Ponderings and Wanderings

While the major advertising, communications and public relations agencies have all created digital specialty practices, the medium and small agency still struggles to adapt to the digital age. Competition from these specialty practices as well as that faced from interactive and social media agencies combines with the tight client budgets and lack of comfort with the new medium form traditional practitioners. This combination leaves many agencies still unprepared for the impacts the industry is facing from social media.

These are some thoughts of how a small to medium sized agency can integrated social media practice into their agency. Please by all means comment and let me know your thoughts.

The Success of Social Media

Social media is a success because of the confluence of three factors:

• inexpensive, high-speed Internet access;
• easy to use technologies;
• and the inherent human desire to participate in like minded communities.

Social networking in and of itself is not new and has been studied by academics for decades. Social networking is now exciting as it has been invigorated via the Internet to apply its concepts on massive scales across geographies, demographics and other barriers.

In the long term all agencies will adopt the variety of new communications strategies currently being pioneered by leading-edge agencies and boutique interactive firms. Along this path, PR teams need guidance from specialists to bring the services into the routine operations.

Social media as the focus of a dedicated practice is justified through the market demand for the specialty services of strategic planning and tactical implementation fulfilled via knowledgeable experts. Based upon requests from clients large scale firms such as Fleishman Hillard[i], Edelman[ii], Weber Shandwick[iii] and others have already established such practices to deliver such services to new and existing clients. Many boutiques have sprung up to address requests for services as most traditional communications agencies have not begun to integrate and fulfill these services. These factors demonstrate that the demand exists and models can be adopted to support a social media practice.

Practice Definition

Social media is the current major impact point for online to marketing. In a little while there will be something new in the limelight. Edelman has named their practice “Interactive, Social and Emerging Media” to match this constant state of change. An agency digital practice can have a similar growth pattern. The initial service set can target social media. Over time, these services can be adopted by the account teams as they become routine public relations tactics. Meanwhile, the practice can be profitably pioneering and delivering the “next big thing” such as the importance of high speed mobile and online interactions via a plethora of other devices such as your car dashboard to clients. This adoption timeframe may vary from a few months to a few years. The key factor is that the practice can maintain a leadership position to deliver high performance award winning efforts.

Balance of Practice Business Volume

It should be expected that forty percent of the practice volume would be from add-on sales to clients of the other agency practices. This can establish a set of immediate success stories. At the start of the practice the day-to-day execution of selected routine service delivery would be through the existing account teams. This delivery by existing teams should be expected to be needed until the volume of the practice’s new clients warrants additional specialty service staff. At that time the delivery method should be examined and responsibilities may switch to the practice team.

It should be expected that sixty percent of the practice volume can be for engagements from new clients where delivery is provided via the specialty staff. These efforts should be expected to entail larger scale strategy and implementation efforts or very rapid campaigns for new or exiting clients that require the skills of the practice staff. It can be expected that the breakdown of practice staff would be heavily weighted towards strategy and communications experts with design and technology being routinely implemented through freelancers or agencies.

Services

The following is a list of expected services that can be further developed as the core deliverables from the practice:

• Strategic Guidance and Planning
  • Social media
  • Social networks
  • CGM monitoring
  • Blogging
    • Branded, Corporate, Executive, product, Crisis, Issue
  • Videos, vodcasts, podcasts
  • Maps, widgets, dashboards and other features
  • Mobile marketing and outreach
• Blogger Training
  • Executives, communications team members
• CGM/Blogger Relations
• CGM Monitoring and Measurement
• Social network and community activation, monitoring and management
  • Creation of dedicated and participation in existing networks
• SEO/SEM
  • Blog, social network
• Wiki/Blog establishment and management
  • Strategy
  • Setup/establishment
  • Audience development and promotions
  • Content/authoring
  • Monitoring
  • Measurement
• Activity awareness
  • i.e. Twitter, Social bookmarking (Digg, etc.)
• Media center and press release optimization
• Vodcasts/podcasts
• Campaign Web sites and micro-sites

Baseline Services for Existing Clients

Initial sales should be targeted through the development of a base package of services codified and presented to existing clients to be adapted to their needs to deliver immediate social media impact to their programs. These would include:

• RSS feed(s) for outbound news -press releases and a new outlet for news not considered suitable for a press release
• Improved linking practices in press releases to related product and service pages on their Web site
• Interactive press release distribution over wire services for online indexing
• LinkedIn® and Plaxo® accounts for key communications personnel
• Facebook and MySpace pages for the company and key products, services, alumni (employee or customer) supplemented with brand and business driving social networking applications
• Social networking and blog strategies
• CGM (Consumer Generated Media) monitoring
• Twitter®/Friendfeed® feed setup and preparation for use in campaigns and crisis communications
• Interactive maps and related application strategies
• Mobile strategy and Web site and email optimization for mobile devises
• Email newsletter optimization for inclusion of social networking tie-ins and improvements.
• Media center improvements for inclusion of social networking
• General campaign input for all projects cycled through the agency

Sales and Marketing

The expectation should be for this unit to be self supporting in six to eight months. This would require an aggressive new business development approach with matching marketing focus to demonstrate leadership, approach and expertise. The first few months would focus on immediate wins with existing clients. These early success stories would then be matched with a marketing campaign to illustrate to prospects the agencies capabilities and track record. These new business efforts could include:

• Aggressive outbound prospecting and meeting schedules
• White papers to demonstrate leadership, approach and expertise
• Speaking engagements at target market industry events
• Demonstrate strategies through the agency’s own marketing efforts
• Case studies built upon initial delivery to existing clients and new client engagements.
• By-lined article placement in advertising, marketing and public relations industry publications and blogs
• Guest authoring and commenting on respected communications blogs
• PR Practitioners Guide to Social Media – An agency branded practical guide to getting started building and growing communities for communications professionals.

Staff

The initial staffing solution would include a director and two existing staff members. One or both of these staff members should be expected to leave the agency in the first few months of the plan. For the director to drive marketing and new business efforts as well while also conducting the initial service delivery it is important that at least one junior staff member be available as a dedicate practice resource. The skills should match those currently exhibited by staff to complete such tasks as:

• CGM Monitoring and reporting
• Editorial – blog post authoring
• Blogger relations – media relations with specialty on techniques to form relationships with non-traditional journalists and individuals
• Social network participation (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg)

Partners

Most efforts would be expected to be executed via an in-house design team’s efforts applied to technology by individual freelancers or very small shops of animators and technologists. Larger scale efforts such as micro-sites and dedicated communicates would be delivered via execution contracts with boutique agencies that could be called upon for their specialties. It should be expected that a formal partnership with an interactive agency would be required in year two.

[i] Fleishman Hillard has been reinvigorating its Digital practice with an emphasis on social media with recent hires in DC and New York. Read more about this practice on their Web site at http://www.fleishman.com/client-solutions/digital.html.

[ii] Edelman established its practice in early 2006. This practice is run by Steve Rubel whose Micro Persuasion blog is one of the most popular covering Web 2.0 and its interface with communications. Good summaries of the Edelman practice goals and strategies may be found at http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/04/accelerating_th.html and http://www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/archives/2006/01/the_mea_revolut.html

[iii] Weber Shandwick has expanded its online special service under the name of the name “Interactive, Social and Emerging Media. See the following URL for the description from their Web site: http://www.webershandwick.com/Default.aspx/Capabilities/SpecialtyServices/InteractiveSocialandEmergingMedia.

Working with numerous advocacy we are always looking for effective methods to rally support and provide opportunities to take action on behalf of the campaign.  Whether targeting congress, candidates or simply gathering supporters, petitions are certainly a mainstay of these campaigns actions.

I have used a variety of tools such as Convio, Kintera, The Soft Edge, CapWiz and others for such petitions and letter campaigns.  These are important tool sets that enable the organizations to have a great deal of control and to capture contact details to build a database of constituents.  These are great methods to activate current contacts and grow a list of supporters.  However, it still calls upon the need to direct people to the organization’s Web site. 

An addition of services from free petition sites can be used to add a broader reach. Certainly, this is not the best method for the core value of build a constituent database.  However, using these variety of services can help extend the ability to reach many people beyond that your own Web site marketing efforts.  You might not obtain registrations from all of these petition senders - but you will activate more people on behalf your cause.  Certainly, offer a signup to your information stream via these services - but do not expect many signups. Do expect more petitions to be distributed.

Here is a list of free petition services I have found.  I have not used all of them so please investigate each before you use the services.

Facebook
Of course you should place your petition on this and other social networks to deliver your message right where people play. The following Facebook applications help you create petitions very quickly and easily.

• Convio - The Convio Facebook Application extension is a great tool.  Check out the application for Healthy Lakes, Healthy Lives.
• PetitionBox
• Mission Petition
• Petitions
• Ultimatums

Dedicated Sites
The following sites offer free petition services.  They appear to be quite popular.  I have not tried these out.  Let me know if you have and how effective they have been for you.

• www.petitiononline.com
• www.ipetition.com
• www.petitionspot.com
• www.gopetition.com
• www.thepetitionsite.com (Care2) - Run by the very respectable Care2
• www.epetitions.net
• www.petitionhost.com
• www.mycuase.com
• www.petitionhosting.com
• www.rallycongress.com - Also offers a paid services when you get to a certain volume and also allows you access to data and skin to match your site.  But the free service seems like one that is also one to try out.

Have others? Think I am nuts.  Drop me a line in the comments.

I have been a proponent of the social media press release (SMPR) and the social media newsroom (SMNR). These efforts by Todd Defren and others have pulled together into a package much of what online communications folks have been saying for awhile. Over at my agency we have even managed a fair number of tests and implementations. In these implementations a common roadblock has been the lack of the clear understandings of the underlying technical requirements.

Many others have stated that an SMPR or SMNR must be built out using blogging technologies. Blog technologies enable the RSS feeds, XML formatting, tagging, commenting and many other functions. They also enable search engine optimization in manners expected of social media search engines such as Technorati, Bloglines and others.

This said, I have found the technical teams that implement the strategies sometimes prefer to hack up an existing CMS to force it to fit a blogging and SMPR/SMNR framework. This has resulted in less than optimal performance. This lack of performance is then blamed on the idea of an SMPR itself. In reality, had the efforts been built out within a dedicated package the performance would have been satisfactory.

Take away – build out a dedicated SMNR site within a blogging CMS such as Movable Type or WordPress. We have found that the hosted TypePad environment is also customizable for the solution. Using such technologies allows us to focus time, energy (and budget) on the content rather than transforming a non-blogging CMS do what others provide right out of the box.

I was recently chatting with folks and I was saying that maps are actually quite easy to create. The following is a set I created with Google My Maps in less than 8 minutes. This certainly is nothing fancy. It is meant to demonstrate that with available tools and some forethought that maps may be embed into every site with very little (if any) tech involvement. Design would help for the labels, but this is not high end design. Just someone with some basic design skills could then make this very snazzy.

If I can do this in a few minutes then there is no reason every “contact us” and address page on every site could not have at least a simple map. This map is also now in the Google Maps search directory. Who knows, someone may find this little guy someday and then they can comment on my selections.

KML File: Open this file to view the Map in Google Earth. This was automatically created for me along with the map.

A link to the map. Click here to open a link to the map in a Web browser.

And here is the embedded map. When I created this I selected this size. You could make it any size to fit your design.

View Larger Map

For my current work at an interactive agency and throughout my communications agency work I have been counseling public relations teams on the use of press release wire services to enhance outreach directly towards target audiences. Recently I have been asked as to the value of these wires versus a company’s RSS feeds.

Somewhat towards this end, several nice reports have come out recently on the influence of bloggers and company social media. Brodeur, Arketi and Bulldog Reporter/TEK Group.

However, I would love to see some direct feedback from the media (traditional and non-traditional journalists) as to their preferences in how they receive company news. I put together this survey rather than waiting for my agency, or another to ask some straight forward questions. (more…)

A communications industry publisher who certainly “gets” social media and the impacts of the online world upon public relations is Ragan Communications. My Ragan is a great social network for communications professionals and something I wish the PRSA had created. Ragan.com is a solid site and the companion set of email newsletters are well formatted, nicely targeted and always seem to have good articles. I have found the Communication + Technology Insider to be a great idea generator and in general one of the better forward thinking publications.

All of these publications show how a trade publisher once solidly in the print world can adapt to the online marketplace. They certainly continue to sell and distribute print version of their newsletters. It seems though that the high quality free content drives more people towards their conferences, workshops research, training and other expert deliverables.

So, what do you think of the Ragan “world”?

As widgets become easier and easier to create they are being used for everything imaginable. What is a widget? A widget is a short bit of code someone provides so that you can place special functionality on your Web site. This is nothing new. However, the popularity of blogging and social networks has led to an explosion of widgets. Just as web page builders, Blogger and MySpace have removed the requirement for anyknowledge of HTML, widgets make it easy to add features without any programming knowledge.

Help me reach my goal!

Debbie Weil brings up some great points on why companies should consider transferring a newsletter into a blog format. She brings up several points including:

• HTML email newsletter layout takes more time than posting to a blog.
• Email is passive. The blog encourages comments and responses
• Blogs support email and RSS feeds – the option is left to the reader.

In addition I have found:

• Email newsletters are increasingly be deleted without being read. Readers of RSS feeds are can opt-in to read items at their leisure without filling up their email accounts.
• Email newsletters are prone to be getting caught in spam filters. RSS feeds from a blog do not get caught in these filters.
• Blogs offer a built in archive, categories and other functions that can require customizations in newsletter software.
• There are many resources to help you promote a blog. Newsletters are much more reliant on word-of-mouth.
• Blogs eliminate the hassles of email distribution and any associated costs.
• Blogs provide a home for you to attract additional readers to an always available archive.
• Blogs encourage more frequent short postings than the less frequent e-newsletter.

WordBiz Report Article

Over at work, we are routinely asked to provide a stategy where a non-profit can recive donations via SMS.  This is cerainly easily and rapidly impemented via the existing technology.  The roadblock is that the carriers end up pulling away 30% - 45% of the donation.  This instanly makes this channel a non-vaiable option for every group we have reviewed thiis outlet.

Amnesty International appears to have taken another appraoch.  They are partnering with  a Working Assests to provide co-branded service — Amnesty Wireless.  Amnesty International then recives 10% of charges without addtional overhead.  This is certainly a more creative model.  It will be interesting to see how many people actually sign up for the service powered by the Nationwide Sprint PCS Network. 

In any case, this is probably the start of a trend in this saturated commodity market for cell phone services to enable affinity programs similar to those we find with credit cards.

Gizmodo Article

Gizmodo is clearly again on the top of things with this important news.  K Fed has his own search engine!  For some reason I think this is going a bit in the direction of over targeting your search engine. Then again this is a neat example of a way for PRODEGE to promote its services and a much better way for K Fed to provide his fan(s) a better site than the average celebrity.

Gizmodo Article