My notes from the MarketingProfs panel "It’s Not Your Mother’s PR: New Opportunities to Influence Your Constituents"

Panelists include Deirdre Breakenridge, President, PFS Marketwyse; Terri D. Andrews, Public Relations Manager, RSM McGladrey; and Donna Tocci, Director, Web/New Media, Ingersoll Rand. The moderator was Beth Harte, Senior Subject Matter Expert, Digital Marketing, Serengeti Communications

Beth led off with an introduction to what is and isn’t PR. “PR is not just media relations,” she said. PR is about building two-way, mutual relationships between your company and your constituents. As PR professionals, you may not be in marketing, but it is your job to help your company succeed.

Media relations is 1/7th of what PR people should be doing. Is advertising part of PR? Companies used to use advertising because it was the easiest way to get your story out the way you wanted it if you couldn’t get journalists to do it. Now companies have blogs as a way to get their message out.

Publicity, public affairs, community relations, lobbying and investor relations are all aspects of traditional corporate communications that social media can affect as well. are elements of PR as well.

PR touches everything, including sales and marketing. Shouting doesn’t work anymore. People will either turn you off or think you’re lying. The louder you yell, the more defensive it sounds.

Your publics have something to say. You can’t control the relationship people have with your company. Your customers want to be heard.

People don’t interact with an ad or a direct mail piece, they interact with the brand. Customers are now interacting with the people they know behind the brand.

Deirdre:

Deirdre considers herself a “hybrid,” taking the best of the past and blending it with social. “I don’t think media relations is going away,” she said. “A lot of great things we’re doing in PR 1.0, we’re going to move to PR 2.0.”

“Your best practice with PR and social media communications is to share and be a valuable resource,” Deirdre said.

She shared an example from a client, The International Recovery Group, a “very high end repossession company.” They wanted to change their image to help them address bankers and other higher-end influencers.

They changed their image with a website facelift, and a traditional PR campaign that landed them in The Wall Street Journal and other outlets. What could they do to repurpose that content in social media? They quickly keyed in to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. They searched communities for keywords related to the brand: repossession, repo, debt, etc., to find where bankers and lawyers were having these conversations.

They took a “social media optimization” approach to sharing their existing content like radio and TV interviews. They created a matrix of free monitoring tools available and the types of content they wanted to monitor.

They do weekly measurement by keyword, spikes in conversations, and related influencers using a dashboard approach, and use Tweetdeck to monitor Twitter traffic.

They produce traditional news releases to the company website, and create social media releases on Pitch Engine, which includes tools for readers to share on social networks. Many of the wire services have 2.0 capabilities as well.

They used Listorious to find the influencers in particular categories: finance bloggers, bankers and lawyers who were blogging. They also used Klout.com to determine the influence of people on Twitter. Deirdre also mentioned Technorati, Twinfluence and several other tools.

Deirdre also likes to use Wordle to create word clouds to show the topics influencers are covering, and finds them useful in showing clients what topics are getting the most attention.

Terri:

RSM McGladrey is a large accounting firm that wanted to raise brand awareness. They run four blogs now, including one aimed at golfers, another aimed at manufacturing, one for recruiting and another based on ESOP, which I’m assuming stands for employee stock ownership plans.

Terri runs the @McGladreyPRNews Twitter channel, and they also have a Facebook page and YouTube channel.

As far as next steps, Terri said, “Integration is the name of the game.”

They are currently developing social media policies and guidelines and a network of registered social media users and working to get more internal thought leaders involved in blogging, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

“I get 99 percent of my news from Twitter, and I’ve had four reporters contact me through Twitter in the last two weeks.”

Measurement is a challenge, and figuring out the right mechanism to do it. They’re investigating both free and paid options, and using an agency for measurement, as well as the Vocus PR tool.

As an accounting firm, they like to see numbers. Terri measures the ROI of their blogging efforts based on the number of visitors to the blog.

They’ve posted 1,900 tweets and have 1,100+ followers. RSM held a golf event and tweeted from the event, and had a 50 percent spike in traffic the next day as a result of the tweets.

Donna:

Donna spent her whole career in PR before taking the web and new media position at Ingersoll Rand.

“The fundamentals have not changed,” Donna said. It’s all about relationships and relevant content. Trust, transparency, honesty are just as important in the social media world.

Ingersoll Rand has 60,000 employees worldwide, which creates a challenge for integration.

One of the first things Donna did was create social media guidelines. “If you don’t have them now,” she said, “Create them.”

They started by changing their daily news items on their internal website into blog posts, which allows employees to leave comments and get their questions answered. People are seeing how colleagues in other parts of the company are accomplishing things, and asking for advice and information.

They also created a new internal portal with a “Conversations & Collaboration” area, where employees can post photos, blog and share. Donna runs an internal social media blog with news and information. A lot of their brands are discovering social media and wanting to get involved, so this portal provides a place for them to get questions answered.

Externally, they are working toward sharing more. They’ve added sharing functionality to the careers section, and will implement it on other parts of the site. They also have a downloadable jobs widget for Facebook pages and blogs that that 2,300 people have downloaded.

On a corporate level they have a Twitter account, Facebook page and YouTube channel. “As much as you can, keep your branding consistent,” Donna advised. Their new Facebook fan page brought in 360 fans in a few weeks.

Donna has been tweeting for the company for two years. “When I started engaging more and more, it really does work.” Donna communicates with journalists, partners and others via Twitter.

Questions:

How are you tying the eyeballs coming to your sites to your business objectives?

Deirdre: “Measurable objectives.” We can tell immediately whatever we’re pushing out, it’s usually tied back to the website which directs them to a bid sheet, that allows visitors to bid on collateral. (I don’t know what a bid sheet is.)

According to Beth, you need to think about how all of your social media tools can be measured, and you can tie them in to a back end to measure the “closed loop” from PR to social media to sales.

What are you doing differently in other countries?

Donna: We’re still figuring it out in China. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are all blocked, so the videos that are most important we embed in our intranet. Donna’s also looking into the Chinese version of YouTube.

Donna relies on her communications teams around the world to give her local advice on what channels are most important for their region.

For most of the world, it’s the same tools.

Beth: Get yourself a book on understanding different cultures, like “Dos and Taboos Around the World.” We think we’re just like England or Canada, but we’re not. Cultural misunderstandings can be amplified by social media.

Question: A social media policy can only go so far. Since you’re actively using Facebook, how do you handle the difference between personal and professional?

Donna: There are thousands of Ingersoll Rand employees on Facebook. Employees who communicate on behalf of brands are asked to keep that professional. Those guidelines are outlined in their social media policies. If you’re doing it on behalf of the brand, you get training.

Beth added this valuable and undeniable fact of modern communication: Whether you’re communicating for yourself or for your company, in social media or even email, nothing is secure and you need to keep that in mind.