The title of this long due post may sound a bit boring as there is really nothing that you don’t already know about spamming. It is indeed extremely irritating to deal with spam on a daily basis, and you wish for some breakthrough technology to spam proof your mailbox (although Gmail does this quiet effectively). If you have been looking at the spam you receive, you will realize that the spam you receive now has undergone a sea change. This is the type of spam that no spam guard can ever be designed to quarantine or free your mailbox of. These days you receive a lot of content in your mailbox from your own network of friends, its almost never intended as spam, and is largely an off shoot of our active online social networking lifestyles.
Blame it on Web 2.0 if you must, but the reality is that we are generating more spam than ever before. This overload of information is not limited to personal lives, it has a spill over effect and is creeping into our professional lives as well. And that is what I want to address here, more specifically from a PR point of view.
Take for instance a case where you send out or post information pertaining to your client on every possible social network, group, forum and blog. What happens next? What are the parameters for evaluation of your efforts – the number of places you managed to post your links, the number people you managed to reach? While this practice is commonplace, it has no meaning because what you actually need to monitor or listen to is the conversation your content generates. Is it in line with your core objectives?
Let’s take a moment first to define spam in the context of this discussion. In all our enthusiasm to integrate social media into our PR plans, we are actively participating in forums, social networks, creating groups, fan pages, twitter accounts, and posting and mass mailing content to bloggers. Stop to think for a moment about what is that we are doing here – all we are doing is distributing content/information about our clients and making it easily accessible to anyone and everyone.
And therein lies the crux of the problem. While we have the right intentions in our SMPR efforts, the application is often off the mark. Anyone and Everyone is almost never your target audience. And pushing information without context to the receiver is nothing but spamming. While traditional media has been at the receiving end of this sort of spam for ages and have their own ways and means of dealing with it, spamming digital media platforms and bloggers can actually be counterproductive.
So before you put ' Create a Facebook Fan page’ in your PR plan, just because you can, take some time to evaluate your client in relation to the community. Are there for instance any hate communities already existing on that social network? What is the general opinion of the network?
We are all aware that most social media efforts start with friends and bloggers. Yes your friend will become a fan once or twice, but is reaching out to your friend your core objective? We all use our friends as seeding grounds with the intent of making our messages viral. And while your friends may be indulgent, without a relevant context the friend of your friend is not going to subscribe to your effort.
Now that we have defined the problem, where do we go from here? The steps involved in approaching social media are no different from traditional media. Study and understand how different tools and platforms work, in much the same way that you would study newspapers, magazines or television channels.
First and foremost, listen and listen close. Just like you gauge the media perceptions about a particular client, spend some time understanding what people are saying about your client in the digital space. Classify the different points of view and classify them, for example: key influencers, followers (people who subscribe to that negative/positive view).
Evaluate that report and then develop your messages. Evaluate these messages and ensure that they fall in line with your overall strategy. At no point you can have separate messaging for traditional and digital medium. You might follow different tactics to counter different views but your messaging should remain same. You also need to define a long term social media strategy and implement it in phases.
When developing your strategy, break down the social media tools into two groups:
In the initial phase it might be a good idea to restrict your plan to the distribution tools. It is also prudent to start building/creating a digital profile for your client at this stage. It could be a blog, a website which is Web 2.0 friendly and have content which is updated regularly and distributed on social multimedia sites like YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare etc. (If a digital profile already exists, you should work towards aligning it with the overall strategy).
Your next phase would involve establishing contact and providing context of engagement. Only when that is done should you consider participation. The golden rule and this has been said before is ‘Don’t start speaking just because Web 2.0 is all about participation and expressing yourself’. When forming or using a community tool for instance, define the strategy first, if you succeed in forming an active community, how will you keep them engaged and what will you like them to do for you?
Through all of this do not lose sight of the first step: listening. Continue to monitor conversation at all times to see whether your effort is producing the desired results.
Now this is no different from what you will do for traditional media, but when it comes to social media we seem to think the basics of communication change. They don’t. Social media is not merely a distribution tool, it’s live active conversation and unless you are talking and participating contextually, you are only creating noise, and noise is nothing but spamming my friend.
Blame it on Web 2.0 if you must, but the reality is that we are generating more spam than ever before. This overload of information is not limited to personal lives, it has a spill over effect and is creeping into our professional lives as well. And that is what I want to address here, more specifically from a PR point of view.
Take for instance a case where you send out or post information pertaining to your client on every possible social network, group, forum and blog. What happens next? What are the parameters for evaluation of your efforts – the number of places you managed to post your links, the number people you managed to reach? While this practice is commonplace, it has no meaning because what you actually need to monitor or listen to is the conversation your content generates. Is it in line with your core objectives?
Let’s take a moment first to define spam in the context of this discussion. In all our enthusiasm to integrate social media into our PR plans, we are actively participating in forums, social networks, creating groups, fan pages, twitter accounts, and posting and mass mailing content to bloggers. Stop to think for a moment about what is that we are doing here – all we are doing is distributing content/information about our clients and making it easily accessible to anyone and everyone.
And therein lies the crux of the problem. While we have the right intentions in our SMPR efforts, the application is often off the mark. Anyone and Everyone is almost never your target audience. And pushing information without context to the receiver is nothing but spamming. While traditional media has been at the receiving end of this sort of spam for ages and have their own ways and means of dealing with it, spamming digital media platforms and bloggers can actually be counterproductive.
So before you put ' Create a Facebook Fan page’ in your PR plan, just because you can, take some time to evaluate your client in relation to the community. Are there for instance any hate communities already existing on that social network? What is the general opinion of the network?
We are all aware that most social media efforts start with friends and bloggers. Yes your friend will become a fan once or twice, but is reaching out to your friend your core objective? We all use our friends as seeding grounds with the intent of making our messages viral. And while your friends may be indulgent, without a relevant context the friend of your friend is not going to subscribe to your effort.
Now that we have defined the problem, where do we go from here? The steps involved in approaching social media are no different from traditional media. Study and understand how different tools and platforms work, in much the same way that you would study newspapers, magazines or television channels.
First and foremost, listen and listen close. Just like you gauge the media perceptions about a particular client, spend some time understanding what people are saying about your client in the digital space. Classify the different points of view and classify them, for example: key influencers, followers (people who subscribe to that negative/positive view).
Evaluate that report and then develop your messages. Evaluate these messages and ensure that they fall in line with your overall strategy. At no point you can have separate messaging for traditional and digital medium. You might follow different tactics to counter different views but your messaging should remain same. You also need to define a long term social media strategy and implement it in phases.
When developing your strategy, break down the social media tools into two groups:
- Distributions tools: RSS, Flickr, slideshare, YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, Stumbleupon etc.
- Community & Active Conversation tools: Twitter, message boards, Q&A forums, Facebook groups, Facebook fan pages (FB groups and Fan Pages are very different and offer different controls so make an informed choice), Orkut communities, LinkedIn communities and groups etc. (Some of the distribution tool may also have community options but they are not necessarily built as a community platforms).
In the initial phase it might be a good idea to restrict your plan to the distribution tools. It is also prudent to start building/creating a digital profile for your client at this stage. It could be a blog, a website which is Web 2.0 friendly and have content which is updated regularly and distributed on social multimedia sites like YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare etc. (If a digital profile already exists, you should work towards aligning it with the overall strategy).
Your next phase would involve establishing contact and providing context of engagement. Only when that is done should you consider participation. The golden rule and this has been said before is ‘Don’t start speaking just because Web 2.0 is all about participation and expressing yourself’. When forming or using a community tool for instance, define the strategy first, if you succeed in forming an active community, how will you keep them engaged and what will you like them to do for you?
Through all of this do not lose sight of the first step: listening. Continue to monitor conversation at all times to see whether your effort is producing the desired results.
Now this is no different from what you will do for traditional media, but when it comes to social media we seem to think the basics of communication change. They don’t. Social media is not merely a distribution tool, it’s live active conversation and unless you are talking and participating contextually, you are only creating noise, and noise is nothing but spamming my friend.
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