Answers to webinar participant questions await your improvements
Earlier this week, I was the presenter for a 90-minute webinar on social media marketing. We didn’t have time to get all the questions answered, so participants forwarded them along to the webinar host, who passed them along to me.
Rather than reply through the loney channel of email, I’ve chosen to answer these queries here—so you can add your own thoughts, experiences, and solutions.
What is the best way to distribute a social media press release? Direct email? Just post online?
While the wire services are working on ways to distribute social media releases—and PR Newswire already has a service, called MultiVue, that handles such distribution (at a premium), the current recommendation from most members of the working group is simply to put the releases on a web page and include a link to that page from the traditional release (and from anywhere else it makes sense).
By the way, for a look at some social media releases, take a look at some of these.
As a small customized invitation shoppe targeting mothers between 27 and 47, how would twitter be of help to me? Facebook?
First of all, you can use these vehicles—each based on its strengths—to interact with customers. They’re also useful tools for identifying new prospects. If you take orders online without respect to physical location, this could be a real boon to your business; people will want to place orders with people they have talked with and come to trust. If your business is strictly local, the greater value will accrue from discussions about what people are looking for in general (information you can translate into your offerings), essentially using your network as a focus group, and in meeting prospective partners, suppliers, and the like.
If CEO and PR is not “trusted” for honest information, then how should we choose a user name to use on social media sites? I want the readers to know that I have some authority.
That’s one answer. The other is for the CEO to begin engaging in honest and open conversation so he (or she) can remediate his (or her) reputation. But there are a lot of companies in which the CEO and PR departments are not the primary social voices, including Southwest Airlines and Dell.
Frankly, the best person (or persons) to engage in social media depends entirely on whom you’re talking to and what the conversation is about. DellShares, a blog from Dell about investor relations, is authored by Lynn Tyson, who heads up investor relations. At GM, Vice Chairman Bob Lutz—the top car guy—has been the principal blogger since the Fastlane blog started, because the company mainly wanted to engage with consumers about cars. Now that the conversation has turned to more core business issues, you’re seeing CEO Rick Wagoner getting more engaged.
If you’re responding to my remarks about the Edelman Trust Barometer and the fact that CEOs and official corporate spokespersons are not highly trusted by the public, the same solutions apply. Tap into your subject matter experts, your thought leaders, brand managers, and the like to engage with those who are interested in the topic areas they represent.
While you can’t use 100% positive comments in social media, what do you do with the CEO/decision-maker who says, “Then we won’t use SM at all?” How does a company with limited resources administrate these short-response devices?
As noted elsewhere, one way is to determine what older media you’ll use less—that is, it’s a reallocation of your communication resources. Another way to approach this is from an ROI standpoint—what goals can you achieve through the use of these channels that you can’t achieve as well with other tools? You can also look at how your competition is using social media—and how effectively. You can talk about how effectively social media lets you strengthen relationships with key stakeholders.
Ultimately, though, if the boss says “no,” the answer is no. You can advocate for it, but if the company just isn’t ready, you’ll have to accept that (or find a job somewhere with a more progressive culture). It always helps to position your advocacy from the perspective of what’s keeping your CEO awake at night.
You can get a lot of answers to your question by listening to this panel discussion in which the moderator played the role of the skeptical CEO and the panel assumed the role of his communication staff. Good stuff here.
Have any strategies for getting CEOs to buy in to SM?
See the question above. I’d also be sure to forward copies of articles that address social media based on the CEO’s issues and concerns.
First, there are blog search engines like Google Blog Search, Technorati, BlogPUlse and IceRocket. Each lets you subscribe to RSS feeds for specific searches (which I highly recommend); you can also sign up for email alerts in order to get an email when any new content matches your searches.
For social networks, unless you pay a service to collect this information for you, you’ll need to visit the networks to search each one individually; they tend to be walled gardens.
There’s a wide range of social media monitoring services, from very inexpensive to six or seven figures. The best collection I know of information on these services was put together by Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Half of Web sites will become content driven? Who is the source again?
This is from Meveo, which used to be Podshow, a company that distributes both professional and consumer-created multimedia. It’s run by Adam Curry, host of the Daily Source Code podcast (and former MTV veejay) and Ron Bloom.
We are using Wordpress’ CMS when creating SEO compliant website creation. How good is the blog tool?
It’s excellent, among the best blogging software out there, and constantly improving. In fact, it’s primarily a blogging application that some people (like you) use for content management. If you’re mainly looking for a content management tool that also happens to serve as a blogging platform, I’d look more toward something like Expression Engine. WordPress’ popularity is aided by the huge community of developers creating modules and plugins that enhance its functionality.
What kind of software allows users to rate the content on your site. I would love to add this to my site, but I’m not sure where to start vis-a-vis software/applications.
One of the easiest tools to use to add ratings and reviews comes from JS-KIT. Depending on the platform you use, you can find other options; your content management system may actually already offer these features; they may just need to be turned on.
How does a company do a podcast?
The steps can be as simple as this:
- Record a digital audio file.
- Get an account at LibSyn.
- Create a LibSyn blog that will be the home to your podcast. They have commercial accounts for companies.
- Upload your file to LibSyn.
- Write about your episode on the blog and publish it.
Of course, it gets a lot more complicated than that (although simple enough to have resulted in the production of some 50,000 or more independent podcasts. There are a lot of great resources to help you get up to speed on podcasting. May I suggest the book, “How to Do Everything with Podcasting,” which (ahem) I co-wrote with my podcasting co-host, Neville Hobson.
This answer, by the way, is focused on audio podcasting. Video podcasting is a whole different kettle of fish.
Which 2-3 social media are the best to learn from?
If I understand your question correctly, you’re asking which ones you should spend time with in order to get a solid handle on how they work. If that’s the case, I’d recommend that you…
- Start reading some blogs that talk about your personal interests or your profession
- Get a Facebook account and a LinkedIn account, and begin networking
- Get a Twitter account and start participating in the conversations there
Of course, there are dozens—hudreds—of other ways to connect, and each could be more or less in tune with your own preferences for engagement. But these three will give you a good introduction to the space.
Can you address how this works from a headcount point of view—12 people from Comcast searching the web for complaints? What were the free monitoring tools?
The Comcast customer service team uses the search function built into Twitter to find messages that include the company name. To find blog posts, use the tools I listed in the question above on how to build buzz.
Don’t worry about the number. First of all, you’re not likely to have as many people talking about your company as Comcast has. Second, keep in mind that every complaint addressed proactively is one that isn’t coming into the customer service call center!
Could you please compare and contrast Twitter vs Linked In?
They’re pretty similar—and worlds apart. They both let you build networks—Twitter is meant to let you communicate with just about anybody, while LinkedIn is aimed at business professionals. Beyond that, though, they’re completely different. On LinkedIn, you create a profile that includes your resume. By linking to someone, you automatically link to everyone in their network, and then everyone in their networks, and (in the words of the commercial) so on, and so on, and so on—up to six degrees of separation. Now you can search your entire network based on a variety of criteria, such as companies at which people worked, titles, job skills, education, and the like. You can also pose questions to your network, join groups (for example, I belong to a group of former Mattel employees and another group of IABC members. I can message these folks, look at information about companies, and a lot more.
Linked in has a New User Starter Guide.
On Twitter, I can send a message of 140 characters or less that is received by other Twitter users who have chosen to “follow” me; I see the messages (called “tweets”) of the people I have elected to follow. I can send a tweet directly to another person by starting with their account name and the @ symbol—to reach me (with your tweet visible to anybody else), you’d start your message with @shel. I can see all the messages that have been sent to me using this technique by viewing my “replies.” You can also send me a direct message—d shel—which only I will see.
Here’s a good Twitter primer.
What is the impact of a social media program on the marketing/communications staff? Seems like managing and responding would be a fulltime job.
That depends on how you use it. First, consider that social media could replace some of the other communication work you do. A number of business leaders, for instance, have found that blogging results in fewer phone calls and conference calls, and less email. Monitoring, once you get it set up, shouldn’t take too much time, unless you work for a large organization, in which case you probably should contract with a service to do much of it for you.
It also depends on how engaged your stakeholders will be. If you’re getting hundreds of comments to every blog post, for example, yes, you’ll need someone moderating those comments. Southwest Airlines actually had to hire additional staff to handle it. Not every company is Southwest, though, and most organizations find that they don’t need to bring new people on board.
What’s more, I’d be willing to bet you have employees who are already enthusiastic users of social media who would be happy to lend a hand.
11/21/08 | 1 Comment | Answers to webinar participant questions await your improvements