Archive for the ‘Social PR’ Category
Why Social Media Matters for B2B Vendors
Monday, March 28th, 2011Social media marketing has clearly been embraced by consumer brands. Pepsi famously dropped its Super Bowl advertising a year ago in favor of a social media campaign. Coke, Starbucks and Disney are among the top brands on Facebook, with millions of fans. SMR has developed a sophisticated methodology for continuously tracking the top brands on social media based on reach, satisfaction and other metrics.
B2B marketing executives, however, tend to be a bit more skeptical. Though adoption is increasing, many b2b marketers still question the true effectiveness of social media for reaching business buyers. After all, four out of ten companies still ban access to social media sites from the workplace, and many more sharply limit its use. B2B products and services don’t generally make the same kind of emotional connection with buyers that consumer brands do, and tactics that work for b2c marketers (e.g. social media games and contests, “checking in” at retail locations, coupons and discounts) are inappropriate or flat-out inapplicable in the business world. There is, so far, no b2b version of Yelp, and its unlikely there will be anytime soon, as many companies worry about the legal liability entailed in either endorsing or disparaging a specific vendor.
Still, social media is rapidly becoming an essential component of the b2b marketing mix. B2b buyers use social media tools throughout their buying processes, from problem-solving and how-to content in the initial research phase through product/vendor comparisons and customer experience validation. Bloggers provide much of this information, supplementing the reporting and commentary of trade publications and industry analysts. Buyers thwarted from using these tools at work (e.g., part of the four-in-ten companies above) find ways around corporate roadblocks, access social media sites via mobile devices, from home or the local coffee shop, or while traveling. They rely on search and social media through the bulk of their buying process, and expect b2b vendors to be there.
For b2b marketers still trying to quantify the potential benefits of social media marketing, here are a dozen helpful stats. You can find the original sources for most of these findings in Best Social Media Stats, Facts and Marketing Research of 2010.
- • Companies active in social media report a 59% higher lead conversion rate for organic search traffic
- • 85% of B2B buyers say they want B2B vendors to engage and interact with them online
- • 93% of B2B buyers believe that all companies should have a social media presence
- • 9 out of 10 start a purchase process with search (and social media increasingly affects search results)
- • Three-quarters of B2B technology buyers say they use social media at some point during a buying cycle to gather information or communicate with colleagues about a purchase; 58% use LinkedIn for this purpose
- • YouTube reaches 36% of all business decision-makers—more than 10X the figure for Forbes.com
- • 43% of employees in Fortune 1000 companies say they use LinkedIn for professional purposes
- • 100% of the Fortune 500 have at least some of their executives listed on LinkedIn. 50% of LinkedIn users are business decision makers.
- • 65% of journalists use social media to conduct research for stories
- • 59% of C-level executives report using social media for business purposes at least weekly
- • 90% of B2B technology decision makers watch online videos
- • 80% of B2B technology decision makers read blogs; 69% are active on social networks
In short, b2b marketers need to embrace social media marketing because the buyers are using it. They expect vendors to use it as well. And you can’t win the game if you’re not even on the field.
Best Social PR Guides, Tips and Tools of 2010
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011Social media marketing, online PR and SEO are three tactics that are all powerful on their own, but have far more impact when used in a coordinated, synergistic manner.
How can you amplify and extend new releases through social media? Optimize company news for SEO benefit? Effectively connect with bloggers and other key online influencers in your industry? Which online tools are most helpful for PR pros? What does the future hold for online / interactive / social PR?
Get the answers to all of these questions and more here in some of the best social PR guides, tips and tools of the past year.
Interactive PR Guides, Tips and Tools
Twitter Pitching Etiquette: What works, what doesn’t… by COMMS Corner
Noting that “Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, if used effectively, can help build relationships, identify new trends and help facilitate networking with like-minds throughout the industry,” Lacey Haines and Adam Vincenzini share a few best practices for pitching journalists through social media, such as keeping pitches short and using a DM rather than a public message when pitching on Twitter.
The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases by Adam Sherk
We’ve seen these before—meaningless, over-used goobledygook buzzwords in press releases—but here Adam Sherk provides an updated list for 2010, topped by “leading,” “unique,” “solution” and “innovator” and proceeding through “customer-centric,” “outside the box” and “peak performance.” So, if you’re stumped for an opening line the next time you’re drafting a press release, try something like “XYZ Company, the leading innovator of unique, customer-centric solutions, today announced an outside the box product which supports peak performance.” Go ahead, works for anything.
6 free online PR tactics that deliver by iMedia Connection
Rachel Hunt supplies valuable guidance on how to use social networking, award submissions, guest blogging, speaking opportunities and original research to maximize the impact of PR efforts.
Public Relations: The best press release is no press release by MarketingSherpa
The headline may be a bit harsh—drafted and used properly (which they too frequently aren’t), press releases can still serve a valuable role—but Daniel Burstein does make some excellent points here. One of the best: “Talk to me (the media) like I’m your older brother, not your mother…When you talk to your mother, she’s likely excited and proud about almost anything you have done…However, try the same pitch with your older brother and see how well that turns out. ‘Loser. You’re only in advertising because you couldn’t hack it in medicine.’ To grab the attention of your older brother, you need something really newsworthy.”
5 successful marketers reveal their favorite public relations tools by Matt About Business
Matt Mansfield interviews five PR pros including Joe Chernov of Eloqua and Lisa Ann Pinkerton of Technica to get the scoop on their favorite tools for PR management, social media and other functions. The tools, briefly reviewed, range from the obvious (e.g., Vocus and Cision) to the obscure (Butterfly Publisher).
Pitching on Twitter? Try these 8 tactics to entice the media by Ragan.com
Maya Wasserman offers expert guidance to successfully connecting with reporters and editors on Twitter, from focusing on individual journalists rather than publications and building a relationship before pitching to using PitchEngine and being brief (which is pretty much enforced by Twitter anyway).
Social Media Press Releases and Blogger Outreach
The Art of Creating a Social Media Press Release by Socialfish
After a quick trip through the history of social media press releases, Maddie Grant muses that the essential elements of a social media release remind her of nothing more than…a blog. She then makes the heretical (!) contention that “You don’t need a PR agency.” While that may be taking a good idea a bit too far, she does make an interesting argument that “If your ‘news’ is cool or important enough that when you post it on your blog, your community shares it, and tweets it, and talks about it, then the trade journalists who cover your industry will notice…Do this right and the news will find you.” Good advice even if you do use a PR agency.
The 5 Cs of Blogger Relations by prTini
***** 5 Stars
Noting (very accurately I might add) that “The top bloggers receive hundreds of pitches a day. Even bloggers with less traffic to their site are still being pitched on a regular basis. Working against us, some PR people aren’t quite so savvy and are spamming these bloggers,” Heather Whaling lays out an excellent model for doing blogger outreach right, including collaboration (“how can we provide content that will drive traffic to their site?”) and content (“before you ever think about pitching a blogger, make sure you’re offering something valuable”).
Is the Press Release Dead? 5 Tips to Revive It by iMedia Connection
“Has the press release taken its last breath?” Paige O’Neill answers “not yet” if it evolves into a social media release, and provides guidance on how to create and share one effectively.
Social PR News and Commentary
The Future of Public Relations and Social Media by Mashable
Erica Swallow interviews 14 PR experts including Jeff Esposito, Lou Hoffman and Dave Delaney to get their opinions “on the future of public relations and how they see social media changing the industry.” In short—relationships with key influencers have always been and will continue to be the key to an effective public relations strategy. Social media changes how those relationships are formed and maintained, but not fundamentally what PR pros do.
Google Launches Blog Finder for Any Topic by ReadWriteWeb
Marshall Kirkpatrick dives into Google’s expanded blog search capabilities and concludes “The search results in this new search by blog feature look pretty good to me. The ranking of those results, however, seems questionable…That said, in as much as I know about the topics I searched for, the top blogs in those fields definitely peppered the search results, to greater or lesser degrees.” PR pros shouldn’t rely solely on Google’s tool when developing an outreach list, but it’s a good one to add to their arsenal.
Update on Trusting PR Agencies without a Social Media Presence with Your Social Media Programs by PR Meets Marketing
Cece Salomon-Lee reports on the progress PR firms are making in using social media for their own business as well as their clients’—”eating their own dog food” so to speak. Among her findings: “While most agencies didn’t link to their social media channels on their website in 2009, 83% included this on their home page in 2010. Twitter was the most popular social media channel, with 80% of PR agencies having a presence. 35% had followers numbering over 1000.”
PR and SEO
Why PRs can be better link builders than SEOs by Econsultancy
Kelvin Newman contends that the skills which make PR pros successful (e.g., deep vertical industry knowledge, writing, relationship-building) also make them natural link builders for SEO. There’s no question that online PR plays a key role, in conjunction with SEO, in successful web presence optimization.
SEO Press Releases Extend Your Coverage by Adventive Marketing
5 Stars *****
Janet Killen explains in a comprehensive yet concise manner step-by-step instructions for getting maximum SEO benefit from a press release, integrating keywords, links, online distribution, social media and RSS.
Get More from your SEO Press Release by InteractMedia SEO Content Marketing Blog
Expanding on Janet’s advice above, Beth Hrusch reminds us that keeping readers in mind is critical too, and provides seven tips for optimizing press releases for both search engines and people.
Related Post
Best Social PR Guides and Tips of 2010 (So Far)
How PR and Social Media Can Work Together
Monday, December 6th, 2010Social media and PR seem like natural allies. Both are primarily focused on brand awareness, credibility building and image enhancement. Both are critical tools for dealing with bad news or crisis situations. Both require relationships with influential people in one’s industry to be effective. And both rely on the ability to tell an interesting story.
So why do corporate PR and social media efforts so often appear disconnected and out of sync? To be sure, some agencies and companies get it, and do an effective job integrating social media and PR efforts. But many organizations in both groups still treat the functions as separate silos—or worse, mix them awkwardly, damaging both efforts.
But integrated properly, social media can help amplify PR efforts, and effective PR can help generate social media coverage. It’s a virtuous circle that looks something like this.
In this example, a press release is distributed online, posted to the company’s Facebook and Twitter updates, and used to create a social media release (using a tool such as PitchEngine). Any significant online news site pickups of the release are posted to Twitter (it’s okay to repeat news a few times on Twitter as not all of your followers will see all of your tweets, just don’t overdo this) and to social bookmarking sites.
For SEO and traffic purposes, the press release and social media release link back to the company’s website/blog. The social media release also links back to the company’s LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
The social media release is used for blogger outreach. Since many (most?) bloggers are overwhelmed with pitches and unlikely to write about the company’s press release, the company uses the press release as a hook and offers to write a (informational, non-promotional) guest post on the topic. When a blogger publishes a guest post from the company, that post gets linked in the company’s LinkedIn groups, Facebook page, Twitter and social bookmarking sites. These links send more traffic to the blog (which the blogger likes) and spread the company’s fame.
Likewise, any other blog or media coverage, or bylined articles by the company, are shared via social media sites. Bylined articles will—and other blog/media coverage may—include backlinks to the company’s website/blog as well. And the website/blog includes social sharing buttons, making it easier for site visitors to share the company’s content with their connections across popular social networks.
PR and social media can also be used together to promote events, speaking opportunities, corporate presentations, video and other content.
Social media and PR can both be used to influence journalists and other influencers online. Smart companies and agencies are putting this together.
What’s the Best Social Media Monitoring Tool? It Depends
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010Until fairly recently, keeping track of your organization’s online presence was relatively easy. Other than your company’s website, most mentions were likely in well-known online news sites or trade industry publication sites. Your PR team was aware of most of these as it often had a hand in generating those placements. A simple tool like Google Alerts would pick up most stray citations.
No more. The explosion of social media has led to a corresponding need for more sophisticated monitoring tools that can crawl the hundreds of social networking and bookmarking sites and millions of blogs across the globe. A rapidly proliferating collection of tools are being developed to meet the need. You can find a list of more than 150 social media monitoring tools here or close to 200 here, but—that can seem overwhelming. For those short on time and seeking a shorter list of tools to evaluate, below are nine tools at various price levels that may or may not be the best but are certainly among the most popular and capable social media monitoring tools currently available.
Budget: $0 (I have no budget, I need something free!)
Though limited (in terms of filters, number of search terms and results) in comparison to the fee-based version of the tool, SM2 Freemium is still an excellent tool for getting a snapshot of your social media landscape—discovering who’s talking about you, your competitors and your industry, what they’re saying, and where they are saying it. Results can be exported to Excel for further sorting and analysis. I’ve used this tool on behalf of small clients for finding hundreds of key influencers on Twitter, blogs and various other social networking sites and forums. The only caveat is that this may whet your appetite for the full version (see below).
Another excellent free tool for finding relevant influencers across the social media sphere, Social Mention is a real-time social search engine that also provides alerts and a cool buzz-monitoring widget you can add to your website or blog. If Google Alerts had been developed with a focus on social media, this would be it. This tool is fast, easy to use, and offers a useful set of filters for finding mentions of a company or topic in specific types of social interaction (e.g. blogs, microblogging sites, social networks, etc.).
Budget: Under $500 per month
An easy-to-use, graphically rich tool that provides monitoring (who’s talking about you, your competitors, key industry terms and trends, etc., and where they are talking about it), sentiment analysis, and collaboration tools for acting on the information. It may not catch everything, but it finds a lot (via blogs, Twitter, social news sites and Facebook public pages) and presents the information through useful charts and graphs. Several pricing options are available, most under $500 per month.
Along with the monitoring and alert features you’d expect, Trackur also includes a proprietary algorithm for displaying the influence and reach of individuals discussing your brand or topic—so you can focus on power users and ignore trolls and spammers. Andy Beal and his team have built a nice tool that’s garnered favorable reviews from TechCrunch and other prominent tech sites. As with UberVU, several pricing / service levels are available under $500 per month.
Budget: $500-1,000 per month
Social Media Monitoring
The fee-based version of SM2 does everything the freemium version does plus providing unlimited searches and results, filters, boolean search strings and alerts. Its monitoring covers blogs, message boards, forums, microblogging sites, wikis, media sharing sites, social networks, online classifieds and review sites. SM2 provides enough social media monitoring power to be relied upon by some fairly large brands, at a price point affordable to midsized and even socially active smaller companies.
Popular with agencies as well as corporate users, Radian6 offers a rich set of tools for social media monitoring, responding, tracking, benchmarking and analytics. The Radian6 Dashboard enables you to monitor conversations in real time, while the Engagement Console lets you respond directly or route posts to appropriate individuals or teams and analyze the results of social media interactions.
Traditional PR + Social Media Monitoring
Cision combines its own PR tracking capabilities built on the former Bacon’s clipping service (older PR pros, you may need to explain to your younger counterparts what a “clipping service” was back in the day) with a white-labeled version of Radian6 to provide markets and PR professionals with a 360-degree view of brand mentions and trends across traditional and social media. Cision’s tools are designed to help organizations of almost any size that are active in PR and social media relations “plan their stories, connect with audiences, monitor media coverage and analyze results.”
Vocus provides a rich set of tools for traditional and social media monitoring, media outreach and news distribution. The company’s built-from-the-ground-up monitoring tools cover more than 50,000 traditional media outlets, every major social media site and 20 million blogs. Its database of 270,000 U.S. / 500,000 global media contacts is invaluable for connecting with the right writers and performing effective outreach. Through PRWeb, which Vocus acquired in 2006, it offers extensive news distribution and tracking capabilities. Social media monitoring can be purchased separately for $3000 per year (putting that tool effectively in the $0-500 per month category) though most users combine at least a subset of the PR tools with this.
Budget: We don’t need no stinkin’ budget
If you’re familiar with terms like product placement and slotting fees, and your brand is familiar to consumers through prime time TV advertising, you should probably evaluate this tool. If all of those things are true and your company is social media savvy, there’s a good chance you’re already using it. Nielsen’s monitoring covers more than 100 million blogs, social networking sites, discussion boards and other sites where consumers can post content. It provides capabilities for capturing customer insights, response, brand management and social media outreach tracking. Forrester Research has named Nielsen a leader in brand monitoring solutions, saying “the vendor has the strongest strategic vision and currently competes at a scale unmatched by any other competitor.”
These tools are among the best for social media monitoring, whatever your budget and needs. But, as noted above, the social media monitoring space is highly dynamic, with new tools and improvements to existing tools constantly being introduced. If I overlooked your favorite tool, leave a comment below.
Also, as a test—since this post is about social monitoring tool vendors, let’s see how many of them promote it or respond to it, either with a comment here or on other social media outlets, and how quickly they do so.
Best Social PR Guides and Tips of 2010 (So Far)
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010Social media has fundamentally altered the practice of public relations. And as any blogger can tell you, PR pros understand this, as witnessed by the incredible increase in blogger outreach “pitches” from corporate PR departments and firms over the past two years.
Of course, there’s more to (successful) blogger outreach than just pitching, and there’s more to the new practice of social PR than just blogger outreach. Like what? Read on to learn how social media is changing PR, how pitching bloggers is different from traditional media outreach, how to optimize press releases for search and online distribution, which tools should be in your social PR toolbox and more here in some of the best articles and blog posts on social PR of 2010 so far.
Will Traditional, Social Media Blend? by MediaPost Marketing Daily Commentary
Writing that “The most productive PR path…is a blended approach to social and traditional media,” Len Stein offers a quick but valuable process for obtaining and promoting old and new media coverage using multiple tools like social bookmarking sites, internal company distribution, your own website, marketing emails and more.
Pros & Cons of Applying Social Media to Traditional PR Campaigns by Howell Marketing Strategies
Amy Howell makes the case that “social media DOES NOT REPLACE traditional PR and marketing, but IT IS A WAY TO LEVERAGE what already works” through a series of pro and cons of applying social media stragies in a traditional business environment. For example, “PRO: Twitter gives us a great way to leverage PR. When we help clients generate news in the traditional news publications–both print and online–we will use Twitter to post links to those stories and give our clients a “shout out.” CON: It takes time to post all client news, especially when you have multiple clients (frequently) in the news…(but) It’s worth the extra time and effort and adds extra value on top of what’s already successful.”
How Is PR Changing? by Journalistics
Jeremy Porter writes a thoughtful piece on what hasn’t changed in PR (the need to communicate to and manage relationships with various audiences) and what has (dialog rather than monologue, metrics and measurement technology, the media landscape, etc.), and what PR pros need to do differently to succeed in this new environment.
Trail of Breadcrumbs by PR-Squared
***** 5 stars
Quoting a recent study from Cision and George Washington University, Todd Defren reports that “an overwhelming majority of reporters and editors now depend on social media sources when researching their stories. Specifically, 89% said they turn to blogs for story research, 65% to social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and 52% to microblogging services such as Twitter.” In light of this, Todd views the PR pro’s role as “casting breadcrumbs” through social media for journalists and consumers/buyers to follow back to the PR sources.
Social Media, PR, and the Shape of Things to Come by CIO Zone
Michael Neubarth reacts to a PR Week piece in which Scott Monty details three ways in which PR pros have the opportunity to “shape social media’s future.” After reviewing these three areas, Michael contends that, “In the big picture, it is social media that is shaping the practice of PR more than PR is shaping social media.”
How PR Pros Are Using Social Media for Real Results by Mashable
Christina Warren takes “a look at how PR professionals are using social media (such as driving authenticity ad building brand loyalty) to achieve real results when dealing with business-to-business relationships…(and) some of the tools of the trade that PR pros are using to measure the success of their endeavors.” Among the tools noted are Omniture (web and social media analytics), Eloqua (marketing automation / demand generation software) and Twitalyzer (Twitter-specific measurement).
How to Reach Out to Bloggers by Chris Brogan
“Are you hoping to connect with bloggers and get the word out about your product or service?” If so, social media guru Chris Brogan has several helpful tips to make your outreach more successful, such as “Be there before the sale…If you want people to write about you, they should probably know about you first,” or what I term “warm outreach” (as opposed to cold outreach, where the first the blogger ever hears of you is your pitch).
SESNY: 5 Tips To Optimize Press Releases For Search by TopRank Online Marketing Blog
Adam Singer summarizes guidance from Meg Walker of PRWeb on how to search optimize press releases. Her advice includes knowing your audience (so you’re using the right keywords and story angle), incorporating images and video, and optimizing content elements like text links and image alt- tags.
The Top Free Press Release Distribution Sites by BigNews.biz
***** 5 stars
An outstanding list of the top 15 free PR distribution sites based on five criteria: Page Rank, distribution to Google News, Alexa traffic rank, cost of optional services, and rejection rate.
10 Free Social Media Tools Every PR Pro Should Master by Social Media Today
Adam Vincenzini reviews 10 tools that he believes “MUST be part of a modern communicator’s arsenal” including AllTop (for finding the most influential bloggers in any space), Social Mention (social media monitoring tool) and SWiX (an interesting tool though it appears to be no longer free).
10 More Online Tools Every PR Pro Should Master (Part Two) by Social Media Today
Building on his post above, Adam reviews 10 more key tools for PR pros including Addictomatic (social media dashboard), HootSuite (social media management platform) and Twitter Advanced Search, as well as a few worthy but less-known apps.
