Here at AHA, we’ve been taking a good, hard look at ourselves and identifying areas where we could improve. So often when you work in communications, you are so busy helping clients that a focus on your own public relations takes a back seat. I found an interesting article on Ragan.com that identifies the seven elements that the writer feels every professional should have in their email signature.
While I agree with many of the points, I also believe that email signatures provide an opportunity to highlight a newly launched initiative or campaign. We recently had a client ask us how they could let people know about a charity initiative that they were holding. This is a multinational organization with staff and stakeholders worldwide. One of the easiest ways was to add a call to action to their email signatures, driving people to a page on their website. It was a quick, no cost, straightforward way to let their community know what they were up to – and it worked. The website saw an increase in visitors once the call to action was added, which in turn helped to support the event and the charity.
I do agree that it is important to have your basic contact information on your email signature – and to use the signature. I can’t tell you how often I get emails with no signature on them at all! And I do think that you can use your email signature to get the word out, when it’s appropriate. A quick call to action and a link can help spread the word about an event, campaign or initiative.
At AHA, we believe strongly in the power of blogging. Having said that, it’s important to note that blogging isn’t for every organization.
A blog gives you the opportunity to connect with your organization’s stakeholders. It allows you to provide valuable, relevant information to people. It can help, depending on the writing style and the content, show the “human” side of your organization. All are important components of your brand and how your organization interacts with your community.
Our AHA blog is currently under review by our crew. We are committed to our blog and find that it provides great value to our community. Our objective with this blog is to provide interesting, relevant, useful information that focuses on communication – both traditional and social media – for our stakeholder group. Readers who may potentially be clients, contractors or partners see who we are, our expertise, skill sets and experience and they understand our approach to business. Having said that, we have written this blog for several years and it’s time for us to see what we are doing well, what we could do better and what we need to drop or add to stay current and relevant to our readers.
I came across a good post on Ragan.com about how to use stats to make your blog a must-read and I found it valuable. I hope you do too.
AHA Creative Strategies is the PR agency of record for Tourism New Zealand (TNZ). As many of our regular blog readers know, TNZ is one of our favourite clients and not just because they are fun and hilarious people. The North American team at TNZ (based in Los Angeles) works with AHA in a partnership and that approach creates positive results. We have had some of Canada’s best travel writers visit New Zealand as a part of the International Media Program and have worked with them to see coverage generated in the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun, AOL Canada, Sympatico.ca, MSN.ca, ReadersDigest.ca, Canoe.ca, and the list goes on and on.
Paul and I will be heading to New Zealand on Friday to produce TRENZblog.com. TRENZblog is a social media campaign that is a great example of identifying and targeting a specific audience in a defined time frame.
When we started TRENZblog in 2009, social media was starting to become prevalent. It wasn’t where it is today, however. As an organization, TNZ saw the value in investing in this social media campaign as a pilot project. Since then, the world has become more and more active on social media networking sites and online in general and TRENZblog has benefited from that. TRENZblog was initially created to connect with travel media (both trade and consumer) and travel industry professionals (travel agents, tour operators, wholesalers, etc.) who might not be able to travel to New Zealand for TRENZ, New Zealand’s largest travel trade show. While this is the largest audience for TRENZblog, we have found as we have gone along that quite a few travellers – people that don’t work in the travel industry, but are interested in travelling to New Zealand – began to follow TRENZblog. This secondary audience is also an important group for us – the traveller interested in New Zealand.
We are now entering our 3rd year of TRENZblog. Each year, we have seen strong growth – up to 30% in audience figures. I think for this specific campaign, there were several key factors that provided a foundation for this success. They are:
TNZ saw this as a pilot project – they (and we) were open to taking a risk and to experimenting and seeing what worked and what didn’t. It was an opportunity to learn, along with our stakeholder group, as we all moved more deeply into the use of social media and online tools.
This campaign had a clearly identified community that it was targeting. Our blog readership and Twitter followers are solid – in context of the target market we want to connect with. We don’t have a million followers – but we have a strong following of travel media and travel professionals along with some non-travel professionals who are interested specifically in New Zealand as a travel destination. This campaign targets an audience that has it’s own audience. For every one person we have that follows us, they may have their community of 100, 500 or 25,000 people. So if we tell them about New Zealand and they tell others, the reach builds.
The campaign was given enough time (now three years) to build a community and to create momentum. Social media engagement takes time and effort. It doesn’t happen over night.
This campaign was also given a specific life span – we start a week before TRENZ (May 22-25, 2011) and we end about a week after. TRENZblog and @TRENZblog on Twitter, with few exceptions, is quiet for the rest of the year. Our community knows that – it’s a little like we’re a friend that visits via social media once a year. We are always welcomed back – and we’re always sad to say goodbye!
For the week prior to TRENZ, Paul and I will travel on New Zealand’s North Island and experience some of the fabulous tourism products offered – from wine tours on a bike, to cruising Lake Taupo, to golfing, to experiencing authentic Maori culture. Then we head to Queenstown, New Zealand’s adventure capital, where we will ZipTrek, tour Milford Sound, check out more wineries (I know, it’s a tough job!) and even skydive!
Then we report live from TRENZ on all the news from New Zealand’s tourism sector. We’ll interview tourism operators (and are happy to interview specific operators on request!). We’ll be tweeting live, almost live-blogging and providing all kinds of photos and video clips. If you can’t be in New Zealand for TRENZ, this is the next best thing to being there!
Our blogs for the next two weeks will focus on this campaign – we want to showcase a real, live campaign – it’s challenges and successes – so that our blog readers who are interested can get a real sense of what can be done, when you do it right!
As many regular AHA blog readers know, we are big fans of Brian Solis. He is a smart guy who “gets” social media and is able to explain it in a straightforward manner in a business context. If you haven’t discovered Brian, read his book Engage or keep up with his blog. The information he shares is valuable and there are few people in the social media world, in my opinion, who can clearly explain the how to of both strategy and execution – and the why behind it. He is a thought leader and he happens to have the ability to inspire and move you to action.
Brian recently wrote 14 Best Practices for Long-Term Social Media Success, which appeared on Mashable. It is well worth a read. The 14 best practices put forward in this piece are gold; they are points that we drive home over and over again with clients. If you want to engage in social media for the long-term and create positive relationships with your community – read this blog post.
I am interested in the newly released Storify. While I need to spend some more time on it, it looks like a great way to curate content on specific stories or topics – and could work internally or externally for our clients.
Ragan.com has a great piece on this new online tool – it’s worth a read.
