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PR and Social Media

How PR and Social Media Go Together

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When you think about PR and social media, you may find the two to be very different. In fact, that’s one of the reasons PR professionals didn’t really embrace social media in the beginning.

However, an opportunity has presented itself to actually combine efforts and maximize both as a result. 

Think about it: public relations is all about relationships and storytelling. What better way to help companies make connections and build a reputation than with social media? 

Recently, I had a great conversation with Christoph Trappe on his Business Storytelling Podcast where we dove into this further. 

PR and Social Media Can Work Together

Despite their differences, PR and social media can be used together strategically to create a major impact for your brand. Approaching them as a united campaign sets your business up for increased brand awareness, more engagement, and better relationships. 

First, social media offers endless opportunities to get out there and make connections.

Beyond members of traditional media like journalists and producers, you can now collaborate with social media influencers, bloggers, podcasters, live streamers, and more. 

Whatever community your collaborator has, that is another way to extend the reach of your story and thought leadership. 

With that said, always align yourself with those who share your values.

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Beyond just brand awareness, PR uses strategic communications to engage with certain groups. 

I shared with Christoph and his audience examples of customers, employees, media, and your community. It’s really up to you which group you want to engage with, and PR is the way to make that connection. 

That being said, communication with your audience can no longer be one-way. PR may be the bridge to communicating your message, but listening is just as important. 

Storytelling and Social Media

Social media allows voices from both directions to be heard. When you take the time to listen, yes it can sometimes feel noisy, but there are also many valuable insights ready to be discovered.  

Lastly, while most people may know PR through earned media and publicity, it is so much more than that. 

In reality, PR is grounded in the fact that good relationships are at the heart of a successful brand. 

Social media gives citizen journalists a platform, which is why we now have so many different avenues to share stories and build those relationships. 

Something we have learned from social media, however, is that you must be authentic in your storytelling. You can no longer just put your spokesperson out there and expect strong relations from it. No matter the audience, social media encourages people to be smarter consumers than ever. Therefore, always make your intentions, purpose, and values clear in any message you send. 

Ultimately, social media is an extension of your public relations efforts to grow your brand and relationships. Marrying the two strategically not only helps tell your story, but build a community around that story. In doing so, you create meaning around your brand for long-term success.

For more building strategy around PR and social media, watch the full episode on https://authenticstorytelling.net/

8 PR Practices poster

8 PR Practices Website Launches to Help Visualize PR Hybrid Approach

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8pr practice

I’ve been practicing the PR Hybrid approach for the last 10 years. My book, Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional was my first attempt at crystallizing these new PR roles and providing a framework for communication professionals. The book focuses on eight distinct practices that PR pros are carrying out everyday. Regardless of their job positions, whether in-house for a brand, or working at an PR agency, non-profit or government agency, new practices have surfaced, as a result of social media communications.

Initially, I had created a small and simple circle diagram to illustrate the functions of the different practices. However, this visual didn’t capture the true essence of each new PR practice and how they often intersected with one another.  Today, with the help of a good friend, we’re introducing a new website, 8PRPractices.com, to showcases our new visuals and to clearly illustrate how the PR practices are tied together in a honeycomb diagram, analogous to the way bees build their nests.  The new website allows you to download the diagrams (all eight practices together or each one separately), and to view the different roles, which are never 100% of one profile. Although PR professionals are multitasking, the new practices are not meant to fragment their PR focus, but rather to build new knowledge, skills and competencies. New practices allow PR to work outside of its silo, which is critical for good brand communications today.

Let me give you a little background on how the new design came to fruition.  I had been talking to my good friend, Roderick (@fogfish) for about three years through social media. We talk almost every day now and he’s my Twitter BFF.  I guess you could call our friendship the perfect example how a casual Twitter friend can become a trusted confidant.  Thanks to Twitter, Roderick and I have been sharing ideas and learning from one another for years.  Roderick is a very talented designer and app developer.  When he showed me his design vision for my PR Hybrid Professional, connecting all of the new PR practices, I immediately saw my years of work come to life!

The new PR Hybrid Professional visual is a comprehensive view of the expanded role of the PR professional, as a result of social media communications and integration with other areas, even beyond the marketing department.  There’s a great deal of information to absorb and as a PR pro; you may not tackle every practice all at once.  However, having the knowledge and understanding of a broader scope of public relations in the organization is critical to the health and growth of our industry.

You can weigh in here … how do you picture the expanded role of the PR Hybrid professional? Please check out my new website, 8PRPractices.com, and let me know what else you would add into our design to represent the new roles and responsibilities in PR today.

 

8 PR Practices - Practice 8 Master of the Metrics

PR Practice #8: The Master of the Metrics Chart of Responsibilities

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Today’s blog post is the last in the “edited” or “cut” chart series.  In my book, Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, PR Practice #8, the Master of the Metrics, focused on how communications professionals must deliver accurate metrics tied to their measurement programs. These metrics have to meet the expectations of their executives, as well as the professionals developing and implementing their social media programs.

I mentioned in the chapter, “Social media doesn’t change good PR measurement practices, although it may add to the complexity.  The same principles you learned about outcomes (quantifiable change in attitude or behavior) vs. outputs (the tangible elements in your campaign) and the outtakes (the key messages you want your audience to take away) still hold true.” Except now, as the Master of the Metrics you have many more metrics to benchmark and levels of engagement to report.  And, as the Chart of Responsibilities illustrates below, there are new practices to learn and embrace, from creating measurable social media objectives to tracking the appropriate metrics over time and clearly communicating the ROI and impact of your program.

 

 

© PR 2.0 Strategies

Here’s how the responsibilities breakdown in your new practice:

Breakdown Metrics From Simple to Complex

Social media communications has a wide variety of metrics for you to choose and a number of tools and resources to help you track your program success. However, setting up a social media measurement program means you must have a full understanding of the metrics available, from benchmarking simple community participation to more complex engagement with your constituents.  There are those metrics that help to illustrate how a company is reaching higher-level business communications goals, as well the metrics that track the goals for different types of social media participation by community. Identifying the simple to the complex helps you to present the types of metrics that executives in your organization expect from social media engagement.

Create Measureable Social Media Objectives

Understanding the different types of metrics is key, however, in order to even decide which metrics are the best to track, you must know what you’re trying to accomplish with your social media program.  The simplest question, “Why are you using social media?” is often overlooked at the onset of a program.  What you set in place as your measurable objectives will allow you to determine if you are reaching your goals.  Are you using social media to create more awareness, how much and over what period of time? Or, is your social media program meant to create leads, which result in sales and how many, by when?  Your metrics will also help you to benchmark how you are performing relative to the competition in the marketplace.

Determine Metrics to Track Over Time

Shonali Burke, VP, Digital at MSL in Washington, DC, said it best in her interview on measurement in Chapter 8.  She stated there are simple mistakes professionals make with their measurement including that they don’t know what they are measuring specifically, and they also don’t track metrics over time.  In order to get a clear and more accurate picture of performance it’s important to track the metrics over a period of time. You may be monitoring your social media communications every week or every two weeks. However, it’s also very important, as you track over time, to compare “apples to apples” with respect to your competition. For example, if you are measuring consumer sentiment about your brand on a weekly basis, then you must be tracking the weekly competitive consumer sentiment as well.

Clearly Communicate ROI

The first step to clearly communicating ROI is to understand the definition of true ROI, which is involves a financial calculation. When you say “ROI” to a C-Level executive this means the money part.  How does social media communication lead to the bottom line? In many cases the metrics you gather are only a piece of the ROI calculation.  You need to show how your metrics, in conjunction with other data (web analytics, sales data, etc.), show click to conversation.  Social media can help to illustrate ROI, as long as you’re able to deliver the metrics that relate to leads, sales, reputation management, crisis mitigation, cost-effective recruiting, customer service efficiencies and/or employee productivity through your social media communications.

Develop a Six-Step Process Metrics Program

You can use a six-step process to evaluate analytics that measure what is or isn’t working in a social media program.  It’s important to realize that all programs from the macro level down to the micro department level need goals and objectives, with supporting strategies and tactics.  If your organization’s higher-level goals include reputation/image, dialogue and engagement, advocacy/relationship building, sales revenue and leads, and thought leadership and education, then your metric reporting may include:

  1. Reviewing sentiment data
  2. Evaluating the peaks and valleys of weekly or bi-weekly volume monitoring vs. the competition
  3. Identifying audience sharing habits through link tracking
  4. Analyzing share of voice in various platforms,
  5. Reviewing relationships with top influencers
  6. Tracking increases in thought leadership (as a brand influencer)

Identify the Inform, Inspire and Engage Metrics 

When a company makes the decision to participate in social media, there are three phases of participation.  At each phase, metrics can be captured with varying levels of importance.  The first phase is the Inform Phase, which focuses on the company’s outputs from their tweets and Facebook posts to the number of YouTube videos shared. The second phase is the Inspire Phase, which means your brand communication motivates your stakeholders to use the information you provide and to further share their experience (comments, blog posts, shares). The third phase is the Engage Phase, which is highest level of interaction with people in your communities. When you are truly engaged with your stakeholders, you are deep in conversation that leads to valuable business outcomes, including leads, sales, customer-service satisfaction, etc.

Evaluate High Level vs. Low Level Metrics

As the Master of the Metrics, you will want to make sure your program goals are always measurable and you are helping to report information that’s required by your executives vs. what department personnel need to monitor and measure community engagement. Another way to look at the metrics is to categorize them into lower level community participation (tweets, retweets, comments, views, friend/follower growth) vs. higher-level adoptions that lead to business growth (leads, sales, registrations, cost savings, productivity, etc.).  It’s the actions at a high level that interest the C-Suite the most, as these metrics are more financially based.

As a Master of the Metrics you have several new responsibilities. You must make sure your organization is capturing the metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on the macro level, which is across the entire organization, and you’re also helping to guide metrics on a more micro level (by department).  You will be driving the metrics in your program and proactively capturing the information to meet the expectations of your executives. At the same time, you’re proving the value of your social media communications program.

 

 

 

Practice 7 - Reputation Task Force Member

PR Practice #7: Reputation Task Force Member Chart of Responsibilities

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The day you started in communications was the day you became a member of the ethics committee and you joined the brand police force.  In public relations, it’s your job to uphold the integrity of the brand and ensure the messaging is consistent and remains intact across all communications channels.  Now, with social media, your messages go further and you cast a wider net; your company is automatically in the center of public conversations and in the critical eye of the consumer.  In my book, Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, PR Practice #7 focuses on how PR professionals must concentrate more on reputation by building a human face, daily monitoring and more brand education for themselves and their peers.

Today’s post is a part of the “edited” or “cut” chart series, which includes the Reputation Task Force Member’s Chart of Responsibilities.  Even though you’ve always had the reputation of your brand front and center, social media increases your need to take a proactive approach on many fronts. Whether you realized it or not, being in the PR or communications means you an important part of an organically growing task force.

I mentioned in my book how, “The Reputation Task Force Member is a natural position for the PR person who usually is immersed in the negative communications issues, the crisis situations or the damaged reputation …  PR professionals also have the knowledge and skills to minimize or neutralize the critical issues or concerns.”  You can see in the chart of responsibilities how human and transparent communication, increased brand education, a proactive approach to reputation and continued task force growth lead to communications success.

© PR 2.0 Strategies

Here’s how the responsibilities break down in your new practice:

Build a Human Face

Proactively protecting a reputation starts with the human face of the company. Anyone who has said social media requires transparency and open communication is 100% correct.  People relate to people. We are social beings who want to connect and engage with other people in different ways.  Your ability to interact and build strong relationships may directly correlate to the transparency and human side you show.  Remember, consumers want to talk to people and not to logos.

Teach Brand Core Values

If you’re not directly involved in the creation of the brand communication guidelines, then you need to get involved! It’s really interesting to note that when an organization develops its brand style guidelines, there are areas dedicated to the communication and messaging, including voice, style and tone. Too often, PR people are not involved in the process.  This is right up the PR person’s alley, as we are responsible for responding to the public through a variety of channels, whether it’s via the media or now directly to customers in our social networks.

Develop a Sentiment Monitoring Program

You don’t want to be setting up your sentiment monitoring program after you realize your customers are not speaking favorably on behalf of your brand.  The time to think about sentiment monitoring is proactively beforehand and at the start of your social media planning. Determining the conversations to track and the keywords to monitor is critical to the success of your brand’s reputation.  You have to know what you’re monitoring, how frequently it’s monitored and the best way to report on your findings.

Engaging in Relentless Auditing

Social media turns the PR professional into a relentless auditor of social media for brand reputation.  Of course, you were always reviewing news clippings and online coverage, making sure your companies, products/services and executives were represented in a favorable light.  There were times when you were able to see a story before it went to print and then there were times you were chasing down an editor to get a retraction.  Today, through social media monitoring tools you can take a proactive approach to reputation, saving precious time and resources by squashing issues early on and neutralizing negative comments before they have the chance to go viral.

Become a Reputation Liaison & Grow Task Force Membership

Being on the reputation task force alone could be a full time job, so it requires the help of your peers in your department, as well as those across the company.  The overall goal of being a liaison and growing the task force team is to be able to better maintain the health and well being of the company’s reputation, in the age of public conversations.  Seeing positive progress through the growth of your task force, and effective and positive sentiment monitoring / measurement, is an indication of “reputation wins.” Positive progress means the participating task force members (and reputation liaisons) have done a great job.

Enforce Active Brand Policing

By growing the task force you will create an active force of brand police who naturally are watching, supporting and reporting on brand communications.  Today, as a result of social media, they say every person in the company technically becomes a part of customer service.  The same goes for the reputation task force members.  Whether officially assigned or spearheaded as a grass roots effort, it takes an entire army of employee champions, on the brand police force, to guide and uphold the brand values and messaging.

With your strong sense of ethics, your knowledge of the brand voice and your constant desire to be a part of the brand police, participating on the reputation task force is the best way to utilize your skills to maintain and often protect your brand’s reputation.

 

Practice 6 - The Relationship Analyzer

PR Practice #6: The Relationship Analyzer Chart of Responsibilities

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I’m reading an advance copy of the book, “Rethinking Reputation: How PR Trumps Marketing and Advertising in the New Media World” by Fraser Seitel and John Doorley. Early in the book, the authors state, “PR is an ancient art form.” They trace public relations back to the days of Moses. Since the beginning, PR is at the heart of a company’s communications and builds relationships to foster goodwill and confidence with the public.  However, a major difference in practicing PR today is the ability to build a meaningful relationship with stakeholders by using technology to deepen and strategically grow relationships for the long term.

There are new responsibilities for PR professionals who want to move from simple connections with audiences to meaningful, one-on-one engagement that leads to more valuable outcomes.  The Relationship Analyzer is PR Practice #6 in my new book, Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, which discusses how you can take your relationships to a new level. To continue with my “edited” or what I’m calling the “cut chart series,” today’s post discusses the Relationships Analyzer’s Chart of Responsibilities. There are many new roles PR professionals undertake, as they move from creating connections to strategic relationships that benefit their brands.

As I mentioned in my book, “When you move from relationship building to relationship examining, a new practice for public relations surfaces … The Relationship Analyzer is a strategic practice that digs into the psychographics of people based on like-mindedness and common critical issues, and the study of behavioral actions of the people in your communities, as the key to higher-level interactions.” The wheel visual below depicts several new roles and responsibilities for you to learn. As a Relationship Analyzer you will continue to uncover information and learn about the people you want to meet in various web communities.

 

© PR 2.0 Strategies

A Relationship Analyzer’s responsibilities include a three-part process, which will guide your approach to connections and deepening relationships.  This three-part process includes developing detailed audience profiles, using technology to analyze direction and growth of your relationship and creating strategies based on a web community’s culture. Several technology tools will help you to actually see and make these connections in your social media outreach.

Here’s how the responsibilities break down in your new practice:

Develop an Audience Profile

An Audience Profile is a helpful resource to identify the needs of each audience segment, to pinpoint exactly where groups are congregating, to distinguish what issues/topics interest them, and to allow you to discover the best ways to communicate directly. By identifying specific needs and interests, you will be able to provide customized and meaningful information, all in an effort to build stronger, more mutually beneficial relationships.

Analyze Growth Relationships

The Relationship Analyzer’s job is a direct response to the depth of relationships and the participation required to keep close connections. You can use technology tools and resources to monitor the direction, growth and strength of the relationship, during all phases of your communications. Technology reveals the weak connections between you and a friend/follower, or between your brand and its stakeholders, so that you can continually apply new strategies to strengthen and/or build those bonds.

Define Position on Relationship Staircase

As you participate in social communities, you quickly learn your friendships appear to fall into different buckets. Remember, these buckets may change depending on the community. However, you can group friends/followers into classifications, from the Casual Friend all the way up the Relationship Staircase to The Trusted Confidant/Brand Champion.  Understanding the position of the relationship helps to you to create additional opportunities to advance and further your climb to the top of the staircase.

Use Technology to Visualize

You can capitalize on the great connections by using technology to visualize the nature of your relationship and its intensity at any given time. Technology tools in the various social platforms help you to see weak ties, as well as your strong connections to customers and to your influencers. These tools help you to figure out a better strategy to cultivating stronger relationships, not only quickly but also through like connections. Visualizing (through maps or graphing technology) where your connections are the greatest and where you need help with your engagement enables you to move from awareness and the Casual Friend to a Trusted Confidant/Brand Champion.

Devise Your Strategy to Grow

Once you identify where your audience, or your influencers congregate you can answer specific questions to devise your relationship growth strategy. These questions include: How do you think your friends/followers view you or your brand on the Relationship Stairway?  Have you taken the initiative to climb the steps a little higher, with some or most of your friends/followers? How do you figure out which friends/followers you want to move up the steps quickly, and have you analyzed these friends or their friendships lately?

Breakdown the Landscape

You must observe and identify the differences between communities and be able to apply cultural norms and group behavior to rally a community on your behalf.  You also have to investigate your own participation to know how to engage differently in networks. Your job is to uncover how culture and best practice engagement plays a part of a relationship’s growth. The culture in your Facebook groups may be very different than the what’s expected from those who participates with you on your brand’s main Twitter feed.  Knowing the landscape and the needs of different communities will help to cultivate the relationship.

Create Experiences for Channels

You will quickly learn that people don’t want to see and hear the same stories, and receive the same information or share identical content in all of your communities. You will come to find how social channels breakdown with different strategic purposes.  Facebook may be used more for crowdsourcing and contests, or customer service and consumer research.  Twitter may become a channel for update to the moment news and information, exciting events and activities as well as reputation management.  Google+ may be your opportunity to have video hangouts for closer interaction with stakeholders and idea generating sessions with your customers.

The Relationship Analyzer is a new and evolving role and one of the most important PR practices.  Relationship building is at the heart of public relations. Your ability to grow relationships and measure the outcomes through technology and visualization is an excellent way to expand the depth of your insight and to achieve your communications goals. Your new knowledge and skills will help you to connect, engage and find mutually beneficial relationships with people who will further your brand’s mission and become loyal advocates.

 

PR Practice 5 - The Pre-Crisis Doctor

PR Practice #5: Pre-Crisis Doctor Chart of Responsibilities

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One of my favorite new practices, which is outlined in my book, Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, is PR Practice #5: The Pre-Crisis Doctor. To continue with my edited or cut chart series, today’s post discusses the Pre-Crisis Doctor chart of responsibilities, and the many new roles PR professionals undertake, as they move from PR crisis managers to Pre-Crisis Doctors.  As I stated in my book, Pre-Crisis Doctors are the PR professionals who, “… proactively monitor social media conversations and track the sentiment of customers and other stakeholders when conversations are under control.”  Pre-Crisis Doctors do not wait until the crisis escalates to neutralize the situation, and they use technology wisely to stay abreast of any rising negative sentiment.

You can see from the wheel visual below that there are several new roles and responsibilities for you to learn, as the Pre-Crisis Doctor, in your own company.  The Pre-Crisis Doctor uses a different strategic process to prevent a negative situation from gaining momentum. Of course, the ideal scenario would be to stop the negative from ever starting, however, due to the nature of social media this is highly unlikely.

 

 © PR 2.0 Strategies

Therefore, as a Pre-Crisis Doctor, it’s your responsibility to catch the negative sentiment, at a point when you’re able to react swiftly. You should have several resources in place, which includes everything from your company’s social media crisis organizational chart and the shell of the message to your measurement tools and key influencers to help keep the public updated with the most recent information.

Here’s how the responsibilities break down in your new practice:

Create an Org Chart of Key Social Contacts

PR professionals are very familiar with the org chart, which provides the communications and reporting structure in a company.  However, building a social media crisis organizational (org) chart gives the framework for who is involved at every different level of crisis escalation. The most common social media crisis org charts start with a bottom layer of social media activity and who is involved (no pending crisis) and works all the way to the highest level of crisis (full blown crisis) at which point your CEO, Chief Reputation Officer, Board of Directors or Cabinet may be directly involved in the situation at hand.

Develop the Shell of the Message

When it comes to social media communications, it’s difficult to have every type of message planned because each crisis situation varies and will warrant a different approach, depending on the issue and the social media channel.  However, your company should know the shell of the message based on company policies, positions and ethics, which can be crafted to meet the requirements and culture of the communications channel. It’s always best to anticipate what could happen through each channel, and then go on the offense with your proactive messages.

Tech Test Tools for Crisis

You will need to identify the best tools, resources and platforms to help you track rapid communication during a crisis. Your tools will also allow you to determine whether or not the crisis communications strategy is working to move the negative sentiment to neutral or positive.  It’s imperative to research, demo, trial and test your technology long before a crisis begins.  When you’re in the height of crisis, that’s not the time to be deciding the best resources to put in place. In addition, the tools you select should be easy for your team to use (tested beforehand), and also allow them to create the charts and reports appropriate for executives who are watching the situation closely.

Build a Comment Response Chart

PR professionals are learning to listen closely to the dialogue of customers, media, bloggers, etc., whether it’s positive praise, product questions, service issues, organizational concerns or outright anger.  As Pre-Crisis Doctors, they analyze how to move through different scenarios, as these conversations are documented and placed into “conversations buckets.” Building these conversation buckets becomes the infrastructure of your Comment Response Chart, or a decision tree. The Comment Response Chart helps professionals to determine how to handle various situations through a series of yes/no questions, which is a monitor/evaluate/respond strategy.

Integrate Department Crisis Plans

Because social media moves across the company, PR pros have to integrate the social media crisis plan to work in harmony with other departments, during a crisis situation.  For example, customer service is an area that’s speaking directly to the customer, and there is a hierarchy of who in customer service will speak with a stakeholder, depending on the level of crisis escalation.  Today’s social media crisis plans must take into consideration how different departments in the company, and employees in all positions, must be aware of crisis measures and directing communication to the appropriate contacts.

Identify Key Media / Bloggers

In the past, crisis managers built their plans realizing the importance of identifying and prioritizing media contacts that they would alert at the onset of a crisis. These journalists would also help to keep the public informed with updated information. The focus used to be solely on the media. However, today we include bloggers as powerful influencers during a crisis situation.  One key reason to build strong relationships is when crisis strikes and negative sentiment runs rampant, you have an outlet to tell your company’s side of the story.

Review New Crisis Measurement

One of your crisis strategies will be to properly identify your approach to measurement and what benchmarks will be used to determine if your evaluation and response system is working.  Measuring aggregated conversations focusing on negative sentiment before, during and after the crisis helps to determine the crisis plan effectiveness.  We have the ability to find the negative sentiment, and understand who and what’s being said in the context of a discussion. There is no more 24-hour news cycle, but rather a minute-to-minute news cycle through social media and your citizen journalists.

Being a Pre-Crisis Doctor is a proactive approach to social media crisis, one that prepares the company for various types of negative conversations. The Pre-Crisis Doctor pinpoints the people, channels, messages and appropriate technology to use before the crisis occurs.

 

 

Practice 4 - The COMMS Organizer

PR Practice #4: COMMS Organizer Chart of Responsibilities

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It’s official … Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional is here!  My book is available (a littler earlier than I expected) in a print (paperback version) and all digital formats.  However, what you won’t find in the book is some of the content I’m sharing in this blog series.  These are the charts and even parts of chapters that were cut at the last minute, during the final production process.  To continue with my series, today’s post discusses the chart, which would have appeared in the chapter on PR Practice #4 (The COMMS Organizer).  The COMMS organizer has an extremely important role, and, as I stated in my book, it takes a “… proactive PR person or team of communications professionals to identify and uproot a long and tired process, and literally flip it upside down.”

You can see from the wheel visual that there are several new roles and responsibilities for you to learn as the COMMS Organizer in your own company.  It’s up to you to embrace a new process first, and then educate your peers on a more collaborative approach to creating communication and then sharing it as a unified team.  Most of all, the COMMS organizer knows there are changes in communication that must be addressed internally for better sharing and engagement with the public.

© PR 2.0 Strategies

As a COMMS Organizer, now, it’s your responsibility to make sure your stakeholders are pulling information from the organization. To accomplish this goal, internally you must create tools and channels to share, and collaborate and integrate with the efforts of your peers. Externally, you’re creating new types of stories and curating content through different channels.  Here’s how the responsibilities break down in your new practice:

Set up a Customer Intelligence System

Your social media program begins with Listening or keyword tracking to gain customer and market intelligence.  PR and marketing are responsible for monitoring the brand and market landscape and reporting back to the C-Suite.  Setting up a customer intelligence system requires information to reach various departments in the organization (beyond communications) that use social media for their own programs. It’s important to turn the listening intelligence on for all areas active in social media and then determine how your Listen/ Evaluate/Response strategy will lead to closing the gap between what you share and what the public needs.

Build a Two Prong Content Approach

You can “Listen” or track keywords to uncover conversation, which leads to the creation of compelling content or the use of existing content (tweaked for social media channels).  With either prong in the approach, information must be shared with meaning and reflect proper timing.  In PR, we time our news and develop story angles often tying into local, regional or national news.  Social media requires us to still listen to the news media, as well as quite a bit of daily community listening.  Community conversations will also offer great ideas on what, how and when to share your content.

Focus on Department Sharing

When your team is aligned and on the same page with respect to a communications effort, the result is better external sharing with public. A departmental content calendar let’s the your team or department know what’s going to be shared, where it’s supposed to be shared and the timing of the distribution.  These calendars are simple to construct.  You can frame when and what should be shared on a spreadsheet (use an editable document on your shared internal platform) to include the timeframe for your initiative, and then the breakdown your social media profiles. Teams often use separate line items to identify what will be shared each day of the week through their social media channels.

Focus on Universal Sharing

Universal sharing means moving away from communication in silos and setting goals based on a new process.  When different groups build social media channels, focus communication around their own initiatives, and don’t share or support overall brand communication, then social media is not working for the company as a collective whole.  In order to make social media work for the entire company, there has to be a coordinated effort from the development of the content to how the information is shared.  Universal calendars are shared across departments to support larger social media communications efforts (an example would be a product launch) with respect to key company events, themes, accepted imagery, link sharing and content, which is highly supportive in broader company efforts.

Develop a Social Media Playbook

The social media playbook is that game plan that keeps all of the team players on the same page and reaching the established goal(s). When different departments are involved in a broad communications initiative the playbook serves a very important purpose.  It identifies the goals, messages, audiences, communications (a blend of social media or traditional), acceptable content, shared links and expert resources.  The playbook is a strategy that allows groups to work together in harmony and to be able to achieve goals together, as an organization, as well as within their own respective areas.

Build a Gatekeeper System

The Universal Gatekeeper System will be the responsibility of the COMMS organizer in conjunction with other department including HR, legal and IT.  Working interdepartmentally to create a communications practice of gathering social media profile account information, or making profile information readily available, is a part of a social media management system. Having the information centrally located is a best practice for the larger organization with a tremendous amount of social media activity and many different profiles per department or for various brand products. Your Universal Gatekeeper System will collect social profile URLs, user names, passwords, and email addresses for the set up of social media accounts.  This responsibility becomes especially important as more champions in the company learn to build community and engage with constituents.

Educate with Training & Toolkits

People adapt to social media communications on many different levels. From the inactive or non-participants to the creators of content, training and education is necessary to offer resources and information for people to learn and grow with the organization’s social media program.  It’s also important to keep your employees up-to-date with the latest types of technology and resources available, especially as the social landscape changes and expands.  Social media education and the development of toolkits (documents created with helpful tools, links to information and learning resources) should be provided at the start of your program and made available company-wide.  A good communications program about training and toolkits will have employees learning and embracing new practices much more quickly than asking them research on their own.

The COMMS Organizer develops a more structured and productive approach to internal communications and collaboration in departments and between departments to create better brand communication with the public.

PR Practice #3: PR Tech Tester Chart of Responsibilities

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Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, will be available on May 4th!  As a part of the book’s launch, I thought it would a good idea to share some of the material that didn’t make it to print. So, I’m continuing with my chart series, which are all of the charts cut out of the production process (due to space constraints), when we were in the final home stretch. Today’s post discusses the chart from PR Practice #3, which is the PR Technology (Tech) Tester. The PR Tech Tester’s new role is to experiment with different types of technology for better internal and external communications, which results in building stronger relationships.

You can see from the wheel visual that there are several new roles and responsibilities for you to learn as a PR Tech Tester.  Learning, embracing and educating your peers on these responsibilities will make you a more valuable asset in your organization.  I’ll be doing a blog post in the next couple of weeks focusing on the results of a pilot study which reveals what employers look for in young professionals entering into the workforce, with respect to knowledge, skills, values and sensitivity. According to the study, information technology is among the most important skills and, today, is considered a core competence.

© PR 2.0 Strategies

The PR Tech Tester is a professional who quickly learns that a critical part of the communications strategic process is how you use technology in your planning for better monitoring and measurement, channel distribution, optimized content and stronger relationships via your brand communications. Remember, it all starts with the hybrid professional, whose knowledge often expands to other areas of marketing. Here are a few of your PR Tech Tester responsibilities:

Select a Database Contacts and News Monitoring Services

Technology offers you unlimited access an online searchable, contact database where you’re able to keep up with media and blog contacts, and their pitching preferences.  These services also offer you instantaneous access to your company’s media coverage, as well as intelligence on competitor mentions and trending industry topics in real-time.  Researching and testing the technology allows you to find the right solution and will help you to follow, engage and build better relationships with specific journalists and bloggers who would find your content to be relevant and newsworthy.

Create a Social Media Monitoring / Measurement Program

As a PR Tech Tester, you will immediately notice many of the social media monitoring platforms today allow you to track daily conversations across platforms, your share of voice (SOV) against competitors and your company’s brand sentiment. These platforms also offer information on key influencers, word cloud formations revealing relevant topics, and top domains where the most relevant conversations take place.  Selecting the right social media monitoring tools will help you to strategically put a system in place, offering a tremendous amount of intelligence; from trending topics to the critical issues of the people you want to reach.  

Determine Website Analytics

PR professionals are getting more and more familiar with the value of website tracking and analytics.  Where social media monitoring ends, website analytics begin. Typically, PR professionals have relied on the marketing and/or web team for website analytics.  But, with your social media programs and stories driving people to your company’s website and newsrooms, you can no longer rely on someone else providing you with the analytics you need.  The ability to track analytics in real time allows the PR Tech Tester to understand a great deal about the behavior of an audience, from how many of your active visitors have actually been to your site before and how long they stay to how many people go to certain pages of your site, revealing the most popular areas.

Test For Social Media Influence

When you discuss online influence or social media influence, from a technology standpoint, it’s an algorithm that helps you to capture the most powerful people in your network. However, there are different algorithms based on the tools you choose.  For example, one influence tool might calculate variables including reach, amplification probability and overall network influence. Another tool might measure different criteria, such as impact, engagement, clout, signal and the velocity, at which you share. It‘s important to familiarize yourself with these tools in your research process as they (1) help to identify people who may have greater impact on their own networks, and those who may be more likely to share your company’s content, as potential brand champions.

Identify the Right Social Channels for Audience Collaboration

The social media landscape is constantly changing and PR professionals must keep up to date on the new and different collaborative platforms, where their brands have an opportunity to engage with stakeholders.  As a PR Tech Tester it’s your job to know the platforms where your audiences congregate and the technology they prefer.  One of the best ways to keep updated on the latest platforms is to subscribe to blogs/bloggers that report on technology, social media and latest and most interesting collaborative platforms for businesses. Stepping outside of your regular circle / network of peers, and interacting and/or collaborating with professionals who have a stronger focus on business and technology will give you insight into many of the new evolving platforms.

Evaluate Email Marketing / Content Management Platforms

In the past, most PR professionals were not focused on platforms that managed content and sent out numerous emails at a time.  PR pros were used to crafting single, customized emails to media contacts. However, today, in order to accurately reach and track responses from numerous contacts, you need an email platform that enables you to customize and then monitor the open and response rates.  PR pros will benefit from sending out their news releases or pitch letters to a select group of contacts through a software management system to learn the number of emails sent out, the open rate and the bounce rate, the number of people who click as well as who forward your correspondence.

Review News Release Technology

Because the media landscape has changed, PR pros are faced with decisions regarding how to share business stories.  As a PR Tech Tester, you will realize how there are a few options.  One option is the use of a wire service that has ramped up distribution capabilities to include 2.0 functionality and reach.  They offer the ability to distribute your news release beyond traditional print, broadcast and online media outlets to reach bloggers and consumers. Then, on the other end of the release spectrum is the Social Media Release (SMR), which is a community tool for sharing news and customized stories.  The SMR is highly interactive and is housed on a blog platform. PR Tech Testers need to research and decide the best approach to sharing their stories with the public.

Being a PR Tech Tester and finding the right technology for your toolkit is trial and error.  Today, technology is no longer someone else’s job. You have to roll up you sleeves to experiment and make it an integral part of your programs for better engagement and communications impact.

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