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For Hire: Social Media Public Relations Professional

Are you looking for a qualified, results-driven social media public relations professional? You have found him. I encourage you to check out my CV. Or, if your prefer LinkedIn, please check out my resume.

Experienced in public and media relations, I can generate the mainstream media coverage you need to raise awareness of your organization and drive business results. With my background as a former journalist, I know exactly what media professionals want in a story, and I deliver it every time. More than your average public relations professional, I leverage social tools to increase the reach of your message, while decreasing the cost of doing communications.

Please pass the word along. Contact me if you need help.

Businesses Plan To Spend More On Social Media In 2010

Nearly half of large businesses surveyed by StrongMail will be spending more on social media and email marketing in 2010.

According to the survey, "social media marketing is a clear focus for businesses, with 69% of respondents planning to integrate it with their email marketing campaigns." And businesses are primarily concerned with building awareness, strengthening customer loyalty and expanding the reach of the company.

The number of small businesses that will be increases their marketing budgets to include social media and email marketing will increase next year too. VerticalResponse is reporting nearly three-quarters of small business owners will spend more on social media next year. VerticalResponse CEO and founder Janine Popick said, "small businesses continue to allocate portions of their budget to... email and social media, despite the downturn in the economic climate... (but) marketers (still) need to help small businesses to see the value of integrating search engine marketing... into their campaigns."

While small businesses increase their social media budgets, there are several important strategies that will make their efforts successful:

• Optimizing content for search.
• Developing an engaging email marketing program.
• Incorporating strategic public relations for community building.
• Using social media tools the foster and cultivate communication between the business and its stakeholder.
  

Developing a social media engagement program like this require the proper assessment of how a small business has used communication tools in the past. From this, trained communication professionals can make recommendations that are tied to and organization's goals.

New Federal Trade Commission Rules Governing Social Media Now In Effect

Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission announced new rules for social media engagement. The Commission will be monitoring Facebook, Twitter, and several other social platforms to foster greater transparency among corporations using new social tools to connect with consumers. Here's what the FTC will be watching:

• Flogging
• Astroturfing
• Sponsored Conversations

At a Fortune 100 corporation where I was the social media point man for the Global Internet Marketing team, we had lengthy discussions about sponsored conversations, one of the more touchy topics among social media communications professionals. "Most important, social media users – from celebrity spokespeople to everyday consumers – who are paid to post accurate information about a product or service will now be required to disclose their deals and could be held personally liable if they don’t," wrote Dallas Lawrence, of Levick Strategic Communications on the Bulletproof Blog.

The Associate Director of the FTC’s advertising division Richard Cleland, has said, “If you can’t make the disclosure, you can’t make the ad.”

Don't Make Them Think. Engage Them

Who doesn't like things simple?  Simple makes engagement easier. But simple messages are actually more complex than simple. When I refer to the word simple, I'm actually suggesting that when we create content, in this case, I'm thinking about a news release, that the term S.I.M.P.L.E. actually means a set of ideas we might want to consider when writing a news release.

Using the S.I.M.P.L.E. technique will help us give our media professionals the "ah! ha!" moment they need to understand the story in front of them. Here's what I mean by S.I.M.P.L.E.

Simple: Get to the point. Use clear, concise writing. And write so that action is conveyed through every word.

Immediate Impact: Put the news peg at the top, within the first paragraph. And add the human element immediately. People connect with people, not statistics, numbers, and abstractions that mean nothing without context.

Meaningful: What's in it for the reader? Everyone listens to WII(FM), even journalists. Make the news for their audience, perhaps include someone from their audience in your story. 

Purposeful: This is the big WHY question everyone needs to answer. If the story in your news release doesn't tell the journalist (or his audience, which is your intended audience too) something about life, then your story is without purpose. Every story teaches something, or it should, if it's a good one.

Lasting: Every story you send to media professionals should have some evergreen effect to it. The message in the story should be an enduring one that people can relate to.

Engaging: This goes without saying, but cut out all the unnecessary facts and figures and numbers that don't add to the story. Develop the character if the story using people with compelling quotes that grab readers by the heart and yank their emotions.

Developing content that moves people at an emotional level, creating content that demonstrates and teaches us something about life, where that lesson is brought to use through the characters (real people and their story) is always more compelling than spewing numbers and statistic soup. We all work for organizations that have great stories to tell. Go out, find them, and tell them. Your clients, customers and other will appreciate it. So will your media professional.

Social Media Changes Everything About Communications, Really?

Is speed the reason why social media changes communication theory? Michael Gross of Anne Klein Communications Group, LLC thinks so. In his article for the November issues of "Tactics" he writes that communication done well still requires us to form the right message, deliver it to the right audience, using the right medium. But he thinks the speed at which these messages travel has changed the MACTriad.

The MACTriad is a theoretical understanding of mass communication, which explains the importance of the message (M), to which audience (A) the message is directed, and through which channel (C) a message is transmitted. Social media, according to Gross, has added another element -- speed. 

Gross misses the point. The argument for speed changing the way we communicate can be applied to any of the past stages of mass communication innovation. If we look back to the 15th Century, the advent of movable type -- Gutenberg's Press -- tore the West asunder. Without movable type, books could not be mass produced, pamphlets could not have been printed en masse -- no Protestant Revolution, no American Revolution, nothing that closely resembles marketing collateral, newspapers or magazines of our modern era. Movable type changed communication forever because it sped up delivery. The advent of radio, television, the Internet and now the social web have sped the rate of speed each it their own way. But each hasn't changed basic communication theory.

If anything social media is forcing us to converge communication theories. For instance, without an understanding of how groups communication, social communities fail. Without understanding various aspects of interpersonal communication, some social media strategies  -- and to a larger degree -- communication and engagement strategies fail. 

While speed has always been a concern, and an attribute of our evolving communication technology, understanding how people connect, how people relate, and understanding the psychology of message development in the context of an ever merging communication discipline is important to the success or failure of any communication plan, strategy or engagement in the marketplace of public opinion.