Category

Social Media

Jul 11
Love0

Truffles, and Social Media in Education, on the Air with Coy Barefoot

By Communications, Crisis Communications, Social Media

Coy Barefoot asked me what my last, best meal was. I had to tell him all about the amazing dish I had while in Croatia; pasta with delicious truffles. That’s it, there on the left. It was incredible!

Other than that, Coy and I talked about education and social media, online learning programs and more, on Charlottesville: Right Now! You can listen, here.

The inspiration for the conversation was the Education and Social Media Roundtable discussion hosted by Jaggers Communications this week. We gathered communications directors and school leadership to discuss how social media is being used by schools themselves, and by the students and parents who represent each school’s community.

It’s interesting to learn what challenges schools face that are different from businesses or nonprofit organizations, and to tackle the role social platforms play when the school is dealing with a crisis situation.

The discussion was interesting and great connections were made between individuals in those roles in the greater Charlottesville community — it’s always exciting for us to facilitate those relationships.

Something that came out of the Roundtable was the concept of fostering good digital citizenship. We’re fascinated by this and how we can assist schools in creating the programs that support it.

We’d love to host more Roundtable discussions in our community on a variety of topics. What industries or topics would you like to see in a Roundtable series?

 

 

Jul 10
Love0

It’s Not just that WE are Social. The World is.

By Communications, Social Media

We talk about social media. We talk with clients about their social media strategy. We talk on this website about social media trends and forecasts. We are a public relations firm. Our job is to relay a company’s stories and messages to the public. It’s just that the public happens to be on social  networks.

We have said this in so many different ways. Social networks were a fundamental tool in the Arab Spring uprising. They are a platform to help people get jobs. If Facebook were a country, it’s population would be 100 BILLION. We’ve talked about how it doesn’t matter what your perception of the social networks is, their importance is undeniable. But still, companies occasionally still tell us that they are not interested in the social media piece.

That is ok. We can still help you with brand positioning, crisis communications and public relations. But there’s a big chunk of the world that will never hear your message because you didn’t present it in the space that they’re already visiting.

 

Jun 28
Love0

Want More Sales? Trust in Me!

By Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Media, Social Media

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sales and how social platforms and processes have affected them. Sales, in case we’ve all forgotten, is the mother of all ROIs. No matter what marketing or business development efforts you engage in, the rubber meets the proverbial road at sales. Did all our effort generate more closed business, or didn’t it?

The social, mobile web has unleashed a torrent of attention deficit issues. There are so many “opportunities” thrown at us everywhere, so many chances to “connect” and “share” anytime that it takes a LOT to get our attention, and the usual cold call or marketing drivel just doesn’t make the grade. At all. As soon as we see an ad, we’re out. To make matters worse (for the seller), we can get most of the information we need to make a decision online these days. To rise above the crowd, companies need a serious advantage, a serious leg up. So what is that leg up?

Trust.

Trust? Wow, OK. So how do you build that with perfect strangers when you’re under a lot of pressure to close new business from the higher-ups? Well, it’s not simple, but it’s well worth the effort. The good news is that one really great feature of all these amazing new social, digital and mobile platforms is that they provide an unprecedented opportunity to LISTEN and absorb conversations that may be taking place around your brand, industry, and process that were never previously available. That means that if you choose, you can start anticipating your customers’ needs by paying attention the conversations they are already having without you. It’s like 24-7 market research that helps you know when and how to interact with a potential customer so that your abilities are aligned with his needs.

Will this chair fit in my office? When’s the payback on that power purchase agreement? Do I need seven or eight generators to run my office? What’s the best way to select a delivery company? When you couple listening with a decent content development strategy, you can become the go-to thought leader in your space because you listened to these questions and created content to proactively answer them. Trust can be further established, often with people you haven’t even talked to yet.

So when you DO finally choose to engage in a sales call, you might have already provided the answers to a potential customer’s business problem via some other process like a white paper, tweet or an online referral. If you offer those solutions freely, in a consultative way, even more trust can be established. You have the proper context at the right time to sell successfully. At that point, it’s not even selling—it’s helping.

To win business these days, you have to be engaged in a lot more places, and over a longer period, to establish trust. Trust is the only way to hold a prospect’s attention in the attention deficit world.

Jun 27
Love0

Filtering the Firehose

By Social Media

When a company begins to think about monitoring the social web for mentions of their brand, news of the industry or other content relevant to their business, they sometimes pause. It’s overwhelming, the idea of how MUCH content there might be to absorb. How much of it will be worthwhile? How much will be a waste of time?

It IS a struggle, at first, to set up the right way to filter the noise. There can be a firehose stream at first, but learning to filter it, to prioritize and strategically exclude, to scan, bookmark and manage so that the best of what’s coming through is found and absorbed.

We’ve had a lot of practice at this and often provide the first set of eyes on client feeds. Our role in setting up what we call the “listening infrastructure” is often supported with the next stage: reviewing and creating a “Readers’ Digest” of the best content around the web in the industry category, mentions worth reacting and responding to, and content worth sharing forward to customers and prospects.

Even if your internal team is pretty good at managing the reading, a second (or third, or fourth) pair of eyes on what’s available helps capture more of what’s valuable.

Sometimes the overwhelming feeling is so strong companies shy away from even beginning to pay attention; this is a mistake of devastating proportions. Companies MUST know what is being said about their brands and what news in their industry impacts their business. Since the tools exist to make this possible and in fact, easy, there are no acceptable excuses for ignoring the content. It is the expectation of the world at large that you, as a business, are interested in paying attention to your customers.

Jun 21
Love0

Forget about the Tools: What’s Your Reason to be There?

By Communications, Social Media

We have a lot of initial conversations with client prospects that get hung up on tools. We don’t need to talk about Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter — the specific tools aren’t any more critical to name in developing communication strategy than defining that we might use phones, or, say, a laptop.

The problem with talking about specific tools is that each person has their individual experience with that specific tool, and it may not be in a business context at all. There are still many business people who hear the word “blog” and think of ranting online diaries in which people air their dirty laundry. OF COURSE that’s not what we’re talking about, but certain words (Facebook, blog, Twitter, e-mail marketing, YouTube) really set people off on a tangent.

We like to derail that conversation by focusing on what message the client is trying to deliver. We talk more about providing content in places where intended audiences ALREADY ARE and will find what the client wants them to find. We try to steer clear of specific tool-driven strategy (tools change; the content and the reasons to use them do not).

What’s useful is defining the best possible outcomes of communicating about your business. Keep focused on that; don’t get distracted by the platforms.