When you start monitoring social conversations it takes a while to figure out which words and phrases return the most relevant content. There are many excellent subscription tools available, but until you have narrowed down your search terms and brand terms, it’s a smart idea to use a free tool.

iGoogle is one easy-to-create and easy-to-use dashboard.  Here’s how to do it:

1. If you don’t already have a Google account, set one up.
   If you have an account, sign in.
2. Once you’ve signed in to your Google account, click on the gear icon on the top right and select iGoogle.
3. If this is your first time using iGoogle, you’ll see the setup wizard called “Create your own homepage in under 30 seconds.”
4. Once you have the iGoogle page set up, you can being to create your dashboard.
5. Organize your dashboard into tabs for easier analysis – next to the Home tab there is a drop down menu.
6. Choose Add a tab and and name the tab according to the categories of content you plan to monitor.

Brand names, competitors, descriptive phrases about your products, and so on.

7.  Now add feeds of content to each tab.

8.  In a new browser window go to the web, news and social search engines and do a search for the brand names and phrases you have chosen to monitor.  You can use Yahoo News, IceRocket, Social Mention or Topsy. (If you use Icerocket  or Topsy remember to adjust the language you want to see.)

8. Find the RSS feed for each search. You may have to hunt around the page, but it will be there.

9.   Click that link and follow the instructions to add it to your Google Homepage

And voila!  Once you have added all the search feeds from news. blogs, twitter etc., you should have a dashboard that looks something like this

Monitor these feeds of conversations every day for two weeks.  Make a spreadsheet and keep track of conversations that are particularly relevant or the people who talk about you or your competitors often, very positively or negatively.

This simple dashboard will help you organize your listening efforts.  If you analyze the content it will also be a great tool for learning what people are saying about you and how you should respond.

Once you have narrowed down the conversations and the people you need to follow you can upgrade to a paid dashboard.  You can use the phrases and feeds you know to be relevant and use a smarter tool for long term monitoring and social intelligence gathering.

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]]> http://www.proactivereport.com/c/pr/building-a-simple-social-media-dashboard-with-igoogle/feed/ 0 http://www.proactivereport.com/c/pr/video-soon-to-be-90-of-online-traffic/ http://www.proactivereport.com/c/pr/video-soon-to-be-90-of-online-traffic/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:59:28 +0000 Sally Falkow http://www.proactivereport.com/?p=2566

Each year at this time  new technology ideas emerge and tech predictions are made at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

In his keynote speech Robert Kyncl, vice president, global head of content for YouTube, predicted that in a few years video will be 90% of all the traffic online.  In case you missed my earlier posts and webinars about the importance of using video in PR, I’m a believer.

Video is obviously a big platform for entertainment. But it is just as important for news content.

The vast majority of media websites now use video to enhance and supplement their stories.  Adding video to your news content today increases the chance of media pickup.  Learn exactly how your chosen media website prefers to receive their video material:  do they want a finished piece or B-roll?  Do they want it delivered with an embed code?  Does your newsroom offer these features?  Figure out how you can better service the digital journalists you want to have cover your news and then craft your news the way they want to receive it.

Take this quote from Steven Covey to heart:

“If we trust our customers, we can actively listen to what they’re saying. We can build the right product for our customers, instead of finding the right customers for our products.”

OK, he is talking about physical products.  But our “product’ if you will, is news.  And our ‘customer’ for that news is the media.

Media websites have an insatiable appetite for good news content. And more and more of them want video.  To get more coverage feed them the right content in the right format.

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A few months ago when PRSA announced that it was engaging the PR community in an ‘open and collaborative effort’ to modernize the definition of PR, there was a spate of posts from PR people.  Many applauded the crowd sourcing approach, but there were also detractors.

As with any such effort, there’s always the risk that individuals or groups with zero, limited or even slanted knowledge of public relations will chime in. There will also likely be a number of agenda-driven folks aimed at unfairly smearing PR.  Phil Gomes

Not sure PRSA’s “fill in the blanks” crowd-sourcing approach will yield the type of definition that truly reflects the enhanced role of PR in the era of social media. Inside PR.com

Edward Bernays, father of PR, defined PR as:

A management function which tabulates public attitudes, defines the policies, procedures and interests of an organization. . . followed by executing a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance.

Here are three possible definitions PRSA published  this week:

1. Public relations is the management function of researching, engaging, communicating, and collaborating with stakeholders in an ethical manner to build mutually beneficial relationships and achieve results.
2. Public relations is a strategic communication process that develops and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their key publics.
   
3. Public relations is the engagement between organizations and individuals to achieve mutual understanding and realize strategic goals.

What do you think of these definitions?  Are they better than the original?  Do we need a new, more modern definition, or did Bernays get it right and all we need is an update on how we do it?

There is no doubt that we have new media and new tools.  The media has been dramatically impacted by the online world.  The way people get news and information has changed too.  But do the Internet and social media change the basics of what we do in PR, or do they just enhance the way we do it  – and give us more options so we can do it better?

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I read a post in CommPRO.biz today about 5 trends for 2012 that will  affect your PR resume. A statement in the first point absolutely floored me:

While a press release does not necessarily need to be well-written.…

What could possibly lead anyone to the conclusion that a press release doesn’t have to be well-written?

The purpose of a press release has changed; that I am the first  to acknowledge.  I started telling PR people that back in 2005.  But that doesn’t mean there is no value in a press release today and one should not bother with how they are written.

There’s tremendous value in press releases today – it is just different value.

In 1906, when the first press release was issued, the purpose was to give information about a company (and an incident that occurred) to the press.   Over the next 100 years changes in mass communication media and advances in technology created changes in the format and purpose of the press release.  It became a news release, since it was no longer only for the press.  We saw the rise (and fall) of video news releases for TV.

Now we have the Internet and social media.

We know that very few journalists or bloggers get their news from the news wire anymore.  So we have to expand our media relations activity – agreed.   Replacing the journalists, we have new audiences for news releases: search engines and news engines index and publish news releases. And, as a result, the public reads them. Yahoo! News has the largest news audience in the world.  When you place a news release on the wire, it will appear in Yahoo! News, Google News and many other news websites listed in the Nielsen top ten.

If you want to be listed high in the search rankings when someone interested in the subject searches either Google or Yahoo! News, and you want the public who find them to read them, your releases had best be well-written.  It must also be optimized for search and news and have visual assets attached.

Digital Journalists are requesting that we present our news releases in a new format:  the social media news release.  But, believe me, they still expect them to be well-written.

In the era of Online PR and social media there is a lot more to media relations than most PR people are aware of.  There are new skills you should have in your 2012 PR resume:

1. The ability to write well in many different styles – press releases, articles, blog  posts. tweets
2. Understanding the criteria that gets good ranking in web search and news search.( yes, Virginia they are different)
3. What makes a good news image
4. How to optimize an image for web search and news search
5. What makes an interesting online news video people will watch longer than 10 seconds
6. How to optimize video for web search and news search
7. Why video is currently the biggest PR opportunity
8. How to create and provide embed codes with your videos, so they are quick and easy to republish
9. The concept of newsjacking – and how to use this in a news release
10. How to craft a well-written social media news release with all the elements a digital journalist or blogger demands today

If you are interested in adding these skill to your PR resume, I am presenting a 90 minute webinar for the Association of Strategic Marketing next week January 17th.

I’m teaching a three -hour, hands-on practical workshop at the PR News Digital PR Summit Feb 15th in San Francisco. Because it is so hands-on I know they are limiting the attendees at this one.

I am also almost done with an online course on the subject and will keep you updated about that.

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Social media impacts every part of your business.  Online PR has assumed greater importance and in 2012 it is imperative that a business

1. Knows who their customers are and where they are active online
2. Understands the power of social media for positive and negative impact
3. Makes social media a part of their risk management strategy
4. Educates their employees – all employees – about the far-reaching effects a social media comment can have
5. Strives to give the best possible experience to all customers
6. Understands how social content gets indexed in search results and how search affects your reputation

CASE IN POINT

At 8:10 pm on Friday night Minhee Cho, a communications manager at ProPublica, ordered a pizza at the Papa Johns on Broadway in NYC.

Her pizza receipt from Papa Johns identified her as “lady chinky eyes”.

Ms. Cho is @mintymin on Twitter.  On Friday she had 500 followers, and by Sunday night she had 1903.  She also has a Peer Index score of  39.  (It took me a few seconds find that information)

On Saturday morning Ms. Cho posted this image of the receipt via Twitpic to her Twitter account with this message:

Hey @PapaJohns just FYI my name isn’t “lady chinky eyes”.

Since it was a Saturday morning not all of her Twitter followers saw the message, but enough of them saw it to escalate the situation and by Saturday afternoon at 5:22 pm The New York Daily News published the story.  By Sunday over 200,000 people had clicked the link and seen the receipt.

Today Google News has 358 results about this incident in newspapers and TV stations across the country.  It’s been covered on CNN.

When you search Papa Johns in Google today, the first result is no longer their website – it is these news articles

I bet that the Papa Johns execs had a tense weekend.  And I hope they know how to take care  of this  social and search content.  Kryptonite Locks had a PR flap caused by a customer’s comment going viral in the media in 2006.

This kind of content does not go away on its own.  Search Google for Kryptonite Locks today and you’ll see that  negative, damaging content right there on page one.

Every brand needs to:

• map their social graph and know their customers
• train their employees on good customer service
• make sure their marketing and PR people know how to deal with an online crisis when it occurs

According to the Burson Marstellar Digital PR Crisis study very few companies are prepared for a crisis like this.

Are you ready?

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In her post about social media trends in 2012 Beverly Macy says content curation is important because people want to know what’s important and they want to discover interesting and relevant content.

“Competitive advantage goes to companies who quickly figure out how to enable effective aggregation curation. Look for rapid innovation in this field.”

There are already a slew of tools that enable curation of content.  You can do it with a blog or use a more sophisticated platform like Curata.

One obvious place to do curation of content – including your own social content – is on your online newsroom with social features. You can create a channel of industry news and interesting content that your customers and stakeholders would find interesting and useful.  As Rebecca Lieb says in her new book about Content Marketing: It’s time to think like a publisher.

This is not a new idea in PR. Many companies have published a regular newsletter for years.  Some firms have produced very professional and sophisticated publications.  If you have been in that sphere of PR, now’s the time to learn digital publishing skills and put that experience to work in your Online PR.

Online media is catching on to this idea.  Advertorial has  always been a good revenue vehicle for the media and a means for brands to publish their content their way.  Forbes now offers branded blogging and HuffPo just followed suit.  I’ll put money on the table that more of these opportunities will arise in 2012.

If you do plan to start curating content in 2012 as part of your Digital PR strategy, read this post  by Robin Good and take note of his curation  checklist:

A great curator:

1. Optimizes titles so it is relevant for that audience
2. Edits  the content to add further relevance of the message
3. Formats the material so it is easy for the audience to read and apply to  their situation
4. Adds good images and other visual material that complements and reinforces the content
5. Excerpts selected text so the reader can quickly and easily grasp the most important elements
6. Adds his or her own voice in an intro  to the piece, adding context and relevance for the reader
7. Tags all content with relevant words and phrases so it is easily found by that audience
8. Supplies links to expand the scope of the piece and give access to added resources about the subject
9. Personalizes each piece for the relevant audience when posting to social sites, when appropriate
10. Ensures all curated content is correct and from a reliable source
11. Always gives attribution and links to sources
12. Filters content vigorously and does not publish anything and everything
13. Has a network of experts and curators in their sphere that they can tap into for personal insights
14. Suggests stories and items to other curators
15. Searches for additional material that can add depth and value or context to an item
16. Constantly scouts for interesting new sources
17. Sets up searches, filters and feeds to get a constant flow of relevant information
18. Makes the focus of the curated content perfectly clear and easy to see right upfront
19. Recommends other newsmasters and curators with great content
20. Crowd sources tips and suggestions from readers and always acknowledges their contributions

“The more of these activities you incorporate in your content curation workflow, the higher the quality and the value that you will be creating.   It is not easy, nor fast, but it is something meaningful for me and it makes me feel I have truly contributed to “make sense” of the information and resources available out there.”
Robin Good.   MasterNewMedia

There is no doubt that content curation is a Digital PR skill that can gather an audience and create a thought leadership position.  And, just as with most activities, success comes from excellent execution.

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Today I am going back to the four social media trends Beverly Macy predicted would be hot in 2012 in the Huffington Post

• The rise of Social Intelligence

• Better use of analytics and more focus on measurement

• Content creation and curation

• Social media education and training

Social Media Intelligence is a sure bet in my view – see this post.

Let’s take a look at Analytics and Measurement.

Measurement

One of the aspects of social media that is changing as it matures is measurement  When businesses first started to experiment with social media activity no-one was particularly concerned with measuring anything.  Kind of like we found a new game of water polo, we all jumped in at the deep end, splashed around a lot and the more people in the pool and the more people we splashed, the better.  We were playing the game, but we weren’t too sure who was on our team or where the goals were.  But since everyone else was there, it seemed like we should be too.

Social media is no longer a game or an experiment.  It’s an accepted and effective business strategy.  It is on the CEO’s radar.  According to a report by Useful Social Media, 12% of the companies surveyed claimed that social media was under the direct control of the CEO.

There is certainly an increased pressure on corporate social media practitioners to deliver on investment – there’s an ever more pressing need to demonstrate ROI, along with progress against other crucial KPIs. But this simply represents social media being treated as a regular business investment, says the report.

74% of CMOS agree that social efforts were finally tied to hard ROI.  What are they measuring?

Some of these are outputs and outtakes, but a good number of them are outcomes: what did people do as a result  of reading your content or engaging with you on a social site?

Did they click a link, share your content, visit a landing page, fill in a form, download a whitepaper or a coupon, watch a video or recommend you to a friend?

CMOs are also measuring purchases and customer satisfaction via  reduced returns, lower call center volume and fewer complaints.

One measurement that rarely gets mentioned in these studies is amplification. We know that word of mouth is powerful and it’s even more so on social media.  When a friend shares something with you it has a much deeper effect that if you received it from the brand.

It is possible to measure how many times your message gets shared by your fans and followers in Facebook and Twitter and it gives you a good measure of the success of your social content.  It also highlights brand affinities and identifies your brand advocates.

Analytics

This is an area that traditionally has not been a PR skill, but it is one we have to master.  And we need to do it in a hurry!

Several years ago Jim Sterne of the Web Metrics Summit said that someone who can understand web analytics and interpret the numbers for the marketing and PR people is worth their weight in gold – and I believe that is still the case today.

So how can you measure all these items?  What tools can you use?

Start by learning the basics of Google Analytics.   Buy this book and spend 10 minutes a day reading it.

Facebook Insights has a fairly robust set of analytics.  Read their product guide here and watch this video tutorial.

TweetReach is a good tool for tracking amplifiers in Twitter.

And what about Google+?  Christopher Penn has a very smart idea of what to do with your amplifiers – create a G+ circle for them

Although measurement, statistics and analytics have not been top of the list of PR skills in the past, they are going to become more and more important going forward.  It’s no surprise to me that they are on the list of hot trends for 2012.

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Booz & Co and Buddy Media’s recent study on the state of social media and marketing offer some interesting insights into what companies are doing now – and where they plan to invest in the future.

For instance: Social media is primarily the domain of marketing.  Less than half (48%) of companies have PR leading the social media efforts.

It seems odd that although only 48% have social media in the PR area, 88% use it for PR purposes.  Perhaps we PR folk have to fight harder for control of the social media function.

Almost 60% of the companies polled said they are going to hire in house social media talent, so if you are looking for a job in PR or marketing, social media training and experience would be your best bet.

Here’s a breakdown of who they plan to hire. Creatives are top of the list – and amazingly only 36% now have an analyst/strategy resource employed and only 43% plan to hire on in the near future.  Creating content without a strategic plan and analyzing the results is not a good idea.

48% are still looking to outsource work to partners, so social media support and content creation will be in demand in 2012.   Perhaps this 48% are also smart enough to hire a digital analyst/strategist so that their social media campaigns  hit the mark.

Around this time of year we tend to see predictions from the cognoscenti ( those in the know) about what will be hot in the coming year.  I saw one today in the Huffington Post that caught my eye because I agree with the 4 trends Beverly Macy highlighted:

The rise of Social Intelligence

Better use of analytics and more focus on measurement

Content curation

Social media education and training

Social Intelligence

For several years now we’ve been told that at the very least we have to listen to the online conversations.  The number of social media monitoring tools has exploded and at last count there were over 200 on the market. However, there is much more to be learned from these conversations than just brand mentions, complaints and sentiment.

Savvy PR and marketing folk are digging deep into the conversations – mining that data to find insights that can drive strategy, inform product R & D, give the competitive edge and improve that pesky bottom line.

You start by listening and gathering information about your brand/s, your company and your competitors.  Once you have the data use that old PR skill called content analysis.

• Map your brand’s social graph
• Find the influencers in each node of the graph
• Discover what different groups within one node are talking about and what’s important to them
• Find out where they are talking about those things
• Tap into what your competitors are doing and what people are saying about them
• Identify threats and opportunities
• Share the data you find with your team and others across the organization
• Brainstorm how best to implement what you find to support the organization ‘s goals

There is a ton of information available in the social networks and conversations, but it takes commitment and work to find all the threads.  A monitoring tool can do a lot of the work, but there is still a lot that  has to be done manually.  And the analysis cannot be done automatically. It takes a  live person with a bright and inquiring mind to read the content and figure out what’s important and what’s connected.  To see those  brewing threats and spot the low-hanging fruit that will bring big rewards.

Stacy Poliseo, Internet Marketing Project Manager, Marketing and Communications for Johns Hopkins Medicine has just recently completed a thorough social audit and will share her insights on Friday November 18 on the Bulldog Reporter Social Media for Hospitals webinar.

Johns Hopkins Medicine, like most companies and organizations, started in social media without much of a strategy.  They just jumped right in.  They had a Twitter feed, a Facebook page and a YouTube Channel going, but the weren’t too sure who they were talking to in which channel.

One of the biggest AHA! moments Stacy had during this audit was discovering the demographics of the audience in each social channel.  She now knows exactly who they’re engaging with in each social site, and what kind of content works for that audience.

There is an old PR saying – “Know before you go.”

For the past few years Social Media has been treated as a warm and fuzzy experiment.  Now that we know it works, it’s time to get serious about this data stream and use it to discover really useful information that can move the needle.

Social Media Intelligence is definitely a trend to watch in 2012

Learn how to do social audits and provide your company with the data they need to make the tough decision. It  will definitely get the attention of the C-Suite and might even earn PR a seat at that elusive boardroom table.

Read the full press release about the study