Public Relations
The practice of public relations may be more important now than ever given the immediacy of the social media channels. Social media is about direct contact that consumers can choose to have with companies and their brands. Today communicating with your customer is dynamic and it happens when consumers interact with your company as well as when they respond and act on that messaging with each other. Social media changed the game and gives control to your customers in these communication channels so its important to be transparent and credible when responding or delivering messages to your community. If you aren’t, they will know and they can be either your best advocates or your worst opponents. Today’s PR professionals need to be interactive, responsive and authentic when engaging in social media communications.
Media Relations
In today’s 24/7 world news is happening faster than the traditional network distribution can get it to the wires. Social media has transformed how information travels. Relationships with journalists who cover your brand are vital in today’s light-speed communication environments. Anyone with a camera-phone can break a story before it even hits the news. A savvy PR professional tuned in to these channels understands that getting to the story before it gets to you is critical for leading and shaping the coverage of your story. Media relations are key to this effort before the crisis hits to ensure effective and timely communications centered around the messaging that is best for your brand. Its all about relationships.
Trust & Credibility
People appreciate it when you are upfront and honest, even when you deliver a tough message. Social media communities demand authenticity and responsiveness. When your brand is just another corporate “talking head”, they know and they spread the word around. The whole idea of user-experience marketing through social media channels has many companies considering what this really means for their products and image. For years, product-focused marketing has been the norm, where the conversation has essentially been a “one-way” street. Now the customer has the ability to give direct and immediate feedback not only to you, but your OTHER customers and POTENTIAL customers, by talking about their experience with your brand and products. It’s a new layer in the way we market ourselves in the social media arena. For companies who are consistent in the delivery of their messages with their products, it can be a good thing. But even great companies occasionally deal with negative situations. It’s a fact of life.
How you deal with it can positively or negatively impact your future relationship with your online community. These people are actively engaged with you. Nurture them. Every seasoned sales person knows that word-of-mouth is the most effective sales tactic. It can also sink your ship. Avoiding the issues, ignoring comments or requests for feedback, or actually deleting comments from Twitter or Facebook around situations you are not prepared to deal with isn’t going to get you very far in this space.
Be honest, immediately interact to touch the customer and let them know you are looking into a problem, and then provide a method to directly communicate with the customer to resolve the issue. This is an effective way to deal with problems that come up on your social media channels. Over time this kind of responsiveness creates good will and may even produce “ambassadors” for your brand. Read: customers from your online community who actively engage to defend or protect your brand because they love you so much. It happens. These kinds of influencers can sometimes deflect other users comments and instigate positive comments to help defuse a tricky situation. It isn’t magic. You have to work to cultivate your brand image in your social media channels to ensure that its honest and responsive to build and engage your social media community.
Many of these tactics are tried and true tenets of corporate PR. They work. There will still be those one-off sticky situations to deal with occasionally. When you have seasoned professionals skilled in the art of communications, thoroughly engaged with social media channels and strong media relationships you have the best of the old and the new to enable your company adapt and thrive in social media.