PR People Take Note - Targeted Social Networks Are Coming

Quora_logo

We have Twitter for instantaneous news collection, dissemination and research; Facebook for a mix of personal and professional networking and larger community collection; LinkedIn for keeping our professional profile updated and for recruitment; Foursquare for broadcasting your location; Facebook Places for following the location of others, blogging for deeper content and so on and so forth.

 

It seems we have all we need in terms of the large social networks. What we need now is services that filter, structure and personalise the kind of information that flows through these channels. In essence, this is the reason why the Old Spice virals took off. The minute the personalised videos started appearing is when it went from very successful to stratospheric promotion for the brand. We also need products that better connect the ‘real world’ with the internet, in a meaningful way of course.

 

A couple of resources come to mind here. One is Planely, a service that allows you to see if anyone in your network is getting on the same flight so you can meet for a drink or share a cab. That’s all it’s for, and therefore some would say limited. However, I’d argue that it’s useful for the very same reason – there is no confusion as to why you are using it so you are more likely to achieve outcomes for your input of time.

 

One service that has recently hit the mainstream is Quora. It’s a question and answer service that is a mix between Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Answers and Twitter. There are apparently about 200,000 users at the moment and the content appears to be very good, perhaps because there aren’t too many people bringing the standard down as yet.

 

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Why? becomes your measure of success.

As with any marketing or business strategy it's important to have some direction. An objective your strategy is working to achieve.

And it's the same for your social media strategy. The first thing I ask people that want to start a twitter account for their business is WHY?

It's not good enough to say "because everyone else is" or "because that seems to be the thing to do these days". It's not about everyone else, it's about your business. Why do you want to socialise your business? What do you aim to achieve by becoming more social?

Some reasons might be

  • to become 'top of mind' for people living in our area when thinking about...
  • to increase sales
  • to create more buzz around our shop, more excitement
  • to build a community that can help you discover new business opportunities
  • to teach people, to educate them in how to use our products in new and interesting ways...
  • we want to reach out to people wider than our local community
  • we want to develop some international relations

Once you have answered the WHY question that then becomes your unit of measurement as well. Your ROI is evaluated by how well you have achieved your objective.

Understanding the WHY question also gives your staff direction and focus for content creation, message style and flavor and a guide to the nature of the conversations you want to encourage or participate in. It's easy to be all things to all people but often that strategy fails to achieve a measurable outcome thats consistent with your mission.

Why is your business becoming more social? Lets discuss...

#Socialmedia For Retailers @flittermedia and @giapo

Last night in collaboration with @Giapo we presented at the Auckland Social Media Club on Social Media for Retail

There are some resources I referenced in the presentation, here are the links

Foresee ResultsRreport on Social Media and the keys to driving success

Heinz imposter tweets on behalf of the brand

Heinz-ketchup

How should you react if your brand (or your own persona for that matter) is being impersonated on Twitter or another Social Media platform?

Mike Werch was the imposter who tweeted as ‘HJ_Heinz’ for a couple of weeks, until Twitter removed his account. Here is an interesting interview with him on the prTini website.

How would you react if you were Head of Brand at Heinz? Would you get the account removed and try and bury the incident or (assuming they weren’t being derogatory about your company), get them on-board as a brand ambassador?

Heinz, for the record, have decided not to contact the Twitter imposter.

5 Insightful TED talks on Social Media (via Mashable)

Halting whaling in Japan; citizen journalism in Iran and China; the power of the user in creating the Twitter phenomenon and Social Media bringing human connectedness back to its roots; it’s all here in a Mashable round-up of great Social Media TED talks from recent times.

 

Twitter lists: do you find them useful?

Man_with_list

I've personally never created a list; partly because I’ve never thought of a list that someone hadn't already done and partly because I didn't/don't find them a particularly engaging tool. And engagement is what Social Media is all about right?

Not too long ago I saw lots of Twitter chatter about the new Dunedin slogan, some of which was hash-tagged and some of which was not. It was all a bit of light-hearted banter, but it made me think it would be interesting if websites had live, real-time Twitter streams for specific sectors. 

There are plenty of sites that have a live Twitter stream of all their personal tweets and there are also a few that have any tweet that mentions their brand or a particular conversation topic relevant to their brand. To me this isn't very in-tune with what Social Media is all about as it's not very collaborative and community based. Indeed, I had never seen one for a specific sector; so I started one up on the homepage of the site for the media networking night I help run.

As is typical with a platform like Twitter, sometimes it will include tweets about what people are eating for lunch, but hopefully it will also be an easy, useful and fun tool to tap into what New Zealand media types are talking about at any given time.

Let me know what you think, but I believe that this is one of the ways Social Media tools (and especially Twitter) can become more useful as we get better at disseminating the deluge of information that passes across us every day.