Archive for January, 2010
Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 27th, 2010
In my role at AHA, I attend conferences, I take online courses, I read blogs and online media, and follow social media and PR visionaries on Twitter and on other social networking sites. I am always learning.
A few years ago, I went through a stage where I felt I had to know all of the social media, social networking, and online tools and technologies to do my job. It became overwhelming and I realized that I started to view each new things as “it.” The old adage that if your only tool is a hammer, you treat everything as…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 26th, 2010
Joel Postman has a good post on socialmediatoday.com that touches on 5 social media myths. It’s worth a read.
There are quite a few myths out there. We hear quite a bit about them at the AHA office. Many of the standard ones are listed in Joel’s piece.
We’re always interested in how organizations perceive the use of social media and what the misinformation or misunderstandings might be.
One of the myths that is sometimes overlooked is that social media is “different” than PR. This doesn’t mean that PR “owns” social media or that, depending on the scope…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 25th, 2010
According to a recent post on MSNBC, the Pope is encouraging priests to blog. This shows how “mainstream” social media has become. In my opinion, the Catholic Church has always been very aggressive in its marketing efforts. They have realized that people are online and that if you want to reach your stakeholders, you need to go where they are congregating (pardon the pun).
The Vatican has had a YouTube channel for a while and now, the Vatican is officially encouraging Priests to blog.
The Vatican has its own challenges in dealing with negative publicity, privacy and a…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 21st, 2010
There is an interesting article in AdAge.com about the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s decision to continue to make a scheduled stop at a private resort in Labadee, Haiti. It’s a pretty strong article with a great deal of criticism from PR pros. As I was reading it, I was wondering where the other side was…there are no quotes from PR pros saying that they “get” why Royal Caribbean made the decision to continue to make stops in Labadee.
As I read the piece, I was thinking that I must not be reading this article right because I would…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 21st, 2010
There is an ongoing myth that social media is free. This comes up reasonably often and when we explain the costs associated with developing a social media campaign, quite often the person is shocked.
Danny Brown outlined an extreme budget for social media on his blog post – and even if it is a little dramatic, it is worth a read.
Setting up a Twitter account or Facebook page is free. You can also get a blog set up at no cost. What does cost is the strategy, an audit, ongoing engagement, content creation and measurement. It’s much…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 19th, 2010
The econsultancy blog has a great post on social interaction measurements. It’s worth a read.
Katie Paine also has another post worth reading (she has a lot of posts worth reading). Here, she talks about problems in calculating the value of PR, based on what the equivalent ad space would cost. Measuring that way is so out-of-date, it always surprises me that it is still used. PR is about relationships, educating people about an issue or cause and helping to inform opinion. Comparing it to what an ad would cost is of no benefit.
With outdated…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 18th, 2010
Katie Paine has a great post entitled: Measuring Engagement is just another term for Measuring Relationships. If you don’t know about Katie Paine, her blog is worth checking out. She is one of the authorities on measurement and there is a wealth of information on her blog.
Measurement has always been a challenge in the world of PR. Back in the day, it was all about newspaper and magazine “clips” and the quantity. And a lot of PR professionals were forced to use clips to show success because that was the standard. At AHA, we have always approached…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 14th, 2010
Webworkerdaily.com has a good post focusing on whether it is possible to be personal and professional in social media. It is a topic that we, at AHA, discuss on a regular basis.
We are a boutique agency by choice. We started that way and it works for us. Now, we happen to believe that you can be small and still deliver the results of a much larger agency. Small doesn’t mean less to us, it means lean, focused and it gives us the opportunity to be a real team. It also allows us to make choices about the clients that…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 13th, 2010
There is an excellent post on the blog of Deirdre Breakenridge that is worth a read. It outlines a checklist that will help you define what you are going to do using social media, why to do it, who will be involved in the process internally/externally, who you want to connect with, how you will do that and how you will measure your results.
It is a good list that you can customize for your own purposes. It’s a tool that I know I will use over and over again.
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