SOCIAL MEDIA - PUTTING AN END TO THE MYTHS
We’ve spoken before about the rising importance of social media, and findings in a new survey of public relations professionals and students show that new communication technology has been widely accepted by the public relations profession. Simultaneously, communicators at all levels of experience, including students, strongly believe that new technology tools, such as blogs and social networking sites, present critical credibility and ethical challenges.
If you haven’t already heard, social media describes the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. It can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video, with popular social mediums including blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs. Social media is a very important consideration for PR campaigns, but a few “myths” are already beginning to emerge as people slowly find their feet in this new communication medium.
- Myth one: using forums in a PR campaign means joining under a pseudo name and talking about your products, services and business as if you’re a happy customer. Forums are very tight knit communities – if you think this will work we invite you to experiment. You will soon discover that forum members will be quick to identify and publicly ‘hang’ you. The best approach is to be honest and upfront – identify yourself and where you’re from and regularly contribute (without sales pitches) and accept feedback from other forum contributors.
- Myth two: Putting lots of website links in your media release classifies it as a social media release. While it’s true that people are starting to include website links and multimedia in the information they are sending to journalists, social media means creating new ways for people to find, share and comment on your information and view it within the context of relevant conversations.
- Myth three: Only issuing your media release via email is sufficient. If the release is never published to the Web (on your website, someone else’s website, a news site, a blog or via the wires) then Google can’t find it, Techonorati can’t find it and the people who might care about the news can’t find it. That’s not very sociable.
- Myth four: Blasting the email out to hundreds of media contacts is fine and personalising the email is no longer relevant. Mass mail-outs to media should be banned. Instead of sending a media release to hundreds of journalists, think about writing a targeted email message to the top five reporters you think will be interested in the information, and go from there.
