By: Aaron Mann

The post last week on ReadWriteStart "Does your PR Firm Need a PR Firm?" got me thinking about some of the ways PR differs from social media:

1. Social is Personal:  Here is a sample email posted by blogger Jason Mendelson :

Hi Jason,

Wanted to make you aware of the below funding announcement just released regarding a new [BLAH-nothing I care about]. Happy to make any introductions to the CEO, [John Smith] or any of the  below individuals for further comment, if interested in learning more.

Any questions or additional information you may have, I can be reached at 212-867-5309 or jenny@randomprfirm.com

Thanks,

Jenny

What’s wrong with this approach?  Just about everything.  First and foremost , it is clear that the sender didn’t spend the time to read the blog and make sure their message was relevant to the author and his audience.  If it wasn’t, don’t outreach.  If you think it is relevant then open the email with a paragraph that shows that you read the blog and why you think your message is relevant.  You won’t hit it every time but that isn’t an excuse for not trying.

Trying to scale social media outreach by cutting 15-30 minutes of review and messaging time per blog is appealing.  But that’s not social.

2. Social is Relevant:  Choose your audience by relevance not segments:  

Quote from a PR professional on why a blog was included in outreach “…in practice, we try pretty hard to target specific kinds of content only to individuals who are interested, and invest in rather expensive journalist and blogger databases like that from Cision, as many other top firms do.” 

The defense seems to be: “hey you were listed in a PR database” 

This may be true from a PR perspective, it is not from a social media perspective. You should choose your targets by relevance not segment.  Nothing replaces actually reading the content, which is also essential for brand stewardship. Socialarc has our own database of 10’s of thousands of sites.  But we don’t just push a “Mom” button and outreach.  Instead we use our Listening tools and some pretty hard work on site selection to identify the subset of our target audience that might actually be interested in a specific message.

3. Scope:  Social media isn’t just blogger outreach (or the Twitter/FB/Foursquare de jour).  It is message boards, groups, and all the little niche corners.  Most important is knowing what the etiquette is for each platform and how they all work together. While every campaign is different, we find that blog outreach is typically only about 25-40% of the total effort.  Social is blogs and a whole lot more.

4. Ask Permission:  Carpet Bombing is bad practice.  Spammy blog or forum comments are also bad practice.  Here is a good guide to commenting: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_comment_about_your_comp.php  . Our Rule #1 is ask permission form owner/moderators first.  Yes, we occasionally get flamed for something.  But the fact we asked permission first goes a long way with the communities.

5. Social happens over time:  PR tends to happen as a ‘blast” at one point in time.  Effective social media outreach happens over the course of months or longer.  This allows better relevance matching (a theme!) as you can wait until the blogger posts something relevant to what you want to say, instead of force feeding it at a particular point in time to suit you.

Do we have the occasional miss?  Of course we do.  The key to managing this process really comes down to being human from the outset – be personal, be authentic, own up quickly when you do err and then course correct. 

All of this translates to hard and time-consuming work.  We think the rewards are more than worth it.

By: Aaron Mann

As a brand marketer, how do you figure out which of your agencies can actually execute the social media job for you? Here is a list of questions that any social media partner should be able to answer clearly and transparently: 

1. What processes do they have in place to ensure consistent, measurable, and on-message execution? Are they  able to map this process in detail, with stakeholder touch points clearly defined?
2. Who is actually doing the outreach?  Are they onsite?  Full or part-time?  What is their profile and how are they managed?
3. What applications and systems do they use?  How can you as a client gain visibility?
4. What is their process and methodology for measuring results and how can you use the output?
5. How do they monitor for FTC guideline compliance and what process do they have in place to handle issues?

Consistent tactical execution is hard operational work.  Make sure your partner has the applications, systems and processes to make it work for you.  If they know how to execute, chances are they are going to be pretty good at the strategies and big ideas that drive successful campaigns.

A few months ago Social Media Group posted this fantastic RFP guide: http://socialmediagroup.com/new/rfptemplate/SocialMediaRFP_Template.pdf.  If you are a brand marketer considering a full-blown Social Media agency RFP we highly recommend using it.

And if you are trying to figure out which of your agency partners can execute for you – ask them some tough questions.



We get the the chance to work on a lot of interesting campaigns, for great clients and agencies.  We were kicking around  common themes and some things that disappoint about social media.  Here are our top 3, along with some hints on how to deal with them:

1. They aren't always talking about you:  As much as Marketers might hope that every (or even most) social media mention of their product and brand will contain deep customer discussion about them, it simply isn't the case.  A lot of times the brand or product is mentioned only tangentially to the conversation.  Our hint:  In order to drive real insights, it is critical to separate out the different types of conversations. It is heavy lifting, but worth it.

2. Your content won't go viral:  Very, very little content actually goes "viral", so set the right expectations.  We prefer to plan for "talkable" by creating content that people want, delivered at the right time and in the right way.  Our hint:  Focus on adding value and let the viral lightning strike take care of itself.

3. Social Media doesn't scale like traditional media: The good news is that an effective social media marketing campaign can be a very efficient lever.  The bad news is that usually you can't spend 10X and get a commensurate lift in campaign results.  This can drive Marketers nuts, after all we all want to do "more of what works". Our hint: Think long-term "always on" by developing value-add approaches that will work for your short-term goal and for long-term relationship building.

That's Socialarc's top three, what would you add?