New York Times? So much that corporations often institute confidentiality agreements with the paper to ensure the cost will not be shared with the public.

Two full-page ads in the New York Times, countless of prime-time TV spots and other expensive marketing tactics are being implemented by BP in an effort to improve public perception and run damage control over the Gulf Coast spill. That’s millions of dollars towards their self-preservation efforts, while the world watches and wonders why that money isn’t going towards gulf-coast preservation.

Proactive communication via expensive forms of purchased media are actually hurting BP. The millions of dollars spent on ads could be going to the clean-up and to fully compensate those who have submitted claims. I’d argue that BP would be in a better place right now had they decided to stick with press conferences and effective social media engagement.

In the case studies that will be written about this PR disaster in a few years, I bet BP is dinged for one overarching communication flaw, and that’s their inability to completely disregard their self-preservation efforts in order to “make it right” like the tagline says.

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Crisis Communications in a World Run by Media

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

I am always on the prowl to get my feet wet (perhaps the correct term is dive in) when it comes to meeting other PR professionals. I believe every opportunity is a potential learning experience, when I was invited to attend a local PRSA Chicago meeting last week, I couldn’t resist.

The conference began with three distinguished guest speakers, all selected because of their strong PR background and expertise. The big topic everyone kept coming back to? You guessed it- British Petroleum. Lately, it’s been difficult to avoid coverage of the company since nearly every media outlet has run some sort of story on them. I’m sure you’ve seen how many of the major television news outlets run video of the oil gushing out two miles below the ocean! Interestingly enough, the public relations professionals at the event were all asking themselves the same question: What was BP thinking?

Our job as public relations professionals is to be both the strategist and the builder– we‘re supposed to make sure our messages are clearly communicated to our clients’ target audiences, while helping to manage their reputation through crises. In addition we protect them from controversy and negative media coverage, and ensure that they are entirely transparent with both the public and the media. British Petroleum unfortunately failed to disclose enough information and broke one of the most important rules in public relations: don’t lose the media’s trust. Unfortunately for BP, this error will likely keep the company on the defensive for the foreseeable future.

Several guest panelists at the PRSA event noted that they couldn’t understand the decisions made by the PR team at BP, especially when they allowed their CEO to go on a “yacht racing” trip. However, one panelist made an excellent point: it’s easy to criticize another company when you’re not involved in the situation. The key is to realize that being on the outside means that we don’t always know all of the variables.

Ultimately, we have to find that fine line between meeting the media’s needs, while simultaneously promoting our client’s messages. As I left the luncheon with a stomach full of ravioli and tiramisu, I came away with a deep respect for the work done by public relations professionals, and a new understanding of crisis communications.

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OilSpill.com

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Like many people, I’ve been glued to the news coverage of the Oil Spill. Beyond the tragedy, it has been incredibly interesting to see this play out online. There have been a lot of angles, and tons of content, so I thought I’d share some interesting finds and observations from around the web.

* There is a huge disparity between online coverage (such as blogs) and within the mainstream press. While initially interested, blogs quickly moved on to more pressing issues like Facebook privacy and the new iPhone.

* Creative agency jess3 got a bit of press for releasing a Firefox plug-in which once installed, blacks out all instances of “British Petroleum” across the web, so that “the company which cannot be named” will never offend readers again.

* @BPGlobalPR An anonymous guerilla tweeter has taken a darkly humorous stand on the calamity by adopting BP’s voice. His snipes are incredibly popular with almost 140,000 followers as of June 8, 2010.

* Grassroots Mapping crowd sourced aerial images of the spill, filling in the blanks in the coverage of the spill. In a related note, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has also crowd sourced the mapping of the spill. It’s interesting to see how it spread over time by adjusting the controls on the map.

* There are over 457,000 people in Facebook’s largest “Boycott BP” group and over 20 other groups with 1000 or more people in them. Many fake BP pages have cropped up with messages from the venomous to the inane.

* On the pro-BP side, well there’s BP themselves. They have deployed a robust array of digital assets, all aggregated here.

* And of course there’s the joint Deep Water Horizon Unified Response effort – which does a good job of being generally informative and helpful, with its own suite of social media tools, courtesy of the US Government.

Nothing on the social media menu was missed. BP’s Facebook page has frequent updates about their clean-up efforts and a live feed of the leak underwater. Their YouTube channel features an apology and a promise to make the situation right from Tony Hayword. Their Flickr page shows the multi-pronged approach to their effort – day by day – and their Twitter profile keeps a steady drum beat of updates and reaffirmation that “the job is far from done” and that BP will “make it right.” They have also released websites for each of the states affected.

All this content is great, but it’s getting lost in the cacophony – which is largely negative for BP. SEO requires time and that’s one resource BP doesn’t have. Rather then let the news outlets tell the story for them, they’ve taken out paid search ads for terms like “oil spill” and “oil news”. Reportedly, they’re spending upwards of $10,000 per day to make sure that their side of the story isn’t lost. Paid media was also used by Toyota during their recent recall crisis.

Not surprisingly, they’re taking a lot of flak for this type of expenditure. As an American, I understand the outrage. As a digital marketer and communications professional, I recognize that if BP is going to emerge out of this crisis and rebuild their image, it must be done. Enduring slings and arrows is something BP better get comfortable with; they won’t be going away any time soon.

Does anyone see other interesting tactics being used to get the various messages out about the oil spill – whatever the perspective or source? Be sure to list them in the comments section.

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We’re All Car Salesmen at Heart

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Working in public relations for the automotive industry for almost five years, I routinely field questions as to what exactly I do for a living. You would think after doing this for so long, I’d have a canned response that would clearly separate my occupation from those moving metal on dealership lots. Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy.

Person: “So, what do you do for a living?”

Me: “I work in public relations for a major domestic automaker.”

Person: “What exactly does that mean? Is that a nice way of saying you’re a car salesman?”

Me: “Not exactly, I focus on product publicity, media relations, event planning, internal communications, community involvement and a few other things that help keep my client and its products in a favorable light in the mind of the consumer.”

Person: “Oh. OK. Can you translate that?”

Me: “I sell cars.”

By that, I mean that everything I do on a daily basis is to generate positive third-party endorsements that help influence the purchasing decisions of a prospective customer – whether it be a product review in the local newspaper, an executive interview at an auto show or even a casual product walk around to a passerby while a vehicle is on display.

With that being said, we can easily convert this idea to suit our jobs as PR professionals on a macro level.

No matter what your field of expertise, or what type of client you work for, your mission should always be the same – help increase the bottom line.

It’s a fairly basic, if not a downright primitive, concept. In my case, my bottom line is to help sell cars, trucks and crossovers, because if my client doesn’t sell vehicles, my client doesn’t have a business.

While some ideas generated might be fun, cool, innovative and garner attention (for whatever reason), it might not exactly be the right fit for your client unless it’s contributing to moving the business forward.

So, the next time you and your team gather for a brainstorm or planning session, always remember that one important (metaphoric) question, “Will this help sell cars?”

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