Eric Schwartzman

QR code marketing, or quick response codes, are huge in Japan. Still, even though they’ve been around for a while in the US, they’re only just beginning to gain adoption among marketers and public relations professionals.

QR Codes let you download content with your cell phone camera. Instead of thumb typing on your mobile device, you snap a photo (or technically speaking, “scan” a two-dimensional bar code) and you’re either directed to a website, or sent a file, text, calendar item, or contact information.

With the growth of location-based social networking and smartphones, the possibilities for communicators to drive online traffic through QR codes are endless.  QR codes appear on billboards, comic books, tombstones...even cupcakes!

In this episode, Wayne Sutton business development and marketing specialist at TriOut, and Master Sergeant Donald Preston of US Forces, Japan talk about their experiences using QR Codes for organizational communications.

SHOW NOTES:

01:26 Mark Sprague of Lexington eBusiness consulting’s recent Search Engine Land blog post “QR Codes: Are You Ready for Paper-Based QR Codes?”

02:53 Wayne Sutton’s experience with QR Codes involves using posters to promote a city arts festival to drive website traffic to the schedule of events online and the development of a mobile application QR code reader.  

His North Carolina-based start-up TriOut is developing what he calls “Quick Check-In Codes,” which are QR Codes that can be used to check into location-based social networking services more effortlessly by simply scanning a code.

04:47 QR Codes can be measured either through custom URL redirects or QR Code generators with built-in measurement analytics, including the date and time, geolocation data, and the type of mobile device that scanned the code.  

Combining QR code measurement with standard website metrics and a conversion activity like enewsletter signups, a Facebook “Like,” or a Twitter Follow would offer the best of all worlds.

06:43 Popular QR Code generators include Qreatebuzz.com, 2DCode.com, and Kaywa.

07:25 Tippinn in New York, which helps public relations firms and digital market agencies with QR Codes warns against customizing the aesthetics too much because it can cause them to fail when scanned.  A positive user experience with a QR Code is more important than clever visual styling. It must load quickly, transit the user to the designated website, and transmit the right calendar item or contact info.

10:51 To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation between Japan and the United States, US Forces Japan produced a Manga comic book about what the US Military is doing in Japan and to drive traffic to a corresponding public affairs campaign website. QR Codes are already hugely popular in Japan.

12:30 The Magna generated 16,000 unique visits from mobile devices (of which 7,000 were from iPhones) to the public affairs campaign website. She was not at all difficult to sell to command because of the widespread adoption of QR Codes in Japan, which appear on billboards, bus shelters, and subway advertisements throughout Tokyo.

16:10 The use of QR Codes in the offline world versus on websites.  A new WordPress Plug-In that auto generates new QR Codes for each post to allow readers to scan posts and read them later on a mobile device or email them to a friend.

18:28 Sean McGarry asks what is the benefit of QR Codes versus bar codes. Is this the mobile version of VHS versus Beta? And is there a QR version of Sticky Bits?  However, since people associate bar codes with price information, adopting the new behavior of scanning a QR code with a mobile device may be easier if the regulations are new and different.  Wayne thinks QR Codes are new, so they’re more likely to be associated with new behavior.

21:20 Whether or not it’s a good idea to write something like “scan this code” right under the placement of a QR Code on a billboard or in print.  Examples of QR Codes include a recent Calvin Klein billboard on Sunset Blvd., on tombstones to retrieve information about the deceased, and for micropayments at Starbucks.

27:28 End

Photo by Mitya Ivanov on Unsplash

Demetrios Skalkotos, SVP for Global Corporation Solutions of NASDAQ OMX [NASDAQ:NDAQ], the world’s largest exchange company, sits down with guest host Mark Story, Director of New Media at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to discuss their new Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Platform, designed to make press release and Regulation Fair Disclosure compliance self-service for investor relations and public relations firms.

NASDAQ’s new DIY platform offers media monitoring and press release distribution on a single platform.  According to Skalkotos, self-service content distribution tools have been more prevalent in Europe.

NASDAQ introduces the tool in the U.S. market with a one-button option to wrap press materials with information that satisfies SEC disclosure regulations.

The system puts NASDAQ’s GlobeNewswire distribution network more directly into the hands of public relations professionals. With enhanced search engine optimization capabilities and audience targeting options, DIY further distinguishes itself as a lower-cost solution for traditional press release distribution.

Skalkotos also discusses NASDAQ’s Social Stream, a video release service that aggregates a company’s social media content into a single site to simplify reviewing a company’s public profile.

NASDAQ OMX is the world’s largest exchange company with trading, technology, and public company service capabilities spanning six continents. NASDAQ OMX Global Corporate Solutions provides technology that powers global business communications.  

The views expressed in this interview are those of Mark Story and his alone. They do not necessarily reflect those of the SEC Chairman, Commissioners, or his colleagues at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

These podcast show notes were written and optimized by Sandra Burrowes, Senior Public Affairs Specialist at The Mayo Clinic.

Over the past few months, the best social media management dashboards for digital marketing companies to choose from have exploded.  

In addition to early contenders like HootSuite and TweetDeck, dozens of new applications are designed to help teams manage multiple social networking accounts and measure the ROI of their efforts.  

If you are a digital marketing agency owner, this episode explains which social media engagement dashboards are the clear winners and what makes them much better.

White Horse emerging media manager Jamie Beckland, the lead author of a report that ranks ten social media management dashboard applications against each other in three categories, shares the inside scoop on the winners and explains which features marketers should be looking for when they evaluate enterprise-class software applications for social media engagement.

White Horse calls them social media management platforms and ranks them for their ability to integrate with social networks, offer practical rules and permission-based team management, and provide the best measurement capabilities.  If your business is social media communications, this is an episode you don’t want to miss.

Social Media Management Dashboard Insights

01:18  Social media management platforms are web-based tools accessible via the browser that let you manage your social networking engagement activities in a variety of popular and niche social networks in one consolidated tool, give teams a practical solution containing branded social networking accounts, and provide integrated tracking and analysis of interactions that ensue.

03:11 Social media management platforms offer social media monitoring to varying degrees of success. Still, currently, White Horse advises clients to keep social media monitoring activities separate to aggregate a more in-depth perspective of who’s saying what and where. While social media management platform vendors claim robust monitoring, the solutions are not as comprehensive as those from vendors specializing exclusively in social media monitoring.  Regarding monitoring, social media management platforms are weakest at tracking conversations on the blogosphere and in online forums.

04: 46 Social media management platforms make it easy to publish to a variety of social networks from one place, but they don’t capture and display all the social interaction that may ensue in the social network to which they’re published.  It’s a dynamic space that is changing, but currently, social media management platforms are better for talking than for listening.

05:44  The inability of social media management platforms to see and report back interactions that transpire inside native social networks is partly due to the capacity of the developers behind them but also because Facebook may block some of that activity from being captured by third-party applications.  Jamie Beckland calls these “growing pains for social media and corporate marketers in general.”

06:44  Jamie likens the rapid pace of innovation in the social media management space as the “Cambrian period,” where things are moving so quickly, with many new entrants promising to be all things to all people, and marketers need to be careful not to rely too heavily on social media management platforms at this early stage.  “You’re going to need still to use the native platform.  You want to be able to have an authentic conversation on Facebook; you need to understand what the rules of engagement are on Facebook,” says Jamie.  Having that first-person experience in the native social network where the conversations occur, rather than through a social media management platform, is critical.

07:35 Social media management platforms use two different presentation styles for their user interfaces.  One is the inbox style, which consolidates all your activities into one central stream, and the other is the channelization style, which displays the streams separately by social network so you can appreciate how their interaction differs from social network to social network. According to Jamie, the inbox presentation style requires the user to invest more attention in prioritizing messages. In contrast, the channel style provides a degree of segmentation that makes it easier to engage with many people.

11:23 In a new report, White Horse ranked social media management platforms in three categories: social site integration in terms of what they offer today and their roadmap for staying up to date with the social networks of tomorrow, team workflow management, and measurement analytics.

11: 48  HootSuite, Objective Marketer, Spredfast, and Sprinklr scored highest for social site integration with 4 out of 5, but no one scored a perfect five because no social media management platform currently integrates non-text based information such as podcasts as online video, posing significant engagement challenges. Some of the tools do use the metadata or text comments associated with YouTube videos to find and display that content. Still, until they consider the actual video content, either by tracking closed captioning or by introducing an audio-to-text translation solution, this will remain a handicap of social media management platforms.

14:51  Spredfast and Sprinklr ranked highest for team account management because they had the most sophisticated understanding of how marketing teams are structured and did the best job using analytics to help couples find those conversations most worthy of engagement at any moment in time.  These social media management platforms also do the best job integrating automated sentiment analysis and ranking, in which conversations come from the most influential online voices. Spredfast and Sprinklr also offer the ability to set up rules, from a content management system perspective, to provide team members with varying degrees of authority based on permission levels.

16:12  On the analytics side, the top-scoring social media management platforms were Argyle Social, HootSuite, Objective Marketer, and Sprinklr, primarily because they integrate with third-party social media measurement platforms like Google Analytics and Omniture SiteCatalyst.  Measurement is the basis of justifying social media marketing to the C suite, and those are the social media management platforms that do the best job tracking, incorporating, and delivering that data.  Argyle went live with Google Analytics support at the outset, integrating with Omniture and pulling conversion tracking data back into their platform.  Argyle tracks on a per-tweet and per-Facebook status update basis the monetary value of a particular social media message.  HootSuite and Objective Marketer integrate with Google Analytics and HootSuite does a good job building their analytics capabilities. Sprinklr ranked highly for their ability to perform custom integration with whatever measurement package the client requests. Jamie says Sprinklr has completed successfully for clients “a number of times.”

19:22 The White Horse social media management platform ranking study rates HootSuite, Spredfast, and Sprinklr highest but the final decision should be based on personal preference concerning how the application works, who within the organization will be using the tools because different business units have different needs and the management structure of the organization.  Suppose you have an extreme need to demonstrate ROI through conversion analytics tracking. In that case, that’s going to narrow down the field of choices considerably, so the choice should be made based on the objectives the marketer is trying to achieve.

22:30 End

Social media management vendor grid by G2

Managing effective brand ambassador programs involves tapping into what your stakeholders and constituents are genuinely passionate about for product marketing purposes. So harnessing and amplifying the voices of Fiskateers – crafters who are also loyal brand advocates for the scissors company – was the objective of this brand ambassador program, launched and managed by their public relations firm under the auspices of Geno Church.

According to digital ambassador marketing expert Geno Church, the charismatic word-of-mouth Inspiration Officer at public relations firm Brains on Fire, it means rolling up your sleeves and discovering what will improve the lives of your online community through influencer marketing.

Why?

Because a true fan will propel and defend your reputation and promote your brand long after your strategic marketing communications campaign has subsided.

They have a sense of ownership and shared identity, and your success and their success are aligned. Drawing on his experience building a community of Fiskateers and reaching out to save teen smokers in South Carolina, Geno Church talks about igniting a community of brand ambassadors, the difference between passion conversations and product conversations, and his new book by the same name, Brands on Fire.  

This interview was recorded at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in DC.

How PR Firms Manage Brand Ambassador Programs

01:37 Creating a community of responsible young people to combat teen smoking was a movement that changed Geno Church’s career ten years ago. Today, his message is that communications strategies shouldn’t focus on social media tactics and tools but on learning from people and empowering them to carry a message as brand ambassadors.

03:31 A look at why it isn’t sustainable to approach social media marketing communications the same way you approach mainstream marketing. Traditional media messages don’t ignite communities – the goal is to go directly to the person engaged in the conversation and they will discover how to become a brand ambassador.

05:11 A brand audit by scissors-maker Fiskars showed an emotional disconnect between the brand and its customers. Geno shares the out-of-the-box approach PR firm Brains on Fire used to ignite and engage the Fiskars community online and the non-traditional involvement required by the company's in-house marketing team.

09:49 Understand the conversation going on in your community before you start thinking strategically or tactically. Why do your customers and employees value your brand? Before building a promotional digital ambassador program, uncover everything you can about how your consumers use your product.

11:06 The crucial differences between a strategic communications campaign and an influencer marketing movement.

12:27 A discussion about drivers that can activate a community and talking with a target community to identify how to promote the voices of brand ambassadors. The practice of focusing on the human element aspects of influencer engagement, whether online or off.

16:00 Discussion about using negative emotions to activate an army of goodwill ambassadors vs. positive emotions and the sustainability of both approaches.

17:17  How to build a sustainable brand ambassador program that stays positive and can police itself.

18:55 The differences between activating communities around policies and ideas vs. igniting communities for promoting and selling products. A discussion of Love146, an organization devoted to abolishing child sex slavery and exploitation.

22:22 Market research reveals how social media is used and viewed in different countries. Geno and Eric Schwartzman discuss fear and greed as motivators in mature markets vs. developing ones, including discussing challenging circumstances in Johannesburg, South Africa.

28:57 The methods for tapping passion in developing and maturing communities are different. Still, the igniting community always revolves around talking with people and walking with them to discover what they need and what value you can provide.

30:27 The role of community mentors and the value, importance, and methods for keeping brand ambassadors inspired, engaged, and motivated.

33:23 Geno’s hard-won advice on how to prepare for the world of parenting online.

37:19 End

Photo by Morgan Harris on Unsplash

Search engine optimization is part of public relations, Rebecca Lieb analyst and author of The Truth About Search Engine Optimization, tells PR agency leader and guest host Sally Falkow in this special episode about the complementary aspects of public relations and SEO, recorded at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in DC.  

SEO Consulting Skills PR Firms Need

PR agency professionals need to know keyword research, on-page and off-page SEO, technical SEO expertise, content strategy development, analytics proficiency, local SEO knowledge, keep abreast of algorithm updates, conduct competitive analysis, effective communication, have a basic understanding of HTML/CSS, be familiar with content management systems, possess ethical link-building capabilities, conversion rate optimization skills, integration of social media into SEO strategies, content marketing proficiency, utilization of SEO tools, mobile SEO best practices, have the ability to create and deliver comprehensive SEO reports and be able to defend against a negative SEO attack.

When a website ranks on the first page of Search Engine Page Results (SERP) for relevant keywords, it gains higher visibility. This increased visibility positively impacts how the website is perceived, as users often associate top-ranking results with credibility and trustworthiness. Effective reputation management ensures that the information consumers learn about a brand or individual online is positive and accurate. Ranking well in SERPs contributes to a positive online reputation. That;'s wny SEO is part of PR, according to Lieb.

Press Release SEO

Press releases are now a key component to reliable SEO strategies. In the evolution of press releases, they were once confidential exchanges solely between media outlets and public relations professionals, transmitted via fax or traditional mail. Restricted to their intended recipients, press releases remained discreet.

However, today, press releases are disseminated through wire services, instantly appearing on prominent platforms like Yahoo, Google, Bing, and various news feeds. This transformation has revolutionized the landscape of news distribution and search engine optimization. It has also blurred the line between public relations practitioners acting as storytellers and journalists. The ubiquity of online press releases presents both opportunities and challenges.

A more personalized, exclusive pitch is now imperative to captivate the attention of online journalists and bloggers. Simply recycling information no longer holds the appeal it once did. It's a new era in press release dissemination, demanding a more strategic and refined approach.

Media Relations vs. Influencer Outreach

In comparing mainstream news media relations to grassroots communications, it becomes evident that the two spheres require distinct approaches. Before venturing into these channels, individuals must immerse themselves in the environment, adapt to its nuances, and master the appropriate tone and language to engage a different audience effectively. This audience is not necessarily professional journalists but individuals who converse on their own terms. Consequently, tailoring one's communication strategies becomes paramount. For instance, in a recent conversation, a communication professional mentioned a nutraceutical project, withholding specific details due to client confidentiality. However, they shared insights into their pursuit of various online communities centered around discussions about different health conditions. This anecdote underscores the importance of understanding and engaging with grassroots communities on their terms, a departure from the structured realm of mainstream news media relations.

These competencies form the foundation for a successful PR agency with SEO consulting expertise, contributing to improved search engine rankings, increased organic traffic, and achieving business objectives.

Dangers of Hiring a PR Firm Without SEO Expertise

The potential pitfalls of enlisting a PR firm without in-house SEO consulting expertise loom large. While public relations agencies have been somewhat tardy in learning the intricacies of technical SEO, the consequences of their hesitance are clear.

The landscape of social media engagement has witnessed the convergence of various players, from advertising agencies to digital marketing companies and search engine optimization experts. This unfolding scenario resembles a competitive turf war, with each contender vying for dominance and recognition.

To underscore the situation's urgency is not to be alarmist but a reflection of the reality. The intersection of public relations and digital channels demands an understanding of SEO, data mining, analytics, and creative content marketing. Emerging PR practitioners must equip themselves with these skills to remain competitive. Fortunately, this transition does not necessitate starting from scratch; rather, it involves adapting existing knowledge to new communication channels. While the essence of PR remains intact, the digital channels through which it operates have undeniably evolved.

Earned Media vs. Advertising Opportunites

In the digital age, earned media versus paid media presents PR agency professionals with a unique and evolving landscape. The traditional model heavily relied on purchasing airtime and print space to convey messages, with public relations specialists aiming to influence the editorial content and narratives surrounding those advertisements.

However, online news media outlets have ushered in a paradigm shift away from conventional advertising purchases. The focus now gravitates toward creating one's owned media platforms, such as websites and shared media presences on Facebook pages, blogs, podcasts, videocasts, and YouTube channels to extend the reach of those owned media assets in a sort of homeland embassy public relations strategy.

To maintain the vitality of these owned media assetsd, a consistent stream of engaging content becomes paramount. PR agency professionals are well-versed in the art of storytelling, so they find themselves at the center of this transformation.

PR firms possess the expertise to craft and narrate compelling stories for journalists and the broader public audience. Additionally, a noteworthy shift involves collaborative efforts between public relations agency practitioners and journalists, adapting their skills to online storytelling and branded content.

In her book, search engine optimization consulting expert Rebecca Lieb brings together more than 50 crucial facts and insights decision-makers must know to drive more web traffic through better search engine placement.

The Truth About Search Engine Optimization doesn't deliver abstract theory: it provides quick, bite-size, just-the-facts information and plain-English explanations that executives, decision-makers, and even small business owners can use, no matter what kind of sites you're running or what your goals and objectives are.  

Rebecca Lieb's perspective foreshadows the concept of cause-related SEO, which puts the message before the technical aspects of search engine optimization. Her book is a good read if you want to get into SEO consulting.

Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash

Communications strategy and grassroots campaigns are key to the beverage industry’s ability to influence consumer attitudes, says Susan Neely, President of the American Beverage Association (ABA). She was part of a panel discussion at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington D.C. called “Shaping the Debate: Public Affairs Strategies and the Health Care Reform Bill."

The American Beverage Association is the leading policy and public education advocate for the non-alcoholic beverage industry that employs nearly 220,000 people nationwide, generates more than $112 billion in annual sales, and has a direct economic impact of more than $136 billion.

Before leading the ABA, Susan Neely led public relations at the Department of Homeland Security, managing threat announcements, branding, public education campaigns, and crisis communications.

Grassroots Advocacy Insights from Susan Neely

1:00 Neely highlights the nature of her upcoming panel discussion at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference on grassroots advocacy and parts of a comprehensive communications strategy used by the ABA surrounding the recent Health Care Reform Bill.

1:30 Susan Neely's political advocacy experience as a Congressional and gubernatorial staffer, and, for three and a half years, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

2:00 The motivation behind her transition from White House staffer to trade association representative.

2:52 An overview of the grassroots activist work done by the American Beverage Association, why Susan Neely enjoys the beverage industry’s grassroots advocacy, and her work in this leading consumer products industry.

5:08 Childhood obesity and the beverage industry: Susan Neely looks at the impact the nation’s growing awareness of childhood obesity has had on the beverage industry. One in three children born today will develop Type 2 diabetes, directly related to obesity.

6:25 Susan Neely reflects on using corn syrup as a beverage sweetener and highlights initiatives by the beverage industry to help consumers watch their calories. These include a broader beverage selection, an industry-wide calorie reduction averaging 21 percent over the last ten years and new beverage labeling. A discussion of beverages sweetened by sugar and those sweetened by corn syrup.

9:35 Coke Classic vs. Coke Zero and what led to the Coca-Cola Company's decision to introduce Coke Zero.

11:09 Susan Neely responds to a UCLA Johnson Comprehensive Cancer Intake study that finds that pancreatic cancer cells use fructose to fuel their growth and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s grassroots activist campaign for a Soda-free Summer.

12:56 The use of social networking for digital grassroots strategy and its rising importance in lobbying. Communications strategists utilize social media to engage consumers in conversation and as an effective tool to influence buyer behavior.

14:31 Susan Neely predicts how social media will change the way traditional lobbying is done and how it already supports grassroots organizing and the public’s grassroots lobbying of the government.

17:11 How will social media influence advertising? Will the migration of advertising from traditional channels to social media outlets change how issue advocacy gets done inside the Beltway?

19:20 End

Photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash

Location based social networking at New York Fashion Week was all the rage, with more than 100,000 fashionistas checking-in, indicating clear winners and losers with respect to where the action and excitement was.

Joost van Dreunen of SuperData Research (acquired by Nielsen) analyzed the check-in data and shares his findings.  

Smart communications strategies embrace location based social networks as tools to drive customer retention, repeat visits and foot traffic, according to van Dreunen, who also did a second geo social networking study comparing Whole Foods to Trader Joe's, revealing significant insights about how each grocer’s customer base differs.

Joost van Dreunen PhD is managing director of SuperData Research, a research firm focusing on interactive entertainment and technology industries.

Prior to founding SuperData, he held senior analyst positions at Nielsen Online and DFC Intelligence.

SHOW NOTES

01:05 Joost’s describes the experience that led to him to look for location-based social networking traffic patterns among the crowd attending Fashion’s Night Out, a promotional event held during New York Fashion Week 2010.

4:06 A closer look was taken at total Foursquare check-ins in the Village and Soho. Which fashion house had the biggest crowd and some of the opportunities location based networks present to event planners and communicators.

8:24 The Foursquare analysis reveals that 31% of geo-based check-ins by Fashion’s Night Out participants continued into the wee hours of the morning, long after the participating retailers had closed, indicating further opportunity for event planners. Top-ranking retailers from Fashion’s Night Out are listed, and a discussion of why prominent fashion designer Marc Jacobs did not rank.

11:35 What promoters, event planners and participating vendors can learn about from the numbers behind the use of location based social networking apps on smart phones on Fashion’s Night Out. Why were certain retailers successful while others were not? Joost discusses the benefits of location based social networking to local businesses.

14:48 A seprate study of grocery store check-ins within a five-mile radius of a Whole Foods store. When were customers checking in? Were they at Whole Foods or at a competitor? Foursquare’s location based app allows Whole Foods to see who’s getting the lunch crowd, the after-work crowd, etc. and see where the opportunities are for the store to do better. Location based networking gives a point of comparison and a sense of market share.

19:53 The quantity of raw geo data generated by location based apps can be immense and that creates a barrier to meaningful analysis. Research firms like SuperData have the infrastructure to deal with the high data volume, however companies that aren’t in a position to hire a professional research firm to crunch the number can work directly with Foursquare.

24:57 End

These podcast show notes were written and optimized by Sandra Burrowes, Senior Public Affairs Specialist at Mayo Clinic

Photo by Yogendra Singh on Unsplash

Communicating in status updates and tweets, the skills required to build an effective communications strategy and avoiding the confirmation bias trap with former PRSA CEO Cheryl Procter-Rogers, vice president, office of public relations and communications at DePaul University, America’s largest Catholic university.  

Prior to joining DePaul University, Cheryl was on the corporate affairs team at HBO and before that, she was director of public relations and advertising at Nielsen Media Research.  

She presented “A Winning Approach to Advocacy Campaigns” at the upcoming PRSA International Conference in Washington DC.

Why Is Diversity Important?

2:15 – An effective communications strategy hinges on five key communications skills.

3:19 – Balancing a successful business career with a healthy home life.

4:17 -- The benefits of knowing who and where your resources are.       

6:39 -- Tips for achieving work-life balance and the organizational systems that can help.

8:18 -- Can chess help you become a master of communications strategy?

10:21 – The 4 Cs of successful career development and the benefits of improving your listening skills.

12:52 -- She introduces the concept of confirmation bias and why understanding diversity is a prudent business strategy.

15:19 -- End 

These podcast show notes were written and optimized by Sandra Burrowes, Senior Public Affairs Specialist at Mayo Clinic.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

A commonly asked questions in my marketing seminars is how do you measure the ROI of a Facebook marketing campaign?  

With 500,000 million users and 11 percent of all time spent online, the potential of Facebook for public relations and public affairs professionals is huge. But given how basic the measurement options are at Facebook Insights, if you do hit it out of the park,  how do you prove the impact of a Facebook marketing campaigns on the bottom line?

In this episode, Jeff Jordan, product manager, social media and video measurement and Tim Waddell, director of product marketing for the Omniture business unit of Adobe talk about audience segmentation, sentiment analysis and having your Facebook page brandjacked.

Through a global partnership with Facebook, Omniture SiteCatalyst (acquired by Adobe) and Search Center Plus report the ROI of Facebook marketing campaigns by monitoring activity on Facebook Pages, inside Facebook Apps, from Facebook Ads and activity through Facebook Connect/Open-Graph, which extends Facebook functionality to destination websites.  

SHOW NOTES

05:11 -- Omniture Discover, an advanced segmentation tool, which can be used to discover which of your Facebook audience segments generate the most revenue.

08:37 -- Omniture intends to launch an analytics component for monitoring sentiment by keyword.

10:38 -- In a previous episode of this podcast with Rob Key of Converseon, he said beware of any listening provider that claims 90% accuracy with computers.  A discussion of just how far off accurate sentiment analysis is, and using it as directional data and for spotting potential trends.

13:36 -- Nestle had their Facebook page brand jacked by Greenpeace. People where flocking to their Facebook page in droves, posting their disapproval of the company’s use of palm oil, which they believe is helping to push orangutans into extinction.  A discussion of how, if at all, Omniture might help a company protect its Facebook page from being brandjacked by grassroots activists.

16:11 --  In a previous podcast with US Navy public affairs officer Jim Hoeft, we learned that Operation Deepwater Horizon’s Facebook Page was literally overwhelmed with thousands of comments during the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf, which the page administrators had no practical way to export or analyze globally.  How do communicators mitigate the risks associated with launching a social networking presence that can be impossible to manage in the event of a crisis?

18:43 -- Using analytics software to determine influence and analytics package rankings.

21:51 -- End

Photo by Mikaela Shannon on Unsplash

Media relations skills are what employers want most from PR professionals, according to the Digital Readiness Report.

But it takes a lot more than luck to land on the front page of a major print newspapers or the interview chair on broadcast television.

It takes solid PR skills, communications skills and media relations strategies, and that’s what this podcast is about: building your media relations skills.

The trouble is, newspaper and network TV audiences have been declining steadily for the last 7 years. And with lay-offs hitting newsrooms around the globe, the news hole has shrunk and there are fewer reporters to pitch.  

Those that remain are working longer hours and under more pressure than ever before. What communications skills are needed to capture their attention?

Enter Michael Smart, a media relations coach who specializes in teaching those skills to PR professionals.

Michael is National News Director at Brigham Young University (BYU) and, in this episode, he shares his media relations skills top tips in an effort to help public relations specialists adapt to the dramatic changes in today’s news media landscape, and the challenge and opportunities those changes require us to make to our media relations techniques.

He outlines specific communication skills and techniques that can be used to build greater publicity exposure in a competitive news environment. In addition to his work with BYU, Michael is an independent media relations trainer and coach and a top-rated speaker at the PR-industry’s biggest conferences.

SHOW NOTES  

01:26 Dramatic changes in the media landscape can make it harder to connect with mainstream journalists than in the past, but once that barrier is cleared, it can actually be easier to place positive news than it used to be. But the basics, like press release writing skills, are still critically important.

02:18 Michael shares media relations techniques for landing positive media placements, including researching the five most meaningful media outlets, searching the archives of those publications for related stories and providing a journalist with credible third-party sources.

05:51 Today’s high media turnover can make it difficult to develop relationships with journalists, especially for PR professionals with clients across a range of industries. Michael shares tactics that can increase the chances for success.

07:50 PR research is done and you’ve identified the right journalist for a story. How do you decide how best to approach the journalist (phone call, email, tweet, Facebook post, etc.?) Michael shares his specific strategies as well as a few mistakes that drive journalists up the wall.

13:47 Media relations techniques to employ when a client announcement isn’t newsworthy—two strategies to employ.

17:41 The three variables that media relations experts can control (creativity, media relationships and perseverance) and a few they can’t. Which PR skills matter most.

21:26 Despite the decline of the traditional news media, there has been a sharp rise in the readership of newspaper content through the internet and mobile phones. Media relations skills will continue to be important to employers and clients.

23:44 Media relations are important to today’s PR professionals, yet the best communication strategies rely on sound social media skills, public affairs skills and even advertising skills.

27:25 End

These podcast show notes were written and optimized by Sandra Burrowes, Senior Public Affairs Specialist at Mayo Clinic.

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash