Tag Archives: sm

Christina Khoury

Christina’s Coffee Talk with Christopher Barger

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Today’s coffee talk is with Chris Barger, director of global social media for General Motors. In March I had the opportunity to listen to Chris’s keynote speech at the 2010 Media Relations Best Practices Summit hosted by PRSA and Ragan’s PR Daily, and immediately knew he would be a great guest. In my opinion, because he was so candid and honest in how he presented that I still remember the information he shared today. He’s also quite funny which kept the attendees paying attention ;).

Like your typical PR professional he’s a fan of caffeine and is very specific with how he needs it. If you’re going to ask him to coffee remember to get him one of the following: Tim Horton’ english coffee cappuccino, Dunkin Donuts coconut coffee light and sweet, and Coffee Beanery’s crème brulee. So sit tight because this is a long one but I promise the golden nuggets of information make it completely worth the procrastination at work ;).

As director of global social media for General Motors’s, I’m going to assume you receive resistance but would you say it’s changed?

The resistance today is definitely different than it used to be before the crash last summer. Continue reading →

Jess Greco

Starbucks Offers New Mayor Deal in All Retail Locations- Will it Work?

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Cup below coffee machineBy now most major brands have realized that they need to get involved in social media, even if it’s only in a small way.  A year ago, only a handful of companies were willing to put their reputation on the line and experiment with establishing a social media presence. One of these leaders was Starbucks, one of America’s favorite coffee chains.

As early as 2006, Starbucks was developing ways for consumers to interact directly with its brand online and extending the experience beyond its thousands of retail locations.  In this astoundingly early year, the company signed up for its first official Twitter account, which now boasts more than 887,000 followers.  In an effort to take its social media activities even further, in 2008 it developed My Starbucks Idea, which ReadWriteWeb described as “a socially driven marketplace for Starbucks-related ideas that will help the company reinvent itself”.  On MSI, which also has its own Twitter account, consumers can literally share their ideas for improvement with the company, giving them a virtually unprecedented say in the direction of the brand. Continue reading →

Arik Hanson

4 ways to beat the social media clock

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One concern I continue to hear from folks across the board: How do I manage my social media time and resources?

“I’m already strapped for time. How do I fit this in?”

“How do I manage my accounts over the evening hours and on the weekends?”

“My senior management staff doesn’t have time for this stuff. But, they want us to be involved.”

Time management is a potential huge barrier for organizations looking to dive into social media and digital PR. In fact, with so many companies now adopting the tools, I tend to think it might be one of the top concerns right now. Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Check and Balance in Every Situation

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Businessman surrounded by crumpled paperI had a conversation last week with some really bright folks who run a social media agency in New York that works with several Fortune 500 brands. We got to discussing crisis communications within a real-time setting, and how they could effectively use social media to almost instantly respond to a crisis and mitigate its effects.

Throughout the conversation, we kept coming back to the point that in order to properly handle any type of crisis in real time, no matter what the brand or situation, you need a proper plan in place well before the crisis even hits. Because no matter what type of media you are using to monitor and respond, you always need a plan in place that details exactly how, who and why you will respond and the type of response you will give to different audiences to ensure their concerns are addressed appropriately. Continue reading →

Jeff Esposito

What are you measuring?

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Thinkstock Single Image SetOver the past year social media has taken up valuable real estate in the toolboxes of many a PR pro. However, many pros still face hurdles selling the utility of social media to their company or clients.  Managers and clients want to know why it’s worth paying an employee to Tweet away all day. For the most part, there is a struggle to pull relevant numbers that reflect the value of social media.

There are many metrics that can be tracked to show success, but the total number of fans and followers is not one of them. The main reason is that any bot can attain large numbers of followers for a small amount of money. These followers are often other bots, not potential customers. Then what should you track? Continue reading →

Rebecca Denison

Sentiment vs. message in social media – which do you value more?

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Scale of justice, close-upRecently I fell into a discussion about specific social media metrics (isn’t that so not like me?) and the concept of sentiment analysis was brought up. There have already been many discussions about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of automated sentiment analysis tools, and I won’t bore you with yet another discussion of whether automated sentiment is worth your while.

What I think is a more valid question: is the sentiment or the message more important to social media measurement? Continue reading →

Marie Baker

In the Event of an Event

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Group of Young People at a Party

I was invited to an event recently that I was really excited about. However, much to my dismay, I was only able to last a half hour before I high-tailed it out of there. From a cramped event space to complete confusion about where I was supposed to go, let’s just say this event didn’t live up to all the hype.

We thought we would use this opportunity as a learning experience, and provide a few tips that you should keep in mind when planning and executing an event. Continue reading →

Danielle Cyr

Sampling Spells Success in SM

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Stacked shirts with sale tag attached on store counter, close-upIt’s evident that social media is a hugely successful endeavor for many brands and companies, while others may as well not have entered the SM sphere. After seeing the disparity in results first-hand, I started thinking about what makes the difference, aside from the obvious differences in levels of engagement, nature of content, audience and relationship building measures. That led me to start thinking about how bakeries use social media (shocking, I know.)  There I found the big difference – sampling.

When you have the opportunity to bait consumers to take their SM love for your company or brand and establish a real life relationship, you are golden. It seems elementary, but sampling is a great way to distinguish oneself from the competition and generate monetized ROI on your SM investment. Continue reading →

Nathan "PRCog" Burgess

Houston, Embedded Tweets Go or No Go: No Go

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Thinkstock Single Image Set

This is a slightly polished version of a similar post that appeared yesterday on PR Cog’s personal blogs.

As some of you have likely heard Twitter recently opened up a system to embedded tweets on web sites, blogs, etc. Initially I thought this could be done well, but had my suspicions, particularly with deleted tweets actually being (more or less) deleted. Unfortunately the worst did happen and as it turns out I’m highly disappointed in the embedded tweets system (though I still love Twitter).

I quote tweets not infrequently and doing screenshots has definitely been a pain in the ass (until I found Screenhunter that is — see post here on that cute lil program).

Here’s my ideal list of what I’d want from an embeddable tweet system: Continue reading →

Danny Brown

Where Next for the News Release

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Thinkstock Single Image SetIf you go with the view that Ivy Lee created the first press release back in 1906, then the bread and butter of what public relations used to be best known for is more than 100 years old now.

In that time, we’ve seen the original idea behind the news release (or press release, depending on preferences) morph into many shapes and ideas. From the standard print release, to the search engine optimized release, to today’s social media news release, it’s evolved as needs have grown.

But apart from adding some nice flashy videos and blog links, or being able to rank a little higher in Google, how far has the news release really come? And is there still room in today’s instant feed market for something like the news release? Continue reading →