Right now, my current Twitter Impact Score is 0%. My goal by the end of the term is to increase it by 2%! What’s your current impact score and what’s your goal?
Posted by: Linda Y. Lam | January 25, 2011
Twitalyzer: Impact Score
Posted by: kgraven | January 24, 2011
Welcome: Ten Social Media Tips
My name is Kenny Graven, I am a student at the University of Oregon majoring in public relations and expecting to graduate in June, 2011. You will find that I’m highly motivated, well-spoken, and a personable individual. I have an exceptional ability to communicate with diverse groups, a passion for taking on new challenges and the desire to succeed. Recently I have come across ten social media tips to get you noticed. I found these tips on The Examiner website and there from social media Guru Shashi Bellamkonda, head of Network Solutions. These have helped me create connections as I hope they do the same for you.
- Use Google Alerts and track online mentions of your name, your company name, and your children’s names.
- Leave comments on blogs. If you write blogs, write your articles in a way to invite comments. Don’t tell the whole story in your blog articles, advised Bellamkonda.
- Own a smart phone, to be accessible at all times.
- Participate on social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Bellamkonda said these are tools that can change public opinion.
- Create a personal or corporate blog.
- Use social media news releases. The use of these tools “enhances your traditional marketing approaches, but does not replace them.”
- Create social media guidelines for your company that emphasize what employees may do, instead of telling them what not to do. Refer employees to the code of conduct for concerns such as confidentiality.
- Create videos and podcasts. Bellamkonda shared examples from Goodwill Industries.
- Train people in your company to use social media effectively. “If you’re the social media expert in your company,” advised Bellamkonda, “your goal for 2011 should be that you’re going to create at least ten other experts at your company.”
- Meet offline. Attend grassroots events and local tweetups. He emphasized the importance of building personal relationships to achieve business goals.
Posted in Tips
Posted by: hatool | January 24, 2011
Category Pages
I wanted to put my categories at the top row of my WordPress.com blog – as if they were pages. I remembered liking it on the Social Media B2B blog.
I found this post on WordPress tips pages which tells you which themes provide that capability. For example Enterprise, Motion, and Titan all use two header menus, one for pages the other for categories.
I am now using the Enterprise theme for my blog. This theme works great for this specific blog, but it’s not for every blog. This is the downside of this simple solution – it doesn’t allow you to choose whichever theme you want.
The other solutions that came up in my search were too complicated to implement with my busy schedule as they require previous knowledge on themes and templates which I don’t have.
Perhaps you blog-savvies out there have a better way of doing this?
I’d love to learn how.
Posted by: sytsma6 | January 24, 2011
Facebook Thoughts
I have a confession to make. I have been fighting “the man” and have (until now) resisted the urge to create a Facebook page for myself. I am quite convinced that a person can continue to have a great social life without online social media. It was a matter of time though, now I will be forced to create one for class. It does not irritate me at all, I have nothing against Facebook; however, I have been considering what Facebook has become and what it all means.
Has Facebook become so dominant in the world of social media that it will be here to stay forever? Twitter surely poses no threat to it because the creators of Twitter ingeniously created a slightly different purpose for their website. With over 500 million users, Facebook is definitely winning the social media war. Will a person come along that makes a website that will put Facebook to shame? With technology increasing at incredible rates of speed, surely at some point in time a better site will be created. Fads come and go in relatively short amounts of time, and Facebook has been around since 2004. Maybe we are witnessing the Facebook era.
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted by: kelseyhelgeson | January 24, 2011
Social Media Trends
Social Media evolves rapidly, very rapidly. It’s important for us, as aspiring public relations professionals to keep up with social media trends as they evolve. What I find interesting, is the shift businesses (possible future employers) are making from traditional marketing to social media marketing. As social media continues to grow and change the way our society interacts with each other, companies are realizing that the best way to target their audience is to go online.
According to PRNewser, there are six big trends for social media in 2011:
Consumer use of social media is still rising: From December 2008 through May 2010, every age group increased its usage of social media. Boomers have experienced the most striking increase, from nine percent to 43 percent. Social media’s potential is strong as it has not yet reached a saturation point.
Prevalent use of social media by marketers: In 2011, 80 percent of marketers will use social media, and that is expected to rise to 88 percent by 2012. Back in 2008, only 42 percent were doing so. This growth has largely been driven by higher usage worldwide and the ongoing growth of Facebook.
Social media’s integration into all aspects of marketing: As marketers become more experienced with social media, they realize the need to incorporate it with their other initiatives. Williamson observed that rolling the social media function into existing departments is a more typical approach.
Social media’s growing share of marketing budgets: In 2010, 83 percent of marketers reported plans to increase their social media spending. Williamson noted that this often comes at the expense of traditional advertising budgets.
Location is more than checking in: While 33.2 million people currently use location based services, up from 12.3 million in 2009, this still represents fairly limited usage. According to Williamson’s data, usage is motivated more by the desire for deals and promotions than the urge to share one’s location.
End of top-down media websites: As content is being distributed across platforms, there has been less of a focus on driving traffic to a single site. Williamson said other tools such asFlipboard on the iPad have become effective ways to personalize media brands.
It’s evident that social media isn’t a fad. It’s here to stay and has already made monumental changes to how businesses attract attention and customers. It’s important to pay attention to how companies and businesses are moving to meet the needs and expectations of their target audience in an ever-changing social media world.
Image from blog.bigcom.com/?p=554
Posted in Social media | Tags: Social media, trends
Posted by: Ashley Sanders | January 24, 2011
Made to Stick
The term “sticky” has been stuck in my head since the first week of class. Since then I have been thinking of ways that make me “sticky” and immediately realize something that makes someone else “sticky”.
To recap, Chip Heath & Dan Heath’s 6 principles for “sticky” ideas are:
- simplicity We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.
- unexpectedness For our ideas to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. Open gaps in people’s curiosity and then fill in those gaps.
- concreteness Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.
- credibility Do research and try before you buy.
- emotions Make people feel something and elicit emotion.
- stories Tell stories to get people to act on the idea.
I think these principles are great tools for us to use to make our ideas “sticky” and to help when thinking of ideas to write about for our own blogs. There is so much information out there on social media sites and if an idea does not stick out, then it will easily be overlooked.
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted by: Nick McDonald | January 24, 2011
Johnson & Johnson Spiraling Out of Control
It seems like things couldn’t be going any worse for Johnson & Johnson, and there doesn’t appear to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Already under investigation by the FDA and the US Justice Department for their recalls at the end of 2010, J&J now has issued a recall for an additional 50 million bottles and packages of their products. They have already lost 12 percent of 4 billion cough-and-cold market and this seems like they will surely lose more. To make matters more interesting they have stated that after they fix the problems in their plants more recalls will have to be issued. Is there any way that people will ever trust these guys again? I think it would be a public relations practitioners nightmare to even start thinking about how they would deal with this. It could be years before the public forgets this and lets them back into their hearts and homes, if at all. This is a PR problem that might be impossible to fix.
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted by: Hana Katen | January 21, 2011
Google Gets Scrappy
While I would not go so far as to say I am a “starving college student,” I definitely don’t have a lot of extra dough lying around these days. Yes, I will admit, this lack of cash could just maybe stem from the fact that I am an, uh, “impressive” impulse buyer to say the least. Somehow, even as the numbers in my bank account continue to dwindle, I simply cannot stop BUYING THINGS.
Yes, I realize this is a problem, but that’s not really the point of this post. You’ll just have to get over your disdain for my ridiculous shopping addiction for the next few minutes and bear with me.
Many of you have probably heard of Groupons by now: A genius social media/marketing hybrid strategy that offers incredible group online deals to its subscribers…basically the fantasy of coupon clippers and impulse buyers alike. Uh oh. Because of Groupons and Living Social (another group coupon service), my roommates and I have spent a ridiculous amount of unnecessary money on “great deals” that we will absolutely never utilize.
The incredible overnight success of Groupon caught the attention of not only customers, but of competitors…and wannabes.
Our little friend Google, after seeing the explosion of Groupon, decided that it wanted in on this success story. So what did it do? Only what any billion dollar company would: Google tried to buy Groupon for $6 billion. Duh.
And you know what ol’ Mr. Groupon did? Refused it.
Well, Google was not too happy about this turn of events. With an indelible desire to tap into this new market, Google made a game-changing decision: It would launch its own online group coupon service, “Google Offers.”
Because of Google’s wide-spread influence and devoted audience, I believe that the project will be an enormous success for Google, and a devastating blow for Groupons.
At this point, I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about Google Offers. While I think that it is a feisty move on Google’s behalf, I can’t help but believe that this will be good news for (most) customers, and maybe bad news for the impulse buyer truly trying to save a couple bucks.
So cheers, Google, to you being the scrappy dog in the park and to me ‘saving’ money on things I don’t need.
-Hana Katen
Check out this article on Mashable that talks a little more about Google Offers
Posted by: Technology is changing us | January 20, 2011
Pitching to the media
Last term in my J440 class we had a guest speaker come in and talk about pitching. After his lecture, I went home and did some research of my own. I stumbled across this great article by Liz Sanders. I have referenced back to it many times in the past few months with my internship and various class assignments.
10 strategies to get you noticed-
- Offer information of value – I feel that this is an important strategy because you need to be able to show the media/public that you have something to offer. You need to stand out, or as we are learning, be STICKY!
- Do your research first – Pitching to the wrong person or the wrong media outlet in my opinion is time wasted. You can avoid that by researching first.
- Be professional and establish credibility – There are others out there competing for media attention, be professional and maintain credibility to show them why they should choose you.
- Use their preferred method of communication – Ask them what works best for them, you need to work around them and their schedule.
- Tie your news into a trend or community issue – This isn’t something we hear everyday, but I feel that it is so important. Journalists want to report on things that are happening now, trending and “in”.
- Be subtle – Don’t pitch and advertisement. The media is for producing news not ads.
- Don’t be sloppy – NO TYPOS or GRAMMAR ERRORS!
- Make it easy for reporters to cover you – Before approaching journalists, it is important to have everything ready to go. They could ask for press kits right then and there. Have it all together!
- Follow-up, but don’t be pushy – You want reporters to see you as a solution to the problem, not a hinderance.
- View the relationship as long-term, not as a one hit wonder – One of the biggest mistakes I see is that PR people only talk to journalists when they want something, keep the dialogue flowing at all times. Don’t be a pest, but let them know you value them and don’t just want them around when you want something. Make it your goal to become a valuable source of information and a trusted, well-liked and respected business person. You want to be on the top of their mind when they need stories.
I love these 10 strategies and use them all the time. I hope they are helpful to anyone else who reads them.
-Shawna Haynes
Posted in Blogs
Posted by: sanourra | January 20, 2011
“Add This” Social Media Widget
Our focus in class so far has been social media, and we discussed the importance of giving the reader easily accessible social media and sharing tools. Therefore I was disappointed to find that WordPress itself does not offer a social media widget with multiple choices. I lurked around Google for a bit, trying to find a social media button block similar to this one that my friend implemented on his site:
This is SexyBookmarks, and I can see that they live up to their name. Unfortunately, it’s not WordPress friendly, and it would take far too much JavaScript for my beginner coder’s brain to make it work.
After looking around a bit more, I found Add This, a social media AND analytic tool in one. Score! Now, I was a little disappointed because the fancier button blocks on the site don’t play well with WordPress, but I’m pretty satisfied with the one I implemented.
If you’d like something similar, or maybe something more like this,
I’d recommend starting on this page to make sure you get one that works with whichever blog platform you’re using.
In WordPress, a user needs to paste the html for the button into a “text/html widget” on the widgets page. If you’d like a break between your text label and your buttons, you can add <br /> before the pasted text.
Now you can have a cool sharing tool in your sidebar, too!
Posted in Uncategorized
Strategically Communicating 