In today’s AHA Fast Take Friday, Ruth talks about the importance of understanding what people want to talk to you about…not what you want to tell them.
It’s a two-way conversation
Blogging for business
Blogging has become a regular communications tool for organizations. One of the things that I have noticed is that when we work with the marketing department or agency of a client, there is a little bit of discussion over which area (communications or marketing) will develop and manage the campaign on Twitter and/or Facebook. There is never any discussion about the organization’s blog – it belongs firmly with the communications team.
Like any communications tool, blogging isn’t for everyone. It depends on the objectives, goals, overall strategy and, of course, the resources. It takes time and effort to produce a relevant, interesting and informative blog post on a regular basis.
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Our communications audits findings
Recently, at the AHA office, we have been working on communications audits for several clients. One of the areas that we review is their use of social media. (We also research and analyze how other organizations in the same field use social media and provide them with best and worst practices during this process.) In our research, we discovered an interesting trend: many organizations have reverted to a more traditional approach of pushing information out through social media channels rather than engaging and starting or participating in conversations.
Of the five communications audits we have done in the past few months, four of the organizations are dealing with challenges in that their social media networking communities are not growing and there is little or no engagement or interaction.
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Offence vs. defence
Today is American Thanksgiving and in honour of our U.S. family, friends and clients, I thought I would use football to make my points today. We have TV sets in our AHA office and usually they are tuned in to news channels; today they will be on football.
What we do as communicators can be compared to football. In the sport, there is an offence and defence; we have proactive and reactive. Each person on the football team plays a key role in their success. Some show their abilities on the field (the players), others in the background (the coaches, trainers, front office staff).
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How to create great content
Technology makes it easy to share content. Your website, blog, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites provide the ability to publish your content. Where you publish depends on where your stakeholder group spends time and it is important to identify how they want to interact with your organization. But how do you create engaging, relevant, timely content?
Create an Editorial Schedule
Do you have a schedule of the content you will upload? A little forethought goes a long way when you are busy and need content or an idea in a hurry.
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