Welcome to InkLings@InkHouse, the InkHouse Media + Marketing blog, where we share our experiences, thoughts on trends and news from the world of communications -- and try to have a little fun along the way.
As a communicator, Quora pushes all my buttons -- in a good way. But folks, let’s get serious. Let’s get over ourselves. Let’s stop trying to be cool and popular, let’s put on our business heads and focus on value and effort. Amid all this Quora buzz (and there have been several interesting articles written in recent days,) the following questions leap out at me. I don’t have the answers; I’m not sure anyone does yet. But it behooves us to think about this stuff before we jump on the bandwagon.
How do I manage another social site? I could spend hours on Quora but, seriously, I have a long, long to-do list to get to.
How do I best use it to complement what I’m already doing for clients on Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, …etc.?
Show me the APIs! If Quora is going to stick around, I’m going to need it to talk to my social media monitoring and measurement systems.
Other than we cool PR/social media/ IT peeps, who else is using Quora? Aren’t we just all talking to ourselves right now? Or is there a serious B2B or B2C audience?
Should I be recommending that clients participate to share content and build thought leadership?
Is it a viable lead gen or referring traffic source for inbound marketing?
Is it influencing attitudes and buying decisions?
Ultimately, Quora feels like another interesting model for finding and sharing information and answers, engaging with quality people, and for distributing and linking to valuable content. But I also think we need to slow down and assess its viability – or we’ll be spending all our time in Quora-land and not enough time focusing on what really matters as PR professionals: delivering value and results.
In part two of my series following a conversation with Scott Kirsner, the Innovation Economy columnist and blogger for the Boston Globe andRoss Levanto, SVP at Schwartz Communications, we talk about the future of the press release. Last week Ross posted a piece of that conversation about targeting your audience, which I encourage you to read.
The topic of the fate of the press release comes up often, most frequently from those who have embraced social media and view it as a relic from the past. Many of these entrepreneurs, CEOs and marketers are looking to use their blogs as the mouthpiece for their news.
Scott said that he comes across younger, more entrepreneurial companies that think they are old school. He said, “They’ll announce interesting things on their blogs and via Twitter, which is great because you feel like that stuff is coming off the CEO’s cuff, but I do wonder about breaking news via your blog or Twitter feed that you may have been able to get the Globe, the Economist or Wall Street Journal to write about.”
The latter point is a critical one. If you are Twitter or Facebook, yes, you can announce news on your blog and everyone will see it. But if you are a startup, it is not enough. If you build it, they might not necessarily come until you convince them it will be worthwhile. You should absolutely use Twitter, your blog and other social outlets to push out your news, but they should be part of a broader strategy to disseminate it to the right audiences through the right channels. While we in the technology community live and breath social media, not all of your customers (business or consumer) do.
So where does that leave the press release? It’s never been more important and should be used as one of a number of tools for a news announcement. Consider that:
·Many bloggers simply repackage press releases verbatim, which means that your message is getting out there in its truest form. This trend is on the rise as bloggers are under pressure to post news within minutes of it breaking.
·By issuing press release over wire services like PR Newswire, BusinessWire or MarketWire you are fueling SEO for your site, if you select your key words properly in your headlines.
·The press release remains an important tool for reporters at top tier outlets who need to evaluate the newsworthiness of a topic before they decide to write a story. This negotiating process almost always happens before the news has been published because it ensures that the news is not stale. Posting it on your blog instantly makes it old news.
As far as the future of the press release and breaking news via social media, this exchange between Ross and Scott was particularly informative:
·Ross: Do you think we’re moving toward some sort of reality where breaking news is aggregated from a mess of Twitter feeds looking for specific tags and then your roles is to identify trends and look at the bigger picture?
·Scott: Maybe, but there is still a role for good old-fashioned reporting. We’re here at the Charles Hotel and virtually every time I have breakfast here, there’s some bit of news I get by chatting with someone I run into. Since General Catalyst is here, I just got a tip a week or two ago that they are moving some people out to Palo Alto and opening and office. That wasn’t something that came through a Twitter feed.
My takeaway? Social media provides an amazing complement to public relations initiatives. While we should certainly adapt traditional practices (as we’ve seen with emergence of the “social media press release”), they still serve an important purpose for communicating news to reporters like Scott, and to bloggers who use them as fodder for their own posts.
Listen to audio from this portion of the conversation here (thanks to Scott Montminy for the editing):
At first social media sites like Facebook and Twitter were dominated by individuals just looking to share some photos or thoughts with other individuals. In the past few years there has been a heavy stream of businesses jumping aboard the social media bandwagon. There are still a lot of skeptics out there that don’t think having Twitter handle or Facebook page is going to make much of a difference to their company, or it’s not right for their type of company -- and I couldn’t disagree more.
Social media is here to stay. It might be constantly changing, but this way of engaging with people from all walks of life, from all over the world, isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Twitter recently reported that they had 125 million registered users. Imagine if you could tap into just a tiny percentage of those users? You really can if you go about it the right way!
You should definitely use the social media outlets to tell your customers about exciting company news, new products and any promotions you are running. But the key to a successful social media presence it to get down to a personal level with the customers or potential customers you engage with on these sites.
At InkHouse we have clients who do an outstanding job of this. They take the time to answer every question tweeted their way, thank those who gave their product or company praise, and do their best to make sure problems and concerns are addressed. It’s almost like another customer service channel at times, and customers are constantly turning to tweeting to a company rather than calling some robotic 800 number that usually ends up in punching the # sign over and over until your finger is numb.
These satisfied customers you just engaged with online often then take to their Twitter handles or Facebook walls and tell hundreds and even thousands of their followers how wonderful of a company yours was and that they made them feel like they mattered as a customer. Then those followers retweet it to their followers or share it with their Facebook friends, and over and over it gets retweeted and shared. Before you know it, those simple acts of customer engagements have made positive impressions on a countless number of people. Word of mouth has a whole different effect in the social media world.
Don’t even think for a second that your company’s line of business wouldn’t benefit from having a social media presence or isn’t the type of company to be tweeting. There is such a broad spectrum of companies using social media it would surprise you. I recently read an article about the growing number of plumbers using social media. They’ve been using Twitter to get advice from other plumbers, share knowledge and look for parts, as well as engage with their customers.
Still aren’t convinced you need social media? Don’t forget, consumers aren’t the only ones using Facebook and Twitter. There are countless decision makers who have a presence on social media sites. Having tools like Twitter and Facebook in your toolbox gives your company another way to start a conversation with these decision makers that some of your competitors may not have tried yet.
