Tag Archives: social media

Crisis Communication In The Age Of Social Media – Sixteen Top Tips

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

It was a great morning yesterday at the NASDAQ OMX Glide event in San Francisco. Chairing such a lively and knowledgeable panel was thought-provoking, fun and educational. A big thanks to all the panelists: Richard Brewer-Hay of Ebay, Rachelle Spero of Brunswick, Ed Terpening of Wells Fargo and Larry Kamer of Kamer Consulting. Thanks too to everyone who came along. It was fantastic to see a packed room and there were some excellent questions and comments from the audience.

Here are my Sixteen Top Tips that came out of the discussion:

  1. Define a crisis by how much impact it will have on your business
  2. Manage your social media on a 24/7 basis, not just when there’s a problem
  3. Many of the basic principles of crisis management have not changed. The one big change is the speed at which issues break and develop
  4. Informal stories work. Richard authors company blogs and also talks about personal issues at the same time. Drives better coverage in the media.
  5. In a crisis, don’t make the mistake of putting your most important audience at the bottom of the list. It’s not always the press.
  6. When managing a crisis there are two things you need to do:
    1. Manage the information
    2. Manage the message
  7. The industry needs regulators to embrace social media and define best practice e.g. SEC
  8. Communications practitioners must work hand-in-hand with IR, Legal and the other corporate functions
  9. It is essential to create common ground with the legal team
  10. Companies need “social media lawyers” i.e. lawyers must be trained and versed in social media best practice
  11. One of the real benefits of social media in crisis comms is the opportunity for learning that it affords. There are so many case studies out there that we can all learn from.
  12. Encourage and promote use of social media in your employees. Don’t be afraid of it. E.g. Morgan Stanley is putting 8,000 brokers on Twitter
  13. Rule of thumb for blog posts – I should be able to read it to my 12 year old daughter (language, appropriateness)
  14. Never start a conversation you are not willing to have
  15. Social media is a great way to spot talent in the organization. E.g. if one of your employees is demonstrating a talent for handling customer enquiries effectively, you can spot it and maximize their skills
  16. When preparing for a crisis:
    1. Listen first
    2. Define your objectives
    3. Dedicate resources. E.g. don’t dive into Facebook unless you have a Facebook community manager
    4. Build a cross-functional team
    5. Consider what is in the mindset of your adversaries. You will always have competitors who will be seeking to exploit your misfortune
    6. Create a step-wise planning model starting at the beginning

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 4 Nov 2011

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

Causing a social media stir this week has been an entirely unsuspecting contender – Shippams fish paste. The brand’s Twitter feed is supposedly run by a social media intern who helps users ‘engage’ with the brand’s crab paste. As The Wall pointed out, “The account is clearly having a laugh at the marketing industry and its need for brands to have a digital media strategy, no matter how established or tedious, like crab paste, the brand may be”. Whatever the motives, the feed is genuinely amusing and has grown to almost 9,000 followers, as well as drawing a lot of attention to the company’s products, of course… *

Westminster Council’s director of comms and strategy recently unveiled their guide, Evaluating Your Communications Tools: What Works, What Doesn’t, suggesting that evaluation programmes should be based on ‘real outcomes’, including ‘measurable changes in audience perceptions and awareness’. The report has the backing of the PRCA and AMEC, and can be found online here.

Meanwhile, Adam Singer writes about metrics ‘Your PR team isn’t tracking… but should be”, focussing on web analytics, including referring sources, branded search engine traffic, and inbound links.

Providing insights into where best to place links in Tweets to maximise click through rates was the focus of a recent study by Dan Zarrella. Sampling 200,000 bit.ly links, Zarrella created a Tweet heat-map to highlight CTRs, concluding the most effective place to insert a link is at around 25% of the way through a Tweet.

Finally, our friends at PressIndex have continued their study into the UK’s top PR agencies, this time looking at levels of engagement with fans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, We Are Social were found to have the most popular fan page, and were also the most active.

 *At the time of proofing this blog (11am), the Shippams Twitter handle no longer exists. More details when we have them.

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 21 Oct 2011

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

‘Can you use social media to predict the future?’ asks Fresh Networks from Wired 2011. Social media obviously produces a lot of content, and Professor Hertz argues that the key is to mine what is useful, highlighting that “the X Factor is ‘research gold dust’, as not only does it generate a great amount of social media buzz, but it also involves a public vote”. (My own efforts to predict last year’s winner of Big Brother were sadly unsuccessful).

MediaWeek has published a comprehensive article on how the recession has affected media agencies, as ZenithOptimedia predicts that global advertising spend will grow by around 4.1 per cent this year.

A study by the Ipsos Mori Reputation Council report found that Comms Directors engage less with social media now than in 2010. The findings led Anthony Hilton to muse, is social media monitoring worth it? Hilton likens engaging with bloggers as intervening in a pub argument. The comments section has prompted some lively debate.

PressIndex this week released a study of the top 150 PR agencies and their social media presence, concluding that “taken in isolation, the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers a PR consultancy has is meaningless” and crucially, “It’s not the size of your social community; it’s what you do with it that counts.”

Finally, the FT this week highlighted the evolving role of the CIO, highlighting that they are now more responsible for Business Information, pulling insights from social media and executive dashboards to drive strategy, for example. How this role compares to the Chief Influence Officer written about by Phillip Sheldrake will be interesting to see.

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 14 Oct 2011

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

After Apple’s dominance of the news agenda last week, it was Blackberry’s turn this week. I’ll refrain from repeating any of the jokes circulating on Twitter, and mention what seems to have angered users the most, namely RIM’s handling of communications around the crisis. CorpComms Magazine provided an analysis of the damage to RIM and Blackberry’s reputations, including insight from Glide’s CEO, Sam Phillips.

PR Week this week reported of the sale of College Group to a private equity firm, suggesting it could pave the way for more PE deals in the PR industry. Danny Rogers believes that despite all the doom and gloom, the sector does have some strong growth areas, notably digital content solutions, and reputation management.

A new study from ISBA and Havas Media Social shows that seven out of 10 marketers believe their CEO understands the importance of social media, while nearly eight out of 10 view it as a long-term investment.

Another study of CMOs this week, however, from IBM showed that although 82% say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years, only a minority actually currently track brand conversations happening online. The research lead highlighted the benefits of real-time monitoring to companies: “CMOs who successfully harness this new source of insight will be in a strong position to increase revenues, reinvent their customer relationships and build new brand value.”

Whilst on the subject, here’s seven free tools to use to help measure your social media effectiveness. (Regular readers will be aware of my views on tool number 7…)

Until next week.

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 16 Sept 2011

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

Twitter was in the news again this week, as they announced the launch of a new analytics platform, providing insights into how many links and Tweets are shared across the platform. Techcrunch TV covered the event as it happened here. The presentation also highlighted that Twitter had passed 100 million users for the first time, and around 5 billion Tweets are sent every month. We also learnt this week that Twitter sentiment is being used by a hedge fund to predict short term stock market price changes (with up to 87% accuracy…).

A fascinating study by Market Sentinel on fan engagement on Facebook showed that despite huge numbers of fans liking pages, only around 0.002% actually engage with the page more than once. Given the way Facebook’s edgerank calculations work (determining what appears in feeds), if people do not engage with a fan page or piece of content, that ‘like’ will disappear from users’ feeds.

Fast Company explained IBM’s latest thinking in transforming companies into social businesses, including insights being derived from the way people interact digitally to improve various functions in the business. The BBC’s Deputy Head of the Newsroom also wrote about how social media is changing the way the BBC operates, and the shifts in the way people consume news.

Finally, the next instalment in the guide to social media newsrooms is here, where Alistair discusses comments and engagement on corporate blogs.

The Social Media Newsroom Part 3: Comments

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

This is the third instalment in my 5-part series about Social Media Newsrooms – to read more about the series read my introductory article here.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 of this series will look at some specific suggestions for things you can do to make your newsroom social, with some good and bad examples of where other companies have done so.  Today I’m having a look at comments, Part 4 will be about using the newsroom to support your social channels and in part 5 I will look at how to make your content more personal.

When looking at how to bring in some two-way dialogue to a company’s newsroom one obvious place to start with is allowing members of the public, or the specific community you are targeting, to post their thoughts, comments and questions on your site in response to your news pieces, blog posts and even press releases.

However, one thing I really don’t like to see on a corporate newsroom or blog is spammy comments!  If you see a blog that has comments that are clearly spam lingering around on their site for days, weeks or even longer what does it say to you?  What it says to me is that there is clearly no-one moderating the site and probably no-one actually bothering to read what people are saying in the comments.

Comments spam and ignored questions – HP blogs

HP has a pretty-looking blog site that is actually a hub pulling together a number of blogs on various topics.

But are they really taking the comments seriously or is this just another gimmick?  Take a look at this post title “Answering your questions”.  Ironically, given the title of the post, no-one has bothered to reply to the people who posted questions in the comments in response to this post.  The last post here from “leo” is clearly spam trying to get some link juice from the HP site (and if you look around other posts you’ll find plenty of spam).  What do you conclude by looking at these comments?  HP isn’t really paying any attention to the community on their site…

Allowing comments and responding to them – Microsoft Hardware Blog

Microsoft have a vast array of blogs on a variety of topics nicely laid out with a summary of the latest posts.  Not all blogs allow comments and you do find the occasional spam but what I like about many of these blogs is that Microsoft does actually respond to the comments people post.

Microsoft Hardware Blog Imagehttp://www.microsofthardwareblog.com/we-want-your-feedback/

This shows a much more genuine attempt to use comments as a way of engaging with people through the site.

How much freedom should people be given to say what they want? Should negative comments be allowed?

This is a tricky question to answer and a lot depends on both the wider culture of a company and also on regulatory requirements.  Aside from preventing abusive posts, spam, blatant self-promotion or links to indecent or illegal content, how far a company goes in allowing people to air their views is really a matter of discretion.

One really interesting example of a company that takes a very tolerant approach to comments on their own site is General Electric.

Take a look at this post about the nuclear meltdown in Japan after the Tsunami and the role that GE played in tackling the crisis.  There are over 111 comments in response to this article, many go beyond negative and are quite damning, it doesn’t really get much worse than being blamed for a nuclear disaster, does it?

The people posting are a broad mix with some people claiming to be engineers and even nuclear experts themselves.  GE have not responded to individual comments but it is interesting to see how commentators with differing views interact with each other.

Do these posts damage GE’s reputation?  GE obviously don’t think so.  Everyone coming to the site first reads GE’s official statement and there are links to other information and posts from GE about the issue on this site.  The community that has developed on this site has also developed a degree of self-correction with individual posters correcting the most blatantly erroneous statements from other posters and there is quite a lively debate about how to tackle the nuclear problems in Japan and the pros and cons of nuclear energy more generally.

There isn’t the usual level of spam, off-topic posts or self-promotion on this site which suggests to me that someone from GE is moderating comments.  Meaning that these negative posts are not there simply because no-one has noticed.

Now the question is, would you let someone say this about your company on your blog?

Comment from a member of the public on GE Reports blog

But look also how the community on the site supply each other with information.  There are a lot of well informed commentators taking part in the discussion.

Comment in GE Reports Blog

I will be interested to hear people’s thoughts on whether such an approach is good for GE but what you can’t deny is that this is ‘social’ in a real sense and also quite ‘brave’ of GE to permit such criticism in a space they control.

In the next part of the series I will be looking at how to use your newsroom to facilitate conversations in other channels.  Thanks for reading!

Weekly Media and Comms Round-Up – 9 Sept 2011

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

In the first of a new weekly series, I’ll be sharing a collection of top news stories across the communications industry to keep you up to date at a glance. Of course, if you see any great news or stories throughout the week, feel free to email me with them (sc[at]glidetechnologies.com) and I’d be delighted to have a read.

In social media news, Twitter now plans to roll-out advertising on the channel to UK companies, following an established presence in the US. Brands can pay to have Tweets appear in users’ timelines and for their chosen topics to appear as trends. Meanwhile, Reuters this week reported that Facebook’s revenue for the first half of 2011 had doubled to $1.6 billion, although the revenue split between advertising and Facebook credits is unclear.

SEOmoz this week published a very comprehensive post on social media metrics and how to track KPIs, whilst Hubspot wrote about 5 ‘vanity’ metrics, which should not be measured, and offers some alternatives. On the subject of ‘vanity’ metrics… love ‘em or hate ‘em, Klout and PeerIndex continue to grow in popularity as they attempts to measure online ‘influence’, and this week the Ministry of Sound announced it is set to use the latter to help target a book launch.

Url shortening site bit.ly published a blog on the half-life of links, looking at how long people will pay attention to them, highlighting that Youtube links had a longer half-life than those on Twitter or Facebook.

Finally, Glide’s very own Alistair began a five-part blog series this week on the future of the corporate newsroom. You can read the first two parts here and here.

The Social Media Newsroom Guide Part 2: The Golden Rules of a Social Newsroom

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

This is the second instalment in my 5-part series about Social Media Newsrooms – to read more about the series read my introductory article here.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 of this series will look at some specific suggestions for things you can do to make your newsroom social, with some good and bad examples of where other companies have done so.  In Part 3 I’ll look at comments, part 4 will be about using the newsroom to support your social channels and in part 5 I will look at how to make your content more personal.

But first, here are my 3 “golden rules” about what constitutes being social in a corporate communications context:

The 3 Golden Rules of being Social in Corporate Communications

Rule 1 – Conversations must be two-way

You can use as many social media channels as you like but if the mode of communication on each channel is still only one-way broadcast are you really gaining anything?  Just posting on twitter doesn’t mean you are being social any more than being in a gym means you are exercising.

Rule 2 – Communication must be personal

Your business is made up of your people.  Your PR team is a team of people.  Do you always have to communicate behind the mask of your corporate logo?  Bring out the individuals in your business – they will often have their own networks that you can connect with through your site.  Put a name and a face to your communications as often as possible.  In order to be social you have to first of all be human.

Rule 3 – The focus is on the audience

One thing that makes ‘social’ communication distinct from traditional PR is the willingness to share content that isn’t directly aimed at promoting the brand or selling goods or services.   This can involve inviting people from outside the business to create content on your site or sharing links to content not created or related to your business.  The goal here is to create or direct people to content because you think it will be interesting to them not because it’s directly beneficial to you.

I could talk about communicating with an audience where they are but I’m focusing here on things that can make the newsroom social, not more widely on how businesses can be more social in general.

If you want more on the specifics then come back next week when I will be publishing the remaining 3 parts of the series.  Thanks for reading!

The Social Media Newsroom Guide Part 1: How to Fake it

Featured

Posted on by
2

This is the first instalment in my 5-part series about Social Media Newsrooms – to read more about the series read my introductory article here.

Many companies want to be seen as “social” – there are now numerous case studies showing how social engagement online can be beneficial for business of many types. Certainly, many marketers and PR people want to be seen to be engaging in social media as it’s the latest thing to be seen doing as a marketing/comms professional.

But sometimes the priority can be on “appearing social” rather than actually being social and this can be seen in the way many companies approach communications through their website.  This is most apparent when you look at the company’s newsroom section – i.e. the place where they publish company news and/or press releases.

In terms of what qualifies a newsroom for the additional badge-of-honour prefix “social media” I think the recipe, in the minds of some companies, works as follows:

Step 1
Take one tired looking online press office.

Step 2
Stick in a few Facebook Like/Recommend or Tweet This buttons so people think they can share the story on their social media channel of choice. These buttons don’t actually have to work, just make sure the buttons are clearly visible. Throw in a few other channels for good measure (LinkedIn is popular, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon too and if you are really current try Google’s +1).

Step 3
Instead of hosting your videos on your site host them on YouTube. Everyone knows YouTube is “social” – don’t worry, you can disable comments if you don’t want people saying your videos are boring and your company sucks on a channel you can’t moderate.

Step 4
Make sure you put a few pictures on Flickr. Some people still use Flickr and people will instantly recognise the logo so it will create a warm fuzzy social media feeling inside.

Step 5
Tag clouds! Every web 2.0 site HAS to have one of these. They also make your site look like a blog and blogs are social, right?

Step 6
Show your latest tweets. This may be just a feed showing tweets telling people what’s on the page that they are already on or it may be a stream of tweets to various people apologising that their experience of your company has been bad and telling them to speak to customer services. Either way, twitter is super-social, so just shove it in. It doesn’t matter if the tweets you are displaying offer no information whatsoever to the person on your newsroom that they a) want and b) didn’t have access to already on that page.

Step 7 (optional)
Add some pictures. Podcasts are also funky; if you have them throw them in too. If you have some presentations, why not stick these on Slideshare too?  The more logos of recognised social media channels you can squeeze in to your site the better.

JOB DONE! You now have a “social media newsroom” which you can tell the world about.

“Social” – really?

Don’t get me wrong. Sarcastic comments aside, I’m not saying that any of the things I’ve listed above are bad – in fact many are actually good things that I would recommend. Tag clouds, for example, are a useful way for people to navigate through your content. And there’s certainly no harm in putting videos on YouTube or pictures on Flickr. Many of the self-styled “social media newsrooms” that I’ve seen are actually quite good as far as a corporate newsroom goes and often give a better user experience than newsrooms from other companies in their sector.

What I’m objecting to here is the notion that there is actually anything genuinely “social” about these sites. In my view, the self-applied moniker “social media” is often nothing more than a gimmick – reinforcing some of the more negative stereotypes about PR as a profession in general, i.e. doing something for a headline when the substance doesn’t match up.

But why do it? If a site is genuinely social do you really need to call it ‘social’?  Shouldn’t it be up to the people visiting a newsroom to decide for themselves if the site is social or not?  If they think it is they will ‘vote with their fingers’ by sharing/recommending your content and by taking part in a conversation with you.

Subscribe to our blog or follow me on twitter to get updates on my next posts in this series.

Next in the series: The 3 Golden Rules of Social Engagement in a Newsroom

The Social Media Newsroom – a 5-part Guide

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

Last week I came across news of yet another corporate newsroom site launched under the headline of “company X launches social media newsroom” and I found myself again wondering, as I browsed through the site, ‘why have they called this a “social media newsroom” as opposed to just a “newsroom”’.

I’ve seen a number of examples where companies have called their corporate news site a “social media newsroom”. Some of these sites do look rather good and have some nice functionality in them, both for journalists visiting the site and for the public. But when you look through the site it is hard to find anything particularly social about it.

All of this has gotten me thinking about what exactly it is that makes a newsroom social? Are we sometimes confusing what represents best practice, in terms of web design, functionality and usability, with actual social engagement? I think we often do, as I’ve seen a number of these “social media newsrooms” receive praise from some for being groundbreaking when in fact they aren’t really doing anything social at all and it can come across as a bit of a gimmick.

So this an introduction for my guide to building a more social newsroom for your business. I’ve resisted the urge to name and shame the worst offenders when it comes to undeserved “social” badges but I will be mentioning a few examples of companies that I think do a good job of it.

Small Business vs Large Corporations

Some of the best examples of using social media in corporate communications actually come from small businesses, but my experience in working in this area mainly comes from working with large corporations. Bigger businesses have both opportunities and restrictions when it comes to engaging in social media that smaller businesses don’t have – so my focus in this series (as with all my posts) is on the larger organisations. If you have good examples from smaller businesses do please share these though!

Part 1: The Social Media Newsroom – How to Fake it