“Speakers & Speeches: Social media, Friend or Foe?”

Here are the notes I took on,Speakers & Speeches: Social Media, Friend or Foe? – October 24, 2008. This was a panel discussion led by the CEO of Ragan Communications, Mark Ragan, about social media being incorporated into his organization.

Why should we blog in corporate America?

  • Customer’s are having conversations and we need to listen to them.
  • When we listen to them, we are building relationships and become “passionate evangelists” and part of our community.
  • Accessibility is key. We need to be accessible to audiences of all ages.
  • We need to have a place for people to talk on “our playground” and be authentic.

Who is writing the blog?

  • Employees that are in the trenches, so to speak. They have the details consumers are interested in and then the CEO can blog ever once in a while about overall concepts.

What if someone writes something bad about us on our own blog?

  • There will be certain guidelines and restrictions enforced making that a non-issue.
  • Also, you don’t have control over your customers, so this way you can hear a problem and deal with it instantly.
  • It is in the companies best interest to remain “transparent”, to show the culture and process of the organization to the public.

What is the ROI, or bottom line?

  • Understanding customers is priceless.
  • Marriott hotels made $10 billion through blogging.
  • This is an open-source technology so it is basically free.

What about people using social media at work?

  • Social media is good during work hours. It is a form of collaboration and work life integration.
  • Work place policies will be implemented and strongly enforced.

Where should we be in 5 years as far as social media goes?

  • We need to be experimenting with new technology all the time to be ahead of the game.
  • We must be adaptable to new technology and open to it.
  • Communications people need to work on building relationships with IT people in their company.
  • We can learn from our children and how they use social media.

February 20, 2010. Social Media Monitoring, Topic of the Week. Leave a comment.

Edelman’s Insight on Social Media & Online Presence

After Reading, Search Engine Visibility An Edelman Digital Position Paper curated by Director of Insights, Steve Rubel. Here are the key things I took away from the riveting paper.

What did I learn?

  • There are two primary visibility tactics?

~Paid Search: aka (SEM) search engine marketing, this is where marketers purchase small text ads that are triggered when certain keywords are searched

~Optimized Search:aka SEO, this is a technical process where webmasters make changes to their pages in an order to rank well “organically” through a google search for example

  • These next two search optimization techniques are altered specifically for the PR Professional:

~Reputational Search: this uses PR tactics to influence search results around certain keywords. There are three basic components to this:

  • Research/planning
  • Content Development
  • Measurement

~Social Search: this is based around creating ’embassies’ or places where employees work to provide for both the community and the company they work for.

What surprised me?

  • Search engines have an active global reach of 89.5% of all users
  • Google has a ranking system called “Page Rank” that assigns every page on the internet a rank on a scale from 1 to 10. The higher the rank, the more that page can affect search results.
  • There are websites called “link farms” that are also known as dummy sites that allow users to place as many “pointers” to their site as possible.
  • Many social networking websites are now incorporating search engine like applications. For instance, many people now use Twitter Search instead of Google News.

What do I want to learn more about?

  • I want to learn more about where social media and online presence is heading in the future. This paper explains that search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Ask.com will be in danger in the future due to the ever-expanding popularity of social media and the tendencies of internet-users to turn to these sites for searching instead. I believe this to be very enthralling and will stay up to date on any new ideas.

February 20, 2010. Social Media Monitoring, Topic of the Week. Leave a comment.