PR 101

You’ve decided it’s time to dip a toe or more into the social media pool. You know the Internet can be a very unforgiving place. You want to make sure you are going to do it right. It’s time to hire agency, but before you do that you want to have your own plan. While you are going to listen to the agency’s advice, you also want to know the landscape and have a general idea of how to get from Point A to Point Z.

This is what I encourage all of my clients to do. Yes, I am the expert, but it helps when they have some ideas of their own. One of the mottoes I live by in my business life is: “all of us are smarter than one of us.” You should do the same. If an agency is unwilling to listen to your input, you are working with the wrong agency. You are paying the bills after all.

Before anything else, this what you have to keep in mind about social media: it is not a tactic, or a strategy or just another way to do what you have always been doing. It is an entirely new way of marketing and it is taking over fast. I am going to cover how fast next week, but know that its use is increasing very, very quickly.

So, what to do first? It most definitely helps that you have your own ideas. The first thing I do when I sign a new client is meet with the principles to discuss their wants and needs. The process goes much faster when both sides have a good idea of the road map they are going to use.

Remember, your social media, marketing and public relations plan should be key parts of the company’s overall strategic plan. Marketing communications should never be treated as an island or silo. Rather, it should be one of the engines driving your company to be successful.

Integrating marketing communications planning with the company’s overall plans is key. I have seen too many companies that keep public relations and marketing in silos. They are only taken out when some senior executive needs to get a message out or sales are dipping. That is just wrong. Public relations and marketing are a company’s front door. It is the first thing a potential client or customer sees.

So, the first step should be to do discuss and define what you want to accomplish. Do a situation analysis. Discuss what the positive and negative forces. Figure out who want to reach and how to do it. Come up with a goal. A goal should be a broad-based destination, where you want your company to go.

It will be up to agency to figure out to reach that goal, to come up with the strategy and tactics for getting you there. But it is key, especially in social media, to know where you are going.

The second thing you should know is that a successful social media campaign takes time and your involvement. This is not like an advertising campaign where you approve campaign concept, check in on the production and then approve the final product.

Social media is a continuing process. It calls for doing things such as blogging, tweeting, creating a Facebook fan page, and posting videos on YouTube. It is highly effective when done right. However, none of those are things you can do once and forget about. It takes your commitment to the process to make it work. Success does not come in a week. Usually it does not come in a month or two. I always tell clients to expect the process to take at least six months to show results.

But when those results do happen, and if done right, they will, the success will be far better than what comes from other method.

When I first met my doctor almost 30 years, I walked into his office, sat down and asked him: “so, what was your grade in anatomy?” He laughed. I asked the question again. He saw I was serious. He pointed to his medical school diploma that was hanging on the wall behind me. It said he had graduated summa cum laude. I was satisfied.

Why did I ask? Because as the joke goes: do you know what they call the medical student who barely passes? Doctor.

You should be asking the same kind of questions when you decide to hire a social media agency. Too many times, I see people and agencies pass them selves off as social media experts when in reality, all they have done is signed up for Facebook and have a Twitter account. When you ask if they use social bookmarking, or how they measure ROI, their eyes go blank. Or, they give you some gibberish about how ROI is difficult to measure.

The agency you want to hire should have a solid grounding in both traditional marketing and public relations and social media. They understand how to use both, how to meld them and how to measure results.

Social media as a method of public relations and marketing matured about four years. That’s when broadband became widespread. Broadband is necessary to run most social media platforms.

Because it is so new, there are not yet any solid standards for determining who’s an expert and who’s a pretender. I have studying and using social media for about three years. I started doing podcast scripts and moved on from there. I have been doing it long enough that I know what I am talking about.

What distinguishes one agency from another is how long they have been using social media, their level of commitment to it, and how successful they have been.

So, if I were looking to hire a social media expert, here would be the questions I would ask:

• How much experience with social media have you and your agency had?

You want to know if they attended a couple of webinars, maybe have a Facebook page and Tweet and now think they are an expert. That does not make them an expert, not by a long shot. Ask to see their blogs, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn usage, Facebook pages, and YouTube posts. This shows they are experienced users. Ask if they use Digg, Stumbleon and other social bookmarking sites.

• Where did they learn social media?

This shows their level of commitment. And also ask how they stay on top of the changing trends in social media. That’s important.

• Ask for the names of clients for which they have run successful campaigns. You want to be able to check on what they did and if it worked.

• How do they view social media – as a tactic, a strategy, or an entire new way of marketing?

The answer is the last one. Social media is not a one-off. It requires a commitment of time and resources. I would argue that it is more effective than traditional marketing, but it takes knowledge to do it right.

• How do they integrate traditional marketing and public relations efforts with social media?

Traditional methods definitely still have a place. Often there is a melding of the old and the new. Many journalists now use Twitter for instance. You need to make sure that traditional methods are not neglected.

• Who handles social media in their agency?

You want to know the senior people are committed to social media. You don’t want to find yourself working with some junior assistant account executive that got the assignment because he or she has a Facebook page.

• How do they measure Return On Investment (ROI) for social media?

There is no one method to do it. Personally, I believe it can best be measured by increased website traffic and sales, but there are other ways. Make sure the agency has a method for measuring ROI.

Those questions you should get started. Next week, I am going tell you about to set up a social media campaign.

And as for Wednesday’s rant: well, I am going to give you my take on NBC’s decision to interrupt the Olympic closing ceremonies.

Since posting the very popular rant last Wednesday on there being too many social media sites, I have had some requests for a post on what is proper social media etiquette. I wrote on the same subject almost a year ago. Like Emily Post did, I think it is time to update. So, let’s get to it.

• Let’s start at signing up for a site. Think of yourself as being at a party or in a meeting. You would tell people your real name, something about yourself and what you do. It’s no different in social media. So:
  • First, use your real name – not something cute. This is the only way that people are going to know you. If you were hunting for an employee, or hiring someone to perform a service, would you hire “drunkguy05” or “sexxxygirl02?” Plus, if you want to be found, the odds are much better if you use your real name.
  • Second, post a picture of yourself, not your dog, not a pretty sunset, or some weird avatar. People want to know what you look like. Why wouldn’t you post your own picture? You on the run from the law?
  • If you have one, include a link to a blog, another site such as LinkedIn or Facebook. This shows you are a real person. Definitely link to your website if you have one.
  • Include a short bio of yourself. Again, this gives people an idea of who you are.
  • This next rule should be obvious, but people violate it all the time. DO NOT SPAM. If you are joining a site simply to sell me something, go away. That’s not the purpose of social media. I am glad you asked – it is to have a conversation, link with like-minded people and share information. It is not to buy real estate in Goa, or some system that promises me I will get rich working five a hours a week. Or a system that makes me into a spammer. If I get those kind of invitations, I will block you, and I will report you to the site administrators. Of course, that goes double for all of those porn people out there.
  • Once you sign up for a site, it is perfectly acceptable to invite your friends – once. Not six times. As I said last week, if I don’t respond to your invitation, it means I don’t want to join. After the third time, I am going to send you to my spam filter, never to return. And know something about the people you are inviting. As a personal example, I am an Apple; I will never be a PC. So don’t invite me to join Windows Live. It is not going to happen.
  • On that subject, there is quantity versus quality debate in social media. Some experts argue that the idea is to accumulate as many followers as possible. Their thesis goes you want to distribute whatever you are sending out to the widest possible network. The other side it is better to be followed by a 100 people who are influencers in their networks. I come somewhere in the middle. It is up to you to decide. However, this is not high school – the person with the most friends does not win.
  • After you join a site, get active on it. Why else would you join?  That doesn’t mean you have to spend every waking minute posting. But, if you join Twitter, tweet twice a day. If you are Facebook, post an update or two each day. You get the idea. I will not follow anyone who invites me to join a site, but has done nothing there themselves.
  • As part of the above bullet, respond to other people’s post. That’s just good manners. If you want people to respond to what you do, you should have the courtesy to do the same for them.
  • Another thing for you LinkedIn people – unless you know someone personally or have worked closely with them, don’t recommend them. And do not send out blanket requests for recommendations to total strangers. How good could a recommendation be if you nothing about someone? Plus, what if you called by a potential employer who asks you about some stranger you recommended? You are going to look dumb and the odds are very good that the candidate will not get the job.
  • A final note – there is no privacy in social media. Well really, there is no privacy in the Internet Age period. So, if you don’t want people to know something, don’t post it anywhere. Things on the web never really go away. Along those lines, all of you college kids who have those really cool photos of that weekend in Cabo where you took your clothes off and jumped into the ocean – take them down. Many companies will not hire someone if they see such photos. Yeah, it is not fair, but that’s the way it is.