But, then I got to thinking–what would an all-day workshop around digital PR include? What would the topics be? What areas would I choose to focus on?

Here’s where I landed:

Basic concepts of digital PR

What are the key concepts to success when it comes to digital PR? Depends on your goals, right? But, there are some universal concepts that really apply across the board.

Blogger outreach

Blogger outreach continues to be a topic many PR pros struggle with. How do I know? I’ve seen the pitches. Heck, I’ve RECEIVED the pitches. And they’re horrible. They’re out of left field. Without sugar-coating it anymore than I can, they’re unacceptable. We need to get better here. We’d talk about how to build a list. How to approach bloggers–and how that’s different than working with the media. And, how to maintain those relationships–without “breaking the bank.” And finally, how to measure success when it comes to blogger outreach. Big area of focus here.

Content marketing

Normally, I’d call this “blog marketing” but it’s really morphed into content marketing since PR people are increasingly the folks companies are turning to for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram (for starters) content, too. Why? Because we’re the writers of the organization. The storytellers. But, how do you tell a story in 140 characters? How do you do it via a Tumblr blog that’s typically more visual? What about telling a story through your iPhone at events? All would play into this topic.

Social Media News Release

Kinda felt like this needed it’s own category–even though it’s really just a tactic. How do you create a Social Media News Release (SMNR)? What are the critical elements? Which tools are best? How do you measure success? Why do I need to use a SMNR? All would be discussed here.

Crisis communications

I’m not the foremost expert on crisis communications when it comes to the online media. But, what I can tell you is that the concepts aren’t that much different from traditional crisis communication, which I am familiar with. The online media just speeds things up. Sure, there are differences–big ones, in some cases. But, for the most part, a session around this topic would involve talking about your traditional plan and discussing how the online media (social, Web, etc.) would fit in and how to resource that effectively in times of need.

Supplementing media outreach

In this session, we’d talk about how to supplement your traditional media outreach (via phone, email, etc.) with social outreach and relationship development–because there’s a lot of opportunity here. With tools like Twitter and Facebook, you can get to know reporters and editors a bit better than in the past. Heck, just follow a journalist on these channels for a week or two and you’ll glean a number of nuggets you can use in a pitch. We’d discuss potential strategies here as well as the tools of the trade. And, what’s appropriate and what’s not–ethics would be a big part of this discussion.

So, those are the top six areas that came to mind for me. What about you? If you were putting together an all-day digital PR workshop–what would you include?

Note: I didn’t write this post to crowdsource my job (in fact, we already have the agenda in place). Merely interested in what others think about this topic.
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We don’t tweet meh.

We don’t upload blah to Facebook.

We use social media to express feelings that are at the opposing poles of fascination and frustration. So why do so many companies toe the line of average, yet expect customers to shout from the digital rooftops about amazingly mediocre products and services?

If you’re going to use social media to accomplish anything of value, you must have a Talk Trigger that rousts your advocates from their naturally drowsy state, and gets them typing concise messages of adoration. But the paradox is that Talk Triggers for social media most often occur offline, not online. The great meal, the over-the-top customer service, the killer swimsuit, the uber-friendly accountant…..all of them manifest in the real world, not the virtual one. We use digital to communicate analog. In fact, Keller Fay Group estimates that 91 percent of word of mouth about companies occurs offline, meaning that we only use social media to discuss things that REALLY make us want to shout or cry, not the mundane victories and defeats we experience with brands every day.

How do you build a Talk Trigger for your company? There are two options.

Spontaneous Talk Triggers

The Talk Triggers that create the most intense advocacy behaviors are those that occur in the wild. The moment-in-time occurrences where a brand exceeds your (typically low) expectations in a dramatic way, causing recipients and observers to grab the closest smart phone and post the “you will NOT believe what just happened” messages that put a smile on your face and make you rethink (perhaps subconsciously) the values and merit of the company in question.

This happened to me a few months ago when a Southwest Airlines flight attendant made a young boy’s day by taping his crayon drawings to the front of the plane, and congratulating him publicly. It was one of the warmest, most genuine things I’d ever seen. I live blogged it (viva in-flight Wi-Fi), and it became a popular post here at Convince & Convert. Southwest subsequently wrote about my post on their blog, and also mentioned it in the in-flight magazine months later. The flight attendant was congratulated in the employee podcast, too.

The spontaneous Talk Trigger was the actions of the flight attendant, and it created a lot of chatter and advocacy.

What creates this type of trigger isn’t a plan or a spreadsheet, but rather corporate culture. A culture that values BEING social over DOING social. A culture where employees are empowered to work outside the script. I’ll bet if you did a social chatter analysis of spontaneous Talk Triggers and mapped them against level of detail of corporate social media policies and other guidelines, you’d find that “open” cultures yield more in-the-moment triggers. (Maybe I’ll write an eBook about that).

Planned Talk Triggers

The other way to create socially-fueled advocacy is with planned Talk Triggers. In this case, the brand is using one or more points of disproportionate awesomeness in a premeditated way to encourage digital statements of support. The planned Talk Trigger is of course more reliable, and can be measured, tested, and optimized. The one thing it cannot be is untrue. If a brand embraces a planned trigger and “nudges” customers to create spread, that trigger better be terrific.

I encountered a fantastic, planned Talk Trigger recently from an outdoor fireplace company called Blue Rooster.

To warm the cool-but-still-pleasant nights spent on the patio of Convince & Convert global HQ in Bloomington, Indiana the missus and I decided to purchase a chiminea. We settled on Blue Rooster based on reviews, size, and style.

It showed up on time, was higher quality than anticipated, easier to assemble than feared, and worked better than hoped.

But the best part was the Talk Trigger. In the parts bag of every Blue Rooster fireplace (I presume) is this marvelous, tiny envelope with three of the company’s business cards inside. The envelope reads:

“Trust us, everyone will ask about your new Blue Rooster Chiminea. If you don’t feel like talking, just hand them one of these! Call or email us if you need more.”

Indeed, several of my friends have asked about it, and now that I’ve written about it here, I can give out the cards.

It’s awfully hard to be great online if you’re less than great offline.

What’s your Talk Trigger?

(for more of this kind of case study, check out my Social Pros podcast – with written transcripts each week)
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Your Company Needs to Be Human Because You’re Competing with Humans

Social media is the first time in history that companies communicate alongside real people, and with no inherent advantage. Go to your Facebook Wall and scroll down for a while. Mine looks something like this:

Friend

Friend

Friend

Brand

Mom

Wife

Brand

Acquaintance

Acquaintance

I’ll bet yours is approximately the same. Now look at Twitter (public feed of the people you follow, not lists). Basically the same, right? A mixture of people you know, people you love, people you want to know, and companies. All of them using precisely the same tools and formats to jostle for your attention. This is simply unprecedented.

Your Mom does not buy full-page magazine ads adjacent to car companies. Your friends do not make 60-second radio spots. Your high school ex-girlfriend doesn’t put up freeway billboards (unless she’s even more deranged than most). Those are brand tactics, not people tactics. Yet in social media, brands and people are using the same toolbox.

Because social media strips away the corporate communication advantages (money, personnel, expertise) they have enjoyed forever, brands often try to fight through the clutter of social media and curry your favor by giving you the BEST OFFER EVER. The paradox is that’s exactly what we don’t want.

We Don’t Want Promotions in Social Media

We the people don’t want promotions in social media. It’s not as if we signed up for social media sites so that we could hang out with software companies and hotel chains and T-shirt purveyors and ham merchants. We signed up to connect with each other, not with commerce.

New research from my friends ExactTarget (I am proud to have them as a client) puts a mathematical fine point on our collective abhorrence for social promotions. In their 2012 Channel Preferences Study (download it here for free) 1,500 Americans ages 15 and older were asked about their usage of email, social media, and text messaging. The results are astounding.

Preferred Channel for Promotional Messages From Companies Whom I Have Granted Permission to Send Me Ongoing Information

Even for companies that we have given permission to send us offers (not Spam), only 4% of us prefer those messages to be delivered via Facebook, and just 1% via Twitter. 77% of us prefer offer to be delivered via email.

Only 4% of us would look at Facebook first to find a deal from a company. Another 10% would look at Facebook second.

Where do we prefer to receive and look for promotional messages? Email. That old, neglected war horse of digital marketing still delivers the dollars, as 77% of survey participants want promotional email from companies, and 44% would look to email first to find a deal.

Be Social Don’t Do Social

I’ve been critical about Facebook’s Timeline and how the company is forcing companies to act like people on the platform.  But they’re right. If we so clearly don’t want special offers and promotions clogging our social streams, companies must focus on being social, and worry less about doing social media in ways that approximate direct marketing.

I’m not saying never run a contest or a promotion or a special offer or a threshold deal in social media. But if your company doesn’t have a social media editorial program that emphasizes spontaneous, personal, human, light-hearted, interesting, funny, timely, and photo-driven content, you are swimming against a powerful tide of customer desire.

Smart companies use social to turn customers into fans, and fans into volunteer marketers. They worry less about squeezing every nickel and click out of each tweet and status update.

The more you sell, the less you sell. 
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This is a reflection on our normal tendency to focus on the negative. The negative is the news.

There is ample clinical research that codifies this trait, which is called Negativity Bias.  Humans have a heightened physiological and psychological response to events they see as negative. Our attitudes are more heavily influenced by downbeat news than good news.

Our capacity to weigh negative input so heavily probably evolved for a good reason — to keep us out of harm’s way. The brain developed systems that would make it notice danger and hopefully, avoid it.

Negativity Bias in Action

But today, with so much stimuli coming at us each day, is it any wonder that when it comes to the social web, we may tend to focus on the spam, the haters, and the tragic, instead of the beautiful, spiritual and sublime?

We saw an example of Negativity Bias in action recently with the much-publicized McDonald’s “McFail” episode.

I respect McDonalds as a well-managed company that tries to do the right thing as it serves millions of diverse customers each day with predictable quality.

Although they are not my customer, I have in the past worked for two of their food suppliers and here is what I learned: No food processing company on earth has higher standards for quality, sustainability, animal treatment, and community involvement. No matter what you think of their food, this is a company that tries to do the right thing.

This carries over into social media, too. They are a gold standard in terms of authentic social media outreach and connection. How many companies of their size have a team of tweeters available for one-on-one conversation? In terms of effectively “humanizing” their brand, I use them as a best practice case study in my college classes.

#McFail

So it came as a surprise when I started seeing headlines about the social media #McFail a few weeks ago. The story went something like this. McDonald’s has hosted a series of successful Twitter chats over the past few months and thought they would try something different. Under the hashtag of #McDStories they invited customers to tell their favorite stories of McDonald’s experiences.

As you might imagine, it didn’t take long to attract some negative stories and outcries from animal rights activists. It was probably naive on the company’s part to think that something like this might not happen.

But let’s look at the whole story.  McDonald’s has made a genuinely positive attempt to be a “social” organization and I give them credit for experimenting by inviting their customers to engage. And even when one of their social media experiments did not go as planned, the company had something like 79,000 tweets and 2,000 of them were negative. So on one of their worst days, they had a positive sentiment analysis of 97.5 percent. In any company I’ve worked for, that would be cause for celebration.

And yet the all headlines focused on the failure. It will probably be a case study discussed for years alongside the Gap logo debacle. That may not be fair, but it’s what we need to anticipate from our society as we lay our social media plans over this layer of Negativity Bias.

We’re standing on digital quicksand

Every one of our organizations is standing on digital quicksand. It only takes one infinitesimal shift in customer sentiment, one outcry from a small number of passionate detractors, to dash an otherwise sterling reputation.

One of the most interesting talks at SXSW was between Billy Corgan of the alternative rock band Smashing Pumpkins, and author Brian Solis. In the talk, Corgan hypothesized that artists take less risks today because of a realization that one embarrassingly human moment will get tweeted and go viral — and possibly kill a career. Before the social web, these moments might be laughed about and become part of band legend, but today it can be career-defining. He wondered aloud about a world where artists would be nothing more than politically-correct robots.

The Vanilla Web

So as we acknowledge this reality, here is the question we need to consider very, very carefully when it comes to our own social media presence and taking risks in this space – is it worth it?

As we have seen many times, even an experiment that barely makes a dent in the company’s overall social footprint can overwhelm any good that is being accomplished, any sincere intentions, any attempt at innovation.

Personally or professionally, is it worth it trying anything new in the social space, even if you thought you could have a success rate of 97.5 percent?  In a world where Negatively Bias is gasoline on a viral fire, and one misstep can overwhelm years of positive work cultivating raving fans, why would anybody take a risk on the social web?

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From the title of the post, you can imagine that this post is regarding a similar topic, so you will not be required to do any of the following:

• Write a ground-breaking blog post announcing how you have revolutionised the world
• Give away freebies in order to be liked
• Do any sort of “Like Gating”

Over the past decade, as blogging and social media marketing have become increasingly popular, some companies are now even outsourcing their blogs to be written by another agency.

I was surprised the other day when talking to a friend about how they measured the success of their company’s blog, that she mentioned one of their factors was getting more “Facebook Likes”. At that moment I cringed, but it also gave me inspiration to write this.

Learning Objectives

Today’s post will show you how to get free likes on your blog post, but will also show you that getting 1000 Likes as opposed to 10 makes no real difference. I’ll also show you alternatives to how you can better monitor the success of your blogging campaign.

How to get Free Facebook Blog Post Likes

In order to start acquiring more Facebook Likes for a blog post, you will need an active Facebook account.

Firstly, login to your Facebook account and decide which blog post you wish to promote. I have chosen a dated blog post that I have found online so as to try and make sure no “real people” would be liking the post any time soon:

Then grab the webpage URL and post it to another Facebook accounts page, as shown below:

Do wait for the image to load up, like above and not like below; if you post without the load of the preview image, it will not register as a like:

After you have finished posting, hit the refresh button and keep posting to your heart’s content, as below:

Why doing this is useless for your brand

Although I am sure many of you could get more than 24 likes in the time I have done this, using Facebook likes as a blog performance metric is a poor way to gauge how well your blog is performing. As awesome as it may be to get a thousand likes for your business, if none of these convert to leads or sales, it is purely a vanity figure and therefore useless.

Measuring the Success of Your Blog

In looking at measuring the success of your blog there are a variety of other ways, one of the most obvious being traffic to the blog, which you can drive down to further factors. With a simple tool such as Google Analytics there are other factors to help measure the success of your blog such as:

• Page Views
• Traffic Sources
• Conversions to subscribers

There are many other more advanced ways to measure the success of your blog but all things start simple and then progress further.

Remember, a blog should be looked as an extension to your company’s brand image and used as a marketing tool to attract new business, and not on these vanity figures such as likes, followers and stumbles.

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