Gearheads: The Sterling Communications Blog

Social Media Faux Pas – Blurring the Boundaries

I wouldn’t say I was an early adopter of social media platforms like Facebook. After about a year of hearing friends yammer on about how great it was to be able to find people they had lost contact with long ago, I finally caved. From that point on, I was pretty much addicted to the site, which gave me great insight into very important matters such as what type of toilet paper my friends were considering buying, and how awesome the previous night’s bar-hop was.

As my use of the site deepened and I eventually amassed nearly 600 close and personal friends, I began to tire of so much needless information, eventually deciding to deactivate my account.

7 Deadly Sins of Online Newsrooms

In all the excitement about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites, it's easy to overlook a staple of public relations: the online newsroom.

Visit the "press page" for many high-tech companies and you're bound to find more than a few that are decidedly low tech -- which might not be a problem if the information that was displayed was actually useful. Unfortunately, many newsrooms compound their problems by failing to recognize they have several audiences, each with distinctive needs.

Journalists, analysts, bloggers, industry influencers, prospective customers, search engines and even employees have real needs that often go unmet 

Here are seven ways online newsrooms fail to serve their organizations, industry influencers, and prospective clients:

Lessons Learned: The Duke Nukem Tweet Heard Round the Web

Never alienate your target audience.

That should be rule #1 no matter what you do. Whether you’re an entertainer, a server at a restaurant or a PR person, keeping good relations with the people in your direct sphere is incredibly important.

Jim Redner, principal at The Redner Group, broke this rule with a tweet a few days ago when expressing displeasure at some negative reviews of the first-person shooter Duke Nukem Forever, which he was repping for 2K games.

As a direct result of his tweet, he lost his client, 2K.

Word-of-Mouth marketing best practice — make it easy!

Asking friends for their recommendations remains one of the best ways to find and select businesses, music, movies, wine, etc., because you know your friends’ preferences and they know yours. Based on your mutual knowledge of each other a useful recommendation can be shared. Harnessing this type of interaction is the essence of Word of Mouth (WoM) marketing. While attending a friend’s wedding in Napa last weekend, and doing some subsequent wine tasting, I was reminded that ease of use is a powerful driver of successful social media enabled WoM marketing.

A Clear, Well-Edited Style

“The only good way to learn about writing is to read good writing," says Chief Justice John Roberts.

This sentence grabbed my attention recently when I heard it quoted by Nina Totenberg in her NPR story on the approach of the Supreme Court justices to their written opinions. As people who live by the pen, good clear prose is of paramount importance to “the Supremes” but, surprisingly, they cite some of the greatest writers of fiction as their models.

Justice Ginsberg named Nabokov as a major influence on her writing style, while Justice Breyer mentioned Proust, Stendhal and Montesquieu. Justice Kennedy’s choices fall closer to mine: Hemingway, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, Dickens and Trollope – OK, well, maybe not Solzhenitsyn.

Like thousands before me, I consistently recommend Hemingway to colleagues interested in improving their writing style.

A Wounded Tiger: Repairing a Tainted Spokesperson and Brand

With the 111^th annual US Open starting this week, the biggest story remains Tiger Woods dropping out of the golf tournament due to lingering issues with his left leg. After his stellar performance at the Masters only a few months ago, the Open looked to be Tiger’s opportunity to sway the same naysayers I personally witnessed at last year’s Open in Pebble Beach. This year’s Open, however, looked to be Tiger’s first tournament win since his infamous 2009 sex scandal. But, with him out and now the next tournaments in August in question, Tiger’s future looks as uncertain as ever. Will he remain a tainted figure, or will he roar back?

What is the social media universe saying about Tiger?

Evolution: The Social Media Age

After devoting the majority of my last blog entry to vacillating between praise and criticism of the evolution of PR into what I defined as PR 1.5, I started thinking about one of the key elements that is facilitating that (r)evolution – social media.

I should say that early on in my career, in the first part of the last decade when blogs began making appearances, I would often scoff at the ‘fools’ who were jumping on that bandwagon. When past bosses of mine would strongly ‘suggest’ that I start paying attention to bloggers, I did so reluctantly, certain this form of 'unregulated sensationalism' was a passing fad and would evaporate within a year. Looking back on that comment now, it seems about as insightful as the statement made by DEC founder Ken Olsen in 1977 in which he said, "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."

As Homer Simpson would say… D’OH!

The Science of Social Media

As PR practitioners, most of us would describe our craft as more art than science. That's because every company, every brand is different, and there's no such thing as a formulaic "one size fits all" approach. That said, many influencers in the social media world have attempted to do just that - with claims that one particular time of day is best to post on Facebook, or that brands should tweet X times per day for maximum efficacy.

As it turns out, there are certain patterns that can predict whether a Facebook or Twitter post will have maximum impact, but those trends are found within the individual brand. Even within the same industry - or the same company, for that matter - differences can be huge. For example, GM's audience is different from Ford's, and the audience for the Focus is different from that of the Explorer.

A new social media management and analytics company just launched last month, and has discovered how to harness the science behind social media and offer brands real-time predictive analytics to help them get the most of their social media efforts. Watch this WebProNews interview with Prosodic CEO Leigh Fatzinger, as he describes how his company is changing the face of social media analytics (full disclosure: Prosodic is a client of ours).

More WebProNews Videos

 

 

Networking: The Smart Way to Climb the Corporate Ladder

When I first heard the term “networking,” I used to imagine an inner circle of high-powered business people getting together to talk strategy and discuss their businesses. The concept seemed intimidating, but being the outgoing person I am, I decided to see what these events were all about.

The more I went to them, the more I realized it was just people talking about their jobs and getting to know one another. At first, it can seem daunting, especially when most of the people in attendance are senior executives and, in some cases, nearly twice my age. However, I’ve found that going to networking events are good for several reasons: