2008 Georgia PRSA Chapter Annual Conference
Scenario: Your client or CEO has just called you into his or her office and told you that he or she wants to understand social media and determine its value to your company. He or she has given you 45 days to come back with your recommendations.What do you do? Where do you start? On what basis will you make your recommendations?
That's the question that PR Newswire's Director of Emerging Media Michael Pranikoff, Toby Bloomberg, and I posed to a roomful of public relations professionals at the Georgia Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America's Annual Conference. It's the same question that many of us now face.
Over the course of the discussion, we addressed a 10-step process to achieving social media success. Click here for the deck we created.
Toby, Michael and I broke the discussion down into four stages: Learn, Listen, Plan, Participate
Learn Step 1: Define social media Step 2: Evaluate Tools
Listen Step 3: Conduct an internal employee audit Step 4: Conduct an external audit to evaluate discussion about company and your competitors on the web
Plan Step 5: Determine initiatives and tools that suit your corporate culture and customer base Step 6: Establish metrics to evaluate success Step 7: Determine cost and resources to implement program Step 8: Determine implementation timetable Step 9: Secure consensus from a wide employee cross section
Participate Step 10: Set expectations
The audience was composed of professional with various levels of expertise. The focus tended to remain on tools. As has often been the case, we social media advocates take for granted the level of knowledge that PR professionals possess. The audience had questions about twitter, RSS, wikis and del.icio.us, and few hands went up when we asked them whether their company had a blogging policy. Few were using RSS in their company's newsroom site. Another claimed he was podcasting. Toby had to gently inform him that his audio recordings were not podcasts as there was no ability for listeners to subscribe or download them.
Michael does a lot of these types of briefings. He is on the road nearly 70 percent of the time visiting schools, companies, clients and members of the media. The audience was asking what everyone is asking. He sees this lack of awareness as a huge room for growth. Moving from tools to broader recommendations, we offered up the following questions for PR professionals to consider:
Internal Audit QuestionsDo you have management support? CEO? Legal? HR? Do you have employee commitment to remain engaged? Do you have support from IT? Who owns the content? Do you have the authority to direct employees and mandate changes? Have you instituted a blogging policy? How will you measure ROI? Do your recommendations reflect the company's brand and culture?External Audit QuestionsWho is your target audience? Do your recommendations reflect your customer demographic? How will you publicize and build participation? Will it be moderated? How will you handle negative, inappropriate, or off topic comments? How will you direct questions to the appropriate company representative? Do you have safeguards to minimize spam? Do you have a SEO strategy to maximize web hits?
My advice: When responding to a CEO, the focus shouldn't be the tools. Make simple recommendations. Focus on ROI and how social media can achieve specific business objectives. And better yet, don't wait for the CEO to come knocking. Take a leadership role and offer to provide a set of recommendations even before you are asked. It is a real opportunity to position PR strategically.
Let me get back to you.Technorati Tags: PRSA GA;PRSA Annual Conference;Social Media;Toby Bloomberg;Michael Pranikoff;Save to del.icio.us
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