During Social Media Week in LA USC held an interesting one day seminar focused mainly on geo location services.
Professor Jonathan Taplin of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California is a co-founder of the Annenberg Research Network for International Communication and he consults for various business and government organizations on the role of digital media in the economic infrastructure. He touched on some points that are particularly relevant to PR – being authentic and building community.
When I asked him how we should go about finding the right influencers so that we can build our community for a brand he explained that it involves a lot of data gathering and analysis. He says anyone can learn to use these tools, but it is not immediately obvious who your influencers are- you have to do the in depth collection and analysis of data.
I’ve been working with a couple of monitoring tools, as well as with some developers who are researching new ideas in language and monitoring of conversations, so I know that his statement is correct.
I’d recommend that you get some social media training – learn to do it with free tools like Social Mention, RSS feeds and a NetVibes dashboard so you really understand the process
Then upgrade to a tool like Sysomos, Radian 6 or Ecairn Conversation.
It’s vital to have this kind of information so that you can
- Discover who your core community is
- Develop content based on the current interests of your core community
- Find the right influencers for that community
- Seed the content into the community at the right place so it gets shared by influential credible people
If this approach interests you, and you will be at the PRSA National conference in DC in October, come to our session on Branded Content Sunday October 17.
