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Brittany Dorfner • 01-11-10
Looking back on 2009, was your company innovative in terms of online networking, or more of a social novice? If last year was your time to learn more about social media, then 2010 provides an opportunity to put your new-found expertise to the test.
As the new year begins, apply what you’ve learned towards planning the implementation of your social media strategy. Innovative networking tools are in the forefront of an ongoing revolution in how we share information, and you need to factor them into your company’s communications plan. To remain competitive with other forward-thinking companies in your industry, it’s crucial to start strategizing with social media now.
Here are three key concepts to guide your company’s social media planning:
1. Personalization
- Today, customers and key audiences are able to connect directly online with the organizations and institutions they value most. Case studies show customers respond positively to the personal connection available through social networks, as well as the rich interactive experience online platforms provide.
- Because of this positive response, it’s important to include personal elements in your company’s social networks. When setting up your company Twitter account, include a 2-3 sentence company bio, along with the name of who will maintain the account, and upload a customized background. On Facebook, share photos of company events or outings to give customers a glimpse behind your office walls.
2. Communication
- Obviously, communication is key. Once you’ve set up your corporate Twitter and Facebook accounts, set goals for yourself. Start with 3-4 tweets per day and at least one Facebook update a week. Share company updates with your followers, and useful or interesting articles on key industry topics. Your followers will appreciate receiving updates about your products and services, and the value you bring to their personal learning network.
- In addition to sending frequent updates, make it a point to initiate or contribute to conversations. Use Twitter and Facebook to resolve customer complaints, product issues, etc., and contribute your opinions to conversations relating to industry issues. Sharing your knowledge and opinions will not only broaden your follower base, but establish your industry expertise as well.
3. Quantification
- As seen in 2009, the big question for anyone building a social media campaign is how to quantify your company’s return on investment. As social media platforms have evolved, so have the tools used to track their statistics over time. Regarding Twitter, tools such as HootSuite or bit.ly can provide statistics useful for demonstrating your company’s social media success. Aside from mentions and retweets, these tools provide information for tweets with links, including Total Clicks, Referring Sites and Conversations to monitor engagement.
- In terms of Facebook, monitoring for comments is generally the best way to track your success – comments initiate conversation with you and other fans, increasing engagement and building interaction. Page Administrators can also view Insights to view Fans Over Time, Interactions and Quality of Posts.
If you’re just starting out on Twitter, and want more Twitter-specific information, check out the CB&A Slideshare account.
After contemplating these three “pillars” of social media deployment, would you consider your company a social media expert, or does your social media plan need work? If the latter, how will you implement these ideas in 2010?
Kristen Plemon • 12-21-09
Congratulations to all the 2009 Edublog award winners and nominees!  The winners were announced in an online ceremony last week.  Four of the edubloggers nominated by the CB&A team were among the winners, although all the nominees are winners in our book.  You can view the list of winners, and the first and second place runners-up, at edublogawards.com.
We look forward to exciting new developments in the “eduverse” in 2010, and to next year’s awards. Thanks again to all the educators who are sharing their ideas, thoughts and projects with the world through social media; their voices are helping to improve education and take it in innovative directions.
Kristen Plemon • 12-08-09
Now in its sixth year, the Edublog Awards program celebrates the achievements of edubloggers, twitterers, podcasters, video makers, online communities, wiki hosts, and other Web-based users of educational technology. It’s a wonderful opportunity to recognize the hard-working, dedicated, passionate educators who are using the Web to share their vision and ideas, and to collaborate with colleagues and others in the education community. There are so many whom we’ve learned from and enjoyed getting to know this year that it was very difficult to choose just one per category, but those are the rules…
Group voting by the CB&A team yielded the following nominations for the 2009 Edublog Awards:
Thank you to Steve Hargadon and Classroom 2.0 for co-hosting the awards with Edublogs Campus!
Emily Embury • 11-24-09
How have public relations metrics changed with the advent of social media? Katie Paine of KDPaine & Partners addressed this question during a professional development workshop at the 2009 PRSA International Conference.
Paine began her presentation with some statistics:
- 91 percent of Inc. 500 companies are using social media – however, 38 percent are not monitoring their brand in social media.
- 48 percent of companies are moving money from advertising to social media – only 18 percent are taking money away from public relations.
- 78 percent of people trust recommendations – only 14 percent trust advertising.
According to Paine, social media renders obsolete everything we know about public relations measurement. The definitions of “timely,” “reach” and “success” – three elements of public relations – have changed. Online coverage appears instantly and, if unfavorable, requires an immediate response. Online impressions are impossible to count, and irrelevant as a measure of social media exposure. Rather than focusing on impressions, or the number of people reached, we need to look at how many people responded or interacted. A campaign’s effectiveness is measured by engagement with a particular audience, not the number of eyeballs.
Here’s an overview of how public relations measurement has changed over time:
Social media also has changed consumer behavior. In the dark ages before social media, the consumer decision-making process consisted of awareness, consideration, preference, trial, and purchase. Now, consumers use social media as a top resource for information on brands or products, which impacts their behavior. The new consumer decision-making process comprises find, observe/lurk, participate, engagement, and purchase/act/link/word-of-mouth.
Paine referred to this as The Engagement Decision Tree:
The change in consumer behavior is important for companies to keep in mind, especially when planning social media campaigns, and related sales and marketing efforts.
CB&A is developing similar functionality to track and analyze the influence of social media, which we hope to deploy in January 2010. Stay tuned.
Emily Embury • 11-23-09
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then imagine the impact of a video.  During the 2009 Public Relations International Conference, Laura Sturaitis of BusinessWire and Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR discussed the use of multimedia as a way to increase news announcement visibility.
Search engine optimization efforts often focus on Google, but a substantial number of searches are also taking place on the second largest search engine – YouTube. In September 2009, while almost 9 billion searches were conducted on Google, there were 10.3 billion videos viewed on YouTube. According to Jarboe, Americans are spending more time looking for videos on YouTube than they spend searching for content on Google.
According to comScore Video Metrix, during September 2009:
•   84.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video
•   125.5 million viewers watched nearly 10.3 billion videos on YouTube
•   The average online video viewer watched 9.8 hours of video
•   The duration of the average online video was 3.8 minutes
 The public relations industry is being rapidly reshaped by the widespread access to online video, and how it can impact public opinion. One example is the public relations crisis experienced by Domino’s Pizza after employees posted a prank video on YouTube. Because Domino’s was not monitoring YouTube, the company’s brand was harmed by mounting negative comments that went unanswered for two days. In a belated attempt at damage control, Domino’s created a Twitter account to address the issue, and presented its chief executive in a video on YouTube, but it was too late to prevent the bad publicity from drawing international attention.
 A second example involves the company Blendtec, which sells a line of industrial-strength blenders. Blendtec created a viral marketing campaign consisting of a series of videos on YouTube in which the company founder attempts to blend various items to show off the power of his product. After spending $50 to produce five videos, the company experienced a 700 percent increase in total blender sales.
To reach this new audience, companies are recording video segments to accompany their news announcements. Online video increases the visibility of a news announcement, connects the online audience to a company’s “human face,” and positions the company as an industry leader sensitive to changing media needs, and in tune with Web 2.0 and social media trends.
During NECC 2009, CB&A recorded video interviews to support news releases distributed during the conference. The videos became a valuable component of our clients’ online media kits, and were publicized on the CB&A Facebook page and YouTube channel to cross-promote the news and make the content available to bloggers. In addition, clients featured the videos in their online newsrooms and YouTube channels. Clients experienced increased coverage, especially in education blogs such as The Educators’ Royal Treatment. We’ve added more videos to our channel in subsequent months.
For more tips regarding online video, read our earlier blog post entitled Lights, Camera, Action – Preparing for Video Interviews.
Emily Embury • 11-20-09
 Ninety percent of journalists rely on online search engines to perform key elements of their job, whether researching a story, locating a subject matter expert, or researching a word’s precise meaning. As newsrooms reduce their staff, journalists are writing more articles with less time and fewer resources, making it ever more critical that companies and their news announcements rank high in search results. Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing outlined the steps required to optimize news content during the 2009 PRSA International Conference.
To understand the importance of optimization, it’s helpful to re-examine the notion of “push” and “pull” public relations tactics. According to Odden, push comprises the tactics used to announce company news, including news release distribution and sharing story ideas with members of the media. Pull involves bringing journalists to a company’s Web site through optimized news releases, robust online newsrooms and social media efforts. Achieving media coverage through both tactics enables companies to extend the reach of their news.
Keyword Research
Begin the optimization process by defining a list of keywords or phrases that journalists or other audiences would use to find a company or products. Brainstorm a list of possible phrases, and test them with a keyword phrase research tool such as Google Insights for Search, Google Trends or WordTracker. Research the popularity and variations of the original keywords, revise as necessary, then list the final keywords in a glossary, segmented by popularity and category.
News Release Optimization
With the keywords in hand, it’s time to put them to use in your public relations campaign. News releases can be more than a vehicle for distributing news. If optimized, announcements can also pull journalists, prospects and customers to company content hosted on its Web site or newsroom.
- Think up and to the left
- Optimize first for people, then for search engines
- Use keywords in title, subhead and body
- Don’t obsess over keyword density
- Use keywords in links to company Web sites
- Add digital assets such as images and videos
- Include a call to action
- Develop and optimize unique landing pages
Newsroom Optimization
Three of five journalists say that information found on a Web site influences their decision to include a company in a story. Journalists require fast and accurate information about your company, and a well-run online newsroom provides the media with exactly what they need, when they need it. As with news releases, an optimized online newsroom easily found via search can be a powerful resource to draw journalists in.
- Use blog software to manage your newsroom
- Add share/save bookmarks tools
- Leverage keywords to categorize news releases
- Cross link from optimized content to relevant content on Web site
Download “The TopRank Guide to SEO” for more information on how to plan and execute an effective search engine optimization strategy.
What strategies are you using to push traffic to your online newsroom?
Emily Embury • 11-19-09
 Are traditional media falling apart before our eyes? And, more important, are we prepared to pick up the pieces? Bob Garfield, host of National Public Radio’s “On the Media,” Advertising Age columnist and author, explored this topic during his keynote address at the 2009 PRSA International Conference. Garfield argued that the yin and yang of mass media and mass marketing – mutually sustaining for more than 400 years – have decoupled. Garfield’s latest book, “The Chaos Scenario,” documents the demise of traditional media as a consequence of the digital revolution.  He supports his thesis with these sobering facts:
Newspapers: In spite of 23 percent U.S. population growth in the last 20 years, newspapers have lost 20 percent of their circulation. Two years ago Robert Murdoch paid $5.5 billion for the Wall Street Journal, a publication that is now worth $2 billion.
Magazines: Newsstand sales were down 12 percent in 2008, and 2009 is looking even worse. In North America, 525 magazines folded in 2008, and another 200 have disappeared so far this year.
Broadcast: Television advertising revenue dropped 20 to 30 percent in 2009. The primetime audience for CBS is down 2.9 percent, 14.3 percent for NBC, and 17.5 percent for FOX.
Overall, 75 percent of national advertisers have slashed their 2009 advertising budgets. As Garfield put it, advertising simply can’t support all the media that are out there.
What about the Internet? Thanks to the digital revolution, the richest repository of information ever assembled is available to all through the Internet. Can’t content providers and advertisers simply change venue from traditional media to the online world? Unfortunately, no, according to Garfield. Millions of Web pages provide a nearly infinite advertising inventory, which drives advertising prices down. The symbiosis of mass media and mass marketing simply doesn’t work in a microworld.
If advertising through mass media isn’t a viable option, how can companies reach their customers during this digital revolution? Garfield pointed to “listenomics.” Instead of shouting at customers, he suggested that marketers treat them as genuine stakeholders and listen to what they are saying. Customers will share opinions and ideas useful for product development as well. Plus, if a company is able to solve a customer’s problem by listening and engaging them, the customer will often share his or her experience with others as an evangelist for the brand.
Another way companies can reach their audience is through public relations. Garfield declared that public relations professionals are uniquely positioned during this digital revolution. The tools of the trade may be different, but public relations always has been about connecting companies with different audiences, and this hasn’t changed. Although fewer mass media are available, there are millions of new “micro-outlets,” and companies can deploy public relations campaigns to secure coverage and boost company visibility through their use.
How are you responding to the digital revolution?
Emily Embury • 11-18-09
Last week I attended the 2009 Public Relations Society of America International Conference (PRSA) in San Diego. More than 3,000 public relations professionals from around the world attended the conference, which is the industry’s largest annual learning and networking event. This year’s theme, “Delivering Value” celebrates public relations as a driver of business outcomes critical to organizational success.
During the conference I attended a number of professional development sessions led by the public relations industry’s thought leaders. In addition, I listened to keynote addresses by Arianna Huffington, Todd Buckholz and Bob Garfield, three of the most influential and respected journalists, authors and commentators working today.
PRSA has published recaps of the keynotes online:
To Stand Out, Arianna Huffington Says That You Need Drama
Despite a Troubled Economy, Todd Buckholz Believes That This is Now the Time for Innovation and Prosperity
Bob Garfield: Shut Up and Listen – Or You’re Doomed
Over the next week, I’ll be publishing a series of posts to share the insights and knowledge gleaned from attending the keynote and conference sessions. Four common themes emerged during the conference – Revolution, Optimization, Multimedia and Measurement. Each post in the series will focus on one of these themes. Let the conversation begin!
Sandy Fash • 11-17-09
 We had the opportunity to participate in a Webinar hosted by MMS Education, edWeb.net and MCH, Inc. on Nov. 4, 2009, where they discussed the findings of their new Survey of K-12 Educators on Social Networking.
The survey was distributed to 82,000 teachers, librarians/media specialists and principals, with a 1.6 percent response rate. Focusing on the use of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook among U.S. educators, here a few key findings:
- 61 percent of surveyed educators have joined a social network.
- Facebook is the site most educators have joined (85 percent); MySpace is a distant second (20 percent); and LinkedIn, a popular site for the business community, is third (14 percent).
- Respondents are using social networking to connect with family and friends, although many are using these sites to connect with colleagues and to stay current with Web 2.0 technology.
- Educators who have joined a social network are more positive about the value of this technology for educational use.
- Social networks dedicated to education (Classroom 2.0, edWeb.net, LearnCentral, Tapped In, TeachAde, WeAreTeachers, We the Teachers) have low penetration thus far, but there is growing awareness.
- Respondents repeatedly expressed the need or desire to keep their online personal and professional lives separate.
- Significant differences were found in attitudes and behavior of teachers, principals and library/media specialists. Â Librarians were the most likely to join a social network (70 percent), followed by teachers (62 percent) and then principals (54 percent).
- Librarians are the most positive about the value of social networking in education, but express frustration with school districts that block access.
- Principals have some reservations about social networking and feel behind the curve, but accept that the technology is here to stay.
- Teachers see how students use this technology, and believe it is needed for success in life, but feel they have little time to use it, and express concerns about their privacy.
Educators also were asked about their use of content-sharing sites and tools, including YouTube, TeacherTube, Wikipedia, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, Google Docs, Delicious, Digg, Ustream, Webinars, Twitter, podcasts, Flickr, and widgets.
- For personal use, the number one tool is YouTube; for professional use, the top tool is Webinars; for classroom use, the primary tool is Wikipedia.
What does this mean for education technology vendors?
The number of educators and school level administrators using social media platforms is growing, but those who are participating could be considered early-adopters, passionate about technology use in the classroom. We do not recommend using these tools to “push” news or your marketing agenda. Rather, participate in these communities to learn about the needs of your potential customers. Listen to what they discuss. Learn what they are looking for in various products, and adapt your marketing, sales and product development strategies accordingly.
In addition, the results highlight the advantages of using Webinars for communications and professional development with principals and librarians, and of creating high-value educational videos to put on YouTube and TeacherTube for teachers to use in the classroom. Consider these options when developing materials and professional development programs that support your technology.
How are you using social networks to engage customers?
Brittany Dorfner • 11-13-09
As people turn toward Twitter to build their personal and professional brands, one practice that’s sparked some controversy throughout the Twittersphere is ghost tweeting.
Ghost-written celebrity biographies are commonplace, but hiring someone to tweet on your behalf is a hot topic among Twitter users. The controversy stems from the notion that Twitter (and other social networks) was created for people to connect with an actual person or company.
Given this presumption, is it appropriate to have someone ghost tweet on behalf of a company, or an individual who wants the benefits of a Twitter “presence” without actually doing the work?
Here are a few comments on the merits of ghost tweeting shared on Becky McMichael’s blog, “Becky McMichael’s PR Balancing Act,” and MyRaganTV:
•   Ghost tweeting is a misrepresentation of a person or brand and should not be condoned.
•   Here’s my rule: if you don’t have the time to have your own original thoughts and key in your own 140 characters, stay out of the game.
•   It violates the spirit of the open community we are trying to build on Web 2.0 with Twitter, Facebook.
•   Here’s an example of ghost tweeting in action: http://twitter.com/Bob_Monkhouse. Bob was a UK comedian who died of prostate cancer. Now, a prostate cancer charity is tweeting in his name.
•   To me, tweeting is like a personal conversation – ghost tweeting is like impersonating someone.
Although we don’t recommend employing a full-time ghost tweeter, there is room for PR professionals to be involved in a company’s social strategy by helping its marketing team manage the planning process, and get their account(s) up and running. However, it needs to be made clear at the beginning that this is a temporary arrangement. The PR professional is there only as a guide during the implementation process, and will step aside when a team of trained individuals is ready to use the network(s) and provide a genuine company perspective.
Internally, it’s OK to have your company’s communication team be the “voice” of your corporate Twitter account. They’re already part of the company culture, and because they’re generally the ones sharing your news, it’s natural for them to jump on Twitter to tweet about company updates and announcements. On the other hand, having them tweet on behalf of your company’s CEO, isn’t authentic and won’t be well received by customers, prospects, etc. The goal of tweeting (whether for your company or yourself) is to be true to the overall purpose of the service –connect with others of similar interests (customers, industry colleagues, clients, etc.) and provide authentic, useful information.
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