Why your communication efforts should include social media
Social media channels are such obvious methods for communications that it is truly beginning to boggle my mind why there is still this weird distinction, or separation even, between social media and public relations.
I am not going to post any fluff here to convince you. Heck, I'm not even going to include any stats about the number of businesses using social media or the projections of social media spending for the year 2011.
Here is my message at it's core: If you have something you'd like to communicate, whether it's company news, a pending product launch or specific messaging or opinion on a controversial issue, you have the power to use social media to get that message to your target audience.
Stop waiting on the reporter to ask you the questions about your product, service, or position on that controversial issue and hoping and praying they'll to put a portion of it in their newspapers or on their websites or broadcasts. Distribute it yourself. That's what social media allows you to do.
If you have talking points in conjunction with a press release, create a video of someone from the company delivering those talking points in a question/answer format. Include the link to that video in the press release. You've now provided a digital asset, with your unedited message, that could very well be picked up along with the news and posted on news sites as well as blogs.
This is how you use social media to further your reach. Creating your own content is key.
As a journalist who has worked in many newsrooms and shared responsibilities for their respective websites, I can tell you that digital assets are of high value. If you provide a link to other materials, that's more content for the news organization to post on the page, increasing the time spent on their websites, and believe me, "time spent" is a highly valued metric in the online news space.
This is something I am increasingly introducing, and I've seen the light bulb go off when people begin to get it.
It's the terms that continue to freak people out. Yes, it may be a "social media press release, "or a release that's "optimized for SEO," but again, at the core we are essentially integrating social media into an overall communications plan.
That's how I see it, and that's how I sell it.
Comments
Good post, Angela. People [including me] get hung up on the vehicle – or sometimes fall in love with it – and miss the communications strategy. Getting out your message is still the main goal. Maybe we should call it social PR...
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