7Summits Agency

Corporations often struggle with where to start with social media. At 7Summits, we are big proponents for strategy guiding your execution, however despite the best of intentions and the most in-depth of strategies sometimes it is still hard to find a starting point. Today we want to share a few insights on a potential strategy that can act as a good jumping off place for those corporations perplexed by social initiatives or as an effective enhancement for those companies with mature social media programs.

Our goal today is to offer up a possible solution that addresses integrating your existing PR and Communication functions with your social media efforts. The primary audience focus for PR/Comms with respect to content distribution and consumption is often limited by traditional media and investors. However there is an entire ecosystem of stakeholders including employees, customers, prospects, prospective employees, partners, analysts, bloggers, researchers and information seekers that can benefit from or be interested in your content.

The Problem (as we see it)

Companies will invest considerable time and effort into developing content  from press releases, events, and multimedia (videos, audio) to thought leadership including research, reports and whitepapers. Most organizations will publish this content via their content management system to their website, and there it sits in a flat and static format. It often amazes us how much time, effort and money some corporations will invest in content generation, without giving much thought to online optimization, distribution, activation and or promotion. What if there was a more contemporary format for this content, one that allowed for increased readership, participation, and conversation surrounding your hard work?  Thankfully, there is.

The Beginner’s Solution- Social Media Press Release

An open standard, the social media press release, has evolved and existed since 2006. It was originally spearheaded by Shift Communications, a PR organization that understood the benefits of social media even in it’s infancy. This template offers some great ingredients for improving the format of static content into a truly social document.

Key ingredients include:

• Sharing capabilities via Email and Open Social (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.)
• Distribution via RSS, Social Networks, and Search Engines
• Multimedia embed for images, documents, audio and video
• Related Content e.g. Links, Events, Blogs, Research, Products and or Services
• User Generated Content via comments and discussions
• Aggregation of dialogue including trackbacks and real time conversations in Open Social
• Categorization via tagging, by date, topic etc.

These added ingredients create a much more contemporary format that creates a living document optimized for user distribution and discovery by search engines and social media.

The Advanced Solution – The Social Media Press Room

Leveraging the SMPR template this format can be applied and in some cases retro-fitted to any organizations existing website press room or resource sections. This advanced solution can turn an antiquated and flat area of a website, like a press room, into an integrated social media distribution platform for communications. Community platforms such as Jive, WordPress and Drupal offer most of the SMPR key ingredients out of the box, and with some customization the feature set can be expanded to include:

• Press Releases – With integrated SMPR features including comments, embedded multimedia, share capabilities etc.
• Blog(s) – To augment the press releases and cover topics or items that don’t fit a traditional PR format
• Alerts and notifications to users in their chosen media (segmented):
  • Email
  • RSS
  • Open Social (Tweets, Facebook Wall)
  • Mobile/ SMS Text
• Integrated Social document repository (segmented)
  • YouTube videos
  • SlideShare presentations
  • Flickr images
  • Scridb documents
  • Podcasts
  • Archived webinars
• Multimedia gallery including video, audio, images, and presentations (segmented)
• Events calendars
• Social Buzz – Aggregated open social conversations from Blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc. around your company/content
• Press Kit – Executive bios including links to their Blogs, LinkedIn profiles and Twitter accounts (if applicable)

The benefits

There are many benefits to leveraging this approach, below we have summarized some of the main points. At a high level the baseline platform outlined above offers a good mix of content in a format that is optimized for consumption and distribution via:

• Paid Media (PRWeb, Adwords etc.)
• Earned Media (Social networks etc.,)
• Existing Media (Website, Search Engines etc.)

Other benefits include:

• Generating more exposure for your company leading to more media opportunities
• A competitive advantage – beat your competitors to the punch by offering a social media press room
• Re-invention of your PR function
• Enabling a social content strategy: Publish, Share, Talk and Interact vs. Advertise
• Energizing all advocate stakeholders with content they can share and re-use to promote you
• Increased awareness, search engine visibility and share of voice (in social media)
• Generating increased sustainable site traffic and conversations
• Setting your content free to create more buzz pre and post release
• Consolidating various efforts and functions into one optimized platform (Content Seeding/Distribution, PR, Blogs, RSS, Multimedia etc.)

Some examples

Below are samples of some of the better social media press rooms we’ve seen:

• Alcatel-lucent:
• AT&T
• Cisco
• Ford
• Manpower
• Microsoft
• Scania
• Sprint
• MedImmune