social media

Don’t let this happen to you; United Breaks Guitars

July 8, 2009 By Theresa Smith

The power of social media. Hopefully United is listening.

Filed Under: public relations, social media, social web, Uncategorized, YouTube Tagged With: PathwayPR, public relations, social media, YouTube

Is NPR the Future of News Media

June 29, 2009 By Theresa Smith

In Josh Catone’s recent article in Mashable “Why NPR is the Future of Mainstrem Media“, he describes how National Public Radio (NPR) “is starting to look like they have the future of news all figured out. Or at least, they appear to doing a lot better at it than the rest of the traditional media.”

Catone reports that NPR now has 23.6 million people ” tuning into its broadcasts each week. In fact, NPR’s ratings have increased steadily since 2000, and they’ve managed to hold on to much of their 2008 election coverage listenership bump (with over 26 million people tuning in each week so far in 2009), unlike many of their mainstream media counterparts.”

Why has NPR been so effective at building its audience while the majority of media outlets are losing their audience? According to Catone the reason for its success lies in its three prong approach: a focus on local; a focus on social media; and a focus on obiquitous access.

photo credit: NCinDC

By focusing on what is happening locally, NPR fulfills a need that has been abandoned by most media. Catone reports, “Focusing on local information is a very smart approach for two reasons. One, because as Schiller says, it fills a gap in coverage, and two, because many people feel that delivering and aggregating hyperlocal content will be an important part of the future of media. In 2007, Alex Iskold, the CEO of semantic web application company AdaptiveBlue, predicted the rise of hyperlocal information, indicating that extremely targeted local advertising could be the path forward for the ad industry.”

NPR has also built its audience by building a strong social media presence. NPR’s Twitter account has more than 780,00 followers and NPR has more than 400,000 FaceBook fans. In addition, NPR has more than 650 podcasts, nearly 20 blogs, as well as their own social community.

According to Catone:

Perhaps the most important aspect of NPR’s approach to new media, is that they have an organizational level commitment to allowing listeners and readers to access their content on their own terms. Schiller, who prior to joining NPR at the start of this year was the SVP-GM of The New York Times web site, told mediabisto.com that NPR aims to bring people access to content “online, mobile, whatever people want, podcasts — you name it — so that you have that same sense of the NPR experience wherever you are. As far as NPR.org — sure, I want the traffic to increase, but to me the ultimate goal is not just bringing people to this walled garden that is NPR.org.”

NPR’s ability to build its audience is certainly impressive especially at a time when so many media outlets are going under. What lessons can your organization learn from NPR’s success?

Filed Under: FaceBook, marketing, social media, social web, twitter, Uncategorized Tagged With: FaceBook, new media, NPR, PathwayPR, social media, twitter

Dartmouth Justifies Cost Via YouTube

June 16, 2009 By Theresa Smith

Dartmouth takes just 2 minutes and 21 seconds to justify the cost of attending. Does it work? What can your brand learn from Dartmouth?

Filed Under: marketing, public relations, social media, Uncategorized, YouTube Tagged With: college costs, CollegeChat, Dartmouth, PathwayPR, social media, tuition, YouTube

Need to Organize Your Tweeps?

June 9, 2009 By Theresa Smith

How many followers do you have on Twitter now? How many are you following? Do you know who you are following or who is following you? What causes some of your followers to stop following you? Josh Catone writes today in “10 Twitter Tools to Organize Your Tweeps” in Mashable that if you are like many of us, “You’ve followed so many people, it’s hard to keep up, and it’s probably time to do a little housekeeping.”

photo credit: Nils Geylen

Here are Josh’s “10 Twitter Tools” to check out:

1. Twitter Grader – Using a detailed 5 piece algorithm, Twitter Grader assigns every users you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you’re following are and that can help you decide if you want to keep following them.

2. Twinfluence – Twinfluence is a scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It’s another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow.

3. Tweetcloud – One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don’t care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person’s tweets to give you a bird’s eye view of the type of things they tweet about.

4. Twitter Karma – Twitter Karma is a great app that lets you sort through all of your follows and see who’s not following you in return, who you have a mutual follow/follow-back relationship with, and who is following you that you’re not following back.

5. Friend or Follow – Friend or Follow does essentially the same thing as Twitter Karma, helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter. The difference is in the presentation, and it might be a little easier to use for those with a large number of follows or followers.

6. Qwitter – Once you’ve done your initial cleaning, Qwitter is a nice app that will update you via email whenever someone stops following you. It will even let you know what you tweeted that caused them to stop following you, which could be useful (if you lose five followers every time you tweet about your cat, for example, that might be a hint to stop talking so much about your cat if you want to retain followers).

7. Nest.Unclutterer – Nest.Unclutterer will automatically block Twitter users who are following more than a certain number of people or who have been inactive for a certain number of days. You can specify those thresholds and white list certain tweeps so that they are exempt from the cleaning. Nest.Unclutterer is actually less about who you’re following, and more about making sure people following you are actually friends you want to be associated with.

8. Twitoria – Twitoria scans through your Twitter account and finds anyone who has been inactive for the past week, two weeks, month, two months, six months, or year.

9. TweetSum – TweetSum digests all your new followers, rates them using what they call the DBI (”Douche Bag Index”), a number that supposedly weeds out Twitter users likely to be annoying, and then lets you easily follow them back or categorize them as tweeps you don’t want to follow. You can see a list of recent tweets for each new follower as well, which is helpful.

10. Tweepler – Tweepler is a new follower management application that lets you make quick, one click decisions about whether to follow people back or drop them into an ignore pile (out of sight, out of mind). In addition to being able to view recent tweets, Tweepler gives helpful stats about new followers, such as average tweets per day.

What are you using to organize your tweeps?

Filed Under: How to, marketing, public relations, social media, twitter, Uncategorized Tagged With: PathwayPR, social media, twitter

Lance Armstrong Reports on Lance Armstrong; What does it mean for your Brand?

May 28, 2009 By Theresa Smith

lance and levi after stage 15 — powered by http://www.livestrong.com

Two weeks ago Lance Armstrong stopped talking to the press. Initial reports were that he took this step after being angered over some media reports that he was responsible for a rider protest that occurred in Milan during the Giro D’Italia. But what’s interesting is that he is still talking to his fans, daily. And he is talking to his fans directly through Twitter and his video blog postings without the traditional media.

In Robert Mackey’s article in today’s New York Times “Lance Armstrong Covers Lance Armstrong” Mackey writes:

Given his immense fame, and the power of the new media tools he has obviously mastered, Mr. Armstrong is now free to cut out the middle man and go straight to the people.

Ever the competitor, Mr. Armstrong even seems to be enjoying tweaking his new rivals in the press corps, secure in the knowledge that he is scooping them hour after hour as he posts regular updates to his chatty Twitter feed, where he banters with other cyclists, comments on his comeback and even answers questions from some of his more than 933,000 followers.Last week he even took a moment to post this comment on a news report saying that some members of the cycling media had stopped quoting his tweets, in an effort to force him to engage with them:

Bitter sports reporters are boycotting @lancearmstrong’s Tweets. Good luck with that, and welcome to 2009.

Whether you applaud Lance for his media blackout or not what lessons can your brand take from his use of social media to stay in touch with his audience?

Filed Under: public relations, social media, twitter, Uncategorized Tagged With: Lance Armstrong, Livestrong.com, PathwayPR, public relations, social media, twitter

Big Pharma Beginning to Join Social Media Party

May 18, 2009 By Theresa Smith

Marissa Miley and Rich Thomaselli reported in Ad Age last week that “Big Pharma is lumbering into the digital realm, using a growing chunk of its $4.7 billion DTC dollars to reach patients and prescribers on blogs, Twitter and YouTube.”

While this might not seem newsworthy to most, according to the article “Big Pharma Finally Taking Big Steps to Reach Patients With Digital Media” is big news to anyone following the adoption of social media in the Pharma space. Miley and Thomaselli found that “Johnson & Johnson keeps a respected and popular blog; Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim and AstraZeneca all use Twitter to deliver news about their respective companies; and most recently, Sanofi-Aventis and AstraZeneca each launched branded YouTube channels to reach certain patient groups.”

Why has it taken Big Pharma so long to begin to adopt social media? Mark Senak, senior VP at Fleishman Hillard and author of the blog, Eye on FDA is quoted in the article, “They’re late to the game because no one wants to get a warning letter.”

Miley and Thomselli write:

To further illustrate the complexities of a digital world without clear DTC guidelines, it took AstraZeneca more than eight months of meetings with a team of 15 to 20 company experts from the regulatory, legal, compliance, corporate, and brand management departments before it put up a YouTube channel for its asthma drug Symbicort. “The social-media space is very much a gray area,” said Dana Settembrino, senior brand communications manager for the drug. “In that sense it makes it challenging.”

The good news is that Big Pharma is taking steps to engage their customers that will hopefully in the end benefit their customers around the world that are suffering from health problems. You can read the entire article here.

Filed Under: social media, twitter Tagged With: Ad Age, Big Pharma, PathwayPR, social media

Is your Brand Boring?

May 14, 2009 By Theresa Smith

According to Josh Bernoff, senior analyst with Forrester and co-author of Groundswell (my favorite book to date on social media), there are two kinds of brands in the world–brands that people like to talk about and brands that people don’t like to talk about.

In his recent post “Social Strategy for Exciting (and Boring) Brands”, Bernoff writes, “Brands that people don’t like to talk about – I’ll call them “boring” brands – are everywhere. If, like most marketers, you market a boring brand, then you’re really earning your living as a marketer. That’s because you are trying to get people interested in something they don’t really care about.”

Bernoff is right–it can be difficult to get people or rather potential customers interested in a brand that is viewed as boring.

In his post, Bernoff writes:

The boring brands have different problem, but social applications can help them, too. The key with boring brands is to get people talking about their problems, since they won’t talk about your brand. In advertising, you can force messages on people watching other things. In a social context, this fails miserably.

Applications that talk about customers problems create “borrowed relevance,” since you generate talk they care about, then make yourself a part of it. And in perhaps the most dramatic example, Procter & Gamble knew girls wouldn’t talk about tampons, but would talk about music, cliques, and school, so it created beinggirl.com as a vehicle to deliver (very quietly) the occasional feminine care products message.

photo credit: kyz

The key –whether using social media or traditional public relations and marketing– is to focus on talking about your customers problems and how you are helping to solve them. The key to success if you have a boring brand is not the product or service you are selling but how you are changing lives or companies through your product. But, this is a bitter pill for many companies to swallow. Many of the boring brands have fallen in love with their products and don’t want to accept that they are not the story. The engaged, happy customer is the story.

At the end of his post, Bernoff writes:

If your brand is talkable, your social efforts will surface the brand enthusiasts who have the most influence. If it’s boring, your social applications will help you find your rare but valuable brand enthusiasts, or even generate a few. Pay attention to these people. Because as advertising clutter rises and word of mouth becomes more important, they’re about to become some of your most important corporate assets.

How are you driving interest in your brand?

Filed Under: marketing, public relations, social media Tagged With: Forrester, Groundswell, Josh Bernoff

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