In today’s AHA Flip Cam Friday video, Ruth talks about communication. It’s more about what your audience hears, than what you say.
AHA Flip Cam Friday
Defining What You Need In A Social Media Consultant
Kevin Barenblat has a great piece on how to choose a social media partner on Imediaconnection.com. He outlines 10 questions to ask if you are considering working with a consultant or agency for your social media outreach. It’s a good article and worth reading if you are considering bringing on social media assistance.
AHA Take
I think that we, at AHA, bring an interesting perspective and specific expertise to our approach to the social media initiatives that we develop for clients. We are a PR agency, not social media marketers, and we view the world from a different perspective. While we work to achieve the campaign goals and objectives, our approach is one that is public relations founded, rather than with a marketing focus. That means that we are also cognizant of any potential risk that might be associated with an organization participating in social media and have the skills and ability to help mitigate and manage that risk in respect to communication.
Social media has blurred the lines between marketing, PR/communications and operations. It provides an opportunity for collaboration throughout your organization. And there are incredible opportunities as well as potential risk attached, so you want to make sure that you are strategic about how your organization uses social media.
One of the questions that Kevin recommends asking is: How will you measure ROI? Measurement is a challenge that communicators have faced for years. Back in the day, we used to measure media clips. Even though that didn’t really showcase the value, it was one of the few tools that we, as PR people, had. The world has changed drastically and providing editorial/advertising value doesn’t work anymore. It’s important, we believe, to understand what your objectives are and to define how you will measure return on investment (and success) relevant to your objectives. Social media demands that you put the information into context and not just take numbers and minutes on your website, it includes engagement, connection and the development of relationships. It can be measured and it should be – regularly. If you aren’t monitoring, measuring and analyzing how people are engaging with your organization through social media and what value that brings on a regular basis, you can’t refine, adjust and improve. Measurement is important.
What questions do you ask potential social media partners?
Should An Intern Run Your Social Media?
There is a very interesting post on Ragan.com. They ask whether an intern at your organization could – and should – be charged with handling social media. That is a really good question, and one that sparked a great deal of discussion at our Vancouver PR agency.
AHA Take
This is a subject that I feel quite strongly about. I don’t think an intern should run your social media, but I do believe that interns and other junior staffers can – and should – participate in your social media initiatives. We often encourage clients to create reverse-mentoring opportunities where a junior or intern works with a more senior staffer and helps them to navigate the online world. This way, the junior person learns from the senior person and vice versa.
Even with a strong strategic communications plan that includes social media, for the most part, an intern or junior staffer doesn’t have the wisdom, experience or the training to manage your online communications. I think that sometimes we think “social media” and have visions of young “20-somethings” in our heads and we forget that social media is just another avenue of communication.
The Ragan piece puts forward a very solid point, one that we often discuss with clients. Would you let an intern speak to media or write your organization’s newsletter without guidance and supervision? Would you let this person be the voice of your organization in other platforms? If you wouldn’t, handing off social media to an intern just doesn’t make sense.
One of the key points that we discussed here at AHA is that there is a perception that social media is free and therefore, it often falls down the food chain of communications efforts. We, at AHA, disagree. Social media is one of the strongest communications tools that many organizations have today. It is crucial that how you participate in social media is seen as a key component of your overall communications strategy, not just some little exercise you hand off to an intern.
It is definitely an interesting debate.
We would love to know what you think.
AHA Flip Cam Friday – Negative Social Media
In today’s AHA Flip Cam Friday video, Ruth talks about what to do if there are negative conversations about your organization on social media sites.
How To Respond Using Social Media When Something Goes Wrong
There was a great piece online last week at theglobemail.com that gave five tips to Air Canada about how they may have better handled a PR issue that happened recently. While the piece is focused on an incident with the airline, there is wealth of knowledge in here for any organization. It’s worth a read.
From what we understand, a young boy who is fighting a terminal illness travelled to New York City recently to live out one of his life wishes. At some point during his travels, with Air Canada, his wheelchair – which is a necessity for this young fellow – was damaged. His aunt tweeted about it, which, given the situation, touched many people and created some buzz online. The thing of it is, while it turns out that Air Canada was working on the situation, they weren’t communicating this to anyone – including the people discussing it on Twitter.
AHA Take
I am not sure whether Air Canada didn’t know the conversations were happening or decided that they weren’t important enough to respond to. Either way, their silence hurt them. Air Canada doesn’t have the best brand reputation and this incident, which was about a sick little boy and a dream trip for him, didn’t help much.
We are always cautious about criticizing how an organization handles things because you don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. In this case, I think that’s part of the challenge. The public (which are made up of a large group of people who travel on airplanes) feels that too much goes on behind closed doors with Air Canada. We feel like Air Canada doesn’t respect us or care enough to communicate with us. It wouldn’t have taken very much effort to get online and explain that they were on this. They could have explained easily that they were fixing the wheelchair AND were going to provide this young boy and his family with some additional perks to make up for the inconvenience and challenges they faced because of this incident. But they didn’t.
The young boy now has his chair back and is excited that he’ll be taking his cousins to Disney World, another wish of his, as Air Canada has offered to take them.
It’s a shame that Air Canada didn’t take the time to tweet or announce that they were doing the right thing. It would have been a lot easier than taking yet another hit to their organizational reputation.