I had the pleasure of chatting with Maggie Fox at the Media Relations Summit in New York City last week. She spoke on the session about the future of social media and in this interview Maggie explains how branded content and the intersection paid and earned media is a growing trend she is seeing.

Great minds think alike, Maggie! Branded content is one of the trends in my Future of PR report

Using paid media to extend the reach of your news content is often a controversial subject in PR. Making the most of the online and social media opportunities to leverage great content produced by customers or bloggers makes good PR sense.

Suppose a blogger or video blogger produces content around a remarkable brand or product experience and their blog only reaches ten thousand people.  You could use paid social media and online news services  to deliver it to other people who might be interested, but won’t ever see that particular blog post. This kind of content has a high trust-factor and sites like digg and foursquare are offering paid content marketing opportunities now.  You can also use services like Outbrain and Newsforce to place the content on major news sites.  And that audience is growing by leaps and bounds. Newspaper websites had their highest ever number of visitors in Q1 of this year.

Its definitely time to add some new ideas and tools to our traditional PR and media relations skill set.

Update:  You might also find this post about the long tail of the media from Geoff Livingston relevant to this idea.

He says:

In Chapter Four of Now Is Gone, we talk about this “ping pong match” between traditional and new media outlets. From the draft material in June of 2007:

One great way to promote your new media initiative remains traditional media, who often use well-respected blogs as sources or even the subject of stories… [Social media attention] drives information into the spotlight forcing traditional media to pay attention – or look like they’ve missed the news, and most importantly the conversation. Blogs [can be] a more effective way of reaching and inspiring traditional media to react than most PR professionals and wire services combined.   Ping pong matches demonstrate that weighting one tool by its actual total community and eyeball impact fails. As Seth Godin said in Meatball Sundae, “It doesn’t matter if the socially generated earned media only gets one percent of the hoped for attention if it’s the right one percent.”

However, it doesn’t hurt to make it available to the other 99 percent either.

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On Wednesday morning a group of people interested enough in social media to brave the LA traffic gathered at the W in Westwood for the Visible Technologies Social Media Readiness breaskfast. The first speaker was Esteban Kolsky of ThinkJar. Kolsky was a Gartner analyst and now does work on social CRM and strategy.

He spoke about the depth of unfiltered intelligence available in social conversations and the value this data has for an organization. Monitoring and analyzing social converations is faster, more accurate and costs about one-tenth of traditional market research.

According to the Trust Barometer what people trust most is no longer ’someone like me’  it’s now  ‘a company like me.’

People trust, form relationships with, and buy from companies that share their values.  They expect, and in fact demand, that these companies become social internally and externally. They want to be involved,  They want to have a voice in how the products are designed and how the company operates.

To be a social businessyou have to:

Listen – but listening alone is not enough. Most companies are not sure what to do with the data and are not organized to use the information

Learn – Analyze the content you monitor and learn from the information and start to do something about it. There is a wealth of information in these conversations.  Mine the data and find those gems of intellegence.

Participate – Don’t let this be a one-way flow.  It’s about the conversation.  That means you have to participate and engage with your customers, detractors and evangelists. Use tools.  Form social media teams. Set social media policies and guidelines.

Collaborate – Provide your employees with the tools to colloborate,  Be open.  Take down that firewall between the smart market and your smart employees, so eloquently described in the Cluetrain Manifesto.   Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in. 
Grow and improve  - use the information you learn from your interactions with people  inside and outside the company to change, adopt better practices and make better products.  Use social media like you use email – it should be that integrated into your organization, not a ‘campaign’ or ‘experiment’ in PR or marketing.

Become a client-driven, innovative organization.

What does it take to do this?

• Buy in from the top
• A commitment to changing the way you operate
• Social media training. 

The training needs to go across the entire organization, from C-suite to finance (they approve the budgets) legal and  compliance, sales and CRM.  It’s not just for the marketing and PR department.

Ravit Lichtenberg of Ustrategy spoke in the keynote at OMS10 about the vital need for a social media strategy rather than “shooting arrows at a moving target.’

Take a step back and figure out  the best way to reach your customers, provide valuable content and stay close to them, says Ravit.

Five Social Media Tips:

1.  Have a vision-driven strategy, but a campaign driven implementation.  Have a strategy based on your vision but choose two to three tactic to focus on for your implementation

2. Own your own content as an organization.Aggregate all your content on your website.  Make is easy for people to find all your content in one place.  (A social media newsoom is a great tool for this.)

3. Put a well-defined structure and process in place.  Define the roles and assign accountablity.  Be fast and agile because the speed of customer engagement online demands immediate response.

4.  Be aware of the role of women in social media.  75% of purchasing power is in the hands of women and traditionally women are good at relationships. Think about marketing to women.

5. Resources – find the right balance between external resources and employees to help you craft the strategy and implement it going forward.

Ravit and I are both presenting sessions at the PRSA Western District Conference and we’ll be on a panel together as well! Join us for a few days in the desert at a lovely spa resort.

The Online Marketing Summit in San Diego was held at the beautiful Paradise Point Resort this year.  I caught up with Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR after one of the keynote sessions and talked to him about search, video and public relations.

According to comScore the second most popular site where searches are conducted is YouTube, Music is the number one genre of videos searched, but how-to videos are not far behind.

Gregs advice for PR people:

The opportunities are increasing online.  PR people have to learn new skills.  You can create videos and upload them to YouTube as part of your pitch to traditional media.  Learn to tell your stories in video, upload them to YouTube, optimize them for search so they get found and work with analytics so you can track and measure your results.