Social Media Strategyfor PR People

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A No-Nonsense Guide to Social Media Strategy for PR People - 2011

Dr Paul MarsdenSocial PsychologistSocial Media Strategyhttp://viralculture.com

Okay, so you ‘get’ social media: it’s just online media that supports social interaction and user contributions

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And you see beyond the jargon; social media is a channel where word of mouth gets published

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And you get that published word of mouth is important and that you need to manage it...

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Your reputation is what people say about you when you leave the room

So you have your Facebook page where you’re publishing news, interacting with customers, and collecting ‘Likes’...

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And you’ve a Twitter profile where you’re also publishing news, interacting, and getting followed and re-tweeted

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You’re publishing your news to a blog section on your website, interacting and getting views and ‘shares’ too...

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And you’re publishing video news to your YouTube channel and getting more views there...

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You even publish key information about your organisation on Wikipedia and LinkedIn...

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And you’re measuring it all by counting views, shares, likes, followers and comments

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2K+ 2K+ 2K+ 2K+

But what now? Is that it? Is social media just a direct news publishing channel for PR people?

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First, if you’re doing these seven things, congratulate yourselves; you’re in the top 5% of organisations...

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But you may be missing something. Do you have a strategy?

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Yes, strategy is a fat word... but it’s the ‘how’ in how you are going to achieve what you want to achieve

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So to have a strategy, you need an objective

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As PR people, we’re interested in generating favourable publicity through media coverage

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Yes, there’s so much more to PR than media coverage, but it’s our core competence, so let’s focus on that first

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If the real-world objective of PR is media coverage, then the social media objective of PR is social media coverage

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In other words, social media PR is about maximising positive mentions in social media...

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Which in plain language means getting people to talk about you positively on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube...

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How do we do that? Here’s a simple PR strategy for maximising positive mentions in social media...

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First, continue publishing news in the medium you wantto get talked about in, but adapt content to the medium

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And that means doing six things...

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One - adapt your news to the medium by making it‘social’ by enabling social interaction and sharing

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Two - adapt your news to the medium by making it ‘conversational’ - informal and brief in style

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Three - adapt your news to the medium by making it ‘real-time’ - live and on demand

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Four - adapt your news to the medium by making it ‘multimedia’ - with images, video and sound

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Five - adapt your news to the medium by making it ‘mobile’ - handset-friendly and location-aware

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Six - adapt your news to the medium by making it‘findable’ - using search terms people use

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So Part 1 of your 2-part strategy is to continue publishing your news in social media, but adapting it to the medium

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SOCIALCONVERSATIONAL

REAL-TIMEMOBILE

MULTIMEDIASEO

Part 2 is to run regular PR campaigns in social media designed to get people talking

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PR CAMPAIGN

And that means doing things that are worth talking about

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re·mark·a·bleadjective /riˈmärkəbəl/1. Worthy of note or mention2. Striking, unexpected or unusual

Whilst there are many ways to skin the social media PR campaign cat, here are three proven strategies

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One - The “Entertain Me” strategy: Running PR stunts with social media

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Two - The “Help Me” strategy:Helping people solve their problems with social media

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Three - The “Love Me” strategy:Activating fan advocacy in social media with fan exclusives

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Of course, there are many ways you can complicate social media for PR; this is just the simple no-nonsense strategy

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BeforeSocial Media Mentions

= 1,500/week Net Sentiment = -10

(% +ve - %-ve) 12% incre

ase in prop

ensity

to recommend -> gr

owth x 2

(Bain Consul

ting)

Social Media Strategy for PR1. Publish Your

News in Social MediaSocial

ConversationalReal-timeMultimedia

MobileSEO

AfterSocial Media Mentions

= 4,500/week Net Sentiment = +30

(% +ve - %-ve)

2. Run PR Campaignsin Social Media

Entertain MeHelp MeLove Me

-> Improved Reputation

I’ll look forward to helping you apply the strategy in the ‘Social Media for PR People’ course. Enjoy. Share. Profit.

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DR PAUL MARSDENSOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

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