Social media and your brand — A beginers guide

Yesterday afternoon I participated in my first webinar, which was put on by Cision. It was a pretty basic introduction to Social Media but I enjoyed it and learned some interesting things.  I created a summary to share some of the key messages that can be useful when trying to start up social media for your company/brand.

If you are not already monitoring social media, you are missing a lot of conversation and information that may have a significant impact on your brand and what it means to consumers.

Best Practices:

• Ask yourself – How does the target community consume news. Are they on Facebook? Twitter?
• Include your brand’s content in a mix of compelling external content. 1/3 – Personal brand content/promotion, 1/3 sharing other’s content, 1/3 engaging in conversation. These rules will ensure you won’t be branded as a spammer or robot.
• DO NOT ONLY POST YOUR OWN CONTENT OR PEOPLE WON’T PAY ATTENTION. Do NOT be purely self-promotional.
• Go where your audience is — don’t expect them to come to your site for information.
• In social media, there are usually people listening. The challenge is engaging them and interacting.
• People care about interacting with a person – don’t just be a brand name.

Starting a campaign:

1) Determine goal – don’t do it because everyone else is doing it. Establish as thought leader in the community, monitor mentions of the brand, develop relationships with media or riders.

2) Identify Target Community. It doesn’t have to be customers. Could be politicians, critics, media…

3) How should you engage – videos, responding, Blogging?

4) How will impact be measured?

Blogs:

• Interesting fact — 242 982 posts mentioning top 25 Fortune 500 companies in the last 30 days.

• Blogs have more of a “community” feel than traditional media.
• Can include live streaming.
• Podcasting can be streamed/linked from Blogs.
• People want to find information in a more organic way: Blogs, webinars, videos on Youtube, etc.
• Discussing metrics – in niche media, size doesn’t matter, find the “right people”
• Content can be fun.

Monitoring:

• Google Blog Search, Technorati, Twitter Search…
• Make sure only representative for your company responds. Potentialy very contradicting and unprofessional to give 2 different responses.
• Keywords: Don’t only search for your brand, look for point of need terms, competitors, etc…
• Identify 20-30 blogs of interest to your company and follow/link content to gain more followers.
• Transparency is key when dealing with negative feedback, engage your audience and show that you are listening

Tips:

• Google Blog Search: Inbound Links measures content sharing of blogs.
• Type link:theurlyouwanttomeasurecontentof in the search bar.
• Technorati: time filter available to find how many other blogs link to this Blog. Measures unique Blogposts, not every single name mention.

Twitter:

• Mr. Tweet sends you a monthly email with a list of people who have similar interests and posts as you, recommending to you people who you should follow.
• Friend people who share your interests so they push your content too.

Social News Sharing:

• Digg: Useful for finding/posting interesting content (photos, videos, articles, Blogposts, news releases). You can submit links and your own comments to the site and it logs them. Post interesting content pertaining to your brand, along with things that aren’t related to your company.
• Delicious: Same idea with a more sophisticated tagging system to organize content.
• Mixx: Bookmarking for the health care industry.
• Stumble Upon: Bookmarking client with an installable toolbar.
• Reddit: You can vote to make things more/less popular by rating content.

Twitter: worthy of social worship, or worthless?

Twitter. The first time I heard of this application was when Maggie Fox, of Social Media Group, came in as a guest speaker for my CCPR program at Centennial College. I decided to create an account to see what it was all about. After only a few short minutes I became bored. No one I knew was on the site and it really didn’t interest me to read about the lives of people that I didn’t know.  I closed the page and didn’t give it another thought until second semester Online PR class.

Now that almost the whole class has an account I decided to give it another shot. I found that it is a great way to stay updated, not only on what people are doing every second of their lives, but on important information as well. Last week when no one knew what was going on with one of our online assignments, everyone was on Twitter trying to figure it out. It didn’t matter if people were at home, in the computer lab, or in the cafeteria. Everyone had this central place to go to and see if anyone else knew what was happening.

For those who have not used twitter, this YouTube video gives a pretty good overview.  

After getting the iPhone in April, I found an application for it that allows you to connect to twitter.  It takes the application one step further and allows you to read tweets of people who are geographically near you at that moment. I guess this could come in handy in some situations, like if you are in a flood and need to find someone nearby to canoe over to rescue you, or if you are at a convention and want to see if anyone else is as bored as you and checking out their twitter account. I still do not have enough experience with the program to determine if it is useful or totally useless, but I will keep trying.  What’s your take on Twitting?