The New Year is off to a great start.  We’re focusing on our resolutions and trying to accomplish many tasks in one day.  With school and work projects, and family responsibilities too, the biggest question is always: How do you manage your time to be more efficient and to achieve your goals?

Recently a PR student and fellow PRStudChat community member, Keith Hayes, who attends Flagler College in St. Augustine Florida, reached out to me with a time management question. He wanted advice on “juggling a number of different projects at one time.”  I emailed him my list of time management “Do’s” and “Don’ts.” However, to fully answer Keith’s question and a question on the minds of so many PR students and professionals, we decided to turn to our community for some best practices.

On Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 8:30 p.m. EST, get ready to share your best tips on time management. Help your peers with your ideas about project management, apps to get you better organized, managing your calendar, and, most of all, selecting and committing to the right projects (and, not every project that comes along). I recently wrote a post about my favorite note taking software, Evernote, and how it helped me to write my new book.  If you want to share some “advanced” tips now, on your note taking software, we’ll highlight your favorite(s) and ask you to elaborate with the community the night of February 16^th.  Please feel free to comment on this post, or to start a discussion in our LinkedIn Discussion Group.

We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts on time management and how you find more efficient ways to juggle the many exciting opportunities and projects in 2012. We want it to be a busy, yet productive year.  Join us for a dynamic discussion filled with helpful tools and resources to get you more organized. Hope to “see” you on the 15^th.

A Little More About PRStudChat:

It began with a simple question asked by Angela Hernandez, then President of PRSSA at Central Michigan University (CMU). “Is PR Right for me?” A follow up blog post by PR 2.0 expert Deirdre Breakenridge inspired a series of direct messages on Twitter between Breakenridge and fellow PR industry pro, Valerie Simon. This was an important question and one that should be explored beyond one student or one blog post. Why not build a community to help students across the country, and even the globe, learn from the experience and perspective of industry professionals… A community where everyone can learn and grow together. Read more

A Guest Post By Jim Joseph

Last week I had the distinct privilege of being a guest host on #prstudchat.  At first I was excited to be invited, thinking that someone out there thought I was a stud.  But when I realized it was going to be full of students … well as a professor at NYU I jumped at the chance!

I am a big believer in the overall brand experience as a way to think about marketing a product.  But the truth is there are lots of people who have theories about marketing.  For me, it’s less about theory and more about practicing and observing and learning and reapplying.  Marketing is a spectator sport, and we can all learn from the marketplace and from each other.  Twitter chats are one great way of getting together and sharing.  And when it’s quick and 140 characters, all the better!  I so enjoyed the “experience!”

QUESTION ONE:   How does PR contribute to a customer experience that builds loyalty?

We are the lucky ones!  I believe that public relations is actually the closest to the consumer.  Especially with social media, we are the part of the marketing mix that is talking directly to consumers as they live their lives.  We have been trained to talk WITH our consumers, not AT them (as in advertising).  We seek out the influencers who they trust, even when it’s just their other girlfriends!  In that way, our efforts seek to build relationships that lead to loyalty and ultimately create a lasting brand experience.  That puts us in charge of building the brand experience and ultimately for me, the brand.

QUESTION TWO:  What are favorite examples of companies with strong and consistent branding?

In my books, I discuss a number of examples where a brand has created a consistent and relevant experience that has created long-lasting loyalty.  J.Crew is one of my favorites because they’ve been able to tailor their experience, yet keep it consistent across all of their venues be it retail, web, social media, or catalog.  Every interaction is uniquely J.Crew, yet specific to the touchpoint.

Lady Gaga also comes to mind.  She’s not just a marketer, but also a brand.  Perhaps one of the best at having a strong mission for the “underdog”, consistent messaging about her fans, and a compelling experience that evolves and evolves.

I would say that brand Paula Deen fell off the wagon this month.  She had a very consistent experience (like it or not) but she took a very sharp turn and it is jarring for her fans.  Let’s leave it at that!

Can’t talk about the brand experience without talking about the magic of Disney – across all of their theme parks, movies, tv shows, merchandise – it’s all about the magic of childhood and recapturing it with your family.  They own it!

QUESTION THREE:  What communications touchpoints engage customers the most?

The answer to this one depends on the consumer and how they live their lives.  But in general, I would say that the most effective touchpoints are the ones that seemingly naturally pop up when the consumer is in the right mindset for your brand.  I’ve seen touchpoints in gyms that are more relevant than mass advertising or PR!

The best touchpoint is the one that bumps into your consumer at the time they might consider you. The other day I was at the gym and saw a poster in the men’s locker room for athlete’s foot.  Now that’s a touchpoint and a brand message that is “right place, right time!”  And you know what, they had samples at the front desk as well.

The best way to pick touchpoints is to know your consumer and how she specifically lives her life.  Figure out ways to get in front of her when she needs you.  That’s how she’ll jump onto your brand experience and then hopefully share it with others.

QUESTION FOUR:  What advice would you give to PR students & pros about creating a better brand experience?

We could write volumes about this, and in fact I have!  But to keep it simple, the first step is to know your consumer and to know her better than your competition does.   To know her is to know how to market with her.  The second step is to know what you, as a brand, are capable of offering her. You can’t give your consumer something that is outside of your brand’s skill sets and abilities.  So the key is to match what she wants and needs with what you are uniquely able to offer to her.  Then build the experience on her terms – when and how she needs you.

QUESTION FIVE:  What are the secrets to finding success at a New York PR firm? 

I think you need to be willing to do anything to learn.  My best advice is to start out working on a smaller brand where you can play a bigger role.  There’s not as much staffing on the small brands so you can become more of a leader and do more strategic activities sooner.

Make yourself indispensable to your clients and to your teammates.  Be the “go to” person for the brand’s information and you’ll find yourself in the middle of all the meetings where decisions are being made.  You’ll be in the middle of the action, not on the sidelines waiting to hear what’s going on.

Don’t expect anything to be handed to you.  Use some sweat equity to build your own brand.  Others will start to figure out that you are a future leader and they will gravitate towards you.

Think about what you want your own brand experience to be for the people you work with and for – make yourself valuable for them and you will rise!

Jim Joseph is the President of Lippe Taylor, the Author of “The Experience Effect” series and a professor at NYU

www.lippetaylor.com

www.jimjosephexp.com

On February 9, 2012, I’ll be joining my colleagues in Amsterdam to deliver a keynote on Eight New Strategic Practices for the PR Champion.  As a part of the preparation for the event, The Social Conference 2012, I was asked to discuss a few topics.  My video focuses on several of the “hot” topics in PR and how professionals today are taking on new roles and responsibilities. These topics include: the differences between the old and the new PR mindset, the impact of social media on the relationship between journalists and PR pros, how social media requires a unique and powerful new communication approach, why social networking changes the approach of crisis management, and what’s going on with corporate messages and the good “old” press release.

I’ll be touching on these topics in my presentation, which is also the subject matter of my new book with FT Press. I’m also very excited to announce that my book, “Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional” is available for pre-order on Amazon.  You can learn more about my book here.

If you’re in the Amsterdam on the 9^th of February, I hope you will visit me at The Social Conference 2012!

My December 7^th Vocus Webinar on “The Techniques of the New PR Champion,” sparked many questions from participants. Here is the fourth and final part of the Q&A.  Parts I, II and III are also available on my blog for review.  I hope that I’ve answered everyone’s questions from the Webinar.   If I’ve missed any, or you have more, please don’t hesitate to post your question and we can answer them together.

1. How does record retention work on social media for government agencies?

There are resources that allow you to archive your tweets and Facebook updates for record retention.  For example, Backupify is a service that provides automatic daily backups, archiving, and export of Google Docs, Facebook page updates, your Twitter feed and Flickr streams, and comments in your other social media channels.  In addition, if you’re using a monitoring platform, such as Vocus, Sysomos, BurrellesLuce Engage 121, Alternian, or Radian6, you should ask your service provider if you can archive manually (by exporting a PDF report), or if there’s a way to automatically archive updates to your social media sites.

2.  Do you have a DVD included with the book with templates for helping to chart a businesses progress?

I’m still working on how exercises will be presented in my book (if they will be at the end of the chapters or in an additional guide).  However, with respect to charting business community progress, there’s one tool I used in my presentation to show how a business can “Chart a Social Map.”  This tool is called Mindmeister, for mind mapping and brainstorming.  It’s a very easy (free) online tool to use and it shows growth of social communities over time.  You’ll want to have an updated chart in your social media plan.

3. For a major hospital, what are some metrics to analyze using social media?

Hospitals are an extension of community, so you will want to look at growth in a number of ways.  In addition to looking at how many people follow and friend the hospital, you should also be tracking how people move from your social media sites to your website to find out more information about the hospital, doctors, areas of specialty medicine, community events, etc.  It’s really important to tie your social media efforts to your website analytics (traffic to pages, views, time spent on site, referring location, etc.)  You should always be driving to your hub, which is your website, because it houses the most important ways for people to interact and to find out more information.

Sentiment is another really important community measure. You should be looking at the sentiment of conversations about the hospital and comparing your positive, negative and neutral sentiment over time (making sure that the positive is on the rise).  You can also track other hospitals in your area to see a comparison in sentiment.  I would recommend doing the same with Share of Voice (SOV) in social networks.  How does your hospital’s SOV compare to that of a competitor on Facebook or Twitter.  These are just a few metrics that are useful as you increase your social media participation.

In addition, if your hospital has a foundation, you will want to track how many members of your social media communities become aware of your foundation, request more information and interact on your foundation’s website, as a result of social media participation.

4. How do you start in the right direction, if you have the responsibility to be the PR Champion, but not the authority or upper administration support?

If you are tasked with the responsibility of social media, but need to get the buy in, then you have to put together a “formal ask.”  Social media is not something that can be approached loosely in an organization.  Here’s one approach:

• Step One: Find research and highlight similar types of organizations with respect to how and why they are using social media.  Be sure to document any success stories, as well as any negative situations, due to the lack of a social presence.

• Step Two:  Begin tracking competition to show that direct competitors are out there using social media effectively and your company may need to play catch up.

• Step Three: Audit your own company’s efforts to show that there are people already talking, maybe even your own employees, and, in this case, proper guidance and training would benefit the company. You may also uncover a few social media fires that need to be addressed immediately.

If you document and present this information in a more formal way to upper administration, it will become more of a priority and hopefully an eye opening experience to get you the buy in that you need.

5. Is it best to ignore and delete comments on company social media pages or respond to them?

No. The only comments that should be deleted are the ones that violate your social media policy, if they are defamatory, harassing, abusive, etc.  Otherwise, any comments that are negative need to be addresses based on your Comment Response Chart. A Comment Response Chart shows you how to move through situations from misguided information and bad experiences to handling “Deterrent Detractors” and “Angry Ragers.”  It’s okay to have some less than flattering comments on your Facebook wall or company blog.  It actually humanizes the company and makes your organization more transparent to the community.  If someone visits a company’s Facebook wall or blog and there’s nothing but glowing remarks, they may be skeptical.  It might appear the company only keeps the positive comments and deletes the negative or helpful criticism.

6. How do you find editors respond to social media releases?  Do editors want to be reached via Twitter or through email?

The answer to this question always varies based on individual preferences.  With respect to the first part of the question, editors want a really good story with factual and credible information. If you can deliver this information packaged in a helpful manner with additional resources, then they will like whatever tool you’re using.  I remember one editor who interviewed in my book, PR 2.0.  He said that if you don’t have a well-written release, with information that his readers would find useful, then don’t bother sending a tool with fancy bells and resources (he was referring to a social media release). It’s really important that you deliver good information regardless of the format.

To answer the question about Twitter vs. email, you’ll learn quickly how a journalist prefers to receive information. If you are unsure then make sure that you ask.  Most journalists are still very comfortable with email, although I’ve come across instances where conversations with a journalist move to Twitter DM, upon request.   Everyone is different, so you want to make sure you accommodate based on a person’s individual preferences.

7. How aggressively do you pursue these types of strategies in a more methodical organization, where process is ingrained and slow to change?

When you uncover the need for new processes and procedures, you will have to aggressively show why social media is important to business communications.  However, that doesn’t mean that the change will happen quickly.  In a more methodical organization, where culture is embedded, and historically change is slow to occur, you will have to take a crawl, walk and then run approach.  One of the most important steps to spark the change will be to use a social media audit.  The audit usually uncovers the issues or areas of liability, which then results in the writing of a policy.  Slower organizations feel more comfortable with a policy in place so that employees understand how to participate properly and that there is guidance or training involved.   Chances are many employees are already participating, so the practices outlined in my webinar will actually help the organization move to a more comfortable level of participation.

8. How do you institute the handling of personal information protection while pushing for PR and marketing product?

A good social media policy will instruct employees, as well as the company’s public, on how to participate properly including the use of personal information.  Some policies have a section that discusses the personal vs. company use of social media.  I look at examples of organizations using social media effectively including the United States Armed Forces and many hospitals across the country. They handle both propriety and personal information that can’t be divulged to the public.  If these types of organizations can participate successfully, then it’s just a matter of getting the right guidance and training in place, so people know what’s considered an acceptable use and unacceptable use of social media.

I’m still working on the Q&A from my December 7^th Vocus Webinar on “The Techniques of the New PR Champion.” Below is Part III of my responses.  The questions from participants range from strategy and planning to the best tool and techniques of the New PR Champion.  Parts I and II of the Q&A are also available for review.  I’m thrilled at the level of participation from webinar attendees!

1. Which social media tools should you put the most focus on if you have limited resources?

If you have limited resources, the listening or monitoring tools are really important. You want to make sure you can respond in real time to questions, comments and engage in dialogue related to your company.  You can also address any negative sentiment as it occurs, and not wait until complaints spiral out of control.  A few of the free tools to monitor include Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Social Mention, BackType, Boardreader, CoComment and, of course, Google Alerts.

2. In protecting a company’s reputation and dealing with crisis, what advice would you give in creating internal social media policy guidelines for company employees.

It’s really important that your social media policy guides your employees’ social media participation. You have to let employees know the best way for them to engage as well as educate on some of the practices that they should avoid.  Many policies discuss the use of acceptable content, personal vs. professional use, legal issues including copyright, intellectual property and privacy, IT issues to protect the company’s network and to mitigate risk, proper procedures such as an account management process, and the best practice guidelines on the rules of engagement.  By spelling out, training and updating your employees, you will put a system of participation in place; one that works to prevent crisis from occurring based on your own employees’ interactions.

3. Where does the time come from to be a new PR champion? Is there a lot of sharing and delegation involved?

Being a new PR champion is an investment in your future and also an investment in your company’s social media growth.  Years ago, when PR professionals were first introduced to social media, the notion of becoming the “Research Librarian” surfaced. PR professionals learned that they had to bring information into the organization and rally for change.  I suggested back then that sometimes it might take some “after hours” effort to make social media a greater part of the company’s culture.

The same is true with the new practices and becoming a PR Champion.  Of course, as you research and share information internally, it often creates a grassroots approach that grows participation as others to pick up on accepted practices.  By involving additional champions from different departments in your company you will create synergy and more impact.  It’s also important to seek out buy-in from an executive who is extremely enthusiastic about social media. Having acceptance from the top down truly lends support for your efforts, and the new processes you are suggesting.

Eventually this type of buy-in leads to increased internal sharing practices that make your job more efficient and suddenly there are other champions who will share in your efforts and work toward common social media goals.  The more people you can involve and efficiencies you can reach through sharing internally, the more you will be able to delegate responsibilities and increase your own productivity.

4. Which sentiment analysis do you recommend, especially to measure competitor sentiment?

There are several platforms that help you to measure your brand’s sentiment vs. the sentiment of your competitors.  They include the following:

• Vocus Social Media Monitoring
• SentimentMetrics
• Alterian sm2
• Sysomos Heartbeat
• Collective Intellect

5. How often do you engage dialogue through social media platforms? How often should this be done? Daily? Weekly?

The question should always be what type of engagement are you trying to achieve and how often do your stakeholders want to interact with you.  I could say you should have three to five Facebook posts and Twitter updates a day to keep your profiles active, but if you have people interested in the information you’re sharing, then the conversations may double, triple or quadruple in size.

Before you can determine how many times to share, think about your audience and their behavior/participation. What interests them and what do they want to hear from you.  By listening first to the conversations and studying the behavior, it will give you a better idea of how you should participate.  Then determine exactly what type of engagement you want from the groups you want to reach or specific individual influencers.

When it comes to engaging in dialog, for example, you might be asking questions, monitoring trending topics to develop meaningful content to share, or even crowdsourcing with your customers to have them solve an issue and you’re using their intelligence.  The dialog will largely depend on what you want to achieve.

6. Should a company do social media if it can’t show return – leads, sales and success stories?

Not every social media program in the organization is directly tied to leads, sales, success stories or registration, although executives want this type of reporting. In many cases, it’s a series of strategies and outputs that eventually show the return the executives what to see.  You should keep in mind, there are other important reasons for companies to participate in social media, which includes: recruiting the best talent, thought leadership in the market, reputation management, customer service through social media platform participation, and social good or cause related efforts through social media. Many of these activities affect good will and public confidence, which is an extremely important measure that’s tied to higher-level company goals.

7. What’s the best way to measure traditional media exposure through newspapers, magazines now that social media is a part of the reach for each of those outlets?

There are turnkey solutions that include the ability to monitor and measure both traditional media, as the reach of these outlets extend digitally and through social media.  At the same time you can measure the conversations and comment via newer media, such as blogs and new influencers, which are also reporting on your company and the market(s) in which you compete.

8. We have a web-based business and know that 40% of our traffic comes from social media.  What is the number one thing that we can do to convert people to paid registrations on the site?

When a visitor gets to your site, the #1 thing you can do to move him/her from click to the conversion is to make it easy to understand, “What’s in it for me?”  Every website should be set up for the different buyer personas.  If you’re able to drive people to your site through meaningful stories and content, then they will expect you to engage with them on a more intimate level, based on their expectations and needs. In addition, they should never feel lost on your site.  The value-add you will provide to any group should always be present, front and center, and it should be easy and immediate for them to find ways to engage more intimately.

9. What is the most effective means to neutralize negative conversations about a product when the complaints are reaching critical mass?

There are several steps you should take when negative comments surface and especially as they are reaching critical mass.  These steps include:

1. Acknowledge the situation.
2. Fight social media fire with social media water by answering where the negative conversations surface.  For example, don’t communicate through Twitter, if the complaints are coming in through Facebook.
3. Be sorry and mean it!
4. Create an FAQ to answer those questions that people are asking frequently about the situation.
5. Create a pressure valve or an area devoted to answer questions, address complaints and ease concern.
6. Know when to move the conversation offline into a more private method of communication (i.e., Direct Message, Facebook Message, email).
7. Provide information company-wide so your employees are not in the dark and know when to refer comments and questions to official representatives.
8. Learn your lessons and don’t make the same mistake twice.

10. What advice do you have for fostering internal collaboration among departments?

The first step would be to figure out what level of sharing or internal collaboration is right for your department or organization.  Sharing can be on different levels from simple document editing and project management alerts for your programs all the way to enterprise collaboration and social computing, where you may have employees connecting through an internal social network by sharing videos, blogging and using innovative idea generation in wikis.  Similar to how you participate externally in social media, you have to find out how people want to share internally and what information would be the most valuable to them.  By researching or doing your homework first, you will develop a best practice approach to sharing internally with the most helpful tools and educational resources to engage your peers, whether they are in your department or you’re working cross functionally on a larger company initiative.

For those of you who caught my December 7^th Vocus Webinar on “The Techniques of the New PR Champion,” here’s Part II of the Q&A. I can tell from the number of questions, (there were over 65 with some duplication), PR professionals are ready to embrace new practices and they’re looking at 2012 as a year with increased social media responsibilities.  If you missed Part I of the Q&A, you can find it here.

1. What is the best way to start social media marketing?

The best way to start in social media is to “listen” or monitor conversations for keywords related to your company, its products/services, executives, competitors, and what’s trending in your industry.  These conversations will allow you to identify the people who are actively engaged in dialog relevant to your brand, in the networks where you need to participate.  You can use either free tools or paid monitoring platforms to track the conversations over a period of time. Listening enables you to know where to build social media profiles because the conversations are frequent and in-depth.  These conversations also help you to understand the critical issues of your audiences, to share more meaningful information with them.  You want your company to become a valuable resource through social media rather than using it as a channel to pump out “spammy” messages.  Setting up a monitoring platform will give you the intelligence you need to prepare a strategic program and to participate effectively.

2. What are some of the key questions we should be asking internally to determine not only where our resources should go, but also how deep into each of these segments we should delve?

This is a great question and so many communications professionals overlook the “why” of social media.  The very first question is to ask, “Why do we need social media and do we really need to be everywhere?” The “why part” will also unfold into:  Whom are we trying to engage?  Where do they congregate?  What specific outcome are we looking to achieve?  Before beginning your program, you should also be asking simple resource questions including:

• Who will be managing the social media program? Will it be a collaborative effort in the communications department and/or what other departments will be involved?
• Where are we participating now and have those efforts been consistently managed from a resources perspective?
• What types of content do we have available that we can use to engage people vs. developing new content, if we’re short on resources?
• How much time will we need to devote to social media with other types of communications efforts in play?
• How are we going to collaborate internally to advance the organization’s sharing and innovation, which is an efficient and more productive way to approach social media?

3. When you say duplicate others efforts, does this indicate we should cut back on RTing?

Duplicating efforts doesn’t necessarily mean cutting back on RTing.  As a matter of fact it makes the RTing more effective.  For example, when you have several departments working on a company-wide program, let’s say a big tradeshow, there is an opportunity to share similar content and to time the release of information for more impact.  You may also want to consider one set of links for posting that lead back to a central landing area, rather than different departments having their own links and separate landing pages for the same content. It’s more organized to have a one set of links driving to a hub, and it’s a lot easier to keep track.  Using internal calendaring or a universal calendar system gives employees access to approved content they can share and then other departments can retweet or support the effort by posting it in their networks.  The more you coordinate the sharing of content, based on timing, themes, keywords, etc., and support one another’s participation, the easier it will be to track and see the success of your efforts.

4. How do you know you are getting good ROI on Twitter, especially?

There are so many different tools to measure Twitter activity.  You can use Twitalyzer, TweetStats and TweetEfect, which will tell you everything from who shares your content the most, the frequency of your retweets, and even which tweets build your community as opposed to the tweets that make you lose followers. However, when you really want to see the ROI, it’s best to use a specific link in a tweet that directs your Twitter followers to a landing page, where you can track their actions. For example, perhaps you want them to register for an event or sign up to download an ebook? Where social media measurement ends, website analytics begin.  Using a link to a landing page allows you to track from click to conversation.  I frequently mention the simple example of Dell using a link to a promotion via Twitter. By offering a link to a discount deal on a PC, Dell was able to track $3 million in sales.

5. Can you give a B2B example of a company effectively using social media?

There are many B2B examples but one that comes to mind is Dunn & Bradstreet (D&B). They use social media including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as an extension of how they connect with, and are a resource to, their customers, prospects and the community at large. For D&B, social media is part of how they bring their data to life; they live up to their brand by being a dynamic company and one that wants to connect D&B users, as much as possible, with the people behind the data and their insights. Similar to D&B, IBM was among the first to recognize that allowing their employees to engage directly with their customers through social media made their customer’s feel even closer to the brand.  Other B2B companies using social media successfully are: Cisco, SAP, Intel, and Network Solutions.

6. What is the best process on finding advocates?

Social media champions can be your internal employees who naturally raise their hands and want to be a part of social media on behalf of the company.  These are the people who take the initiative to start and manage the first social media profiles.  These individuals are great candidates to participate on a Social Media Core Team for strategy or to be a part of your Social Media Coalition, which handles a lot of the day to day activities on your social media properties.

The external brand advocates or champions come in many shapes and sizes. You can have customer advocates who engage, use your products and naturally want to share the information in their networks.  When you set up the monitoring of your keywords you can usually uncover these champions and their favorable reviews and endorsements.  They also make themselves very visible on your social media properties, constantly thanking you and looking for more information to share.  There are also influencers or champions who take an interest in what you do based on an interest they have in your industry. They, too, can be uncovered by listening to the conversations in different networks.  Of course, with these bloggers, you want to do some homework to identify their level of influence and the communities where they participate. It’s important to take the time to get to know them before you jump into the conversations.

In both cases, your once you pinpoint the needs of your champions, they are willing to share relevant and meaningful information with their communities. Suddenly you have an audience of audiences, happy to further the reach of your stories, further lending credibility to your brand.

7. I am the only person focusing on social media in my company, do you recommend focusing on a few channels or touching on many channels less frequently?

With scarce resources, I would definitely recommend focusing on a few channels and mastering engagement in those places, rather than spreading yourself too thin.  The pace you set from the onset has to be maintained, and if all goes well, it will increase based on engagement with your customers and other stakeholders.  Too many times I’ve seen companies very enthusiastic about social media participation to later find out months down the road they can’t keep up with the activity and many of their profiles go “dark.” Remember, we are dealing with people and their interests. If someone visits your Facebook page and you haven’t taken the time to post in two months, there are plenty of other places for them to engage with more interesting organizations.  People also want to interact with people, so it’s especially important that you have the resources to have a personal presence and to attend to your audiences needs, rather than just use a timed feed of updates or tweets.

8. What method do you recommend for measuring the effectiveness of your PR efforts.

I measure PR in the higher-level buckets, which include financial, employee productivity, reputation and customer service levels.  When you put a social media program in place it has to be integrated with other communication and also driving to a hub where this information can be captured, from click to conversion.  In many cases, departments may look at community growth, buzz across platforms, the number of retweets on Twitter, or comments on a blog post. However on a higher level, executives want to see how social media looks with respect to leads and sales, how much money it saved the company, the brand’s reputation, endorsements and sentiment tied to public confidence, and how employee activity resulted in productivity by delivering successful projects on time and under budget.  PR can also be tied to customer satisfaction by using social media to answer questions directly, measuring customer sentiment, and gathering research and applying helpful feedback to your products and services.

9. What are the best practices a one-person shop can adopt?

A few best practices for the one -man shop include:

• Don’t be in too many places; pick a couple or a few channels and really move toward engagement with people rather than informing with outbound messages.
• Realize that you have to plan your content carefully and know in advance what you are going to share each week.  Of course you need to be active on a social site to thank people, ask and answer questions and engage with them, peer-to-peer.
• Monitor keywords carefully and filter down to exactly what you need to hear.  Focusing on the most relevant keywords based on your overall communications plan and what you’re trying to achieve will help you to maximize your efforts through social media.
• Enlist the support of other potential champions who work in the company and who may already be out there social networking.  They may be able to help you increase the your reach and also help you to listen for negative conversations that surface.
• Set up a good monitoring system and have it tied to your mobile device, especially if you find yourself away from your computer for a good portion of the day.
• Realize you can pre-plan and time certain updates and tweets when you know you have a scheduled meeting or you are in transit.  But, be sure to check back with your community to make sure they don’t have any specific questions or issues.
• Monitor and measure frequently, so you can show progress and benchmark small wins. This may lead to additional resources moving forward.

10. What was the website to look up the best practices social media policies?

One of the best websites to help you in your social media policy development is www.socialmediagovernance.com.  The site has over 100 best practice social media policies for you to review.

On December 7, 2011, I participated in a Vocus Webinar on “The Techniques of the New PR Champion.”  It was exciting for me to present some of the material from my new book, “Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional.”  With a lot to say on the topic and very little time, the Q&A period was cut short. So, I’m taking the time now to answer questions asked by the participants that were not addressed during the session.

Here’s Part I of my Q&A:

1. How do you convince dinosaurs in companies to join in with the social media revolution?

At this point, it’s important for people who are not active in social media to understand that social media is not a trend that’s going away.  Social media is a way of life and business.  The people, who you want to interact with your company, including customers, partners, suppliers, media, bloggers, employee, etc., are active and using social media daily for their news and information, to connect with their family and friends and to receive updates, promotions, discounts and customer service from their brands.  Not everyone in a company will participate the same way.  I wouldn’t expect every CEO or senior executive to blog or to be out there on Twitter.  However, if company stakeholders were actively participating in web communities, I would expect executives to provide the resources, tools, trust and empowerment to their employees who need to make meaningful connections with constituents, from creating awareness and interest to generating leads and sales.

To provide the inactive with a better understanding of the value of social media is to approach employee participation through a more formal “ask” process.  Social media is not something that you can just throw out in a casual conversation.  It deserves research including: uncovering best practice examples, identifying what competitors are doing, and showing how its use can save the company money, increase awareness as well as coverage and credibility. It’s also important to be prepared with information on the internal resources and people who would be involved.

2. How do you implement a social media strategy, with company policy restrictions?

The numbers of companies restricting social media is less than in years past and these numbers will get smaller in 2012 and beyond.  It’s important to educate your executives on employee use of social media, regardless of restrictions; they will use their smart phones during the day and go home and be active on Facebook at night.  It’s much better to open up the social media channels and to have a social media policy along with an overall company strategy to guide the proper participation. It’s also better to offer employees the tools, empowerment and guidance they need.  This may be a crawl, walk and then run type of effort, but baby steps are really important. If you’re currently participating in social media activity, then your strategy will reflect the types of social media that is permissible, as stated in your company policy.  Of course, you will need to focus your efforts on showing some benchmark wins on what’s currently working. If you can show some small wins then executives will slowly move toward more activity and less restrictions.  The PR Champion often uses a grassroots approach, in this case, and rallies other champions to form a team or a Social Media Core Team.  Forming a strategic team or perhaps even an Advisory Board outside of the company is an opportunity to create a solid strategy where social media contributes to the higher-level company goals and proves to executives there’s true value in social media and employee participation.

3. The PR Champion role looks like it’s becoming an internal social communicator, as well with external audiences, would you agree?

Absolutely! The PR Champion works from the inside out, realizing there are new processes and procedures that should be set in place to accommodate better communications externally with the public.  A few examples in my presentation included the Internal Collaboration Generator who creates better team sharing on the inside of the organization and the COMMs Organizer who guides the content creation and distribution of communication, as the process has changed from mass communication to direct one-on-one engagement in web communities.

4. Is it the C-Suite who creates the core team?

The C-Suite is informed of the effort to create the Social Media Core Team and they buy into the idea.  But, typically, the Core Team is not picked/appointed by the C-Suite based on title, but rather a person’s knowledge, use and passion with respect to social media.  A Core Team usually develops from the first set of champions in PR, marketing, web and IT.  Sometimes, it could even include HR, Sales or other active departments.  These people are social media actives and they (1) have a greater understanding of social media, (2) realize there will be different objectives to reach social media goals, and (3) will uphold policies within the organization.  The C-Suite should, of course, give its blessing and communicate to all employees that they are on board and senior leadership should show employees there’s buy in from the top down.

5. What kinds of policies?

PR Champions will be involved in the creation and guidance of social media policies, which include:

• Overall employee policies for participation
• Department policies
• Comment policies
• Public participation policies
• Training / education of policies
• Blogging guidelines, with respect to advertising/spokespeople endorsement

6. How do you us PR to promote a small business, which seldom has news stories to put out over the wire.

Social media is great for small business, which have stories to tell that are more targeted and customized, and should be shared directly with their stakeholders.  More companies need to realize that not every story should go over the wire.  Small business can make great connections with bloggers and the media who are looking for interesting and unique story angles.  Using social media is also a great way to build community through awareness and to drive people to the company’s website, where you can offer more information and have people engage more intimately with the company.  Of course, this all starts with a plan.  Using PR through social media is a more targeted way to create one-on-one interactions through direct connections.  You can “listen” or monitor keyword conversations to hear what interests your audience and then use social media as an opportunity to share relevant content, provide meaningful advice and build relationships with them.

7. How do you start knocking down the walls between departments to incubate the hybrid position?

You should start by auditing your social media properties to see who is active and to take a look at the useful and not so useful efforts to date. This is often the impetus to approach management with the idea that there needs to be a dedicated team of champions to create a plan/strategy for the company, rather than different departments working in silos and not using social media to align with higher level goals.  Let management know that forming a social media Core Team will begin the strategic policymaking process, which will make senior leadership more comfortable.  Share the audit with the champions in different departments and once you have the buy in from management, begin the process to meet on a regular basis. You will slowly start breaking down the silos with internal communication (you will also need to set up an internal sharing platform, if one is not already in place) and get your champions on the same page. Using the audit, you will work together on the policy and a social media strategy to guide the organization’s participation.  The effort will naturally take off from there.

8. How can I get my social media team on the same page so our social media content is consistent?

A good social media policy will often refer to the brand guidelines and also to acceptable content that can be used.  An Internal department and universal calendaring system helps to keep everyone on the same page with respect to content, so you can visualize what’s be shared, by whom, every week or month.  It’s also important to remember that there will be a brand voice often supported by resources and materials (perhaps your driving to information on your website) but that employees should also be developing their own unique voice.  There are great examples of companies who use internal twitter feeds to share daily, in 140 characters or less, what’s going on in the company (a tweet or a message a day). Employees are encouraged to take the tweets and use the content, but to say it in there own voice externally through their social media participation.  You have to make sure that everyone understands what’s considered acceptable and unacceptable, and you have to trust people to use what you provide and to share it in their own unique way.

9. What are a few of the top resources for keeping up to date with PR practices and social media action?

• Ragan.com
• PR Daily
• Spin Sucks
• Social Media Today
• Mashable
• PRNewser
• Bulldog Reporter
• Social Media Examiner
• eMarketer Charts

10. How do you build thought leadership through PR?

Thought leadership is built through direct interactions. You’re able to create trust and credible communications by sharing insight, direction and industry information that’s forward thinking.  Social media in your PR program is an excellent way to build thought leadership because you can listen, evaluate and respond in direct one-on-one conversations, and use interactive mediums including video, podcasting and blog communities to go deeper into a subject and to also show more of your passion, interest and knowledge.  Many B2B companies are capitalizing on thought leadership through social media sharing more information and resources in communities, where they would never have been invited to participate before.  You can use social media to create multimedia and collaborative learning opportunities with your constituents, and to position your experts as valuable and knowledgeable resources.

It’s December and we’re ringing in the Holidays at #PRStudchat! Growing together over the past 2+ years, we’re like one big family and it’s amazing how much we’ve shared together.  On December 21, 2011 at 8:30 p.m., get ready to share some more. Our Holiday Twitter chat session will give PR professionals, students and educators a chance to discuss with friends “a few of their favorite PR things …”

Here is what we want to hear from you that night:

Q1. What are your favorite PR tools/services?

Q2. What are your favorite books?

Q3. What are your favorite classes?

Q4: What are your favorite PR communities … online and off?

Q5. What’s your favorite PSA (favorite Social Good campaigns/hashtags)?

Q6. Who are you favorite PR industry leaders/role models?

Q7. What are your favorite conferences?

Q8. Do you have a favorite portrayal of a PR Pro on TV or in the movies?

Q9. Do you have a favorite current Holiday campaign?

Q10. My favorite part about being a PR pro is …

We’re also taking this opportunity to invite the other PR Twitter communities to join in our December Holiday chat, to make it a more of a Holiday Mixer.  So, if any of the other PR communities want to participate in the festivities, please send @ValerieSimon or myself a note. We’ll add your hashtag to the communications moving forward and also promote your participation in future articles and blog posts.

We’re really excited about our Holiday celebration.  It’s a special time with special friends. We want to celebrate all of you and the tremendous support you’ve given us through out the years.  We look forward to a dynamic discussion filled with “a few of our favorite PR things.” Of course, if you have any ideas about your favorite PR things that you want us to discuss on December 21^st, please feel free to post them on our LinkedIn Discussion Group.  Hope to “see” you on the 21^st.

A Little More About PRStudChat:

It began with a simple question asked by Angela Hernandez, then President of PRSSA at Central Michigan University (CMU). “Is PR Right for me?” A follow up blog post by PR 2.0 expert Deirdre Breakenridge inspired a series of direct messages on Twitter between Breakenridge and fellow PR industry pro, Valerie Simon. This was an important question and one that should be explored beyond one student or one blog post. Why not build a community to help students across the country, and even the globe, learn from the experience and perspective of industry professionals… A community where everyone can learn and grow together. Read more