Posted: July 02, 2008

Take a deep breath

Strategy is key when incorporating social media

By Rebecca Cole

Companies caught up in the whirlwind of social media and Web 2.0 tactics can stray into the danger zone of ignoring strategy, messaging and the continued importance of personal interaction.

That’s what Terri Douglas and Guy Murrel, principals of Catapult PR-IR, told about 60 members of the Boulder Marketing Group last week at their monthly brown bag lunch event. Although new media is here to stay, they said, companies need to have a carefully thought-out strategy and not throw traditional PR tactics out the window.

"Sometimes there’s a notion with all this Web 2.0 stuff that all you have to do is push a button and you’ll automatically reach your target audience," Douglas said. "And it’s not true. With so much confusion and overload out there, companies need to take it one step at a time."

People are going online for their information in ever-increasing numbers; what’s new is the way they are receiving that information. Eighty percent watch videos, up from 62 percent a year ago, according to Universal McCann, a division of InterPublic Group Research. Seventy-eight percent read blogs, and nearly 60 percent are members of a social network.

Perhaps most significantly, RSS consumption has more than doubled, from 15 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2008, showing that more people are not going out to specific sites for information, but rather having it fed to them from a hodgepodge of news and information sites, blogs or wikis based on narrow topics of interest.

And that’s a good thing, says Murrel. "The most profound change all this brings is the ability to self-publish your own story, whether through news releases, blogs, videos or interacting with other bloggers and message boards," he says. "It’s exiting for companies to articulate their own story the way they want and reach a far greater audience than 10 years ago."

Not only are companies finding social media networks to be more cost-effective than creating collateral or a corporate video, they can respond quickly with the right message to the right audience.

But before posting that blog and blasting out tweets to Twitter-land about your business (or what you did last night), Douglas says to research your industry and the competition. Visit message boards and blogs to gauge the conversation occurring in the market. What’s the tone? What are people saying about the competition? Are they talking about your company — or is it invisible in cyberspace?

"Get your company into the dialogue," Douglas says. "Any company, no matter how small, can get started and build a dialogue."

The new rules of social media

    * Don’t forget about traditional PR tactics and the importance of face-to-face communication.
    * Do have a strategy around how and why social media is used in the company.
    * Incorporate RSS feeds to update your community on new postings.
    * Use an RSS reader to keep track of industry and competitor news and blogs.
    * Add social media tags to press releases for social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and Technorati.
    * Use social media yourself; create profiles on LinkedIn (Douglas advises kicking in the extra bucks for the subscriber-level option as it has many more features) and Facebook (it’s not just for kids anymore), and use them.
    * Write keyword-rich press releases.

For business-to-consumer companies, social media can be a goldmine with an enormous amount of opportunity. "It’s a ready-made channel to engage customers and see what they’re thinking," Douglas says. "Whether it’s good or bad, companies need to know."

Business-to-business companies can strategically use social media, too. One of Catapult’s clients, Sonic Foundry, a maker of rich-media Webcast software based in Madision, Wis., hosts a separate site that invites end-users to share their presentations. The site, mediasite.com, has morphed into "YouTube for geeks," Douglas says, with a growing scientific community.

"Even though it’s a B2B software company, it’s pulling in the end-user. The company can see what’s resonating with that audience and how they’re using the software."

Douglas and Murrel both caution against embarking on a social media strategy unless the company is committed to doing it right. Starting a blog that is never — or rarely — updated only defeats the purpose. What often stymies companies, says Murrel, is the lack of a dedicated person to manage the company’s online communication efforts.

"It’s fragmented and managed in fits and starts," he says. "When they don’t see value they may give up."

Savvy companies that are taking advantage of social media tactics discover there’s an audience for almost every topic in the universe. "You can build a following," Murrel says. "It might not be 25,000 people, but 500 might be all you need. And you can reach those people directly."

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