Social Media and Your Business: A Small Leak Will Sink a Great Ship

Benjamin Franklin once said, "Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship."

This principle applies in many areas outside of our finances. From a public relations perspective, a seemingly innocuous statement made or action taken without proper forethought can become a major problem. This is especially true in the rapid-fire world of Twitter and Facebook.

This week, I was made aware of a situation which bears this point out. A person in a position of prominence posted an item on their Facebook page which generated a significant amount of discussion. Unfortunately, one of the other people participating in the discussion posted a comment which included a racist statement. The person who started the discussion posted what was in essence a "You Tell 'Em" response -- a response I believe they posted without having thoroughly read the comment to which they were responding. The person's knee-jerk response to the comment blew up in their face, resulting in a negative news article which branded them as a racist.

The moral of the story: be careful what you post on Facebook, Twitter, blogs or any other social media site. If you are responding to something, make sure you have actually read what you are responding to. If you have to think twice, don't post it. If it could easily be taken out of context or distorted, don't post it. Once you post it, it's out there -- and Google has a very long memory.

Pioneering Quotes - Opportunity

"I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one."
- Mark Twain

"Opportunity is often difficult to recognize; we usually expect it to beckon us with beepers and billboards."
- William Arthur Ward

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."
- Helen Keller

Press Releases: Details Matter

Those who know me know that I am involved in a variety of civic and political organizations. In one of those groups I am working to help the leaders learn how to write and distribute their own press releases. During this process I have been reminded of the importance of attention to detail when working in this area.

A few key details to which you should pay attention include:

• The subject line. If you are distributing your press releases via e-mail (which you should be), the subject line must get the editor's attention. If not, they may never open it. In one of the groups in which I am involved, the person who distributed our most recently release simply put the name of the organization in the subject line, with no other information. A busy editor who receives hundreds of press releases each day might never open that e-mail or see the press release.
• Targeting. Make sure you send your release to the right reporter or editor.
• Formatting. Send your press release as plain text in the body of the e-mail (not as an attachment), with little or no special formatting. As someone who receives press releases for several Web sites I manage, I cannot tell you how important this is. If a press release contains lots of special formatting, one of the first things I do is remove all of that formatting and convert it to plain text. If there is so much formatting that the release is difficult to edit, it had better be newsworthy or it will never see the light of day.
• Specifics: Include the basic information (who, what, when, where, why and how) related to whatever your release is announcing. In the case of the press release mentioned above, it was intended to announce an upcoming event. The person distributing it followed a template which included all of the specifics on the event. As an example, if you are announcing an event, always include the full street address of the location. Do not assume that reporters or others know where the venue is located, no matter how well known it may be.
• Press Contact: Always include the name and contact information of a person reporters can contact with questions. Make sure that person can actually answer reporters' questions if they receive such a call, and make sure they are available to do so.
• Send Yourself a Test E-Mail: Send the press release to yourself before you send it to your list. Triple-check it for formatting errors, special characters which mysteriously appear, etc. In the press release referenced above, the contact e-mail address for the organization came through with strange formatting when it was distributed.

This is by no means an exhaustive list; these are simply a few things that have jumped out at me as I have worked with the volunteer organizations in which I am involved.

Marketing: The Power of the Internet

Today I spoke to the Lower Cape Fear DOVIA (Directors of Volunteers in Agencies) chapter on on Leveraging the Internet to Promote Your Organization. As with any group, some members of the audience were more Internet-savvy than others. Consequently, I felt it appropriate to share some statistics and concepts which underscore the increasing power and importance of the Internet.

Consider the following:

- According to a June 3 report from the U.S. Census Bureau, Internet use among American adults has tripled over the past ten years.

- Facebook recently surpassed 200 million subscribers. This is astounding when you consider the fact that only four countries have populations exceeding 200 million (based on recent estimates by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs – Population Division).

- Twitter surpassed both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in terms of unique Web site visits in April of 2009.

- According to an August 2007 survey by Rasmussen Reports, a majority of Americans under 40 cite the Internet as the best source for news and information.

- Nearly everyone I know uses Google or another Internet search engine when they need to look up a business; very few use the Yellow Pages.

- If I want to find out about an organization, I try to find their Web site. If I cannot find them online, they may as well not exist.

In short, the Internet has radically changed the way we market, socialize and conduct business. This trend will only continue.

This leaves most businesspeople who have not yet embraced the Internet as a marketing tool with a choice: Embrace and leverage the Internet as a central component of their marketing efforts, or be left behind by those who do.

Quote: Edward R. Murrow on Communication

"The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it."
- Edward R. Murrow

Classic McDonald's McCafe Commercial

A Few Thoughts on Twitter as a Marketing Tool

More and more people are using Twitter as a tool to promote their business or organization.

If you utilize it properly, Twitter can be an effective marketing tool. If not, you may do more harm than good.

While I am still relatively new to Twitter, I do have a few observations on what Twitter users should and should not do in terms of promoting their businesses:

• Twitter users choose whom they will "follow" based on whether the person's Twitter posts (a.k.a. "tweets") are interesting, relevant and valuable.
• With this in mind, your tweets (Twitter posts) should offer something of value to your followers.
• When I say "offer something of value", I mean information that is valuable -- i.e. marketing advice, financial advice, etc.
• When I say "offer something of value", I do NOT mean telling everyone how your organization is the best thing since sliced bread.
• For example: yesterday I received a Twitter reply from a company I had never heard of telling me that their flood wall solutions were supported by Senators and FEMA and that hurricane season was coming soon.
  
• The company's reply had absolutely nothing to do with the post to which they replied.
• Today, I received a virtually identical reply from the same company. When I clicked on their profile, I discovered that they had sent the same reply to CNN, Rush Limbaugh, Larry King, Oprah, Katie Couric, The Ellen Show, Whole Foods and a long list of others (famous as well as not-so-famous).
  
• In a nutshell, this company was using the "reply" mechanism to spam anyone and everyone on Twitter.
  
• A better approach would have been for them to follow people whose attention they want to get. If those people reciprocate, then they will see the company's posts.
  
• In terms of the content of the posts, the company would have been better served to offer information and tips that people can use. That advice and information would have enabled the company to establish credibility by adding value -- and to do it without giving away the store.

Press Releases: More things NOT to do

Recently, I have published a series of entries on things NOT to do when dealing with the media or distributing press releases. A couple of additional entries:

1. Do not write press releases in first person. A press release should read like a NEWS article, not a letter or marketing brochure. Do not say things like "we" or "us" in the body of the press release; save those for quotes attributed to an individual. For example: your press release should say "ABC company announced today...", not "We announced today...". Additionally, avoid saying "ABC company is pleased to announce...."; stick to "ABC Company announces..." or "ABC Company announced...".

2. Avoid the use of unnecessary adjectives or descriptive phrases in the body of the press release. A good rule of thumb is to stick to facts in the body of the press release and only "spin" in a quote attributed to someone. If I receive a press release which reads "ABC Company today announced a wonderful, first-class event which does this and that," I immediately remove "wonderful, first-class." Why? If a media outlet includes those in the body of their news article, then the outlet is the one saying the event is "wonderful, first-class." Those are matters of opinion, not statements of fact, and including them could be construed as an editorial statement in favor of the event. However, if the president of ABC Company is quoted as saying the event is "wonderful, first-class", then it may be included.

The bottom line: The more your release reads like a news article, the easier you make the editor's job. The easier you make the editor's job, the more likely you are to obtain coverage (provided, of course, that your story is newsworthy).

Media Relations -- two more things NOT to do:

Media Relations -- two more things NOT to do:

- Do not send a press release with a subject line full of typos. Such an e-mail came to the press address for one of the Web sites I manage today. The subject line began (typos replicated exactly as they appeared in the e-mail): "I am ivviting my hewest local newspapers to publicise..." (I have deleted the latter portion of the subject line to protect the identity of the sender). Needless to say, this did not help the sender's credibility, especially given that I have never heard of them or their organization.

- Do not send something that is so unclear an editor cannot get the point. I have scanned the aforementioned e-mail several times, yet I still have no clue what the point of it was.