Social media strategies can complement PR efforts perfectly, and as publishers continue to ramp up their online content – the opportunities to leverage your outreach via social media soar.
Now, social networks act as first-stop sources of breaking news, offering unparalled access to journalists and as-yet unseen speed of coverage.
Yet clearly our sector still struggles to quantify the impact of social media efforts to senior management. We’re therefore grateful to socialmediaexaminer.com for coming up with a useful take on ways to measure the ROI of social media activity, summarised here.
1. Cost per impression
When you show the change in the cost per impression with and without social media, you can make a compelling case for the impact of social media on your PR strategy. On Facebook, you can get impression data on Facebook Insights. It’s trickier to measure on Twitter, but try TweetReach and Simply Measured to assess the reach of your messages.
2. Cost per engagement
Social channels are unbeaten for engagement, which can be measured with shares, clicks, comments, likes and mentions. Aggregate how people engaged with content and divide this figure by the cost to determine the cost per engagement. More »
The web has evolved from a network of sites to a network of connected people. PR has had no choice but to evolve, and the best PR campaigns now incorporate a social element. Savvy online PR now means thinking way beyond the tweetable press release headline. Here’s a round of three truly innovative social PR campaigns to watch and learn from:
1. Rayovac: Rapid-response Twitter campaign
In a brilliant example of tailoring PR to the current climate, Rayovac timed its campaign to coincide with America’s biggest snow day, 2 February 2011. Working fast, the brand appealed to millions of housebound Americans with a virtual snowball fight and a two-day snow day ‘tweet-up’, inviting users to tweet about their local weather. The result of tapping into the frosty Zeitgeist? The effort generated 1,188 click-throughs to download the campaign widget, while Rayovac made its first appearance as a top ten global trending topic on Twitter.
2. Healthy Choice: Pairing a social coupon with blogger outreach
In a bid to grow its Facebook fan base, increase engagement and reinforce the brand’s reputation for value, Healthy Choice launched a coupon on its Facebook page. The value of the coupon increased as more people ‘liked’ the page, ultimately becoming a ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ deal. Facebook marketing was supported with blogger outreach, inviting relevant bloggers to purchase a Facebook ad and drive their audience to ‘like’ Healthy Choice and sign up for a coupon. An innovative, two-pronged online PR strategy got results: the Healthy Choice Facebook page grew from 6,800 to nearly 60,000 fans, while more than 50,000 ‘BOGOF’ coupons were snapped up. More »
In an attempt to show that B2B videos can be creative and fun, we’ve launched our own video series featuring interviews with online marketing specialists filmed in the back of a London Taxi Cab.
Called London PR Taxi, the video series covers a number of subject areas that make up what we call ‘new fashioned pr’ beginning with, in episode 1, an interview with Brian Storey – Creative Partner at Wand, discussing Viral Video techniques.
While the subject matter is serious, the context is far from it with coffee flying about as the cab, driven by a mad cabbie – nicknamed psycho Paul, swerves around London’s streets.
Episode 2, which discusses the place of media relations in 2011, ends with a cup of Starbucks coffee literally all over Gorakana’s Michael Davies (thanks Michael, you were a star).
Replies to this question I posted on LinkedIn last week ranged from:
“You can’t sell a Bentley out of a lock-up.” to “Visible signs, such as swanky offices, top-of-the range cars, very expensive lunches / five star hotels, send out the wrong signals.”
Somewhere in between was:
“I would invest in good meeting areas but keep personal work spaces modest and flexible”
This last comment is pretty much where we are in the debate.
It was a leading question because Furlong PR has just moved to Floral Street, Covent Garden where we have lovely meeting rooms and super-efficient receptionists, managed by the excellent MBW Business Exchange.
We’re still essentially a virtual operation though, there’s 16 of us, working day to day from locations dotted around London, using Floral Street as and when we need it.
We’re hoping it will be the perfect compromise, providing a professional meeting environment without the overheads of a full time office.
A senior PR agent at a large agency once said to me, rather cynically, that if a client asks ‘can you do this?’ the answer is always yes, then you go and figure out how to do it.
No doubt there’s a bit of this when it comes to online pr and social media, levels of purported expertise vary hugely, so here are seven questions I’d recommend asking a prospective online pr agency/agent, to establish if they really ‘eat their own dog food’.
1) Do they write a blog? If they aren’t blogging at all, put the phone down or call a taxi. If they’re blogging less than once a week, you have to question their content led online pr strategy – do they really believe in it?
2) How many connections do they have on LinkedIn? – Anything less than 100 connections and they’re playing at it.
3) Are they a mayor of anywhere on Foursquare? OK, this is quite new but if they say yes, you’re talking to a proper social media geek that’s interested in what’s next, not just what’s popular now. More »
Furlong PR is pleased to announce an expansion of our product offering to include a full search engine optimisation service, in partnership with search engine marketing experts WhyCommunicate?
We see this as a natural extension to our core blog management and social media services which are focussed on creating inbound website traffic for clients in the technology & corporate sectors.
There’s such a close relationship between online pr, social media and SEO and each discipline ultimately has the same goal – raising brand profiles online. And while SEO companies are not experts in PR, neither are PR agents experts in SEO. We need each other.
We’re initially offering two products – an SEO audit which grades websites and blogs for SEO effectiveness and a reputation management service which measures brand sentiment and recommends ways to influence negative comments posted online.
Online pr helps unlock the IP lying dormant within corporations and SEO makes it discoverable to those you want to see it – add in social media marketing and the combination has a powerful effect on website traffic.
David Miliband is not only William Hill’s favourite to win the Labour Party leadership at odds of 4/9 but he’s also by far the most accomplished exponent of online pr and social media, judging by a review of the nine potential candidates’ websites.
Miliband’s smoothly designed website is the only one to include a blog and the only one to employ all of the most powerful core social media channels – Twitter, Facebook, Flickr & YouTube along with an RSS feed.
Ed Balls’s site is the nearest competitor for social media leadership, with Twitter, Flickr & YouTube channels appended to what is a very badly designed site indeed.
Harriet Harman and Andy Burnham are the only other potential candidates to run a Twitter account from their sites while the only concession to online pr being displayed by Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson is the inclusion of an RSS feed.
While I wasn’t particularly surprised that Peter Mandelson & Jack Straw haven’t bothered with a personal website at all (bravo), Ed Mlliband’s site is a bit of an eyebrow raiser – functional yes, a work of design beauty it is not. In Chrome the minute text over-writes the pictures, though they are so small it hardly matters. More »
Erik Qualman’s music-enhanced, statistics-based video of social media’s wildfire growth was one of the B2B viral video hits of last year. With social media moving so quickly, he’s already updated it for May 2010 with yet more revelatory intelligence, including that Facebook has now overtaken it’s own country of origin as the third largest by population in the world, behind India and China. When Zuckerburg was programming ‘the facebook.com’ – as described in David Kirkpatrick’s new book, he knew he was on to something big, but this!?
The PR profession has hit a technological glass wall. I can see all these slick communicators pressed up against it, looking at all the weird buttons, lights and gizmos, wondering whether they’re looking at their future or their demise.
The grey haired leaders, who brought them to this point, are getting angry, like the DVD player at home, they can’t work out how to program it and are too damned long in the tooth to be bothered with these tricksy things now.
Somewhere at the back, a few youngsters have Foursquared their location and are now sending abuse to each other on Twitter. One of them says something derogatory about the MD’s lack of tech savvy and will get sacked later on.
All the while, behind the glass, in amongst the lights, cables and myriad computer screens, the rock star techies are playing warcraft and eyeing up a big pile of cash with ‘online pr’ written on it.
One of them is on the phone, you can just about hear him saying – “certainly we can provide content for the organic SEO, keyword optimised, linked to product pages, yes no problem. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – oh yes we can do that too”. More »
Twitter has long kept secret the number of its registered users, reports Adweek, however the figures were finally revealed at the company’s Chirp Conference on April 14, along with a few other key stats:
1) 105,779,710 registered users
2) 60% of those are from outside the U.S.
3) 180 million unique monthly visitors
4) 75% of all Twitter traffic comes from outside of Twitter.com
5) 3,000,000,000 requests per day to Twitter’s API
Social media strategies can complement PR efforts perfectly, and as publishers continue to ramp up their online content – the opportunities to leverage your outreach via social media soar.
Replies to this question I posted on LinkedIn last week ranged from:
