Social Media Strategy and Branding: Modern Brand Is Created Through Crowdsourcing

Creating a modern, pre-eminent brand in our New Media Era is done through crowdsourcing by digital natives through user-generated content. Crowdsourcing is the act of a digital media follower ("a friend", "a follower"), in spreading content. This act was traditionally done by a brand employee or contractor. In New Media, followers communicate the content that the follower finds interesting and engaging. It is communicated to a friend, using a social media platform, like Facebook.

The "followers" and "friends" are digital natives. Digital natives are a demographic group usually between ages of 11-30. They have been brought up on digital technology. They enjoy and are comfortable communicating with their friends digitally, most notably through platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

User-generated content is the material that the Natives share with their friends. The content is created in the form of posts, blogging, podcasts and vblogs, videos, photos, mobile phone video, and wikis. Social media has reconstructed the paradigm on which modern marketing is constructed. Marketing has changed from a "push" situation to a "pull" framework because of social media.

In Old Media times, an organization, created products, and pushed those products upon the public. One way advertising campaigns were constructed to brand the product. In our new era, it is a "pull" paradigm. In this new paradigm, brands and consumers have a two-way conversation. The products take on an almost human dimension. A brand and a customer become almost like human friends. The general public doesn't believe the claims of Old Media advertising. People do believe the recommendations of their "friends". Modern consumers "Pull", from store shelves those brands that they want to buy---the ones that are their friends. The ones that their friends have recommended. The benchmark for modern social media branding are the Ford Fiesta (The Fiesta Movement), and the Obama Presidential Campaign.

The nature of our era creates an interesting situation. This situation has to be understood by a modern marketer in order to create strong, modern brands in a Social Media Era. A company legally owns the brand. If a brand is to be created, in this new era, the brand's followers actually take ownership and develop the brand. Followers "pull" the brand and develop it. Followers create the actual brand in New Media branding.

The Fiesta automobile and Barack Obama campaign created world-class brands through crowdsourcing. In both cases, world-class brands were created, and created very quickly, when followers took engaging material from a Facebook Page and shared this content with their physical friends in the form of posts, text, video, and blogs. At the center of crowdsourcing, and the thing that makes it powerful as a branding device is that brand is created by friends recommending products to their friends. This is how brand is created in New Media.

To understand why crowdsourcing is such a powerful vehicle, you have to understand The Consumer Decision Journey, a concept created by McKinsey & Co. McKinsey discovered that a purchasing decision is the end of a long journey of many touchpoints in which the consumer is engaged with the brand over many experiences. Modern brand is created when friends recommend to friends products through the material they create in blogs, posts, video, and texts. This brand awareness development is critical in the selling of products.

McKinsey, through its Consumer Decision Journey, discovered that friend recommendation makes a product three times as likely to be purchased. Crowdsourcing creates the brand awareness that creates world-class brands. The brand provides the use of a platform. The platform is a hub, a place where followers can go to grab content. This can be a website or a Facebook Page. The content can either be created by the followers themselves, or provided by the brand. In crowdsourcing, the content is then sent to friends from friends.

Ford's Fiesta campaign, The Fiesta Movement, revolved around Digital Natives. Ford did not spend a nickel on conventional advertising. At the end of the six month social media branding campaign, the Fiesta had 38% brand awareness among its target group, and it sold 11,000 units in its first month of availability, in a tough year for auto sales.

In Barack Obama's case, he went from being a virtual unknown, to winning the Presidency. Much of the credit for the success of his campaign was his brilliant use of social media. It was this campaign that communicated to business just how important social media is in creating brand.

Dean Hambleton

dnhammbleton@gmail.com

Social Media creates strong, modern brands. These brands are created by the brands themselves, through crowdsourcing. This article explains what crowdsourcing is and how it works it creating strong brands. The thing that I learned most in this article is that in social media brands, to create a great one, a brand has to give ownership over to its followers. I hope that this article helps you. I can be of help to your organization, I hope that will contact me at:

dnhambleton@gmail.com

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Social Media Strategy: How Barack Obama Used Multiple Touch Points to Create a Brand

Barack Obama used multiple "touch points" and social media platforms to create a brand that was a key ingredient to winning the Presidency in 2008. His brand strategy is a case study for marketers to study in creating brand in a New Media Age. President Obama's branding strategy is something that is a distinct paradigm change from previous social media strategy and branding. It is basic strategy for a company to integrate their websites with social media platforms. What President Obama did that is different is that he created a web site, MyBO.com that functioned as a mini-facebook, a mini-social platform. He broke new ground in the use of social media in branding. Private companies should study Barack's strategy to understand how to create a world-class brand virtually overnight. In our era this is important for a marketer because there are many, many products. For a product to be chosen from the many, it has to have a strong brand. How does a startup, which is what Barack's campaign was, create a strong brand when the startup has limitations in capital? Social Media has created a new age. Social Media has changed how modern marketing is done---but a marketer needs a strategy to succeed and that strategy revolves around the strategic use of multiple "touch points".

At this point I think some important introductory comments have to be made. President Obama is a lightning rod. As in all politicians there are many people who like him and there are many who don't. This article is not a political statement, one way or the other, for President Obama. This article is about social media branding strategy. Irregardless of where you stand in the political spectrum, even Barack's greatest detractors say his social media strategy was a classic use of social media to create a brand.

When I talk about creating "brand", please don't interpret this as a cynical statement of our political system and our way of electing presidents. Marketers should study political campaigns because they are classic studies in the creation of world class brands. In each political cycle, a large group of candidates emerges originally. Only one can be elected. A candidate must quickly distinguish themselves from the rest of the political field. The American people are not stupid. American elections are an example of the wisdom of crowds. To be elected a candidate must show that he is different from the rest of the candidates, and if elected can do a much better job than the others in the field. To win the American Presidency, a candidate must be an expert in creating brand awareness, creating a value proposition, and brand positioning. Winning the Presidency is not unlike creating a new product, and creating the brand for that product to be successful in the marketplace. This is why studying Barack Obama's social media strategy is important. Barack Obama is analogous to a small startup creating a product, but having significant limitations in name recognition and capital.

In old media, a startup couldn't afford a large advertising campaign to create brand. Social Media has changed that. Social Media has created a "Perfect Storm". To create a brand, a marketer has to have scale and presence. A lot of people have to know about your product, and a marketer has to be able to engage those large amounts of people at the precise moment that a purchasing decision is going to be made. Social Media allows a marketer to do just that. Perhaps ¼ of the world's population belongs to a social media sight, and most of the major social media platforms are integrated. From those sights, a marketer can observe what a consumer does during their day. This tracking allows a marketer to target the individual consumers that are interested in the marketer's product. A marketer can now target an individual at the precise time that a purchase is going to made.

Barack Obama was one of the first significant marketers to understand the tremendous communication capabilities, database management, and tracking abilities that a social media platform affords a marketer. Barack Obama understood that he could engage large amounts of people at once over many "touch points". When his campaign first began, Barack had no name recognition and no money. Hilary Clinton had both. Barack understood the forces that social media platforms unleash to a marketer. He realized, far better than anyone else, that his limitations were minor. Barack realized that social media platforms gave him the tool that he needed to create a major brand almost overnight. Before the Obama campaign, social networks were seen as just that---a social network. Someplace you came to hang out with your friends, share pictures, and just basically enjoy yourself. To a limited extent the Howard Dean campaign used social networks to raise money in 2004, but not at the scale that Barack Obama did.

Barack's campaign was not a haphazard affair. His social media campaign had goals, plans, and objectives. Barack realized that personal engagement was going to be critical. He created a web site that had the scale that was going to be needed. Barack took advantage of some major structural changes in the modern marketplace. Modern people no longer trust advertising. People trust their friends. In a new media age, a product is branded and purchased when two "friends" have a conversation, and a recommendation is made. To be successful a modern brand must be a "friend" to the consumer.

Two sources best explain the world that modern marketers must function in. The June 2009 McKinsey Quarterly talks about The Consumer Decision Journey. The December, 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review talks about "Branding in the Digital Age". In both cases, in a New Media Age, consumers no longer develop brand awareness through one experience, such as a major advertising campaign. Rather, a brand is created after many and varied experiences between brand and consumer. In a new media age, a brand takes on almost human characteristics. In human relationships, the more experiences we have with an individual the more trust we have for that individual. We choose are friends for their brand. That brand is based on trust. We can depend on our friends. We know a lot of people, but we trust our friends. In a group of people, we seek our "friends", from a wide group of people, because we can trust them. We realize that our friends are imperfect---there might be "better" people around than our friends---but we seek our friends because we trust them.

How does this trust develop? Trust is developed over a period of time through a series of experiences. This same principle applies in branding products. We develop friends through many "touch points". Consumers seek out products through texts, video, blogs, podcasts from a social platform. This is how a brand is created---through a social media platform that creates many and varied touch points. Barack understood this.

A key element is in his campaign was to create a website that was actually a mini-social platform. Initially, a supporter or a seeker would go to MyBO and a profile would be created. Then, just as on Facebook, you made a decision on just what you wanted to do. The sight was there for you to help. It allowed supporters to access the information that was needed create meetups, to have fund raisers. It had a database of people to call on behalf of Obama. The sight allowed people to what they wanted to do. There was a method to the madness. Through the sight, the campaign could track the people who were strong supporters. This information allowed the campaign to discretely get volunteers to do more committed things. The more committed volunteers held fund raisers at their house, to call friends, to go door to door. An important function of MyBo was to link people who knew each other outside of the campaign to connect, such as is done on Facebook. For instance, if a strong supporter worked at a particular company, the campaign had the names of other people who also worked at that same company who were undecided or leaning toward Barack. The supporter could then go to their coworkers and talk about Barack around the water cooler in a discrete manner. Friends having conversation with their friends to recommend a product (Barack). This is how Barack's brand was created. This is how products are branded in social media. Barack was able to brand himself as a "friend" in comparison to the other candidates---who were just "candidates".

As the campaign progressed, supporters started making their own texts, videos, shooting their own pictures, making their own podcasts, and sending them to their friends, through the different social media platforms. Barack's website (a social media platform) had these numbers:

• The site attracted 1.5 million members who organized themselves into 35,000 separate activist groups, each of which could be called INSTANTLY from the campaign headquarters to be given specific tasks in drumming up support.

• On election day, a MILLION calls were made. There were maps to the polls. Supporters were identified. Rides were arranged. Before the election, absentee ballots were delivered. During the campaign, million new supporters were registered online.

• 150, 000 separate meetings were used to mobilize volunteers

• Supporters placed their own campaign videos on YouTube. This is significant. People made these videos. The videos were placed on a sight that is one of the most popular on the Internet. YouTube viewership rivals major cable and home TV networks. This added media exposure was estimated at $47 million that the campaign did not have to pay.

• $600 million was raised from 3 million people

There is a critical fact to observe in Barack's brand building. The Obama campaign gave the "brand" over to supporters. This is an interesting fact to observe about Barack's branding strategy. Barack's branding strategy was organized and managed. There was adult supervision---but much of his branding was done by individual supporters. This is analogous to the Ford Fiesta Movement that Ford Motor Company used in marketing their Ford Fiesta. To create a strong brand in the new media era the brand has to be given over to supporters to develop among their "friends".

The hallmark of social media branding is the development of trust. This trust allows a brand to handle the unforeseen. There are no perfect people running for the Presidency---just as there are no perfect brands. Because of his brand building strategy and the trust that Barack developed, he was able to whether storms that happen in every campaign. People believe in their friends, and trust them, even when bad things are found out about them.

In the campaign of 2004, the campaigns of Dean and Kerry were derailed when stories began to appear about their personal backgrounds. Barack was able to handle bad events in his campaign. Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rescko, bad quotes from Michelle, would have been enough to sink a lot of campaigns. Barack was able to weather these events because he had built up a lot trust among voters. To many people, Barack was a "friend" and could be trusted. In new media, because trust is developed among "friends", when bad things happen to your brand, customers still buy the brand.

Barack Obama created a brand through creating a social platform on his website and by engaging supporters at many touchpoints.

Dean Hambleton

dnhambleton@gmail.com

deanhambleton.blogspot.com

http://www.deanhambleton.blogspot.com dnhambleton@gmail.com

I hope this article has helped you in creating better social media strategy in your own company. I am interested in how I can help you better. I am interested in what you think. If you think that I can help you in your company, write to me. Please make comments about my article. Please concentrate on the strategy area. President Obama is a controversial figure but his social media strategy in 2008 was a classic.

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Creating an Effective Brand: How President Obama Used Social Media to Create a Brand

To create a modern brand a marketer must have a "conversation" among "friends ". Okay, now just how does a marketer create those "friendships" to have those "conversations" to create those strong, effective, brands? A case study in how to do this is the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008.

At the beginning of this article I want to state this misnomer. President Obama is a lightning rod. Some people love him and some people hate him, but even his biggest detractors have to admit that his social media strategy was a classic. Marketers should study this campaign because it is a tutorial on how modern products must be branded. I hope that the reader will focus on the marketing and not the politics.

Barack Obama is a classic case in how a brand can be created in a New Media Age. To win the American presidency a candidate must have a great deal of money and a great deal of name recognition---a brand. If a candidate does not have a brand, if voters do not know who you are, you are not going to be elected. If a marketer cannot distinguish their product in the market place, that product will not be bought. This is why modern marketers should study the Obama campaign. Before the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama had no money and was unknown. By contrast, Hillary Clinton was a well-known senator from a large state. During 2006-2007, it was a foregone conclusion that Hilary would win the Democratic nomination She and her husband had created a vast political network to draw from, and she a lot of money---she had a strong brand. Barack had no brand; even in his own household. When Barack broached a potential candidacy to Michelle, her response was, "This is the craziest thing you ever said to me. Nobody is going to beat Hilary this year...Get over it, kid". Barack and his team did have knowledge of social media and how to use it in a campaign. This knowledge was his biggest asset.

The campaign of 2008 is analogous to the modern market place. In times past, it was very hard, and very costly to create a new product and brand it. This is why social media is such an important element in modern marketing. A social media campaign allows a new product to be created and branded in the market place quickly, at very little cost. The modern market place is best explained by author Shiv Singh. There has been a change in the market place. No longer are consumers interested in engaging with large impersonal brands. Consumers do not trust brands any longer---they trust their friends. In a recent survey conducted by The Economist half the respondents stated that they don't trust big business. They trust the recommendations of their friends. Leveraging the recommendations of friends is the way to create brands. This is the reason why the use of social media is so critical to branding. Through social media, friends meet, conversations happen, and brands are created.

This means that if a product is going to be selected, the brand must become a "friend" to its consumer. This is what the Obama Campaign did and the way that he did this should be studied by marketers because it is a case study in how to create modern brands using social media. By combining social media that creates micro-targeting, force multipliers are created that are needed to create world-class brands.

The knowledge of the modern market place allowed Barack and his team to quickly develop a strong brand and overcome the Clinton campaign. At this point, I would like to clear up an error that I made in a previous article. Recently, I wrote an article entitled, "The Perfect Storm: Why Companies Should Adopt Social Media Marketing as the Center of Their Marketing". In this article, I identified David Plouffe, Mr. Obama's campaign manager as an original member of the Facebook management team. This was an error. The Obama staff member that I was thinking of was Chris Hughes, who served as the Obama Campaign Director of Online Organizing. Mr. Hughes had a great influence on the campaign social media strategy.

Let me summarize what the Obama campaign did to brand itself:

• They had a goal

• They created the scale to achieve this goal

• They made their platforms easy to find, and fun to use and navigate

• They channeled online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that furthered the campaigns goals

• Integrated online advocacy into every element of the campaign

The Obama campaign was not the first campaign to use social media. They were the first to co-ordinate social media with an entire campaign. They were the first to organize the use of social media. For social media to work, it has to be organized. John McCain and Howard Dean used the medium before Obama, but Obama and his staff was able to integrate and organize social media into every area of the campaign in a seamless way. Because of this Barak was able to create "conversations" that engaged. He created enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm his sight created was smart enthusiasm. He used social media sights in a way that targeted supporters and voters. This targeting allowed him to understand the important metrics that he needed to know in order to win his campaign. He was able to target and focus on his true supporters.

The strength of Obama's social media branding approach is that it was constructed to make and develop "friendships". This is important for marketers to realize. When you meet someone there is a veil between you and that person. As you get to know each other better, the veil comes down. As your relationship develops, trust develops, and deeper conversations begin. These conversations bring about deeper relationships on a human level. On a marketing level, these relationships become strong brands.

The Obama campaign knew that it had to engage people, but that engagement had to be based on trust. The Obama engaged people in what it called "the ladder". You engage one step at a time, build the relationship deeper, and each step is a higher level of commitment---a ladder. The steps of the ladder are based on the comfort level of the individual in relation to the campaign. A marketer would call these steps creating touch points.

The first touch point would be Personal. This is the point at which a marketer and customer first come into contact and "friend" one another on a platform like Facebook. In the Obama case, it was at this stage when people are getting to know one another. A person signs ups for messages and emails. The next touch point is Social. It is this touch point that people start making posts or comments to a friend's profile about your product. At this touch point, a friend explains to their friend why a product is a good thing. In the Obama campaign, these profiles integrated with their web site. At the Website, a supporter may create an account. In the marketing area, an organization would integrate with a Facebook or Twitter. At this point, a customer may feel comfortable enough with a brand to join a "group" or create a "group".

In the Obama campaign, the next stage would be to become an Advocate. To drive interest, pictures may be posted, blogs written, or a video may be created and posted to You Tube, for instance. There are analogies in the advocate stage for a marketer trying to converse about the product with a "friend" (a customer) and vice versa. It is in the advocate stage that a supporter might have now feel committed enough to Obama to host an event, ask friends to donate money, or to register to vote. In the Advocate stage, in a marketing situation, a person might talk to a friend and recommend a product, creating a brand.

The next stage is the Empowering stage. This stage is for serious supporters of Obama. Here a supporter gets heavily involved. The campaign tracked volunteers and could target its most reliable supporters.

These committed people could create social and fundraising groups on MyBO Web site. The Obama campaign could now organize their own networks of supporters that gave supporters access to the Obama database, from which they could pull phone numbers for doing phone banking from their living rooms. In reading this article, a marketer has to make an analogy with what the Obama campaign did to what each marketer can do with their own brand to increase engagement with their customers. Perhaps some organizations could offer discounts to their customers if they introduce their friends to the marketers and solidify the brand. Here a marketer can be flexible in their own situation to extend their brand.

The reason why social media platforms are so popular is that friends now have the means to share video, blogs, pictures, and posts with their friends. This is a god-send for marketers as they try to create and expand their brand. Ford Motor Company just did this in an effective campaign to introduce their new car, the Fiesta. Ford called this the Fiesta Project. In the same way that Ford extended brand awareness for the Fiesta, the Obama campaign provided source material for user-generated content. Here is where scale comes into play. The reason why Ford's and Obama's campaign was so effective was because they both had the scale for "friends" to "converse" to create the brand. This is why the planning stage is so important in creating a brand. As Napolean said, "Every army has a plan until the first shot is fired". A marketing campaign is chaotic. Things happen. A marketer has to be flexible. The reason Ford's and Obama 's social media campaign was so successful was because there was planning and enough scale was created to engage "friends".

In the case of the Obama campaign, its web site, MyBO contained videos, speeches, photos and how-to guides that gave people the raw materials they needed to create their own compelling content in support of Obama. In return, supporters created more than 400,000 pro-Obama videos and posted them to YouTube. They also wrote more than 400,000 blog posts on the MyBO Web site. A modern marketer has to engage their customers to create compelling content for the company that creates brand awareness. This is why social media is important in creating modern brands. A company is going to have a hard time in doing this, left to their own devices and more importantly, finances. In the case of Ford, Ford did not spend any money on their Fiesta launch. Fiesta had a great presence on social media sights, but the presence was created by private individuals. When the Fiesta was launched, 38% of the target market was aware of the car.

This is the reason why both the Obama and the Ford campaigns were so successful. According to Edelman's 2008 Trust Barometer, the most trusted source of information is consistently from a "person like yourself".

The next step in the later that created brand for the Obama campaign was the integration that took place between MyBO and the social media platforms. In the case of the Obama campaign, its website served as the hub for electoral activities, with spokes that reached to an array of platforms, all of which drove conversation back to the Web site in order to engage the people, empower the voices, raise the money and get the boots on the ground needed to win the election. This again is a scale issue that involves planning. A marketer must have a common source to integrate with social media because there are so many social media sites. If a brand is to engage with friends, the conversation must be fun, easy, and simple. This takes scale.

The Obama made the search for content easy. What good is great content if it can't be found? According to Google, 90% of searches are taken from the first page. The Obama campaign understood that you have to be on page 1 to be found. For this reason, it created simple Web sites with the URLs of popular search items to increase the likelihood that they would appear at the top of the search results.

The ease of navigation was an important issue in developing brand for the Obama campaign. In any campaign, something happens beyond the candidate's control. Sometimes these happening derail campaigns. In 2004, the "Swifties" derailed John Kerry's campaign because he did not have a means to control in the negative information flow. In March of 2008, with the nomination seemingly in the bag, the issue of Jeremiah Wright appeared. This issue was enough to sink most campaigns. Because of his branding and his presence on social media, Barack was able to offset this.

The opposition created videos criticizing Obama. The campaign replied by releasing videos that used the same tags so that its positive response could be found when people searched for the original. The campaign understood that most people on YouTube use "related videos" to find what to watch. By mimicking tags, people were more likely to find the Obama response alongside the original critique. The campaign understood that more than one-third of the public does not distinguish between organic search results and paid search ads. It aggressively purchased search ads to increase the likelihood that users would be driven to friendly information.

An important reason why the Jeremiah Wright issue did not destroy the Obama campaign is that Barack knew what people were thinking because his own interaction and presence on the different sights. To derail the controversy, Barack knew a major speech on race had to be given. In his speech, Barack knew exactly what had to be said to derail the controversy. Barack's social media strategy allowed him to communicate with the public in real time. He was able to turn a real negative, into an absolute positive.

There is no perfect product. Something will always go wrong with any brand. With a social media presence, a marketer can find out what people are thinking. A marketer can understand problems in their early stages. Social media allows a brand to communicate directly to customers and to control the situation when bad things happen.

The Obama campaign was able to brand successfully because the campaign understood the importance of mobile devices. The use of mobile devices is a critical element in a modern branding strategy. The Obama campaign realized that 90% of Americans are within 3 feet of their phones, 24 hours a day. People read 90% of their text messages, while ignoring their email. Mobil phones and text messaging allowed Barack to reach and converse with his supporters any time any place. A 2006 study by the New Voters Project found that text message reminders helped increase turnout by 4% at a cost of only $1.56 per vote, much less than the cost of a door to door canvas. The conventional get out the vote techniques cost approximately $20-$30 per vote. These metrics have great relevance to marketers as they seek to create a brand among their customers.

The Obama campaign was able to target important touch points with voters at a time when voters were making their voting decision. This has great relevance to modern branding. Because of the social media platforms, the Obama campaign was able to closely target voters. The Obama campaign was able to track the success of each email, text message and Web site visit, capitalizing on the analytics that are inherent in digital communications. Each ad and e-mail was created in multiple versions (different headers, buttons vs. links, video vs. audio vs. plain text) to test what worked and what did not. The campaign developed more than 7000 customized emails, tailored to individual prospects, and made real-time improvements to its outreach materials. Adjustments were made daily to improve performance. This targeting allowed much conversion from McCain to Obama during the campaign.

This is analogous to touch points for a marketer and it is critical to a branding campaign. A marketer has to know the precise time at which a buying decision is going to be made. To a marketer this is known as The Consumer Decision Journey. There is a proliferation of media and products and this requires marketers to find new ways to get their brands in the minds of their customers. Social media branding has created a more targeted customer. Social media has allowed a marketer to know precisely at one point the consumer buying decision is going to be made. In times past the consumer buying decision was (1) Consideration of the brand, (2) Evaluation of the brand (3)Buying the brand. Social media has created newer touch points. The consumer buying decision is now:

• Consider the brand

• Evaluate the brand

• Buy

• Enjoy

• Advocate the brand

• Bond with brand (a friendship is developed, conversation is made, and a brand is created.

Marketers should study the branding of the Obama campaign. A man who began with no brand, was quickly defined in the minds of the American public. He did the defining. During a speech, Barack said that "only in America can a "skinny, black kids, from Chicago, with a single parent become President". It can also be said that only in the New Media age can a brand be created almost overnight at very little cost.

Dean Hambleton


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PR Agencies and Social Media: 4 Tips to Power Social Brand Building

The Importance of Social Media for Public Relations

PR professionals today are using social media to either supplement or add to their existing strategies, signaling an evolution in the role of PR over the last few years. Public relations specialists were among the first few to understand the power of social media, making them leaders in the social space. Along with handling website content, more and more PR pros are responsible for their company's and clients' social media presence. The gradual shift towards, what industry experts call 'the social media release', indicates how the traditional long form press release is changing. According to David McCulloch, director of public relations at Cisco Systems, "The press release of the future will deliver its content in text, video, SMS, microblog and podcast form, to any choice of device, whenever the reader decides, and preferably it will be pre-corroborated and openly rated by multiple trusted sources."

eMarketer expects PR as well as ad agencies to witness an increase in their social media revenue in 2011. Findings from a joint study by the Transworld Advertising Agency Network and Worldcom Public Relations Group show:

• In 2010, 28% PR firms said that between 15-33% of their revenue came from social media.

• This number has grown by 44% in 2011.

• The study indicates that, when compared to ad agencies, the PR industry is more effective in leveraging social media.

The Road Ahead...

Industry research firm IBIS World has predicted the factors that are likely to fuel the growth of PR firms in the coming years and the expected rate of growth.

• PR firms are expected to grow at an average annualized rate of 5.7% to $12.8 billion from 2010-2015.

• This spurt will be attributed to the increase in demand by companies who want PR firms to handle daily interactions with consumers and the press on their social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

• The recent shift from traditional media to more direct media (social media) will result in PR firms specializing in or launching divisions devoted to blogs, social networking sites, mobile media and podcasts.

• Over four-fifths of PR firms are anticipating an increase in digital and social media work in the future.

Whether it is consulting with clients from the agency point of view or working with an in-house team, PR agencies need to be social media ready. Position² lists a few guidelines that will help your agency survive and stand out in the digital space:

1. Making a Pitch

Social media has given a whole new meaning to the concept of 'pitching'. While the idea of e-mailing a press release to journalists, editors and bloggers is not completely obsolete, it is easy for the readers to hit the delete button and forget about it. Incorporating social media in your PR strategy will ensure your pitch is heard above the din. In order to effectively use social media in your PR pitch plan, we recommend a few points that can be added to your 'to do' list:

o Avoid the Fancy Stuff:

Too much information laced with fancy catch phrases like 'cutting-edge, mission-critical applications to improve business process, etc' can put off readers. Keep in simple.

o Getting your Tweets Right:

If you are planning on using Twitter to make a pitch, keep in mind, you have 140 characters to get it right. According to Nicole VanScoten, a public relations specialist at Pyxl, getting your tweets right leads to high response rates than e-mail.

o Don't Spam them:

Whether its journalists or bloggers, no one likes to receive random tweets or Facebook messages. It would be a good idea to learn about the journalist or blogger before reaching out to them. Read their Twitter profile or personal blog to find out if these are the contacts that need to be targeted and then make your pitch.

o Build a Relationship:

Once you have figured out your contacts list, the next step is easy. Building a relationship with a journalist or editor involves getting on their radar. What you can do is a) check out their Facebook page and comment on the posts you like b) retweet their messages and c) comment on a blog post. This will ensure your presence on their radar, even before you decide to make a pitch.

Here's an example of a good pitch made by a PR professional to a marketing blogger:

For PR pros, using social media to make a pitch saves time as well as money, besides yielding much higher response rates.

2. Delivering Value to Clients

The last 2-3 years have seen PR agencies don an entirely new role in organizations. A large part of a PR specialist's job involves educating clients on the benefits of social media. Handling a company's or a client's account these days includes everything from building brand loyalty to promoting and monitoring content on various social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn). In order to be a successful, we believe a PR firm should deliver value to its clients. Here are a few simple suggestions:

o Creating Content:

PR companies are expected to be experts when it comes to writing. Therefore clients expect your agency to figure out how to turn a boring announcement into interesting content. This could either be a campaign or a company blog. Churning out good content will not only get the required media coverage, but will also help generate leads.

o Identifying the Influencers:

Identifying and developing relationships with the 'influencers' in the PR domain is an added advantage. Instead of simply looking for bloggers and journalists who are magically expected to create buzz and drive sales, it will be wiser to:

o Determine who the real influencers in a noisy market place are. This can be done by connecting with reporters, bloggers and journalists who cover the topics that are closer to the market your client is interested in.

o Keep in mind, the size of one's audience does not always translate into influencer popularity.

o Engaging and Monitoring Conversations:

Social media monitoring and engagement is vital for any PR agency that wants to deliver value to its clients. Brands understand that they not only need a social presence, but are also keen to work with PR agencies to know what is being said about them in the market. By using social media monitoring tools such as Brand Monitor, you can:

o Measure your influencer scores: Social media monitoring tools make it easy to identify journalists and bloggers with high influencer scores.

o Handle Crisis Situations: By keeping a watch on blog conversations, twitter messages and Facebook posts, your agency can help identify signs of trouble. Following this, you could either diffuse the situation yourself, or alert your client asking them to respond as necessary.

o Measure the consumer sentiment for clients' brand (s) and products (s) and quantify impact.

o Measure the connection between press releases and news coverage with social media activity.

o Assess the effectiveness of your communication strategies.

o Provide you clients with domain expertise based on the data obtained.

o Measure detailed metrics such as popularity, share-of-voice etc.

When videos of rats running around at a Taco Bell outlet in NYC were posted on YouTube, owner Yum Brands saw its stock sink to an all time low, with customers doubting Taco Bell's hygiene standards. Within hours, duplicates and versions started multiplying. Customers looking for reassuring information from the brand had a hard time finding it. Although Yum Brands' PR team was not entirely ignorant (the CEO posted an apology on YouTube), monitoring the situation better and engaging with customers in real-time could have averted the PR crisis.

With the public relations industry evolving rapidly, the need to monitor social media channels has never been more important. According to Daryl Willcox, founder of PR industry information firm Daryl Willcox Publishing, listening is a critical part of social media strategy - a proactive process as much as a reactive one. A survey by his company indicates that almost 60% of PR agencies and departments that monitor social media channels spend less than two hours a week doing so. These statistics indicate the growing need for PR companies to monitor social media.

3. Sorting Out your Social Media Toolkit

With so many social media platforms to choose from, how would you know what's best for you? As professionals in PR domain, it's not always about putting a PR pitch on Twitter or Facebook; the social media platforms with the most value must be used to connect with a client's target audience and should function as a meaningful place for brands to connect with journalists, bloggers and consumers. We believe that each social media tool has its own benefits, depending on what your agency wishes to achieve.

o Facebook & LinkedIn:

While Facebook and LinkedIn are almost perfect for establishing and maintaining relationships with media, these tools are slightly more personal than Twitter. It would be wise not to start sending friend requests to every reporter possible. After using Twitter to initiate a friendship with a journalist or a reporter, you can then follow this up by connecting with them on Facebook or LinkedIn.

If you are looking to increase engagement or reinforce your brand's reputation for value, then Facebook is the place to be. For instance, when the Healthy Choice brand aimed to grow its fan base and increase engagement, the company decided to target its huge Facebook fan base and launched a progressive coupon on the Healthy Choice Facebook Page. This was supported through a variety of PR tactics. Efforts by the brand's PR team resulted in the Healthy Choice's Facebook page growing from 6,800 to nearly 60,000 fans. The PR team also distributed over 50,000 buy-one-get-one-free coupons.

o Twitter:

Twitter is a great tool:

o If finding influencers in on your agenda: What you can do is look for influential blogs in your industry, subscribe to them and start following the authors on Twitter.

o For connecting with other independent PR professionals: This will help establish valuable relationships with other PR agencies and professionals. By using Twitter, you can connect with the rapidly growing independent PR community to exchange advice, references, and suggestions in general.

o For Increasing Tweetability: Writing a headline with 'tweetability' in mind can influence the number of tweets or retweets your press release registers. This will help get your agencies or client's name noticed in the social web. While writing a tweetable press headline you must: a) keep it short enough to include a Twitter handle and link b) ensure that the company or product name is in the beginning so that it does not get cut off c) add relevant keywords to make it searchable d) and keep it attention-grabbing enough to generate retweets.

o Blogs:

Blogs can be useful for sharing multimedia content and news that does not always require a press release, but is important enough to pique the interest of the media. Blogs are beneficial:

o If you have a small budget, but want to influence your customers and increase readership.

o For creating a sense of community with your present and future potential clients and customers.

o For providing valuable content to your clients or their customers instead of simply advertising to them.

o For publishing successful case studies; this will also help build your brand.

o For designing campaigns for your clients.

When the BALSAMS Grand Resort Hotel in New Hampshire decided to use social media to stand out in the digital space, the hotel partnered with agency bobdonpaul. The agency's PR strategy involved selecting one 'resorter' from several entries and allowing him to blog and post videos (in addition to other social media activities) about his experiences. The campaign was a success and saw 20% increase in hotel bookings in a month.

4. Measuring ROI

How can you tell if your public relations efforts in social media are working? To determine the success of your PR strategy or programs, we suggest measuring the return on investment (more appropriate in case of PR- return on efforts). The benefits of measuring ROI include:

o Knowing if your efforts are generating the desired results.

o Helping you decide if your current strategy needs to be reworked.

o Bringing about positive changes in popularity and online traffic.

o Helping your client make informed buying decisions.

How to calculate your social media ROI?

o Assess you reach: Evaluating how many Facebook fans or Twitter followers you have. How many 'likes' has your Facebook page registered.

o Tracking how many 'likes' on your clients' Facebook page are actually converted to sales.

o Comparing Results Before and After Launching Social media initiatives: Has your newly launched Facebook page or your new twitter account make any difference to your brand's reputation online?

o Listen, Measure and Engage: Social media monitoring tools like Brand Monitor offer you a platform to listen, measure and engage with customers across the social web.

Conclusion

What gives the modern PR firm the edge over its yesterday's counterparts is the fact that today's public relations professionals are more open to syncing social media with their existing strategies. Whether it's in-house assignments or working for external clients, PR agencies understand that surviving in the digital space is centered on getting their social media strategy right. While mass social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will continue to be important to a certain extent, niche, industry-specific networks are expected to be of greater value in the future.

In the next five years, the most important tools in PR will be monitoring and measurement tools. PR specialists, as well as their clients, will be more concerned with what happens after a message is out there. We expect PR companies to not only dedicate a budget for their social media efforts in the future, but also hire social media specialists to handle their client's social media activities. The social media world is dynamic; however, the job of the PR person remains the same: generate positive coverage across media to help build brands. It will be interesting to see how PR pros in the years ahead will leverage the power of social media to do what they always have been doing; communicating and connecting.

Position2 is a Search and Social Media Marketing firm that delivers continuous growth for our clients using our proprietary "Surround and Intent" Marketing Methodology, delivered by our products. Our proprietary methodology is a result of years of experience in working with diverse clients to deliver customer acquisition goals through search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (SMM), and Pay Per Click (PPC) and online media advertising.

Position2 was founded in 2006 with funding from Accel Venture Partners, and has offices in Palo Alto, Bangalore and Mumbai. Position2 is a certified agency with Google, Yahoo, Bing and is also part of the Google Adwords advisory council.

http://brandmonitor.position2.com

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