Exploring the intersection of communications, marketing and social media with PR professional Dave Fleet

Three Ways To Wag The Long Tail Of Content

11.10.04

I was glancing at my blog traffic stats the other day, and noticed something that made me sit up and take notice – after three years, the most-viewed post on this site continues to be the opening post in my good communications planning series, with over 125,000 views.

What’s more, the traffic to this post is continuing to rise over time. Here’s a chart of the daily traffic to the post:

Doesn’t look much like the typical ‘long tail’ image of traffic over time, does it?

I got to wondering why this is happening. Here are my ideas:

1. Useful content

The 13-part series of posts I wrote on communications planning walk through the process of creating a communications plan, from start to finish. It (I hope) is useful stuff; content that people find applicable and helpful.

2. Evergreen content

These posts are as helpful today as they were when I wrote them. While best practices around plan development will, I’m sure, evolve over time, this series should remain helpful for a long time.

3. Optimize for search

As someone pointed out to me on Twitter, Google “good communications plan” and this post is the top result. “Communications plan” continues to be one of the top search terms used to reach this site. I thought-through the titles of the posts, and the cross-linking between them, when first writing them, and it worked well.

I’d love to hear your take – have you experienced this kind of effect before? What caused it then?

Posted in: social media, statistics

Tags: analytics

4Comments

7 Tips For Getting Legal Approval on Social Media Programs

11.09.27

I don’t think it matters which form of communications you work in; “legal” often seems to be a pain point. It’s not surprising — their job is to manage risk for the organization, and public-facing communications activities (especially two-way ones) naturally offer an element of uncertainty. There’s a natural tension between the two.

Last night I spoke on a panel for the American Marketing Association on the topic of “How to launch and implement a social media initiative.” One of the questions revolved around whether panelists had encountered problems with legal departments when introducing social media initiatives. I thought I’d share some tips I offered the audience there for working with your (or clients’) legal departments, to make the process smoother.

Here are seven tips for working with your legal team:

Tie back to organizational objectives: Show how the program you’re trying to implement ties-in to business objectives, and help to educate the legal team on the strategy behind your proposal.
Educate your legal team: Don’t just throw something new and uncertain like social media at them “cold”; walk them through what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and show them best practices that have been established.
Show them how you’re reducing risk: Walk the legal team through the ways you’re working to reduce risk on the project. If you’re looking to leverage user-generated content, show how you’re going to moderate it; if you’re empowering employees to engage online, show them the policy and guidelines you’ve created to frame it; etc.
Loop them in early: No-one likes to be blind-sided last minute. Loop your legal team in early, to ensure you’re aware of potential concerns and are able to manage around them (the same goes for IT, HR and any other stakeholders).
Give them case studies: The legal system revolves around precedents. Your lawyers are likely to respond well to examples of how other organizations have done similar things successfully (and trouble-free) in the past. If other people have blazed the trail ahead of you, show them.
Draw lines around roles: Clearly frame the role that stakeholders have in your program, ahead of time. Your legal team doesn’t need to be editing your text for style; they need to be working to minimize risk for the organization. Make sure everyone is aware of that role, and reinforce it if necessary.
Be their friend: This pointer came from Eliot Johnson – one of the other panelists: become friends with your legal team. Many people wrongly treat “legal” as the opposition, when they’re just trying to do their jobs. Work with them, not against them, and you’ll find that things go much more smoothly.

What do you think?

Posted in: social media

Tags: legal, social media

9Comments

Lies, Damned Lies and Mis-understood Statistics

11.09.21

Earlier this week, All Facebook featured a post on a report by DDB and OpinionWay examining the reasons that Facebook users “unlike” brand pages.

The key findings, as reported by All Facebook (the report appears to have been taken down from SlideShare, so I can’t link to it):

The brand was no longer of interest to me (49 percent);
The information available was not interesting (46 percent);
Information was published too often (36 percent);
The brand published information I did not appreciate (27 percent)
Information was not published often enough (14 percent).

Interesting, useful data.

This follow-up chart in the post, however, is next to useless.

Why is this chart useless?

Because the sample size is too small for this kind of segmentation.

The original data is useful because the analysis is conducted at an aggregate level, over 630 respondents. At that sample size, we’re looking at a 3.9% margin of error at a 95% confidence level. That means, while there may be some variation among the top results, they’re useful at a high level.

Dig down to a country level like the chart above, though, and things start to fall apart. With a sample size of 78, given the number of Facebook users in the United States (155,746,780 according to Facebook), the margin of error for the US numbers is over 11% at that same confidence level. It’s not just the US, either – the margin of error for the France numbers is over 8.5%. Despite this, there’s no mention of these details on the post or comments; just an assumption that the numbers are correct.

This is a great example of why I think math is a critical skill for PR professionals.

PR pros need to understand the difference between valid statistics and invalid ones, so they can take advantage of useful information (like that at the top of this post) and disregard the non-useful stuff (like the regional breakdown above). What’s more, they need to know what’s news and what’s non-news too, so they can make an informed decision on what to pitch as the former and what to advise their clients to pass on promoting.

Are you comfortable reading between the lines when it comes to statistics? If not, it might be time to brush up.

Posted in: statistics

Tags: statistics

3Comments

Two Ways To Quickly Improve Your Communications Plans

11.09.19

I’ve worked in communications for a while now, and one thing I’ve noticed — consistently — is that the same two elements of communications plan get overlooked time and time again:

Objectives
Strategy

These almost always get sacrificed in favour of the bright, shiny part of the plan: tactics.

What’s more, your objectives and strategy are the most important part of the plan. They’re the part that frames the ultimate goal that you’re trying to achieve, and provides a focus for the tactics that should aim to achieve that goal.

That means that, sadly, most communications programs fail to live up to their true purpose.

I think this failure stems from two primary misunderstandings:

1. People don’t understand the difference between objectives, strategies and tactics.

Simply put, your objective should state what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you trying to sell 30,000 units of something? Increase customer loyalty? Reduce employee turnover? Remember, too, that there are business objectives and communications objectives, and the latter should flow up to the former.

Your strategy defines how you will achieve the objective you just outlined. If you’re looking to sell product, for example, one strategy might look to raise awareness of the product among a key audience. Another option might be to improve its visibility among key purchase-driven search terms.

Your tactics provide the final level of detail in your plan – the granular activities that will drive towards your strategies, and which ultimately fuel the accomplishment of your objective.

Too few people understand the difference between these three areas. If they’re on the client side, they’re the ones who, despite the great program delivered, still ask “but how many media impressions did we get” even if the business results are there for all to see. On the agency side, well, they’re the ones who risk those same clients never having the business results to ignore in the first place.

It’s CRITICAL that people get their heads around this, as these parts of your plan ensure you’re driving at the right result.

2. People focus on shiny.

Lots of people, especially in the communications industry, are highly creative and really enjoy the creative side of things. Let’s face it, brainstorms are fun. Blue sky thinking, a “there’s no such thing as a bad idea” mindset and no consideration of limitations is a nice mindset to have. Unfortunately, I’ve found that that often comes at the expense of strategy – of putting boundaries around creativity to ensure it is pointed in the right direction.

I had a great discussion with a colleague last week after a brainstorm. I commented that we had some great ideas coming out of the session, but that at that point most of them totally diverged from our strategy for the program. Her response (paraphrasing) was: “Agreed. It’s our job to take those ideas, filter them and tweak them so they fit.”

The perfect team combines people with creative strength alongside those with a strategic mindset, so you get the best of both worlds.

Want to improve your planning? Educate your team and your client about the difference between objectives, strategies and tactics, and make sure they’re taken into account when developing your plan.

Posted in: communications, communications planning, pr, public relations, strategy

Tags: communications planning, planning, pr, public relations, strategy

8Comments

You Never Know

11.09.16

It’s all too easy to shoot your mouth off sometimes – to pass judgement and get a quick dose of attention and reaction from others - without thinking carefully of the consequences.

Just remember – you never know:

Who might be your boss one day
Who might interview you, or review your resume, one day
Who might be a colleague one day
Who might be a client one day
Who might be a key supplier one day
Who might be a potential recruit one day

It’s easy to pass judgement… but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Posted in: career

4Comments

Video: Thoughts on Social CRM for Small Businesses

11.09.14

Social CRM is a hot topic right now. As companies’ use of social media tools begins to mature from a pure marketing focus to more of a social business focus, the various use cases of social CRM are gaining more attention from practitioners. In fact, I’m in the middle of reading a book on social CRM right now (The Social Customer, by Adam Metz).

So, when Lauren Carlson drew my attention to a video interview she conducted with Marshall Lager from Third Idea Consulting - a well-known name in the field – at the CRM Evolution conference, it caught my attention.

A few interesting notes from the interview:

Unlike most other business tools, social CRM is largely derived from consumer-related tools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs etc., which weren’t originally designed for business uses. People are using these tools to share experiences they have. Businesses have finally caught on to the potential benefits of being involved, and are starting to monetize their relationships.
You can get started with social CRM by simply signing up for a free or trial account on a service, and starting to listen. Trick number one is to find out where your customers are and what they’re saying. Once you have that, you can begin to craft a strategy (I would add that before you do that, you need to figure out what business objectives you want to accomplish).
Lager says small businesses especially can benefit from social media – the closer to start-up, the better – because the people there are extremely passionate, focused on where the next sale will come from and are likely to have a direct relationship with their customers. He argues that the benefits of social media to small business can outstrip those for large businesses, who already have an established brand and established expectations, very quickly. Small businesses can touch every one of their customers, and have a significant effect in doing so.
Strategy is important. You can build it as you go to a certain extent (I would argue that while this may be the case for some companies, for most it would be far better to figure out your strategy first), but at a certain point you need to figure out what you’re trying to do with social media. You need to figure out your company’s voice; your rules of engagement (and several companies have published their verisons; here are 57 sets of social media guidelines and resources to get you started).
One of the most important things that companies can do online is tell the truth. If people trust you, they will do business with you. If they don’t trust you, they want nothing to do with you.

I found the interview interesting; while there are a few comments I would respectfully disagree with, there’s some interesting stuff here – especially for small business owners who might be curious on how & why to get started.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Posted in: social media

Tags: social crm

6Comments

A Simple, Effective Way To Boost Your Creativity

11.09.08

Want a quick way to improve your creative output, at work and at home?

Carry a notebook with you at all times.

Carrying a notebook is a habit I’ve fallen into and out of over the years, but I’ve noticed that when I do, my creative output soars. Right now I’m rocking a Moleskine notebook, and I love it. Frankly, you could use scraps of paper instead, but having a notebook makes it way easier to refer back to later.

Why?

Because having a notebook means you can capture ideas as they occur to you, without the risk of forgetting them before capturing them. When you first start this, you’ll be astonished at how many ideas you

Yesterday, on the way to work I jotted down three ideas for blog posts that I had on my 30-minute commute. Today, I took notes on a book I’m currently reading (The Social Customer by Adam Metz).

Cheap, easy to establish and effortless to maintain, but the payoffs are huge.

Posted in: miscellaneous

Tags: miscellaneous

14Comments

4 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Content Strategy

11.09.07

Lots of people spend lots of time nowadays thinking about how to build up channels/audiences/communities (choose your buzzword as appropriate) through social channels. Relatively few, however, seem to apply similar rigor to the process of communicating with those people after the fact.

With a few degrees of variation, most people will suggest you look at around a 90/10 ratio of engagement to static content on social channels. That means, if you post 20 tweets (for example) per day, you have roughly two opportunities to insert your own POV into the stream.

Are you making the most of the static content you post on your channels? Are you using each piece as an opportunity to move towards achieving an objective, or are you just throwing words out there for the sake of posting something?

Here are four ways to begin to improve your social media content strategy.

Set Goals

Launching a new social channel, or campaign on a channel, isn’t the end of the planning process. You should know, clearly, what you’re trying to achieve through your social media activity, and bear that in mind at all times. Sometimes high-level business goals may be a bit abstract, so distill down from those:

Business objectives –> communication objectives –> social media objectives

Tweak these depending on where social “sits” in your organization, but make sure these ladder up, and make sure the content you’re posting does the same.

Optimize

Are you optimizing your content based on previous results? If not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

Content creation doesn’t just mean throwing out posts randomly. Just as media buyers analyze which versions of ads convert better than others, you should take the opportunity to look at the types of content that:

Generate more engagement
Lead to more click-throughs
Lead to more conversions

What type of content works best? Is it UGC-focused content? Links to third-party sites? Opinion pieces? What time of day works best? (Visibli and RowFeeder are two great tools for helping with this)

Think “Search”

What are you doing to ensure you “own” the first page of search results when you make an announcement? Think beyond your marketing terms, and towards what people are searching for. Create useful, interesting content that targets those terms, and publish it at the right time.

Why does timing matter for search? Because in today’s fast-moving environment, if other influential online sites get out of the gate with their content ahead of you, they’ll become the go-to source and they’ll claim your spot in the search results.

If you’re currently losing this battle, take a look at what the other sites are doing better than you.

Remember – you have the advantage – you know what’s coming down the pipe, and you know when it’s coming. That means you should *always* be able to beat them to the punch.

Use Multimedia

Multimedia is such a 90′s term… everywhere except search. Universal search is meaning that different forms of content are being displayed next to each other in search results. That means you’re not just competing for the top-ranked text; you’re competing for the top-ranked image too, and the top-ranked video. Not everyone has cottoned-on to that yet – take advantage of it and think beyond text when you’re planning-out your content.

There you have it – four tips for optimizing content. What other tips would you add?

Posted in: social media, uncategorized

Tags: content, social media

10Comments

You Don’t Need To Know Everything

11.08.29

I recently took on a new role within Edelman (it’s a good thing, don’t worry), and as a result have begun working with a new team – once again, spread across different offices. Last week, I made a trip down to our DC office to meet with several of them.

You know what I did down there?

I learned.

I sat with each member of the team there and asked them what they did on a day-to-day basis; how they saw themselves within the team; what was going well and what wasn’t, and how I could help them. When they had questions I answered, but in general I said as little as possible and just absorbed.

I found it immensely valuable.

It seems like common sense, but I don’t think many people manage to find the time to make these sorts of meetings happen. To me though, they’re among the most important conversations that I will have in the near future – these are the people I’ll be working with day in, day out; getting to know them, what makes them tick, what they like and dislike and what they need from me will make it a thousand times easier to do my job. Plus, they’re a great group of people who I really like, which makes things even better.

I know that I’m good at what I do. By the same token, I know that my new colleagues are good at what they do, too (really freakin’ good), and that we have a tonne to learn from each other. I certainly didn’t learn everything over the space of a few hours meeting with them, but it’s a start.

What’s more — and critically — through these meetings I let them know that I don’t pretend to know their jobs. I’ll rely on them to educate me and on the leaders of the team to let me know where I’m needed, so I can focus appropriately.

Will I have ideas? Sure. I already do. However, I’m making sure I take the time to make sure that my ideas are grounded in reality and not just flights of fancy, and that I don’t just interfere in things that are working well when there are things that really do need my attention.

My old boss gave me a good piece of advice recently — he said you don’t need to know everything; instead, you need to develop a team around you that you can trust and that can make sure you know everything you need to, so you can help where you’re needed and get out of the way where you’re not.

Good advice.

Posted in: Agency life

Tags: agency

8Comments

Book Review: Social Marketing to the Business Customer

11.08.22

Despite all of the books out there about social media, most of them are pretty generic or focus on end-user 101s. So, when I heard about Social Marketing to the Business Customer (by Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman), I picked-up a copy straight away — because I think the marketplace is desperately in need of solid B2B books offering practical social marketing advice.

The bottom line: I’ve already recommended this book to several colleagues looking to learn more about social media from a B2B perspective. Even if you’ve worked in the social media space for a while, this book offers useful pointers and case studies that will help you to think differently about how you approach B2B social marketing.

For me, three key things stand out about this book:

1. It acknowledges that social media isn’t the second coming. While, per the title, the book is totally about social marketing, the authors frequently remind the reader that there are other promotional tactics available to business owners, and points out that social media isn’t always the best set of tools to use. A little dash of reality is essential to a book on this topic, when everyone else sometimes seem to have the blinkers on.

2. It brings new case studies to the table. We’ve all heard about the obvious case studies a hundred times. Dell, Starbucks, and so on (disclosure: Starbucks is an Edelman client). If you’ve read a social media book, you’ve heard their stories and you’ve learned all you will from them at this point. They’re in this book too, but so are organizations like InnoCentive, the Oil Spill Recovery Institute and the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts. In fact, along with the examples spread liberally throughout the book, there’s a whole chapter consisting purely of case studies of eight diverse organizations using social media in diverse ways.

Why does this matter?

Because you’re much more likely to be able to relate to one of these companies than you are to the giant first movers.

What’s more, this book doesn’t just talk inputs, it talks outcomes – it lets you know the results of those companies’ social media activities. In doing so it provides the substance that you need to take those case studies to your management to help convince them that your ideas are good ones.

3. It’s written for the average B2B marketer. You don’t need to be a social media expert; you don’t even need to be a digital marketer. You just need to have a good marketing head on your shoulders to understand and get value from this book, as it starts you at the beginning of the planning process and takes you through to tool selection and measurement. That’s why I’ve recommended it to colleagues who are looking to learn more about this topic — because it will help them go from 0 to 30 in B2B social media marketing. Our digital team can help them along the rest of the way.

Of course, there are things I would change. The chapter on ROI makes a LOT of assumptions, and I noticed more grammar errors in the book than in most others that I’ve read recently. They didn’t detract from the value in the book, though — and the fact that there IS a chapter on ROI made me happy.

Who should read this: People looking to gain a basic understanding of B2B social media. If you’re in this boat, Social Marketing to the Business Customer is a worthwhile read.

Who should avoid this: Purely B2C marketers (although you may still learn some useful pointers) and people at an advanced level of knowledge in the B2B social media space.

What you’ll learn: