Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

There was a point four years ago when marketing agencies—that sprouted up thanks to the explosion of social media—didn't want to be identified any longer as purely "social" practitioners. They contended: We have grown to be so much more.

In recent weeks, it's become clear that a similar mindset has fully taken hold among the social media platforms themselves. Snapchat is now a "camera company,"accented by its recent announcement of its video-recording sunglasses calledSpectacles. The Venice, Calif.-based company, now known as Snap Inc., has been trying to shed the "social" tag in recent months when meeting with the press.

Twitter COO Adam Bain last week mentioned at Advertising Week that his company recently moved its mobile app listing in Apple's App Store from the social section to news—and his team saw downloads of the app accelerate. 

The idea that Facebook is a social network? Pfft. ...

We get this question pretty frequently here at Quintain Marketing. We’ve been advising clients on their social media marketing since early 2009 and I can’t tell you how many times this has been the focus of client meetings.

The problem with this question is that it is really the wrong question to be asking. It’s the marketing equivalent of saying “where should I go out to dinner tonight?” Just as you can’t really recommend a restaurant without knowing what kind of food the person would like to eat, it’s impossible to know what social media sites a business should be on without first figuring out who they are targeting and what the message is.

In fact, I would argue that it’s less about what site you are on and more about what it is that you are using social media to accomplish.

...So back to the initial question about what social media sites your business should be on. My new answer is that I don’t care so much about what sites you are on as I do about what content you are using those sites to promote. If you’ve got great content, you’ll be able to drive traffic and leads....

Our imagination tends to outpace our ability to invent. And something can be invented long before it’s a conventional part of people’s lives.

So we must separate the bells and whistles from the nuts and bolts.

Creating a strategy focused on measurable business goals will help you develop a filter that helps decipher flash-in-the-pan technologies from the sea changes. (How to develop this type of strategy is an entirely different post topic).

But instead of focusing on the technology side of the future, focus on the human side. Human behavior is a more consistent bet than technology. If we prepare our website for the future with human nature in mind, we will put our organization in a good position regardless of how the flood of technology leaves things.

5 Future-proof ideas for websites

If we bet on technology, we can either be really right, or really wrong. But if we bet on human nature, we can count on consistency and know that our website is going to be well-positioned for the future. Besides, there’s no prize for beating your audience to the future (unless you’re the inventor)....

Ian Cleary founded RazorSocial.com and built it into an award-winning blog in only six months. I invited Ian to Marketing Smarts to discuss his approach to content creation, as well as the tools he used to build his blog audience, email list, and social media following.Ian is a social media tools and technology specialist; he is also a respected speaker on social media, technology, and blogging. His blog, RazorSocial, was named one of the Top 10 Social Media blogs of 2013 in the annual Social Media Examiner blog awards after only six months of operation. Here are just a few highlights from our conversation....

The transition from traditional marketing techniques, however, hasn’t been without some challenges. The shift in mindset to engage their audience online (as opposed to simply broadcasting) has been a fairly confusing proposition. Although the concept of engaging and interacting with their follower base is new, most will agree that it’s an important component to adopt if they’re to actively create brand advocates.

But what is considered engagement?

In it’s purest sense, engagement is the ability to cause another person to respond. Because of the wide variety of social media platforms, a brand follower can conceivably respond using any (or a combination of) the following methods:...

Is your company using the power of social media to its full potential? In both a personal and business space, social media can be used to start meaningful conversations. However, many business owners do not take the medium seriously enough to invest in it. If social media is used correctly, it could have a positive impact on a company’s sales.

How? Since social signals are becoming a more influential factor in determining placement in search results, using social channels properly can play a role in getting your site found more easily online. And that has positive correlation to sales. Here are three examples of methods to garner sales from multiple social media channels....

Here are 5 easy to implement excellent social media technology tips that will help you grow your presence on social media....

It’s never too late to implement change. We can easily look back and wonder why we didn’t change sooner but that does us not good at all. So look forward, make change and start to-day! So let’s get started. Here are 5 Social Media Tool and Technology tips. So if you’re on the edge and need some help, we’re here for you!....

Social media has grown to much more than an avenue for teenage ramblings about what they had for dinner....

It’s hard to believe that despite the life cycle of social media being only in its infancy, it has revolutionized our personal and professional lives so profoundly. Organizations have finally begun to recognize the importance of building a business platform that can seamlessly amalgamate the interests of employees and customers. Companies are branching out via social media tools such as blogs, forums, viral videos, Facebook contests, etc. that allows customers to see the dynamic personalities driving corporate entities.

Linear processes and conventional marketing models are rusted chains clinging to your organization’s arms, preventing it from reaching its true potential. In order to do so, bold and brilliant leaders who are willing to embrace social media must step up to the mantle and overhaul outdated business models to take your organization to new levels.

Here are 5 essential tips to follow to become a truly successful social media leader....

...If you have been in public relations for any amount of time — be it agency or corporate — you have come to the fanciful realization that we have not selected a 9-to-5 gig. In fact, it can be more of a 6-to-midnight gig given any number of ancillary deadlines.

Well, fret no more fellow flacks, it seems that we have a life preserver in the raging waves of PR — social media. Simon Fraser University(in O’ Canada) released a study to prove it. While the study group is not that impressive spanning 100 communications, marketing and PR professionals, the results are telling.

And among those surveyed, 84 percent say their job satisfaction has either increased or remained the same with more social media responsibilities. “What we found surprised us,” says Peter Walton, who directs the PR program and oversaw the research project and report. “We figured people would be frustrated by the increased demand they’re facing because of technology. We were wrong.”...

What do The Walt Disney Company and the WWE have in common (other than lucrative merchandising revenue and a cast of memorable characters? 

If you followed the Dachis Group’s Social Business Index, which “analyzes the effectiveness of strategies and tactics organizations employ to engage the market through social channels,” you’d know that Disney and the WWE are two of the most socially savvy brands out there. Apparently, people are still gaga for staged fighting and Donald Duck.

Did these corporate giants reach such great social heights by pursuing the exact same social media goals? Of course not. Disney and the WWE are vastly different companies with vastly different business objectives. You don’t market sweaty, hulking wrestlers the same way you do talking mice.These two very different companies achieved social media success by applying specific social media tactics to achieve specific business objectives.

You may not be a multibillion dollar business with a killer mascot (at least not yet), but you can still do social like the best of them, so long as you connect your business objectives to an effective social media marketing strategy....

Marketers can reach a greater audience than ever by combining the power of social media and storytelling. The game has changed. We no longer live in a broadcast era where marketers can simply buy people’s attention with a TV campaign. There are different rules now and we need to earn the attention of our audience.

We have a connected consumer revolution. The consumer is now in control of what they view, what they share, and how they view (on what screen). So there has been a major shift in terms of the relationship between consumers and marketers. And there are bigger things at work as well. We saw it with the Arab Spring, and the critical role social media had in the way information was shared. We saw it with the Occupy Movement as well. Social media can have an impact on traditional power structures.

From a marketer’s perspective, that means that we’re moving towards pull versus push approach, sometimes referred to as inbound marketing. We can no longer push our messages across, we need to pull customers in with engaging, useful content. All of these trends are turning the traditional media model on its head, and brands are evolving into media properties. One of the best examples of this is Red Bull.

Red Bull is putting out such compelling content that traditional media properties like NBC are buying the rights to this content. They’ve completely flipped the model around as a brand, where the broadcasters are after them for their content. They’re a great example of a brand doing it well in social....