Social Media

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 if it were a nail is accurate. I think it is important to first understand what the objectives and goals of a plan, initiative, project or campaign are before you decide what tools or tactics you will use.

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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).

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…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 less than some traditional media buys, which has been one of the benefits of PR over the years—more credibility and less cost than ads. However, I think that we need to view social media as a component of communications and there are few people still out there who think that PR is “free.” There are similar comparisons, an organization doesn’t pay a reporter for editorial coverage, but to develop a media relations strategy, create a pitch, get it out there and connect with a journalist and follow through—that takes expertise, time and effort, which costs money.

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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 we take on. We don’t have to “feed the machine” so we don’t take on everything that comes our way.

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Kami Huse at Communication Overtones has a great blog post on why Twitter Is Making Us Lazy. She hits the nail on the head with this post while she reminds us that social media is just a tool. Great public relations is about creating a strong relationship with your stakeholders. It is about sharing ideas, thoughts, a vision and, in some cases, explaining why the people in an organization took or didn’t take a specific action. Tools like Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media networks or tools assist in the dissemination of information and are meant to help create a discussion. The key words there are “assist” and “help”—they don’t replace every other tool. Speaking with people is important. Telephone calls, meetings, conferences, town halls—all of it matters.

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