This morning I had the pleasure of giving a presentation to an engaged group of people involved with early childhood education and family services at the Augusta Civic Center. Called “Engaged Communities, Growing Small Children,” the conference focused around a book called “The Charismatic Organization, 8 Ways to Grow a Nonprofit,” by Shirley Sagawa. I tied my presentation in to Shirley’s book by talking about how organizations can engage themselves better with their communities through effective communications if they share their stories and newsworthy events on an ongoing basis. Continue Reading »

I met with a client recently who was struggling with ways to come up with ideas for their company’s blog and Facebook pages. They felt that every blog post had to be about something new and newsworthy happening at their company and every Facebook post had to have something worthy of front page news coverage.

I told them that one of the beauties of social media is that it allows public relations people like me or organizations’ representatives to show the human side of the company. I said, “don’t be afraid to share your personality, talk about what you’re doing, what you’re reading and what you find interesting.”

Of course you should post news about new hires, awards, new clients, new projects or other ‘hard’ news items. But your blog readers, or friends and fans on Facebook will also be interested in what books you are reading, what articles you find interesting, and random things happening at your company, like a visitor from out of state or a moose walking through your driveway. Social media is an act of socializing, which includes some ‘chit chat’ about yourself that helps others get to know you better.

How do you think creatively when it comes to brainstorming ideas for content on your blog, tweets on Twittter, or posts on your Facebook page? I’m interested in hearing what you have to say about this topic.

There’s a terrific website called Help a Reporter Out, otherwise known as HARO. The tagline is “everyone’s an expert at something.”  Publicizing peoples’ expertise is one of the ways that my agency has helped clients to obtain PR coverage over the years so we follow the media leads provided by HARO and pitch when there’s a good fit.

A work-obsessed triathlete named Peter Shankman started this site as a service to connect people like me who do PR with journalists who need information to write their stories. You can go to http://www.helpareporter.comand sign up to receive daily e-mails with tips on what reporters are looking for in terms of contacts and information.  There’s a whole comunity of HARO PR people and journalists now who are tied together by this site which also has a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. The whole concept reinforces to me how PR has gone social in the past several years, and how we as PR people must stay connected to what’s happening in these online communities to find leads on stories and find the right people to pitch our stories to. Continue Reading »

Yesterday, I presented a workshop for members of the Maine Public Relations Council in Portland on social media. I want to thank my friends at The Caliber Group in Tucson, Arizona for their help in developing the presentation.

Social media is part of an overall integrated strategic PR Program. Many people would argue as to exactly what constitutes social media, but most think of it broadly in terms of any kind of online interaction, even e-mail and e-newsletters.

The Big Four
The Big Four social networks are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn, although there are many other new communities, games, forums, apps, blogs, micro-blogs and media sharing programs being developed every day. They are allowing us to communicate directly with highly targeted audiences. Social networks build online communities who share interests or want to explore others’ interests. Members create their own online ‘Profile” with biographical data, pictures, likes, dislikes and other information. Introduced in 2002, Friendster was the first social site, followed by MySpace a year later. Social media is evolving every day. It is likely that within five years the “Big Four” will be replaced by other big networks of some kind or other. Continue Reading »

Through the PR social media communities I participate in, I have ‘met’ Ayelet Noff, who owns a social media consultancy called Blonde 2.0.  I love the way she writes and thinks abot social media. She kindly gave me permission to share her  blog post with my readers.

I’ve been in the social media space now for quite a few years and I meet with at least 5 com­pa­nies each week who have under­stood the impor­tance of uti­liz­ing social media for their busi­nesses but are still afraid of enter­ing their brands into the new media age.

What are they wor­ried about? Here are the top five con­cerns that I’ve heard from exec­u­tives and my response to them:

1) They’re afraid they’ll lose con­trol of their brand and open them­selves up to neg­a­tive feed­back — When you open a busi­ness and start mar­ket­ing your ser­vices and expos­ing your brand to oth­ers, peo­ple will start talk­ing about your brand. And this is why you exposed them to your brand in the first place.
Peo­ple are going to be talk­ing about your brand no mat­ter what. The ques­tion is: Do you want to be a part of the dia­logue or do you want to just play ostrich and ignore what peo­ple are say­ing? If a per­son is dis­sat­is­fied with your ser­vices, do you pre­fer he opens up this dis­cus­sion in a “I hate ” group opened up by another hater or do you pre­fer that he come to your page and post the com­plaint there allow­ing you to respond appro­pri­ately and even per­haps win him back as a client? Continue Reading »

Thanks to Sam Brace at the Caliber Group in Tucson, Arizona, for this blog post on social media. The Caliber Group is a member of the agency network that my agency belongs to:  The Alliance of Marketing Communications Agencies.

Social Media Sways the Conversation, by Sam Brace, The Caliber Group

Social media’s multimillion person reach influences our daily conversation.

We have known for several years that participation on social media platforms are growing by the numbers. Social media is also growing in terms of influence, according to the May 10 issue of Time magazine. Continue Reading »

Thanks to Kevin Gove, one of my long-time account executives at Nancy Marshall Communications, for providing this article with tips for successful blogging. Kevin’s article will be featured in our bi-weekly e-newsletter, “The NMC Report,” coming out today. If you haven’t already, please go to our website at www.marshallpr.com and sign up to receive The NMC Report, which is packed with useful (and free!) information about the intersection PR and social media. Continue Reading »

Thanks to my friends at crwinteractive.com  for providing me with this article from their Market Trends Report on social media.  CRW Interactive is one of the agencies in my national network called the Alliance of Marketing Communications Agencies. Together, all our agencies provide a wide array of marketing communications services from strategic planning to print , ad and Web production, advertising placement, direct mail campaigns, social media marketing and public relations services.   Continue Reading »

Thanks to Rich Brooks of Flyte New Media  and to Nicole Ouellette of Breaking Even Communications for this article that was published on Fast Company’s blog about making the social media choices that are  right for you. Some of my clients have asked me recently which social media they should engage in. There is no one clear answer. You need to engage in the online communities where your targeted audience can be found (the expression is to ‘fish where the fsh are,’) and you shouldn’t over-extend yourself. Only get invovled with as many online networks as you can keep up with.  If your goal is to drive traffic to your Web site, then you need to measure how many visitors are going to your site from each online community or network, then measure the effectiveness of your efforts. 

Of course some people engage in social media because it’s fun!  I love to go on to Facebook because it’s an extension of my normal socializing. I don’t really expect to achieve anything from it other than happiness.  If  happiness is your goal, that’s O.K.!

Ragan.com, a company that shares useful info about public relations and marketing communications, just posted an interview with Adam Brown, who is in charge of social media at Coca-Cola. I strongly encourage you to read the article and watch the video. Continue Reading »