How to Prepare for Your First Foray into Social Media

by Steve Lubetkin, APR, Fellow, PRSA; Senior Fellow, Society for New Communications Research

By now, most public relations practitioners have been bombarded with advice about social media from colleagues and self-appointed social media experts.

You’ve probably been counseled that you need to begin developing ways to use social networking websites (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace), conversational media tools (Twitter, Yammer, Plurk, Friend Feed) and distribution mechanisms (YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.TV, PodBean.com, Libsyn.com).

The good news about social media and conversational media tools is that you can jump right in and use them without a lot of technical knowledge.

The less-good news is that if you use them in ways that diverge from the accepted practices of the social media community, there are plenty of people who will remind you - very loudly and very publicly - that you have broken some unwritten rules.

You can protect yourself from embarrassment and reputation damage to your company/client brand by preparing for your first foray into social media.

Tips for success

• Stop, look and listen. Before you jump into any social media venue, it’s worthwhile to take a deep breath and just look around the community first. Don’t immediately respond to postings made by others, but observe the ethos of the community. Do members respond to each other with constructive comments, cross-references and links that amplify the original postings? Who speaks to whom?
• Do some research. There is little, if any, privacy on the Internet anymore. Take advantage of that and learn more about the people who frequent the social media communities you are exploring. You can build a very helpful profile of their skills, interests, knowledge and experience by using the same search tools you use for other business projects, like Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo and other sites.
• As with other communications channels, you should choose the social media you use for the audience you want to reach. Different social media tools have different purposes. You will need to use a mix of these tools just as you do with traditional media activities.
• Remember, social media is about “the conversation.” Social media is not just a free tool for you to shout your marketing or sales message to the world. You are supposed to engage in real interactions with the people you meet there. Social media users expect to exchange ideas, information, tips and helpful advice among themselves.

In particular, be careful about using software tools to automate your postings. Nothing says “clueless” to the Twitter community more loudly than automated messages triggered when someone follows you, saying “Thanks for following me. Check out my product at www.buymenow.com.”

• Social media does not have to mean raw, unedited, unprofessional-looking multimedia content. There is no bigger opportunity to give a bad impression about your company or your client than in the widespread production of “rich” media like audio, video and photography. Probably the biggest mistake I see is the distribution of raw, unedited photos, and audio or video content that looks and sounds like it was prepared by amateurs.

Social media are communications channels, and it’s perfectly OK to try to put your best foot forward. Don’t make your video look like a highly polished commercial, but do think about providing your audience with unique content in an appealing format.

• Learn the necessary skills. You’ll need to learn about creating fan or business pages on Facebook, and you’ll need to understand URL shorteners if you are going to share links on Twitter.

Learn how to use inexpensive software tools to edit audio and video programs. Read a basic textbook on audio or video production. Learn how to use a tripod and capture audio from the house sound system. Put titles and introductions on your audio and video files so people who get them from sources other than your website know what they are hearing or seeing. Remove the dead spots!

If you take photos, learn how to use photo editing and tagging software. PhotoShop can do this, or check out PhotoMechanic (www.camerabits.com) to add text metadata to the caption and keyword fields in the JPEG image files. Never upload publicity photos to sharing sites with hard-to-remember default filenames like P000013284.jpg or DSC_10929848.jpg. Rename the files you upload with descriptive, memorable file names.

And of course, if your budget allows, consider engaging someone who already knows how to do these things to help you.

• Make sure social media managers have the authority and resources to do the job well. The reason why some companies have been successful in social media initiatives is that they have not only assigned responsibility for social media tools to capable managers, but also given those managers the necessary authority to make things happen. It doesn’t require a committee’s approval to react to real-time interactions. In addition, make sure you align sufficient resources to manage the initiative. If you are promoting your company’s/client’s use of Twitter, there had better be a team dedicated to monitoring Twitter and responding quickly if someone talks about you - or Tweets to you!

Social media present an exciting array of new communications channels for public relations practitioners, but we should not lose sight of the fact that these are just channels. I hope the time is not too distant when “Oprah Winfrey used Twitter today” will sound as ridiculous as saying “Oprah Winfrey made a phone call today.”

Steven L. Lubetkin, APR, Fellow, PRSA, is managing partner of Lubetkin Communications LLC and its Professional Podcasts LLC subsidiary. He is a past national board member of PRSA (2003-2005) and is a Senior Research Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research (www.sncr.org). Since 2004, his firm has helped corporate and professional services clients produce award-winning documentary audio, video, multimedia, and e-learning projects for distribution over the web. He can be reached at steve@lubetkin.net. His company’s website is www.professionalpodcasts.com.