The Art of Social Media

12-7-2010

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last two years, you have heard the term social media and have probably heard about businesses using social media to promote themselves. It has become the pervasive buzz phrase of the ad world for the last year. Sprint commercials talk about checking your “Facebook” status on your phone, the pope has a blog, and Congressmen are twittering during the President’s State Of The Union address. Basically, it’s everywhere. But how can it be effective for you? If you have a thirteen year old daughter she can set up your “Facebook” page.  If your son is a techie he can set you up with a “Twitter” account and a blog…but then what? That’s the problem. Too many companies are starting down the social media path without an understanding of what it does and does not do.

Social media marketing tied with its cousin, online viral public relations, when used in the business world is basically a brand having a conversation with its perspective buyer. In other words, it’s public relations by another name. As with most public relations, it is best to work with a professional when developing and implementing your plan….and you do need a plan!

Social media can take many different forms including Internet forums, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures, and video. Technologies include: blogs, music and picture sharing,, wall-postings, e-mail, instant messaging, crowd sourcing, and voice over IP to name a few. Examples of social media applications are:

·    “Facebook” (social networking)
·    “Google Groups” (reference, social networking)
·    “Wikipedia” (reference)
·    “Linkedin” (social networking)
·     “Yahoo Buzz” (social network aggregation)
·    “Digg” (bookmarking)
·    “YouTube” (social networking and video sharing)
·    “Del.icio.us” (bookmarkin)
·    “Second Life” (virtual reality)
·    “Flickr” (photo sharing)
·    “Twitter” (social networking and microblogging)
·    “Tenporium” (social polling and consumer product reviews)
·    Microblogs such as  “Jaiku”, and “Pownce”

Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like “FriendFeed”, “MyBlogLog” and “Plaxo.”

Viral Public Relations is a direct-to-consumer form of public relations that creates news stories online for consumers to find your products, services, or cause. Your audience becomes the millions of people with internet connections, access to search engines, and RSS readers. This involves making sure your press releases are posted online to all online news sources, are replete with keyword-rich content, have links imbedded to deliver potential customer to landing pages on your Web site, are optimized first searching and browsing, have social media tags for “Technorati’, “Digg” and “Del.icio.us”, and drive people into the sales process. This will fundamentally change the way you use news releases and drive buyers straight to your organization precisely at a time that they are ready to buy.

So, now that your head is spinning with terms, jargon, site names and information, you must to be asking yourself, “How can this help me?” Let’s get down to brass tacks here. The insurance industry has always been about networking. Get your cards in front of enough people, shake enough hands, eat enough rubber chickens, and use those relationships to turn them into clients. Now social media is the great frontier of networking. You can get your name and company in front of more people in a week than all you would at all the rubber chicken dinners you could attend in Piscataway, New Jersey in five years.

Right now there are more than 500 million active users on Facebook and 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day. The average user has 130 friends. People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook  and there are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. The potential for businesses to develop relationships within this network is incredible.

You have to be asking yourself, “How do I keep on top of it all?” New internet tools are becoming available almost on a daily basis but not all tools are suited for every company. There is such a thing as bad public relations.  This is where bringing in a profession can help you wade through all the options available to your company to choose the ones that are best suited for your needs. In addition to developing your social media and viral public relations strategy, a professional can handle all the individual tasks that make up your plan. They would create an integrated approach that will provide essential accountability throughout your public relations program and prevent your campaign from drifting off course.

At the NewCom Group we spend countless hours a day researching numerous social media sites and viral public relations techniques to find what fits our clients best. Not every site is perfect for every client and one of the biggest mistakes made in social media marketing is not knowing the culture of the site you are joining. This could end up with you being ignored at best and banned at worst! You have to remember this is SOCIAL media marketing. Your message needs to have a social context and not be pushy or overtly sleazy. Many other mistake made by businesses attempting this for the first time include, being fake in any way, not listening to the group, being oblivious to formal and unwritten social rules, and approaching all social media channels at the same time.

Hopefully I haven’t scared you away from social media, but have given you a healthy respect for what seems to be very simple but is actually very complicated. If done correctly, social media and viral public relations can provide your company with access to clients at a relatively low cost compared to other mainstream forms of advertising. But once again, it does require planning.

As you go through the process you have to plan out what you want to inform your prospects about and where it is best to find them. For example, if you sell wedding insurance you should look at sites like “Wedding Wire” or “Bridezilla” and work within those communities. Alternatively, if you sell car insurance you can look to the many car enthusiast sites, forums and twitter feeds. If it is your personal lines you want push there are family sites and blogs you can comment on. Maybe its business insurance you are focusing on? Then you can use sites like “LinkedIn” and many others. Most importantly you need to focus your message, keep it consistent and conversational, and make sure you aren’t too pushy.

On The NewCom Group’s social media pages we focus a lot of attention on our Hollywood clients. We post a lot of video clips and create events for their upcoming films or shows in which they will be featured. We provide links to their pages and they are members of ours groups. All this is done as a conversation with the community to provide them with “insider information”. The goal is to keep fans coming back for more information, create a buzz around our actors and production companies and shows NewCom as a leader in the public relations field.  All this is done without an obvious sales pitch.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to work with a professional. They will create a comprehensive plan that will:

·    Identify your target markets
·    Develop your niche in the marketplace through proper social media branding
·    Create a viral campaign identity
·    Define the purpose of your social media marketing and viral public relations program
·    Develop a comprehensive method of marketing
·    Choose your social media and viral public relations tools

A professional will write content that is remarkable, unique, and newsworthy. This content will be marketed through vast social media and viral public relations sites. This will be part of a comprehensive program that will target a variety of different internet groups and categories and well as viral public relations sites and social media press release.

A professional will keep up on the social networks on a regular basis and make sure you are constantly visible. They will also make sure to be in contact with your organization on a regular basis to keep the program fresh and moving forwards.  Most importantly, they will make sure all your sites align with each other. It is crucial that your blog feeds into your “Facebook” page and your “Twitter” feed and that your “Twitter” feed connects back to your website. These types of cross connections create the value in social media and viral public relations.

It isn’t a matter of if you should do social media and viral public relations; it’s now a matter of how you are going to do it!

Victor Cipolla is the Executive Vice-President of The NewCom Group a full service Public Relations firm and Ad Agency specializing in Social Media Marketing , Viral Public Relations and Entertainment Publicity.  NewCom has offices in Albany and Los Angeles.  You can find Vic on as www.twitter.com/newcomvic  and you can find The NewCom Group at www.thenewcomgroup.com and on facebook at www.facebook.com/thenewcomgroup or our blog www.weherdcats.com  and many many other places!