Ikroh’s Summary of the Vocus Online Conference – “Retweet: Engagement Means Business” – Part 1

 
Public Relations Management software providers Vocus held a fantastic webinar last week, which included talks from five influential speakers from the PR, marketing and social media world: Deidre Breakenridge, David Meerman Scott , Beth Harte, Lee Odden and Brian Solis.

We thoroughly enjoyed the whole day of marketing and 2.0 insights and we thought for those of you who didn’t get a chance to watch the speakers and get involved in the live chat, we’d summarise each speaker’s presentation (and their scheduled chat afterwards) and try to answer any unanswered questions from the chatrooms. Every weekday this week, we will post a summary, following up next week with the chat questions. Enjoy!

Deidre Breakenridge – Author, President & Executive Director of Communications at Mango!

Overview:

Breakenridge opened the Vocus webinar with her talk: “From PRs Past to Social Media Power”. The talk was lively and very useful to those in PR looking to find out more about integrating traditional methods of marketing (where the audience is reached through impressions) with social media marketing (where the audience is reached through engagement) – or, as Breakenridge described the process, becoming a “Hybrid”.

This means stopping just making ‘noise’ at your customers and target audience – social media is about two-way communication, listening to what your clients want and feel about your brand and services, and making meaningful interactions.

Companies need to start overlapping different, perhaps fragmented departments and building relationships in a streamlined, integrated way; between marketing, advertising, digital creation, design, public relations/communications and brand building.  All these aspects of a business can connect via social media, providing your audience/customer base with familiarity and cohesion, and encouraging group success.

For social media success you need to first listen, consider the best place and the best time to start to engage, and choose the most influential people to connect with. Think carefully about where you should place yourself, and put out feelers to get networking – whether it’s in the blogging world, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, specific forums etc, you need to find the niche where you’ll make the most impact. Who you connect with can make a massive difference to. These people might not be just the ones with the most followers – they could be A-listers (or particularly influential in their own sectors, trendsetters and so on. Refer to Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism for where to network:

Finally, you must monitor, measure and assimilate your results and data into helping you adapt and improve your social media strategy and move forward. 18,00 senior PR professionals, surveyed by Vocus, said they planned on integrating social media and invest in new technology. Social media is critical to brands, professionals and business and it’s important to take notice and get involved.

The Hybrid

Breakenridge referred to Forrester’s Social Technographic Ladder, showing the level at which Hybrids must be operating to make a difference in social media. We need to move from being inactive (it seems bizarre but there are many businesses who literally have no online presence or interaction going for them and they are missing out on a huge audience), to mere spectators, to actually connecting with social networks, to collecting and organising content, to responding to others’ content, to engaging in conversation, and finally becoming creators- fully interacting with their peers, their customers and their potential audience and making social content go.

Being a hybrid means you must fulfil all of the following roles:

• Strategic communicator
• Social media expert
• Sociologist
• Market analyst/expert
• Web marketer
• Customer service representative
• Relationship marketer
• Viral marketer
• Conversationalist/listener
• Research librarian

Gain experience in all these fields through thorough research and experimentation. Most importantly, you need to be able to feed information back to your boss, your client, whoever, about the value of social media interaction. Only 16% of businesses are measuring the ROI on their social media, according to “Social Software in Business” by Mzinga and Babson.

Ways to Engage

You need to make the right decisions to reach your audience – choose the correct media and presentation of your content to make the most impact. Traditional PR needs to be translated into a Hybrid approach, using social media releases, polls, surveys, wordclouds, widgets, wikis, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, VNR 2.0, case studies, newsletters, tweets, presentations… the list goes on. Take it a step further and let your customers enter into your news and press department, let them talk to you and your business and give their input, their feedback and their questions.

Monitor your data

There are lots of different ways you can monitor your social media engagement:

• Who are your top influencers?
• What is the sentiment towards your brand, your industry and your competitors?
• What are the trends in your success or popularity?
• Where are your best conversions coming from?
• Which are your most popular posts/conversations?
• What volume of traffic are you getting from your different networks?

There are various free and paid for programs and companies to help you do this, including some simple tools like Google Alerts, Social Mention, PostRank and Vocus. Interpret your results intelligently and present them to your executives/clients in ways that clearly show the impact of their social media interactions and make them easy to process, for example by using buzz graphs, word clouds and other visual representations.

With social media we are able to be more tech savvy – a blog can look like a pretty flash website, and contain the important composite parts needed to act as one, and allows a company to be directly connected to a blogging community. We are less reliant on IT and design departments to get involved ourselves. Breakenridge stressed the importance of media training the right people from the bottom to the top of your company, incorporating employees who need to be engaged and increasing the points of contact for your customers.

Well, that’s all from us today – thanks again to Vocus and Deidre Breakenridge for a great presentation. Come back every weekday this week for the rest of the webinar summaries, and check the blog next week for our Q&A session comprised of all the questions that couldn’t get answered on the day.

You can read the other parts of our Vocus Online Conference Summaries with David Meerman Scott, Beth Harte, Lee Odden and Brian Solis at the Ikroh blog.

Resources:

Books:

Putting the Public Back into Public Relations by Brian Solis and Deidre Breakenridge

Trust Agents by Chris Brogan

The New Community Rules by Tamar Weinburg

Groundswell by Charlene Li et al

Websites:

www.deidrebreakenridge.com

www.briansolis.com

www.conversationagent.com

Tags: Beth Harte, Brian Solis, conversation prism, David Meerman Scott, Deidre Breakenridge, hybrid PR, Lee Oddin, PR 2.0, Social media, social media engagement, social media for business, Social Media Marketing, Social technographic ladder, Vocus conference, Vocus webinar
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