Toe-In-The-Water Strategy for Social Media

Social media means marketing departments, public relations people and CEOs have to let go. They have to let go of control. They have to let the conversation develop and dialogue take place.

And that. is. hard.

If your organization is not ready to open itself up to the world, but wants to dip its toe in the social media water, a couple of things will get your started.


Start monitoring conversation about your organization, key people, trends and issues. The two primary places for monitoring are Technorati and Google Blog Search.

Both services allow you to subscribe via RSS to a feed. I highly recommend Bloglines to manage your feeds. Lots of people would be just as adamant about Google Reader. The benefit to a feed reader is that you can view all your searches and commonly read blogs in one place, keeping your "favorites" folder more manageable.

Start an internal blog. You can define what "internal" means. In a pure sense it would mean internal to your organization. But you can also have an "internal" blog for members only or for your staff and board of directors.

Most blogging platforms allow you to let in or keep out who you want. Wordpress is quickly becoming the Internet standard and has lots of great options for privacy. The Intranet Journal offers this how-to on creating an Intranet via Wordpress.

The clear benefit to an internal blog is that there's still a great deal of control, but you can test systems for posting, monitoring and responding with relative security. You can also foster a blog-friendly culture that will be more open to creating an external blog when the time is right.

CIO Magazine has seven reasons to create an internal blog here.

Understanding blogging culture and social media is an important part of getting started. You'll find some great tips here at Marketing Profs (one of my favorite resources!). And Kami Huyse at Communication Overtones has two excellent posts to which I refer frequently on corporate blogging - here and here.

Need more toe-in-the-water strategies? Media Orchard offers a few additional tips here.

Take your time and be deliberate. It may be an instant medium, but when you're participating on behalf of your organization, it's important to have all your systems, policies and strategies in place before you dive in.

- Kelli


"Toes" via Flickr by Crawford 721.

It Was a Great Workshop!

Thanks to the participants at our first-ever social media workshop this morning: Verve in Bloom.

I'd love to hear what you thought!

In the meantime, here are some links to today's resources:

View the presentations here. (slideshare.net)
Find more resources here. (del.icio.us)

Best Web Tools We're Using Right Now

Thank you, Web 2.0! We've found some terrific free and low priced resources to make working virtually around here work better.

Huddle: A file-sharing, to-do list making, message-leaving, approval-asking collaboration tool. My favorite part is that you can ask someone on your team for approval. If that person edits your document, you can track the edits, as well as ensure that you get the approval (from your supervisor or even a client) that you need. You can give it a whirl for 30 days to see if it works before you sign on for a small per-month charge.



Highrise: Share contact info, track when/where/how an individual was last contacted and if/when/how a follow up should occur. Really ideal for PR folks - the best contact sharing system I found. Those folks over at 37 signals are smart.


Finally, Good Widgets is a super simple and very cool photo widget. Choose from eight different styles and you can upload photos from flickr or webshots or photobucket automatically.

For more great Web 2.0 tools, check out Go2Web2.0.

A Writer's Coach: Learning How to be a Good Writer

Last week I had the privilege of hearing Jack Hart speak at a local PRSA luncheon about his latest book, “A Writer’s Coach.”

Jack Hart, managing editor at The Oregonian, has served as the newspaper’s writing coach and staff development director. His book is the culmination of more than 40 years in the industry working shoulder-to-shoulder with award-winning journalists.

The book is a step-by-step approach to the writing process and what good writers to do produce good writing. Here’s a quick rundown of the six steps of Hart’s writing process:

Step #1: Develop the idea. Understand the difference between a topic and an idea.

Step #2: Plan your reporting and organize your material. What you do before sitting at the computer directly impacts your writing. In other words: It’s obvious when a story is lacking research.

Step #3: Revisit your initial idea to discern a focus. Develop a simple theme statement (Subject-Predicate-Object) that encompasses what you want to say.

Step #4: Develop the story’s structure to convey a message. Take one manageable step at a time, line by line.

Step #5: Draft. Any problem you encounter while writing can be traced to the step before. For example, if you run into research roadblocks, your idea is probably weak.

Step #6: Polish and edit. Editing should be a collaborative effort between the writer and the editor. Read your story to anyone who’ll listen and work together to create seamless copy.

These steps transcend all communication industries from PR, to advertising, to broadcast journalism.

One more writing tip from Hart: “Get right to the main point.”

- Michelle Pera

Creativity Has Its Place

Working with a marketing, PR and design firm should be fun. Your communication team should bring lots of expertise and plenty of fresh ideas. But creativity has its place. Creativity must be part of an overall campaign with your long-term interests at heart.

Making a splash with a bit of media coverage is great. But publicity is only one tactic and often focuses on short-term gains. Media relations should be one tool in the toolkit of your firm.

Having a beautiful brochure is terrific. But a good firm will ask good questions and work to understand your target audience to determine if it's the best method to reach your objectives. Creating a brochure for the sake of having one is a couple of thousand dollars ill-spent.

The key is to balance short-term "splashes" with long-term results. Give your communication team enough time (and enough budget) to do both and the results will be measurable.

- Kelli