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Eight New PR Practices

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Coordinating Social media Across the Organization

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Joseph Provenza is the CIO at Flagler College in St. Augustine Florida. Joe takes a lead role on the College’s Social Media Core Team, which consists of the office of Web and New Media Services, Admissions and Marketing.  With Joe’s background in technology, I thought it would be interesting to share his thoughts on coordinating information across an organization:

In an enterprise of any size (which, if you look at something as simple as a married couple, means two or more people), coordination is critical.  If information can come out of more than one area and/or get communicated to more than one location or channel, you immediately have the potential for a disaster, if the effort is not coordinated.  At best, the organization can look rather foolish and, in these days of rapid and global information sharing via social networking, it can look foolish in front of a lot of people in a very short period of time. 

At worst, the organization may be responsible for misinformation that causes hurt to its customer.  Poor customer service, especially when the customer is acting on published information from the organization, will exasperate the customer.  Additionally, it exasperates the employees as their job goes from taking care of a customer (which makes one feel good at the end of the day) to damage control (which makes one not want to come to work the next day).  The effects are far-reaching if one thinks about it long enough.  The bottom line is, for want of the up-front discipline of the coordination of information, an organization can spare itself public relations nightmares and the kind of reproach that may cost it the loss of customers, reputation, and employee morale.

Joe also shared with me a brief story about another important area of coordination, which is social media account management, mentioning a recent situation at Flagler College:

It seems to me that, since nothing is forever as it pertains to organizations, it is critical that access to all social media platforms be kept in one place.  We recently experienced the pain of this when a professor asked us to update a site.  We had never heard of the site so we asked for its credentials.  It turns out the site was created by students who have since left the College, so we have no way to access the site.  Since we have been in charge of this effort, we request credentials for every site and social media account about which we are aware.  Every now and again, we find one of which we are not aware. However, it reminds my team why we request social media account information in the first place. 

How are you coordinating social media at your organization and what are your best practices?

Mission Ready Infographic

#PR Tech Testing: Using Easel.ly for Customized Infographics

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Lisa Gerber, Chief Content Officer at Spin Sucks, mentioned in her blog post, Becoming a PR Technologist, that “… it is our responsibility to stay ahead of technology. For that matter, it is the responsibility of any professional regardless of industry.” I agree with Lisa whole-heartedly. I enjoy being a Tech Tester (PR Practice #4 in my book) and I’ve been trying to tech test new platforms and experience different tools every week. It’s not only helping me to stay abreast of the latest resources for my clients, but also allowing me to speak the language of my marketing, brand and web colleagues. For most of my projects, I’m working with interactive agencies, brand professionals, and online web services teams.

As a part of my quest to rally my communications friends into tech testing mode, this post introduces a tool I’ve discovered to create custom Infographics. It’s called Easel.ly and it’s simple to use. You don’t have to be a designer by trade to develop colorful and creative visuals. And, with Infographics being “all the rave,” why not use some of the first-hand research you’ve uncovered to visually illustrate unique information about your client, product or cause.

Here are some tips to using Easel.ly that will help you create one of a kind Infographics with the potential to spark conversations and great collaboration with your stakeholders.

  1. Be Creative: An important thing to understand when beginning to use www.easel.ly is that the infographic themes provided are there to guide you, not dominate your creative vision. What makes an infographic interesting is the creativity and individuality that goes into each one.
  2. Select the Right Theme: Look at the information you have prepared, and analyze which layout would be the best fit from the choices provided. Do you mostly have statistics to share? Would it be more effective to use a chart or a graph? Those are the kinds questions to consider. When picking a theme, only concern yourself with the general layout because colors and objects can easily be deleted and replaced.
  3. Explore the Tools: There are so many options when it comes to using Easel.ly. However, none of them will be fully useful if you do not familiarize yourself with the different functionality. If you’ve selected your theme, then you’ve barely even touched the surface of what this resource has to offer. There are a multitude of objects, shapes, and text fonts to insert, you can change the colors, and if that’s not enough, you can also upload any images you’d like to customize your infographic. By capitalizing on the options provided, you’re able to transform one of the template themes into your own creation.
  4. Use the Lock Tool: Organization is the number one way to ease the process of making an infographic. The best way to stay organized is by using the lock tool. As your infographic progresses, you’re going to acquire an assemblage of various text, shapes, and objects, which can get confusing. The lock tool is functional for all items to prevent any further moving, resizing, and scaling. Once the object is in place, hit the lock button so any further design won’t interfere while you continue the creation process. Consider all confusion eliminated!
  5. Learn the Grid Tool: When you’re designing anything, uniformity should always be a major focus. The grid tool allows you to have even placement between all items within your graphic. By doing this, the graphic as a whole becomes more visually appealing to the eye, and, in turn, more effective for the viewer.
  6. Show How Less is More: You never want a graphic that is too overpowering, so simplicity is key! Although there are so many options to include in your infographic, you can avoid clutter by only using as much or as little as you need. Choose a few objects, maintain a minimal color scheme, and avoid too much font variation with your text. Here’s where the saying, “everything is better in moderation,” really applies.

Being a Tech Tester and finding the right technology tools to create interesting and meaningful ways to share information can be trial and error. So, when you discover an easy tool or application to use, please make sure you share your tool and tips with your colleagues.  Together we have a lot to learn, but we can uncover a lot of ground together.  Happy tech testing with Easel.ly!

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.

 

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 #1: PR Policymaker Chart of Responsibilities

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Finally, my book, “Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional” is done!  I just reviewed the cover and the manuscript is in its final form.  It was a fairly smooth process with only one slight hiccup.  After writing almost 300 pages, my publisher told me that I had to cut back to about 175.  That’s a lot of pages to cut!  As I removed chunks of copy, I also had to remove many of the graphics developed for the book, including eight charts, with each one relating to the roles the different practices.

For the next several PR 2.0 Strategies posts, I’ll be sharing these charts and discussing briefly the related roles and responsibilities.  The first chart cut was from Practice #1: The PR Policymaker.  You can see from the wheel diagram there are several new roles and responsibilities for you to learn and embrace, as you evolve into the PR Policymaker.

© PR 2.0 Strategies

The PR Policymaker is a professional who quickly learns that a crucial part of the communications strategy and planning process includes the development of social media policies, training, and governance. Not only developing social media policies, but also maintaining them falls within this new PR practice.

Here are a few of your new responsibilities:

Spearhead a Social Media Core Team: You and other social media champions in your organization will form a team responsible for vision and strategy.  This is also the team that creates the social media policy and guides the process.

Conduct a Social Media Audit: A social media audit allows you to identify any of the challenges or problem areas within your brand’s current social communications program. By evaluating your social properties, you’re also able to pinpoint genuine opportunities and what has been working with respect to participation and engagement in the social media landscape.  A few areas the audit focuses on include brand guidelines, types of content shared, frequency of content, levels of engagement, measurement, etc.

Establish Policy Objectives:  As a member of the communications department, you will have several of your own objectives for creating a social media policy, but so will other groups within the organization that want to accomplish specific goals. These groups may include HR, Legal, Marketing, IT, etc.  If you’re a PR policymaker, then you will help to build a policy to accomplish a variety of objectives fulfilling department objectives across the organization.

Guide the Policy Process:  Your natural liaison skills make it easy to help guide the policy process.  As a PR policymaker you may be coordinating team meetings across departments, assigning tasks to appropriate department champions and using your project management skills to get the policy written, reviewed and shared with your organization in a timely manner.

Create a Plan to Communicate the Policy: Writing the policy is only step one.  Step two includes delivering and supporting the policy the right way.  The PR policymaker has to develop a communications plan to introduce and inspire employees to embrace the policies.  A couple of examples include communication through interactive formats rather than long Word documents and considering a reward program for social media participation, as a part of employee recognition.

Measure Policy Compliance:  Another important part of the PR Policymaker process is measuring the behavior and usage of the policy. You can ask for feedback through employee questionnaires, informal interviews, polls, and by monitoring and evaluating employee internal participation and collaboration.  You will need your employee evangelists to be willing participants, and to also be that unified voice or army of champions who support and add value to the brand’s social presence.

Maintain the Policy: As a strategic communicator, the practice of the PR Policymaker does not stop with the first round of development.  In many organizations marketing and PR are responsible for maintaining and updating the policy every six months to a year and then working with different departments on implementation.  A good social media policy reflects where and how the organization communicates and the constant social media growth in different communities.

Are you currently involved in any of these roles and how are you managing your new responsibilities?