Social Media Tips and Takeaways from the 2010 Media Relations Best Practices Summit

by Kaylen McNamara on March 5, 2010

This past Wednesday I attended the 2010 Media Relations Best Practices Summit, presented by Ragan’s PR Daily and PRSA at the Con Edison building in New York City. One session that I found particularly helpful was the PRBreakfast Club lunch panel, which featured a group of young PR pros who presented “35 ideas in 30 minutes: the best social media ideas from 2010 young PR Pros.” This session was packed with great tips on how companies and brands can harness the value of traditional media and embrace the power of social media in the rapidly evolving media landscape.

The full list of tips can be viewed on the PR Breakfast Club blog, but I have listed below the sound bites that  I found most valuable:

#3- One person should either operate or oversee all social media. One voice should be heard/read from the company.

#6- We will all finally realize that it’s time to get over the notion that every CEO/C-level needs to be on or “get” social media. They don’t. It’s our job to help them best understand why certain initiatives and accomplishments within social media are relevant and important to the business’ bottom line, and that means putting social media concepts into more traditional terms that CEOs/C-levels readily understand.

#14- Credible sources still rule. Even in real-time crises that are played out on Twitter, blogs, etc., still need to link back to credible sources (e.g. a company’s official blog or some other official info source) so that rumor mill doesn’t continue to spread. Twitter is a link-based economy, and just simply sending tweets w/o credible links will do little to get truth out there to the right people who need to know that info.

#20- Remember: Journalists still have specific ways they’d like to be pitched. Pay attention. Is it now through Facebook or Twitter or still via e-mail or phone?

#28- There will continue to be the struggle of the importance of quantity vs. quality. Is it about how many “fans” you have, or is it really about who’s listening?

#31- People need to realize they can’t be robots. Auto dms and canned responses don’t build & engage the community.  Be human, show some personality in your SM interactions.

#34- Platforms and apps come and go, but the ability to tell a story to people who care will always be our bedrock.

Have any tips to add to the list? Leave a comment or send me an email.

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Writing a Social Media Usage Policy – The Lawyer & The Marketer’s Perspective

by Sandra Fathi on March 2, 2010

Credit: Dan Foy

I recently attended a PRSA-NY event entitled “Regulatory Scrutiny of Social Media” that was co-hosted by Michael Lasky, Partner, Co-Chair Litigation, Public Relations Law at Davis & Gilbert LLP. Michael shared some sage advice during the session on everything from the impact of FTC regulations on marketers and PR folks in social media to crafting a social media policy for your organization. I found his advice straightforward and simple to understand and follow if you are working in a corporation or agency. Often organizations are so focused on restricting use of social media that they forget to encourage positive behavior that can benefit the company and the brand.

Here is a summary of Michael’s outline for drafting a Social Media Usage Policy which will satisfy the lawyers and the marketers:

  1. Create a policy that includes:
    • Permitted conduct
    • Encouraged conduct
    • Prohibited conduct
    • Company’s rights and remedies if these policies are violated
  2. Educate employees not to violate others’ intellectual property rights (i.e. copyrights, trademarks)
  3. Prohibit disclosure of confidential information
  4. Ensure that discussions regarding competitors are not overly-negative or inflammatory
  5. Prohibit employees from posting objectionable content
  6. Educate employees to disclose that their statements reflect their own opinions, not the company’s
  7. Ensure that employees disclose their connection to the company when posting about its products or services

    8. What’s in your policy? Feel free to share your suggestions to add to this list.

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Five Takeaways from My First Year of Agency Life

by Kaylen McNamara on February 18, 2010

It’s hard to believe that it has been almost eight months since I started full time as an assistant account executive at Affect Strategies. Having only graduated this past May, I have not only learned a tremendous amount about PR and marketing, but have experienced the fast-paced and dynamic environment of an agency. Now, days into my new role as an account executive, I look back at some of the key lessons I have learned in my first year working at an agency:

  1. Maintain an upbeat attitude. While the agency environment can take some time to adjust to, it is important not to get lost in the moment. Even when stressed or under pressure, keep an optimistic, excited attitude. Not only will this improve the quality of your work, but it will have a positive affect on your relationship with coworkers and clients.
  2. Produce work that is “client ready.” Whether it’s a monthly report or a draft of an email, no assignment should leave your desk unless you are 100% sure that there are no errors. Taking the extra time to reread your work and check the formatting. This will prevent you from having to redo assignments and will show your supervisors that you can be trusted to communicate directly with clients.
  3. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. When starting a new job, and in my case my first job, it is natural to want to prove that you can handle projects on your own and to feel that asking questions will make you look incapable. However, this mindset doesn’t help you or your agency. Asking questions is something you will need to do throughout your career and shows your coworkers that you are dedicated to producing the best results possible.
  4. Focus on today’s priorities. With a to-do list a mile long, it is easy to get overwhelmed by assignments that are due later in the week or month. While it’s great to plan ahead, it is also important to realize that there is only so much that can get done in one day. Stressing about deadlines that are weeks away will distract you from focusing on the task on hand.
  5. Take initiative. Don’t let yourself be defined by your job title. Being the most inexperienced employee in the agency doesn’t mean you should sit around and wait for assignments and instruction. Instead, come to the table with your own recommendations and don’t be afraid to take advantage of opportunities beyond your job description.

Kaylen McNamara is an account executive at Affect Strategies. She joined our team as an intern in December 2008 and came on board as an assistant account executive upon the completion of her undergraduate degree in public relations at Quinnipiac University. Kaylen was promoted to account executive in February 2010. Congratulations, Kaylen!

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Social Media Week: Navigating Social Media & New Technology in the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Industries

by admin on February 11, 2010

At long last, we have reached our final Social Media Week 2010 post. This one comes from Affect Strategies Assistant Account Executive, Antoniette Pemberton, who has already put some of the healthcare social networking sites mentioned in her post to use.

Social media is continuously changing the way we receive information and interact with each other. Like many, I turn to my friends and colleagues when considering a purchase, looking for a new restaurant and especially when searching for a good doctor. (As a matter of fact, all of my physicians were recommended through colleagues!) Armed with this information, I then turn to search engines and social networks for further reviews and recommendations.

The healthcare and pharmaceutical industries are attuned to these new consumer behaviors and have begun experimenting with social media platforms in order to build stronger relationships between doctors and patients.

Last Thursday night, I had the pleasure of attending the Navigating Social Media & New Technology in Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Industries event. The panelists were:

The panel participants were passionate about improving healthcare through technology. They provided insightful tips on how patients and physicians can use social media to create better relationships. In addition, they discussed new platforms that have been recently created that provide a better experience in finding doctors, getting appointments, and even receiving post-appointment follow-ups.

According to Dr. Oliver Kharraz, “the average wait for a primary care doctor is 24 days.” Is 24 days too long for you? Want to find a doctor in or out of your network? And book an appointment online? Dr. Kharraz’s website, Zoc Doc, the OpenTable of healthcare allows you to do just that.

Now that you have your appointment, you may want to find out what other patients have the same concerns. If so, The Health Tweeder is there for you. Dr. Jay Parkinson and Dr. Oliver Kharraz stressed that physicians need to become better listeners, provide customer service and remove the burden of following-up with physicians and pharmacies from patients.

Although the cost to start a social platform is expensive, the reward is great. Unfortunately, doctors have to finance these initiatives themselves and are not monetarily compensated for their time.

The most interesting platform for me was, Hello Health, a site where doctors and patients can build relationships through a direct pay model, where patients can pay a nominal fee to speak and interact directly with a doctor. Event-goers excited about these networks had tons of questions.

  • How do you get doctors to engage?
  • What legalities do you face?
  • What do you do with the data?

Even though the panelists could only respond on behalf of their respective companies, they all agreed that doctors need to get paid for their time (whether responding to an email or interacting face-to-face) and the biggest challenge they face with social networks is providing content in real-time, due to legal barriers.

The panel’s consensus was that people don’t need more content. Instead, brands (including individual doctors as well as pharmaceutical companies) need to create meaningful relationships with their patients and customers.

–Antoniette Pemberton

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Blogging Your Way Into a Job

by Sandra Fathi on February 10, 2010

Jessica Dickler writes the Hired! blog for CNNMoney. Her most recent post tells the story of how a pilot received multiple job offers after building an online network and blogging about his experience. Jessica contacted me about the story and asked my opinion on his approach and using social media to source a job. I also reached out to my Twitter friends who were generous enough to share their stories on how they are using social media to advance their professional career. It was inspiring to hear their stories and encouraging to know that more and more folks are turning their online connections into real-life opportunities. You can read the full story here.

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Social Media Week: The Road from Listening to Activation

by Kaylen McNamara on February 5, 2010

Throughout Social Media Week, it has become increasingly obvious that companies understand what social media is and how it works. However, are these companies really listening to what is being said about their brand? Yesterday morning, I attended a panel discussion on The Road from Listening to Activation, which discussed how mining and analyzing conversations can be used to develop a strong activation strategy between brands and their audience. Read about my takeaways from this discussion on the Johnson King blog!

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Social Media Week: A Shaq to the System- Tebow, Tiger and the New Online Realities of Sports Journalism

by Kaylen McNamara on February 5, 2010

Real-time updates, instant analysis and interaction with sports fans as the game is played – social media has completely changed the landscape of how sports are covered and written about. Pete Cataldo, account executive at Affect Strategies, shares his insights from a Social Media Week panel of five well-known sports journalists on how their roles have evolved … and what it means from a PR standpoint. Read the full post on the Johnson King blog!

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Social Media Week: The Advancement of Twitter

by Katie Safrey on February 4, 2010

What have you learned so far during Social Media Week? Our next social media-themed blog post comes from Jonathan Mathias, senior account executive at Johnson King. Johnson King, our partner, is a European technology PR agency headquartered in London.

The Advancement of Twitter
By Jonathan Mathias

Since signing up to Twitter two years ago, I’m now following over 400 different accounts – something which recently led to an alarming crisis of confidence and a subsequent overhaul of how I use it.

It’s always been clear to me that Twitter would be a powerful tool, but given its ever-changing nature, the question of what you can do with it is much harder to answer. This makes it difficult to create a comprehensive Twitter strategy and has doubtlessly prevented many from investing the time needed to fully get to grips with it.

Any Google search will find you a million Twitter tips, most of which can be summed up in one sentence: “post regularly, with useful, relevant, interesting or personable content and always interact with your audience” – common sense, no?  Conversely, you’ll also find a multitude of blog entries debating why anyone would use it in the first place or whether there’s any real business value in using it (which rather misses the point – whether you like it or not, millions of people are using it to communicate every second of the day).

But, aside from what to do and why, with more and more businesses and their audiences clocking-on and signing up, how to manage Twitter has become far from straight forward.

At a very basic level, you can log on to the Twitter website, see what’s going on, search, post your updates, send private messages, etc..  Depending on how often the people you’re following post updates, this will probably work just fine up to about 100 people.  As you go past this figure – 200, 300, 400+ – it becomes very, very chaotic.

By logging into my account from the Twitter webpage at any one time, I’ll only see updates from the past five minutes or so.  If I want to see anything that happened before five minutes ago, I’ll have to go onto page two and beyond.  What about the vitally relevant tweet that was posted an hour ago?  In all likelihood, I’ve missed that chance.

Yes, you can search Twitter with relevant keywords in the hope of finding conversations you may have missed – but, if it’s anything, Twitter is immediate – and not very many people can afford to sit there on it all day doing that anyway.

A way to tackle this issue is to employ a Twitter client that specifically helps you to cope with large numbers of updates – like TweetDeck or Seesmic.

I’d dabbled with these in the past but until recently they seemed a little like overkill and over complicated – and, to the casual user, they are.  But, if you want to develop a worthwhile presence on Twitter, you’re going to want a manageable insight into what a lot of people are saying – something which is very difficult to do from the Twitter website alone.

I’ve just gone through a very long process to configure and learn how to interact with Twitter via a popular client.  This is not to say that applications are badly designed – they’re very necessarily complex, as they’re very powerful tools.

I’ve grouped the people I’m following into lists/columns (and handily added in LinkedIn and Facebook feeds), making it much easier to digest or catch-up on what’s going on at a glance.

Although most brands will have, at the very least, registered a Twitter account by now, many will be cautious users, content to wait and see just how big, useful and profitable it will be.  But some brands are already electing to use more advanced tools to manage Twitter.  And, given my experience, they are wise to do so.

Basically, to get the most out of Twitter, you need to be following a lot of people (and hopefully have a lot of followers) and you’re at an advantage if you use a client to manage the flow of information this generates.  Twitter’s user-base growth and the incorporation of it into day-to-day business seem to be pointing towards a future where Twitter could one day become a truly ubiquitous method of communication.

What’s certain is that Twitter has evolved massively in a short time, with new features and innovative ways of using it coming to light on a daily basis.  Will Twitter ever be a lean, mean, worthwhile business machine? Perhaps, but what’s sure is that if you want to be there when it does, you’ll need to put in some legwork now.

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Social Media Week: What do the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and MarketWatch have in common? Social media.

by Julia Gaynor on February 4, 2010

Earlier this week I had the privilege of attending the Publicity Club of New York’s “The Wall Street Journal, Et. Al.” Social Media Week panel discussion. As I sat down to eat my dry chicken breast and salad, I noticed that I was one the younger people in the room. I couldn’t help but think to myself, “This isn’t exactly the audience I expected at social media week?” Boy, did they make me looks stupid. Turns out social media tools are no longer just for the young and nimble, but everyone now seems to be seeing the value in connecting via the world wide web—well everyone except financial institutions (we’ll get to that later).

The distinguished panel included reporters and editors from all major Dow Jones properties:

Each panelist gave some interesting insight into how they develop stories. Julie Iannuzzi explained that all publications under the Dow Jones umbrella are looking for a full package when reviewing a story idea. Including multimedia elements, specifically digital video, will help you immensely when pitching them a story idea.

When discussing how social media tools have impacted the media landscape, Jon Friedman made the insightful statement that social media is no longer just a tool, but a way of life. He went on to discuss how PR practitioners can effectively reach the media—his take: think like a journalist. Note to the wise, before pitching think about what the real story is and why the reporter should care.

Peter Kafka bluntly told the audience that his goals and his reader’s goals differ vastly from ours and those of our clients, so pitching him is generally an act in futility.

Although the panelists had differing views on how to reach them with story ideas, they all agreed that publicists should never call. They are always on deadline and you are just interrupting. So word to the wise, only call if you know the reporter well enough to justify your actions.

Another thing they could mostly agree on is that financial institutions have been slow to show up at the social media party. Peter McKay, who covers financials for The Wall Street Journal, is active on Twitter, but unfortunately many of his subjects are not. Peter asserted that this is likely a result of an abundance of caution and not strict adherence to any sort of FCC rules. True or not, it’s defiantly an interesting subject.

One more topic that sparked lively debate was the recent hoopla around the iPad. Does Apple’s slow leak of information and veil of secrecy around its products help or hurt? While the panelists were divided, most could agree that what goes up must come down—Apple will get their share of bad press eventually. As Jon Friedman so eloquently put it, the media loves to build people up and then tear them down, so Steve Jobs will get his—yikes!

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Get More Twitter Followers – 9 Legit Tips, No Gimmicks or Tricks

by Sandra Fathi on February 3, 2010

Image Credit to TeachersPodcast.org

A friend and colleague of mine recently shot me an email asking me how can he gain more followers on Twitter. As I started to respond, I realized that although there were many resources available, my quick and dirty response could help some other folks as well. So, here is my best/shortest advice on gaining more Twitter followers:

  1. Follow folks who are going to be interested in what you have to say. (For the non-rock stars among us, there is a direct correlation between the number of people you follow and how many follow you.)
  2. Say something interesting – have a point of view – provide great content – have an expected topic list. (Don’t go off about unrelated items or Seinfeld-like observations – provide value in every tweet.)
  3. Interact with other folks – retweet (RT) good material, ask questions, thank people for following and RTing you. (According to @skydiver, a RT is the highest compliment on Twitter!)
  4. Promote your Twitter handle – add it to your signature, your bio, website, Linkedin and other profiles, promote in newsletters etc.
  5. List yourself in Directories – like Wefollow or Twellow – that allow you to tag yourself so that interested parties can find you.
  6. Tweet live from events and use #hashtags. Folks at the event who are following it, will see your tweets and may follow you.
  7. Join groups and participate in chats in your area of interest. For example, a PR person might join #journchat a scheduled conversation every Monday night between PR folks, journalists and bloggers.
  8. Cross-pollinate – post your blog posts on Twitter, update your status on LinkedIn/Facebook (when relevant for that audience) through Twitter
  9. Find your friends – use the Twitter tools to scan your contacts for Twitter users.

On a closing note, Twitter should be about quality, not quantity. If you have a few dozen followers that you are engaged and conversing with, that’s much more impressive than thousands of Twitter bots who’ll never help you succeed in life or business.

If you want to chat with me on Twitter, you can find me here – @sandrafathi.

Happy tweeting!

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