A Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Campaign Execution

CATEGORIES: Papers
POSTED ON: 08 Jun 2009
TAGS: Our Online PR & Social Media Agency Work, Rowan Stanfield, Social Media, Social Media Campaign, Social Media Marketing, Social networks

C&M Guide to Social Media Campaigns

How to Win Friends and Influence People With Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the Blogosphere.

Overview

This short paper gives you a ‘101’ view on how to research and implement a basic Online PR / Social Media Campaign.  Specifically, it offers some best practise advice on how to use Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the Blogsphere for successfully seeding campaign ideas.  (If you’re a Facebook or LinkedIn addict don’t worry:  we’ll be writing a separate paper about Online PR in Social Networks very soon!)

Part 1: Social Media Campaign Philosophy

“The skills required in the Online world are very different to those practised in traditional Media Relations.”
Roger Warner, MD of C&M

It may have been said before, but I’m going to say it again: Online PR is putting the ‘public’ back into ‘public relations’. Gone are the days when us PR people have to rely on a third party (i.e. the mass media) to get a message ‘out there’, because Social Media has opened up a wealth of opportunities for talking directly with your customers. And for this we use a Social tool set and a more human approach.

But this also means that we assume direct responsibility for what is said, and are liable to take the flack if we say something offensive or inappropriate. The phrase ‘outreach’ has been banded about a lot in relation to Social Media and Online PR campaigns lately – but we try to avoid it here at C&M. ‘Outreach’ seems to imply a one-way, outbound transaction with external parties (it’s a term often associated with the disenfranchised – homeless people, drug users, etc.), whereas our best work is all about give and take on a very intimate level. Talking to Joe Public is an entirely different ballgame to media schmoozing, and should always be approached as a conversation rather than a pitch.

Social Media Campaigns – Just like a face-to-face chat, but online.

Once you get your head round these essential differences, Social Media campaigns can be a huge amount of fun and massively rewarding – in a much more personal, direct and measurable way than, say, seeing an article placed in a magazine. It’s not about firing off press releases, sucking up to journalists and counting the column inches, it’s about starting a dialogue, that should – if you do it right – take on a life of its own,  distribute your message, and drive warm blooded web traffic.

Part 2: Social Media Campaign Research

“True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.” Ben Jonson

The best conversations in life are those we have with like-minded, interested, interesting people who are good at listening as well as talking. The same goes for Social Media conversations, so don’t waste your time and energy on someone who really isn’t bothered about what you’ve got to say.

In most cases, the quality and relevance of your followers/friends/contacts is more important than the quantity. It may look impressive to have a 1000+ Twitter following, but how many of them are actually contributing anything to your cause? And who they are and where they come from is often less important than how they can help you.  In Online PR terms, your media can be a customer, a partner, a consultant, a member of staff or a reporter – the important thing is that they care for you and are able to extend the conversation around your brand.

Identifying the right audience is the first step to good Online PR practice, and there are hundreds of tools out there to help you do it. Here are just a few of our favourite research tools for Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the blogsphere, plus some general notes on monitoring and managing potential contacts.

Part 3: Social Media Research Tools for Online PR Campaigns

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust

Twitter

• Twellow is a really useful directory of Twitter users, because it lets you search people’s bios as well as their names. So for a UK-specific campaign that’s promoting new web design technology, you could type in “Web Designer UK” to get a list of relevant users.
• Tweetbeep is a bit like Google Alerts for Twitter. It allows you to set up keyword specific searches that can be turned into alerts or RSS feeds so you can receive alerts whenever someone is Tweeting about a specific subject. The tool’s advanced search also letsyou can also specify a location: for example ‘500 miles from London’ would show you any tweets on your chosen subject sent within that radius.
• Twitter Karma is particularly handy if you’re taking on an existing Twitter account that needs some TLC or if your current profile is in need of a follower overhaul. It shows you who is following you back and which of your followers you are also following. The main advantage of Twitter Karma over FriendorFollow (another popular Twitter housekeeping tool) is that you can speed up this process by bulk following and unfollowing.
• When deciding whether to follow someone on Twitter, we also take into account the velocity, sociability and lucidity of their tweets, as well as the obvious number of followers and weight of second-order followers. Twinfluence is a good tool for measuring most of these things.

Flickr

• The most straightforward way of searching for suitable Flickr contacts is within Flickr itself. The ‘search for members’ function allows you to find people by their interests, which makes it easy to target relevant people. Of course, users may not put all of their passions into their bios, so another way to approach it is by tracking down photos on a certain subject and tracing them back to their creator.
• For a photography competition we’re currently running with Plain Lazy, I used Compfight to find pictures of skaters, surfers and other relevant communities. It shows you a big page of thumbnails on your chosen search query – and this is much easier and less time consuming to browse than Flickr’s own search engine.

YouTube

As with Flickr, it’s often easiest to search for photos rather than users, and for this I recommend using Google’s advanced video search, which gives you more options than YouTube’s own search engine. (Note – I’m suggesting that you leave the YouTube environment to conduct YouTube searches here.) This also allows you to turn your searches into RSS feeds, so that you can monitor new content via your RSS reader app without needing to go back and do new searches each time.

Blogs

To identify relevant blogs, we use a combination of Google blog search and Technorati, and then rate their influence manually using sites such as delicious and by counting the level of backlinkage and extent of connectivity within blogger communities. We also use Linkdiagnosis.com to validate the quality and relevance of the backlinks.

Another Great Multi-Purpose Tool

For an all-round handy tool, Social Mention is a Social search engine that pulls content from across all Social Media. This is especially useful if you don’t have time to search each platform individually.

The Influencer Monitoring Dashboard

Once we’ve identified the users and communities to target, anything with an RSS feed gets plugged into our campaign Influencer Monitoring Dashboard (we use Netvibes, but any RSS aggregator would work), so that we can keep tabs on new activity in real time. The Influencer Monitoring Dashboard is also where we collate all our keyword searches for blogs, news sites and any other relevant online communities. (If you’re interested about how we do this and what a Dashboard looks like, then just email us or tweet us at @contentmotion and we can share some examples with you.)

The C&M Influencer Monitoring Dashboard

Part 4: Social Media Campaign Implementation

“A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.” Truman Capote 

Once we’ve identified the communities and individuals to target for a campaign, it’s time to start talking. There’s no secret formula or etiquette Bible for getting this right – we just rely on our instinct and approach it as we would any sensible conversation. You wouldn’t burst into the middle of a club you had just joined and start shouting about yourself without getting to know people first, and the same rule goes for online communications. 

Our advice here is to just be friendly and polite, contribute to existing conversations and be up front about why you are there. If you’ve done your job right in the identification process, it shouldn’t be too hard to get people listening.  Another key thought here is utility.  People are more likely to listen to you if you have something useful to contribute to a discussion – which in practice means servicing their agenda in the first instance and not yours.  In this context, a blog comment or a forum post will address a need – it won’t be an advertisement.

Social Media Campaigns in Action

Here are some examples of recent Social Media Campaigns that have worked well for us, and some tips as to how we implemented them.

Twitter

A recent campaign we worked on with IBM proved that Twitter can be a real force in Online PR, especially for niche campaigns directed at tight-knit communities. The aim of the campaign was to drive sign-up to a virtual event inside IBM’s Virtual Forbidden City and for our Twitter activity we took a two-pronged attack: enlisting the help of IBM staff and brand influencers to spread the word on our behalf, as well as targeting potential event attendees directly. We didn’t need a massive following to create a buzz because having a small but well-connected and active community was just as effective.

As well as talking about the event, we did our best to make our Tweets interesting by sharing news stories, replying to relevant questions and generally interacting. The campaign was a success, with the majority of traffic to the main site coming from Twitter.  (You can check out the full case study here.)

Flickr

We’re currently working on a photography competition with Plain Lazy, that’s using Flickr as the host platform. To get things going, we started leaving invitations on relevant pictures, asking the photographers to add them to our competition pool and explaining the campaign incentives (great prizes, etc). We mostly chose pictures that already had a number of comments, so that the note would also be seen by the previous commenters in their Flickr activity feed. After a few days, the campaign took on a life of its own and photos started appearing in the Flickr pool without being directly invited.

YouTube

In much the same vein as Flickr, YouTube is all about the comment box – although the main disadvantage is that web links are disabled in YouTube, and comments tend to be less friendly and constructive than in Flickr. In other words, it’s less of a conversational environment than Flickr, making For an upcoming competition with Hotels.co.uk, we’re getting around this by making a promotional video that will be hosted on a dedicated Hotels.co.uk channel, and can also be posted underneath relevant videos as a ‘video response’.

Blogs

Perhaps the biggest minefield of all Social Media interactions, blogs also have the biggest potential for reaching a large audience, and coverage tends to be longer-lived and carry more weight than most flash-in-the-pan Twitter stories because of the backlinkage they carry and their general permanence. But how to talk to bloggers without being perceived as a self-promoting PR menace?

For the IBM Virtual Forbidden City event, we used our Influencer Monitoring Dashboard to monitor activity on the blogs we’d identified as relevant and influential in our initial research and analysis. Whenever a related post came up, we’d then leave a (relevant, appropriate) response, along with a link to the event site – or we’d alert our IBM team to do likewise). This not only helped drive traffic to the site and signups, but it also resulted in follow up blog posts, comments and Tweets about the event.
 

Conclusion: Social Media Campaigns, Sorted

So, with a few handy tools, a bit of imagination and a willingness to research the playing field and get stuck in, there’s really nothing that scary about running Social Media campaigns. Think of it like blind-dating: find someone with similar interests and hobbies, work out a suitable place to meet up, remember your Ps and Qs, and don’t spend all night talking about yourself. If all goes to plan, you’ll be engaged before you know it…

 

CATEGORIES: Papers
POSTED ON: 08 Jun 2009
TAGS: Our Online PR & Social Media Agency Work, Rowan Stanfield, Social Media, Social Media Campaign, Social Media Marketing, Social networks