StevenSilvers.com

For young employees, social media ain’t no failure to communicate

Recent studies report that almost a third of college students would prioritize social media over salary in deciding where to work.

Does this mean millennial graduates won't chose your company unless they have cart blanche to spend whatever time they want on Facebook and Twitter, where they are also free to post comparisons between their employer and certain unsavory animal parts?

It's complicated.

The notion of social media being the new office water cooler is well-established. But newer studies tell us this: That young people entering their careers consider access to social media in the same say that us Eisenhower-era boomers thought a good place to work was one that didn't make you clock out to go to the restroom.  They grew up with it.  They don't expect to go backwards for the sake of a job.

The younger the workforce, the more social media becomes a cultural issue before it becomes a company communications policy.  Like it or not, your newest workers may not appreciate the primordial relationship between social media freedom and accountability to the animal parts who sign their paychecks.
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New York Times | Even if It Enrages Your Boss, Social Net Speech Is Protected

 

Social media is an unruly street corner. Not a billboard on the highway.

Amazing. Another successful brand launches a social media campaign only to be pummeled by people who loath the company.

That’s what happened to McDonald’s, which after only on hour pulled the plug on a Twitter promotion the company thought would “highlight the hard-working people who help to produce its meals and promote the chain’s use of fresh produce.”

The company's contracted Tweeter team posted just two items, including one from a guy claiming to be a french fry supplier who said, "When u make something w/pride, people can taste it.”  And that did it. 

Within minutes McD’s happy patter was hijacked by people who said they got sick eating the food, animal rights activists accusing the company of torturing pigs and former employees who claimed they were wrongly fired. And – always the cherry on any PR disaster cake – the news media soon reported on McDonald’s misfire.

It’s an embarrassing lesson that even the biggest companies learn the hard way.

Proving again the Internet’s infinite capacity to add meaning to our world

Put down that New York Times, inquisitive and engaged citizen. The Weather Channel has launched its own Twitter-powered social media site where you can "See what people are saying about the weather across the U.S.!"  Imagine the conversation you're missing right now...

Don't just let the weather happen.  Be happenin' with the weather.
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Follow me on Twitter at StevenSilversPR

My prediction that Twitter will eventually wither and die does not mean that I’m not eager to exploit it for all it’s
worth.  I’m still a professional public relations professional.

Follow me on Twitter at StevenSilversPR.
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You realize that Twitter is to PR what men’s room graffiti is to advertising, right?

Like most Americans, I get hit with some 5,000 marketing messages daily.  Most I don’t notice. There’s no way I could.  You'd need more than four hours a day even if you spent on average only three seconds considering every ad, logoed item and pitch.  (And they said PR bloggers can’t do math.)

Yet the other day I spent a few seconds reading an email alerting me that I’m being followed by a guy who says, “I Help Individuals to Improve Their Immune System, Wellbeing & Fitness And To Build Wealth Online From Home.”

As I hit the delete button it occurred to me that this Twitter thing is pretty amazing.

With all the competition for eyeballs and eardrums, Twitter manages to push ads and publicity right into people’s face. I gave a valuable sliver of my limited attention to a promo just because he clicked on my follow button.

Does this hyper-intrusiveness mean Twitter will be around forever? Hardly.

It happened with AOL and other Internet phenoms.  Twitter will eventually ripen, rot and fall off the tree from the weight of its own success. Teens already don’t use it, and the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters were using Vibe, a more private short-message service.

Today only eight percent of Americans use Twitter. This isn't many. It’s less than the number of Americans who think the Earth revolves around the sun. (Ten percent, but I’ve known the truth for weeks.)

Overlay the Twitter-ers with the Earth-firsters, minus the number of Tweets that are useless or incoherent -- and you have a phenomenal but narrowly-used Internet novelty destined for the history books.

You can’t argue with PR blogger math.
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Five ways to establish social media credibility

Guest post by Hoa Cong

Most corporations are looking to social media as a vibrant platform to increase sales and profits. However, you can't just open a Facebook account or blog and expect people to come flocking in. You have to actually connect with your customer base and create relationships.

Here are five critical elements that can make or break your social media campaign:

1. Choose your platforms wisely. Social media extends far beyond Facebook. Find out where your customers are on the internet and go there. If you sell to creative types, set up a blog where users can contribute content. For sports types, try an interactive game. The possibilities are endless, and a company that fails to do its homework is destined for failure.
    
2. Speak your customers' language. Every group has its own language and acronyms. To market to them, you must also speak this language, especially in social media environments. The best way to learn to do this is to read the blogs, Facebook pages and other sites that are created by your clients and customers. When you use -- note: not overuse -- the correct language, you gain instant credibility.
    
3. Keep a cohesive message. The fastest way to lose people is to have too many messages across online platforms. Remember that your customers use multiple social media venues themselves, as well as traditional media. Integrate your message across all so your customers see you as the focused company you are.
    
4. Be active in your chosen forums. Your blog, Facebook page or other platforms are not simply advertisements to lure in customers. Social media is interactive by nature, and you'll lose credibility if you're not active in posting, giveaways and two-way communication. People can sniff out fakes, and it will cost you.
    
5. Let your customers give input. People who engage in social media expect to be able to interact with you, but also to be heard. Campaigns where customers can submit ideas for new products, advertising, or slogans can bring considerable traffic and give your customers a sense of participation in your product. When they feel like part of your group, they are much more likely to recommend and use your products.

For the today's companies, the only thing worse than not engaging in social media is to do it poorly. As the guidelines suggest, a cohesive message delivered in a truly interactive environment will bring out the most value of your online campaign.

Hoa is a representative for Capterra, an extensive online catalog of more than 300 business software directories.
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Twidiots have become corporate risk factors

I still know business executives who think Twitter is something they do at the Golden Pony Men’s Club.  

Thankfully they’re a shrinking minority.  A new Burston-Marstellar study indicates that more Fortune 100 companies use Twitter than any other social media platform. Today 77 percent of companies have accounts, up from 65 percent last year.

As more companies and organizations adopt Twitter, so do their employees – some who are designated to Tweet on behalf of the brand and many more who do so on their own.

And that raises the risk of Twidiots.

Every few days mainstream and viral media pick up on a “Twitter gaffe” by somebody whose 140 characters created a public relations problem for their organization. Just like the over-30 Dominos employees who uploaded video of themselves stuffing cheese in their noses, what makes Twidiots dangerous is that so many of them are people who should know better.

Case in point:  International journalist Nir Rosen resigned from his position as fellow at New York University after his Twitter tirade about CBS reporter Lara Logan, who had been sexually assaulted while covering events in Egypt.  As Logan was still being treated, Rosen posted remarks like these:

"Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger" and "Look, she was probably groped like thousands of other women."

Just weeks before, fashion icon Kenneth Cole had to make groveling apologies after one of his people tried to make a marketing promotion out of Egypt’s revolution:

Perhaps there will come a day when every mobile device and computer carries a required warning label:

ATTENTION: Use of Twitter may cause embarrassment as well as increased risk of liability for you and XYZ Corporation. Do not operate while inebriated, angry, depressed or after a large meal.  Have a Twittering problem? Call 1-800-NoTweet.

Until then, you probably should have every board member, employee and even vendor sign a social media policy. Still think it unnecessary? Consider this: Deloitte's 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey found that a third of all employees never even consider what their boss might think before posting something online.

Your guidelines can be thin or thick.  You can remind people that confidentiality agreements extend online. You can authorize only designated ambassadors to post for the company or prohibit uploading pics and videos taken on a work site. You can require training or offer midnight interventions.  You can discourage the use of mass political uprisings to sell pants.

Whatever the approach, your social media policy must make at least one point crystal clear:  That people can be held accountable for what they do on the Internet.

Here’s a database of social media policies to start from.

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• Scatterbox  |  Managing the unmanageable: Employees talking about your company on the Internet

Ten billion Tweets means what, exactly?

Most of my clients and colleagues acknowledge the expanding value of social media.  But they still don’t know what to make of Twitter.

Blogs, online communities and forums are relatively easy for them to comprehend as strategic communications tools.  But the incessantly babbling Twitter, with its Gnostic lingo of hashtags and retweeting and @replies, is not. 

So what are we to make of the fact that Twitter has reached 10 billion tweets?  Maybe a lot.  But maybe a lot of nothing.

Consider this unscientific illustration of Twitter’s contribution to productivity.  If each Tweet took on average only ten seconds to be posted and read, then Twitter would already account for almost 28 million manhours.  That’s an average year’s work for 15,414 Americans. 

What value has come of all this effort is debatable, especially when you consider that 40 percent of Twitter posts are what one study called “pointless babble.”  Probably just as many posts are babble that makes a point. 

Twitter also suffers from a growing spam and phishing infestation. A study by online security firm Barracuda Networks estimates that only 21 percent of Twitter users are genuine.

Nobody denies Twitter’s ability to spread the word.  But for many otherwise Internet-savvy communications executives, it’s still far from clear how to most effectively anticipate, respond to and leverage a free online messaging service that by design is a magnet for the world’s clutter.

Also see:

CEOs won't say Twitter and other contradictions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it

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(Above) Social media consultant Muhammad Saleem created this excellent graphic illustrating Twitter’s path to 10 billion tweets and what’s been shown true along the way.

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Getting caught is the new transparency and other realities of the coming year

Five truths for 2010:

The age of transparency is mostly about getting caught.

Ten years into the new media era, the institutions we love to hate – government, banks, big business, media – aren’t any more willing to tell us what they’d rather keep to themselves. The constant outing of reality TV frauds, tax-supported executive bonuses, front groups and scumbag celebrities is still a function of how Americans use the Internet to inform and entertain themselves.  Not the other way around.

Social media is getting less social.

Over time, millions of people will stop using social media sites because 1) their bosses lock them out during working hours, 2) they tire of all the commercial clutter or 3) they learn how those revenue-hungry companies are sharing their profiles, posts and friends lists.

The Rocky Mountain News is still dead.

For all the outraged hang-wringing and new ventures, media consumers in Denver and many other American cities are still only willing to support one local daily newspaper.  Barely.

Journalism, however, isn’t dead.  It’s just changing.

So-called “advocacy” media will flourish as more formerly ad-supported news outlets – or individual journalists and commentators -- become funded by interest groups, politically leaning foundations, single corporations and even government.  Whether you think it’s biased or not will depend on your point of view.

No company will ever hide its identity again.  Har.  Kidding.

Getting nabbed isn’t as certain as, say, driving through a DWI checkpoint with an open bottle of cream de menthe in your lap.  But some well-known brand out there is going to have a major PR problem when it draws the first high-profile enforcement of the Federal Trade Commission’s new transparency in marketing rules.
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Is your social media agency into social media?

Marketing cage-rattler and blogger B.L. Ochman had the audacity to suggest that companies shouldn’t hire social media experts that aren’t “thought leaders” in using social media themselves.

This generated an immediate protest from one agency executive who said they don’t need to show their expertise in social media to prove they get it.  “For an agency to build a large community of followers,” she wrote, “is more difficult than for a marketer as they don't really offer anything to the general public.”

This “we don’t sell to the public” line is an old, specious defense by ad agencies that avoid spending their own time and money on the products they want other companies to buy in mass quantities. 

It rings even less true given social media’s supposed game-changing capacity to build business.
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