PR and marketing folk are starting to see the potential in social media
What an intense week this has been. It seems marketing and PR people are getting the social media message.
Wednesday was the three hour pre-conference workshops for PR Convergence – Deploying Social Media for Business Advantage, a three day event held in LA. The attendees had the choice of Social Media, Podcasting and Online Reputation Management. Linda Zimmer of MarCom Interactive and I did the social media workshop. Linda really opened their eyes and minds to new ideas and opportunities. She gave them the why and I followed with the ‘how to.’
Thursday morning was the first day of the conference. Attendees were treated to an array of experts – Phil Gomes of Edelman’s Me Too, Brian Solis from Future Works, Eric Schwartzmann of iPressroom, Mike Manuel from Voce, Bill Flitter of Pheedo, Jamie O’Donnell of SEO=PR, Paul Dyer of Market Wire – and the list goes on.
Mike Manuel and I spoke on using for RSS and why it gives you a business advantage. Mike spoke about RSS use in the mainstream media and how you can use this tool to increase your media relations success. I showed examples and case studies of how it can be used in a marketing and PR campaign.
The main take away? RSS enable your web content. RSS is the tool that is ‘greasing the skids’ of online content syndication and collaboration. Take that first step – do a content strategy and then make this content available in feeds. Make it easy to subscribe, save, bookmark and share the content in the social media sites. Read feeds. Find out which journalists and analysts are blogging. Do your competitors have feeds? There’s a wealth of information to be had.
One good example is Vision Magazine. Long a print only publication Vision now has a robust online edition. Eight months ago, after attending a conference similar to this one, they embarked on a social media and search focused PR campaign.
All their online content is now search optimized. Their site shows up on page one in Google and other search engines for many of their core search terms. All the article sections of the site have RSS feeds. Their site traffic has increased by 9X.
A recent article about the Neuroscience of Motherhood was promoted prior to Mother’s Day with a search optimized press release. This release got good ranking in the news search sites and drew traffic to the article. The article got posted on digg and resonated with that audience – to date it has had 296 diggs. From there it got picked up in dozens of blogs.
The result? Over 4000 visitors to their site on the Mother’s Day weekend. The scale on this Alexa graph doesn’t really show the size of the spike, but you can clearly see it there.
