Posts Tagged ‘public relations’

10 social media myths exposed

Monday, May 31st, 2010
You don't need a magic lamp either

You don't need a magic lamp either

To our delight, more and more Middle East brands are looking seriously at using social media in their communications and making efforts to plan, structure and invest in strategic activities. It’s no secret that Spot On PR is a big fan of social media and actively recommends that all organisations pay attention to the irreversible changes that social media are bringing to business communications. However, no two companies are the same and we have no ready-made proposals for what social media tactics organisations should use and we would caution company’s against trying to copycat as an alternative to proper planning, particularly if your organisation is a large one. Learning from others social media efforts can be extremely valuable, but not as a replacement for having your own strategy. Equally, beware of one-size-fits-all social media campaign solutions. Here are some common social media myths that are worth being aware of.

1. Social media is cheap.

It certainly can be, but as with many things in life and business, you get out of social media what you put into it. Low budget, low effort social media campaigns have their place, but success usually means more audience engagement and more engagement means that more management and resources are required. Scale is obviously a key factor in influencing costs if you already have a large audience online, don’t expect an intern with a new Twitter profile to be the best way of managing conversations, enquiries and complaints: you’re going to need to have a system in place.

2.You have to be on Facebook!

There are lots of good reasons why it might make perfect sense for your organisation to have a Facebook fan page. However, bear in mind that Facebook is littered with the inactive pages of companies that started a Facebook page because everyone else did. If you can’t think of a good reason why your customers would sign-up for your Facebook page, or what you could post on it beyond company press releases then your brand may be better off without one.

3.You have to be on ‘X’ (where X is a social media platform).

Social media platforms will come and go. Whether they make sense for your business will depend on whether your brand can engage effectively with relevant audiences on them or not. Finding out where your key audiences spend time online is a good first step for any campaign.

4. More connections = more success.

This is obviously partly true, but there are limited returns in investing in indiscriminately increasing the number of social media connections that your brand has. There are many ways of enticing social media users to connect or sign-up for pages, but real engagement is about how audiences interact with you, not passively remain connected to a page or profile they never visit. Focus on making the connections that matter.

5. You have to be ‘cool’.

Of course, everyone likes a cool brand. However, if you’re providing a business-to-business product or service, don’t expect teenage SMS-style messages to resonate with your target audiences. Communicate with your brand’s stakeholders in the way that they expected to be communicated with. Don’t translate all your communications into SMS, MSN or Twitterese!

6.You can automate everything.

Beware of “experts” telling you how to automate your whole social media campaign. Plans are good. Social media tools are good. Any tools to help with content management are good. Frameworks and policy documents are good. And you will find some time-saving practices. However, at the end of the day, people respond best when communicated with personally. If your customers, partners and other important audiences expect to communicate with a real person, don’t give them an RSS feed that SPAMs them thirty times a day instead. If you’re not continuously in dialogue (versus simply broadcasting your messages), then you’ve sort of missed the whole point of social media.

7.You have to have a blog.

A blog is a communications tool like any other. Blogs can be very useful and a provide a cost effective way of publishing information and getting feedback. However, not every business has the content or writing skills to maintain a blog to quality, and many businesses still need to cater for less Internet-savvy audiences that are more reliant on the press, broadcast media and email for their information. Invest your social media efforts where you’re going to be able to drive the best results. If a blog makes the most sense from a content, audience and a resource point of view, then blog away!

8. Social media campaigns replace advertising.

For sure, the open access to information, viral nature and sharing capabilities of social media are forcing significant changes on the world of advertising. Advertising is having to shift its focus from broadcasting brand messages to creating platforms for dialogue with consumers. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here! Don’t mistake resistance to advertising for resistance to irrelevant advertising. Social media hasn’t replaced email marketing either, but you’re only going to get an increasing tide of negativity if you insist on spamming your audience over and over in an effort to increase your email response rates.

9. If you have budget, you don’t need to do it yourself.

Agencies can play a pivotal role in helping your brand leverage social media platforms within the scope of your brand’s communications (but then I would say that, wouldn’t I!). By their very nature agencies gain insights into how different campaigns are implemented for different clients and so can provide useful third party advice for brands planning campaigns. Your agency should be able to help you plan, focus and manage your social media activities for maximum returns, but subcontracting the running of your social media profiles, blogs and other social media tools to your agency in their entirety is a short term fix at best. Your customers think they’re connecting with you, not your agency. Even if your campaign is heavily agency-assisted, plan on being directly involved day-t0-day.

10. It’s not all about “the conversation”.

Thanks to the Cornwall SEO blog for this one. Taking your brand onto social media should take place within a pre-defined framework that allows your brand to both promote itself and take part in conversations with key audiences. Being part of “the conversation” on any social media platform, knowing how to engage other users and being, well, social is a pre-requisite. However, being part of the conversation probably isn’t your most important objective. So, while you’re tracking your followers, conversations and social media engagement metrics, try to remember your original objectives. How many people have you reached? How many sales leads have you generated? How many customers have you engaged with? How many customer service issues have you solved? How many new visits did you drive to your website? That was the whole point, right?

Useful links (external)

Social Media Myth No. 1 “It’s about the conversation” (Cornwall SEO Blog)

Debunking Five Social Media Myths (Socialmediatoday)

4 Myths About Social Media and Business (Mashable)

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post about social media campaigns, you might also like:

Are you engaging with the right fans? (May 2010)

The coolest agency in the world (February 2010)

Social media measurement (November 2009)

Social media isn’t socialist media (November 2009)

Social media takes time (November 2009)

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in CRM, Content, Customer care, Customers, Facebook, General, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, SEO, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »

The coolest agency in the world

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Social Media Plans

Campaign planning is the easy part!

The coolest agency in the world can’t execute brilliant social media campaigns if the client doesn’t want to invest in the idea – not just of using social media as a megaphone like an advertising replacement, but of actually changing things around to make open social communications a long term investment. That investment necessarily takes a number of forms, too.

It’s not just about assigning a budget, by any means. The investment in time and effort required from the client in executing sound social media campaigns is nearly always greater than that required by advertising campaigns. Engaging with customers over social media platforms can mean some pretty big changes at the client’s side. They don’t all have to happen at once, but it’s important to map out some of the expected change points and commit to them in order that a long term programme of value is created, not just a tactical ‘quick hit’ with potentially negative consequences.

Is your management ready?
You have to ask if your company is structurally ready to undertake social media engagements – a process that involves some difficult questions. Do the management and reporting structures you have in place map to social media? Can you escalate issues quickly and effectively to all your different departments? Can you guarantee to respond quickly? How do your current HR policies map to social media? Who is responsible for that unhappy customer on Twitter – marketing or customer service? And how are you going to resource manning your social media engagements? (because if you think the agency is going to take the full 100% of the load and handle it, you’ve got another thing coming! If your agency says that you don’t have to be involved day-to-day, get another agency fast. Really.)

The next investment comes before you ever tweet a tweet or book a face. It’s in defining your social media guidelines, working with HR to make sure that these are embedded as a core element in the company’s process. Next up it’s making sure that staff are aware of what those guidelines are and, ideally, have the chance to question them or clear up any areas which appear difficult to understand or apply to a given person’s situation.

Now there’s a process of defining roles and responsibilities – who owns what platform and what are the internal processes and ownerships?

Once the job of deciding the niceties is out of the way, things like the naming conventions you’re going to use, building the graphical elements of your ‘social identity’ and deciding on the tools you’re going to use, you’ll need to work together with your agency on selecting platforms based on your target audiences, planning the use of those platforms and their rollout. Part of that process would include working out which platforms your key audiences frequent and what you can contribute to the communities you’re joining – what their informational preferences are and how you can help to improve things for them.

In fact, the key challenge that social media poses for companies, particularly those that consider themselves to be ‘customer centric’ is that they have to re-think their processes in order to be truly customer-centric via social media.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in CRM, Content, Customer care, Customers, Facebook, Internet, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »

Losing the battle for control

Monday, January 11th, 2010
Losing the battle for control?

Losing the battle for control?

A man goes into a shop to look for a new electronic product. He’s already been researching his new purchase online via the manufacturer’s website as well as news sites, product review sites, blogs and by asking his online and offline friends about which brand and products they know and recommend. Armed with this store knowledge he knows exactly what to look for when he goes into the shop and is, in fact, much better prepared on the subject than the sales representative he’s just about to ask for help. Some of the customers calling the retailer’s help line for support are similarly empowered with the latest information and frustrated when the customer service reps don’t know what they’re talking about. A journalist calling the marketing department for an interview already knows about a product recall that has so far not even been communicated to the shop floor. However, some of the company’s staff have already found out about the recall via Internet chat and so have started to post jokes about it on Facebook. Meanwhile, it comes as a surprise to the customer service team that a disgruntled customer has aired his colourful views on the company’s service via his blog and that this has attracted a wide audience and much agreement from dissatisfied customers.

The company management takes a long hard look at its communications and concludes that an increasing number of communications about the company, its services and its products are completely out of its control. The more difficult reality to come to grips with is this is perfectly normal and will, in fact, become increasingly the case.

Social media is bringing changes at every level of organisational communications. And this is not simply online communication either. Increased consumer access to information and opinion means that customers, employees, investors and other stakeholders engage with organisations with the benefit of knowledge gained from a wide range of other sources. Organisations now have much less control over what their customers see, read and hear about them. Customers, on the other hand, have an almost infinite choice of information sources. More and more consumers decide when and how they access news and information, and then access it via their preferred media platform. They also become conduits for information, creating their own content channels: filtering, sharing and recommending content to their own contacts, forums and audiences.

In the past organisations have focused a great deal on putting out what they want to say and far less on what their audiences want to hear. In the age of social media, where people have an overwhelming choice of content, every organisation needs to be in the content business – and that means carefully considering the content consumption habits and needs of its stakeholders. Those that fail to meet the content challenge may see third party content, well informed or not, fill the vacuum.

The consequence of this shift in communications is that many organisations are likely to find that focusing on information or messaging control as a core strategy is going to become less and less effective as time goes on. Some will simply find that the battle for control is simply not worth fighting, since the Internet provides so many ways for content to be created, copied, edited, shared and commented on that are outside the possible purview of corporate control. The new challenge for organisations is to ensure that their own content is the most compelling, most easily accessible content available and therefore the most appealing for their stakeholders. Ensure that your own content is the most copied, shared and commented on by your key audiences and suddenly the ubiquity of content channels becomes an enormous strength.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in CRM, Customer care, Customers, Facebook, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media | No Comments »

Social media measurement

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Social Media MeasurementSpot On’s Alexander McNabb is taking part in a panel session on PR measurement in social media at News Group’s PR Measurement Summit in Dubai today. So, as the region’s public relations practitioners meet to discuss the region’s demand for monitoring, research and measurement methodologies, it’s probably as good a time as any take a quick look at measurement for social media.

I’m not going to delve deep into specific metrics and tools here. In fact, one could argue that all social media metrics either measure influence or engagement, or both and there are a growing number of tools to help marketers define and monitor such metrics. Instead I’d like to take a moment to tackle the broader problem that so often stands in the way of effective social media measurement. The crucial starting point for all social media communications campaigns. And this vital first step will come as no surprise to experienced communications and marketing professionals, because it is simply good objective setting. Without clear objectives social media is likely to be a waste of time, budget and resources for any organisation and the larger the organisation, the uglier it can get. Unless you can step back and take a strategic look at why you’re engaging social media and what results your organisation would like to acheive, all the social media monitoring and measurement tools in the world can’t help you become more effective. A simple enough propostion, but it’s still sadly a lesson that many corporate users of social media have yet to learn.

If you’re ‘different’, why copycat?
One of the first things to recognise is that your organisation’s social media objectives are going to be different to others. Everyone has their own core proposition. Everyone has their own target customers. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. You’ll want to plan your own social media campaign to get your own messages across to your own target audiences: in a way that suits your organisation. So, bear in mind that whilst other social media marketers maybe a great source of inspiration, it’s not always wise to copy everything that they do and join every social media platform they use, just because their social media campaign is successful. Their social media audiences may behave in different ways and be engaged by different online content to your target social media audience.

Here are some broad objectives that you might consider, elaborate on and prioritise for your social media campaign:

- Generate brand awareness
- Build brand engagement
- Build a following
- Run product/service marketing campaigns
- Generate sales leads
- Establish / reinforce leadership
- Create a new communications channel
- Enhance customer relationship management (CRM)
- Test new concepts
- Drive visit to your website or blog
- Monitor opinions & feedback

Likely, you’ll find that several of these objectives figure in your planning and that prioritisation is the key. It’s through defining and prioritising obectives like these that you will be able decide what constitutes success for your social media program and identify the right metrics to monitor and review your campaign’s success moving forwards. As with other forms of communications, there are a range of methodical and anecdotal ways to track success and there are some quite sophisticated tools now available to track success metrics for online campaigns. Many companies will find that their online social media campaign is actually an extension of their offline activity and that one feeds the other, and so a combination of online and offline metrics will make sense for measurement. Many companies starting out in social media for the first time may also question the wisdom of investing in a state-of-the-art social media business intelligence system and instead opt for free-to-use online tools and existing offline monitoring methods. Note that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for measuring social media campaigns.

As you spend more and more time running and monitoring online campaigns — and the clicks, links, visits, friends, fans, followers, subscribers, keywords, comments, replies, references, referrals, opinions and perceptions that are relevant to them — you’ll realise that social media is almost infinitely measureable. The trick is to know what you’re measuring and why you’re measuring it.

Useful links

Social media analytics systems: Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Radian6, Sysomos, TNSCymfony
Chris Brogan: Prioritize Your Social Media Efforts
Mashable: ViralHeat: Sophisticated Social Media Tracking on the Cheap
Mashable: HOW TO: Track Social Media Analytics

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in CRM, Customer care, Customers, Internet, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, brand marketing, public relations, strategy | No Comments »

Alexander nominated for Communicator of the Year!

Sunday, November 15th, 2009
Spot On's Group Account Director Alexander McNabb

Spot On PR's Group Account Director Alexander McNabb

The MEPRA Awards shortlisted nominations and submissions are out today, which include 10 best practice categories and two individual awards categories, being Young Professional of the Year and Communicator of the Year. Having decided as an agency not to enter into the MEPRA Awards best practice categories this year, we had no expectation of seeing ourselves entered for any award. So, imagine our surprise on reading the official MEPRA Awards 2009 press release today when we saw Spot On’s own Alexander McNabb nominated for the Communicator of the Year Award! McNabb himself very nearly choked on his morning coffee as the news broke in the office!

MEPRA’s Communicator of the Year Award was created to recognise a communicator in the Middle East region that has demonstrated outstanding communication success in reaching stakeholder audiences in 2008-2009. Honest, open communications is something of a mantra for us and Alexander has certainly championed the need for organisations to communicate openly and honestly with their publics during the past year via a variety of media including print, radio, television, conference platforms and social media. Alexander is one of five nominees for the award and the winner will be announced at the MEPRA Awards 2009 gala dinner on Tuesday, November 24th.

You can read more of what Alexander has to say on the Spot On blog, his own FakePlasticSouqs blog or follow him on Twitter. And, by the way, he’ll be talking about public relations and the MEPRA Awards 2009 on Dubai Eye’s Dubai Today program tomorrow (Monday) between 9am and 12 noon.

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Awards, MEPRA, Middle East Public Relations, Twitter, public relations, social media | No Comments »

Scorn

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

It’s perhaps interesting many of the marketers who are taking social media seriously are seeing a campaign platform rather than a fundamental change in the way the business communicates and, indeed, behaves. That’s fair enough, it’s a wise person who dips a toe in the water before going for the full-on dive bomb and it doesn’t take the wildest imagination to see what’s going to happen to Young Roger as he faces the directors in the mahogany-panelled boardroom and suggests they might like to gamble the future of the company on Twitter.

But a campaign-led approach to social media really does need to be framed in the context of a wider move to adopt social platforms to transform the company’s communications, it can’t just be a tactic.

That does mean writing a new rulebook and challenging some very entrenched attitudes and procedures – it’s an early adopters game, too, requiring a willingness to take a transformational approach to aspects of the business. It can be a two-track process of gradual change, there’s no need to try and change the world overnight, but it does have to involve an element of change.

Declaring that you’re cool and down with the kids then running a Twitter competition to win a super prize is not what social media’s about – and neither is tacking a Facebook page onto the tail end of that expensive regional TV and outdoor campaign.

Agencies and clients alike have to be careful of 2.0wash – the temptation to stick a blog, Facebook fan page and Twitter ID on every pitch PPT. Although that might sell to the credulous, it’s not doing the client any favours in the long run, just creating a range of disparate, off-message and wild communications with no follow-through. You wouldn’t recommend that kind of behaviour with a ‘conventional’ campaign, so why do so with social media?

Without a planned, consistent communications strategy behind it, a social media campaign as a tactic is in very real danger of making the client look flaky. And social media, incidentally, has evolved a very special way of treating such campaigns – public scorn.

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »