Chapter 11. Social Media: Immerse Yourself and Your Brand

Web 2.0 and social media (such as message boards, forums, podcasts, bookmarks, communities, wikis, and Weblogs) are not just heating up for consumers—they're hot! Remember that you're a consumer too, and you can't truly understand what audiences want and why they demand social media unless you're heavily engaged in it yourself. Unfortunately, time is limited, and the demands of your day pull you in many directions. What happens? Consumer audiences can become much more skilled in social media than the communication professionals who deliver their brand messages. Don't let your audience outpace your brand. If you feel you and your brand fall into this category, I recommend you quickly step up your game and practice what you preach. The more you personally get involved in social media, the more apt you are to deliver P.R. 2.0 strategies that enable audiences to drive their communication. You will be satisfying their daily craving for social media. PR 2.0 is definitely not a "fad." If you don't embrace PR 2.0 or you don't act with urgency, your lack of engagement is a disservice to your brand. The public wants social media. They won't accept anything less. Your job is to know and deliver the needed communication.

Be a Social Media Consumer

Based on the experts I've interviewed for this book and their many experiences with social media, both B2B and B2C brands will benefit from social media. What does this mean for you? The time has come to take your 2.0 knowledge and skills to the next level. Don't wait another second to begin your own blog if you haven't already. Sign up for Facebook.com, MyRagan.com, LinkedIn.com, Classmates.com, or MySpace.com and don't just check back occasionally—become actively involved. Roll up your sleeves and use those interactive 2.0 tools in your PR planning, including RSS feeds, podcasting, and streaming video for your brands. The more comfortable and proficient you are with social media, the more you will be able to apply meaningful and effective PR 2.0 strategies (strategies weaved into customized social media communications programs to reach groups online) when the opportunity arises.

Being aware of the level of your audiences' social media sophistication and interactivity is an important point that I can't stress enough as you move forward. You should study your audience's behavior. Try employing some of the newer research techniques to aid you in better understanding your consumer or business professional's level of 2.0 adoption. You need to assess their interest and use of social media. This holds true for all your influencers, too—those VIPs you need to communicate to in a bigger effort to reach your customers. But remember when using social media that you are using a direct to consumer approach, reaching outside your usual universe of influencers or company partners/channels.

A 2007 study conducted by eMarketer.com revealed a significant percent of time consumers spent online at user-generated sites versus company-generated sites (by age group). Of course the numbers presented in the study will change in time. Of particular interest was the group called the Millennials or Gen Y (ages 13–24), who were on user-generated sites 51 percent of the time as compared to Gen X (ages 25–41), who spent about 35 percent of their time on these sites; and Baby Boomers (ages 42–60) even less time, at 27 percent. When these groups are not on social networking sites, yet still on the Internet, the remaining percentage of time is spent on company-generated sites. This is a tremendous consideration and opportunity for brands to use social media tools incorporated into their PR strategy and planning and overall Web communications.

Rethinking Communication Based on Consumer Behavior

Obviously, this isn't your "Father's" Internet anymore. Your brand needs to change and be flexible with the times. What was popular in Web 1.0 has changed or is no longer being used. For instance, at one time you might have raced to your e-mail inboxes to retrieve e-mail messages. The days of being thrilled over e-mails in your e-mail box are over. Consumers are long past those days. I'm not surprised that today many forward-thinking companies are rethinking e-mail communication. As a matter fact, Fast Company published an article titled, "E-mail is Dead." There's still a great deal to be done to make e-mail communication better.^[1] According to Doug Belzer, the author of the article, "The average e-mail account receives 18 MB of mail and attachments each business day." This is a stifling amount of communication and information, comparable to what the author describes as a "crushing tsunami."

Three companies—Capital One, Union Bank, and Reuters—are building new e-mail models to accommodate today's Internet users. Capital One is teaching its employees how to manage and control e-mail by crafting better messages, shortening subject lines, and by creating succinct body text that uses bullets, bold text, and underlines. Clear and concise e-mails save time. Union Bank came up with an RSS solution. Rather than broadcasting e-mails to all Union Bank's 10,000 employees, the new model has targeted RSS feeds that enable employees to receive information through a feed based upon their job description and location. Reuters also has chosen Instant Messaging (IM) as an alternative to e-mail. Certain instances occur when meetings need to be arranged and conference rooms secured, and according to Reuters executive VP David Gurle, "If you use e-mail to conduct business transactions in a conversational way, you'll end up with a full inbox." However, Gurle's opinion is that e-mail will never be replaced by IM, and I agree with him.

The excitement of e-mail and even IM has waned because there are so many more interesting and better functioning types of Web communications. Today, online audiences are racing to the Internet to socialize. According to a weekly survey of online activities of Internet users by age, among the participants surveyed in the Millennial group, 78 percent of them are downloading and listening to music, and 55 percent of them are reading blogs. And, even though the Millennials clearly take the lead in Web 2.0 and the use of social media, Gen X is not far behind. As a group, 57 percent are searching, downloading, and listening to music and 42 percent are reading blogs.^[2] Knowing that the Baby Boomers have their favorite Web 2.0 activities is even more amazing. Among this group, 40 percent are watching and reading personal content created by others and 38 percent are maintaining and sharing photos. Also according to this weekly survey, even mature audiences (ages 61+) are spending time utilizing social media. Approximately 36 percent of this group is watching and reading other's content and 43 percent are maintaining and sharing photos (even more than the Boomers).

If you did your own informal research and were to ask 10, 20, 100, or perhaps 500 consumers what they want from Web 2.0 and their brands, you might find consensus on similar preferences and behaviors. From my experience, and based on what I've heard from the many experts who shared their experiences, consumers want to

• Receive direct communication from their brands
• Have easy access to brand(s) and any information regarding products and/or services
• Be able to ask questions about products and services
• Get a quick response when they have an inquiry
• Hear a voice from a company and know a company's position on certain issues that might affect their industry
• Believe they can trust the people behind the brand
• Drive and control their communication
• See how other people feel about a company, its products, and/or services.
• Interact with people who have similar viewpoints
• Share information with others, including photos, video, podcasts, and blogs
• Discuss favorite books, movies, leading ladies or men, teen heart throbs, artwork, and anything else they can share their thoughts about openly in a community of members with like interests
• Contribute information and create content in an open-source forum

Giving Power to the People

The consumer preference "to contribute information and create content in an open-source forum" is one of the greatest accomplishments of the Web 2.0 platform. To enable consumers to participate in a content building forum is the penultimate of social media, where the users build, test, and add to the contents in the forum. The finest example that comes to my mind is Wikipedia, which truly exemplifies Web 2.0 and how people engage and interact in a community. So much is available to discuss when it comes to Wikipedia and the notion of wikis. The best person to provide insight and expert perspective on the wiki is Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Jimmy started Wikipedia and literally gave "Power to the People." For consumers, Wikipedia means community control over communications and endless opportunity. Although Wales did not invent the concept of the wiki—the term was coined by Ward Cunningham, meaning a Web site you can edit—Wales realized that if people have the tools they need to collaborate, then they can do more than just "code." They can build whatever they want. For his first concept, Wales focused on the encyclopedia. To him, it was a way for people to come together. Wales had the idea in 1999, and he was "just obsessed with it and very excited." He was actually in a big hurry because he thought it was so obvious, that someone else would do it before he did. But it turned out that for two years or so, as he and his team struggled with a first version of Wikipedia, nobody else was doing what he was doing, not even close.^[3]

Get Your Audience in Your Backyard

Where do you rate yourself on the social media scale? Are you savvy with social media or are you just getting started? Ragan Communications (www.Ragan.com) is an excellent resource that has been helping communications professionals to learn and engage in social media whether they're beginners or advanced in Web 2.0. In an interview with Mark Ragan, CEO and publisher, he discussed how communications professionals are getting involved in social networking on his Web site. His first point focused on social networking and what it offers B2B companies—the powerful ability to build their brands in unprecedented ways. By sponsoring a social networking site, or building your own social networking site and branding it after your company, you are engaging and allowing other people to partake in a very intimate conversation between your company and them, and then solely between your customers. "There's a user-generated aspect that's significant. As long as my audience is in my front yard having a barbeque and drinking beer, all assembled in my space instead of the guy's yard down the street, I can come out the door and sell them some hot dogs. The whole notion behind gathering your audience in your yard is that you would rather have them there than in someone else's yard," explained Ragan.

A second point of interest is that you're going to see an inevitability to move toward social media. He feels it's somewhat present now, but somewhat invisible unless you're really engaged in this topic. And, inevitability that is going to mean that if you don't do it, your competitor will be doing it. So you better get out there now and get everybody in your yard "eating your hotdogs and drinking your beer because otherwise they will go to somebody else's yard," as Ragan puts it. He stressed that you need to feel a sense of urgency to engage in social media. "I think there is urgency. Although my colleagues in my profession, which is niche publishing, look at me like I'm crazy. They keep saying, 'where's the economic model? We don't see it.' I just ignore them. They continue to print publications and basically serve their audience the way they've always served them. Instead, I've chosen this other route that is not much of a risk because the costs are very, very small."

As of today, there are almost 8,000 people on the social networking site www.myRagan.com on any given day. Approximately 700 of the online users are completely engaged, either writing blogs or responding to forums. Ragan openly admits that he likes to watch the whole thing happen. He can practically eavesdrop on his customers. He sees what they're interested in. He can see what's keeping them up at night. He can also see what's driving them to drink. Then, he is able to respond to their needs by sponsoring the appropriate conferences and seminars that answer their questions and solve their problems. It's a smart plan. This type of interaction gives an instantaneous way to look at what hot issues are affecting customers. "We're doing a social media conference—as a matter of fact, our third conference on social media. It's no surprise to me that we're already three times ahead of where we would usually be for a conference a couple months away. I think it's because of the social media site that we have. There was such a buzz among the rank and file in the industry that it's rubbing off on our other products already."

To some extent, MyRagan steers customers in a favorable direction. It builds the brand even deeper into their lives because the cutting-edge customers are out there on the Internet in communities everyday, and for Ragan, it's better when they're out there on a social networking site called MyRagan. This is a distinct advantage. With respect to disadvantages, he has colleagues in the industry who would say the pitfalls come from the fact that Ragan might be undermining his paid content by allowing a lot of user-generated content to be posted online. However, the problem with that argument is that paid content has been undermined for the past 10 years. He believes that if you sit there and simply gripe or cry about it and throw up walls around it, that's not the solution. No matter what, it's happening anyway and there's nothing you can do to stop it. You should take the position, "If you can't beat them, join them." If you look at the tremendous growth of the site, Ragan's approach has worked.

Ragan remembers first focusing on social media when he was "tired of driving the car into that brick wall each and every day." The brick wall Ragan speaks of is that same brick wall that has affected all niche publishers, which is free content on the Internet. Some publishers feel free content on the Internet has pretty much destroyed the economic model of all niche publishers. Ragan was grasping for ideas on how he could continue to make money as a provider of training in his market, which is internal communications and PR, keeping in mind that audiences are less and less willing to pay for content. He had a gut feeling that whatever he chose in the end was going to have to be an Internet-based solution. He started looking around at the popularity of MySpace and Facebook and realized that there was this tremendous power in bonding your customers to you through a community type of medium. Of course, he realized early on that a question comes up: How are you going to monetize this type of solution? You can monetize it the way you monetize any kind of system that is enabling you to build a crowd of customers around a brand. Simply, it's to sell them other "stuff."

"I may not be able to maintain my subscriptions, but I'm selling them an enormous quantity of books and manuals and seminars, conferences, Webinars, audio conferences, special reports, and research reports. What social media enables me to do is gather thousands of people in my front yard who I might not have interacted with otherwise. And, then I can go out there and start selling them what they need," commented Ragan. Even better, his social networking solution is growing quickly, relevant to the size of the overall market he's looking to attract. It certainly is not going to be a Facebook or MySpace because it's a niche market. However, it's experienced unprecedented growth. The site launched on May 3, 2007, and in just over three months it attracted about 8,000 members to the site without doing any real marketing. Without any promotion, the site grew by 200 users per week

When asked about his audiences' behaviors on blogs, Ragan mentioned that they are discussing the concerns in their industry, such as "How do I measure the effectiveness of my communication?" or "How do I beat the approval process, which has become a nightmare at my organization?" He knows that these are the hot buttons or sensitive issues. The difference now, as a result of social media, is you are surrounded by user-generated copy that generates great stories. What you get now is the kind of information that you used to have to conduct with a focus group to receive. Ragan has people blogging on subjects, telling real-life stories, and first person narratives. For instance, what it's like to have your boss take your communication and rewrite it even though the boss has no expertise in the field. It's so important to hear the "first person Readers-Digest-type stories that are just filled with color, drama, and narrative," which you can then turn around and use in your promotions and direct mail copy.

It goes one step further. You can monitor the stories and actually approach a member of the community who wrote a particular blog entry and then ask that individual to speak on the topic at an upcoming conference. "There's so much power behind that. We have people, for example, the Director of Internal Communications for NASDAQ, on our site. I can see what's on his mind and I can one day go to him and say, 'Hey, did you see that we're doing an event with Southwest Airlines' hoping to have a conference at some point at NASDAQ'...or maybe it's a Google or eBay executive who's on our site," explained Ragan. He found that this model for a conference works particularly well. For three years, his organization was searching for a partner, and then Southwest Airlines said they'd be willing to do it. This was a tremendous breakthrough for the company.

The feedback from communications professionals on MyRagan is positive. Not one person has offered a negative comment. No one has said, "I don't like the site, or this site isn't worth my time." Of course, Ragan realizes that there are many people who sign up for the site and aren't active. These are the people who come back every two weeks or so. However, about 10 percent of his audience is really engaged. "The same rule applies for most social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace. What's that statistic I always hear—it's that 10 percent of the population online produces 100 percent of the content," he said. Ragan's 10 percent is busy on MyRagan responding to forum threads and checking in everyday to see if they have mail. They're the real active people. They're hardcore and Ragan believes that these numbers are going to grow.

MyRagan is considered "the first ship in the fleet of three." He was proud to discuss his "Mother Ship," a huge daily newspaper modeled after The New York Times for corporate communications and PR people. "It's this massive Web site that has the bells and whistles," he stated enthusiastically. The last ship is MyRaganTV with free video content for professionals to access. Approximately 150 videos have been produced that his team will be uploading to the site. He's positioning MyRaganTV as the YouTube of the PR and corporate communications industry. The channel will enable you to go out there and view hundreds of videos that Ragan has produced. More important than that, just like YouTube, it will enable you to go and post your own video. He discussed how if you have a little marketing company in San Diego, and it's a one-person shop and you want to promote it, you would do a video of yourself talking about your expertise and go to MyRagan TV and be able to upload that. Of course, he'll have an approval process on his end, mostly to prevent inappropriate content.

The news division part will be the videos produced by Ragan Communications, and then there's a community blog. If a user doesn't want to go to all the trouble of getting his/her own blog software, he or she can use the platform that's available to upload and run personal video blogs. There's also the YouTube-like embedded code function so that if you like a video posted by Ragan Communications, you can just grab that video and put it on your own site. "We have one thing that I'm not sure if YouTube has. We're also going to have an editing function that enables you to see a five-minute video, and if you like everything but the last three minutes, you'll be able to edit the video on the site and then embed your edited version," he said, excited about the possibilities. In addition, you can rate the videos, comment on them, and you can embed them on your own site. There will be 15 different categories, including PR Showcase, Internal Communications Showcase, Community Blog, Most Recently Viewed, Most Popular, and so on. If you are familiar with YouTube, it's basically a clone of YouTube, but for the communications industry.

Ragan offered advice for the communications pro. He recommends that you spend a lot less time studying the issue and "just jump in." Realizing that social media is cheap, and doesn't cost that much to start, is important. He did mention that it was much more labor intensive than it is dollar intensive. A perfect example he says, "I'm standing in my neighborhood right now, in old town Chicago, which is a very cohesive community. The other day I was walking through the neighborhood with my daughter and thought I should start a social networking site for the area. It would cost $100 for the software. Then I'd stick leaflets in everyone's door. Before you know it, you'd have several hundred people on the site within a matter of 2–3 days. You'd have a business running. And, once you reach critical mass of several thousand people, you start going to the merchants. Anybody can do it. A woman living at home with her kids can launch a social networking site for a couple hundred bucks a month and start building a business around her particular niche. The only way to do this is to take this advice and just jump in. The whole notion of Web 2.0 is the creation of platforms that enable the everyday person to create and drive communication."

An Expert's Perspective on Social Media Tools

Marketwire (www.marketwire.com), headquartered in Toronto, Canada, has also been focusing on ways to help clients engage and join in the online community. The company is another expert resource that you can turn to with solutions on how to make news releases blog friendly, and how to deliver your news to community-driven online content forums and social media sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati, and virtual worlds such as Second Life. Thom Brodeur is Senior Vice President, Global Strategy and Development, at Marketwire. He's been with the organization for approximately four years and just six months in his current position. Brodeur is responsible for new product development, strategic planning, mergers, and acquisitions worldwide. He shared with me his thoughts on how communications professionals need to feel comfortable with social media before incorporating these tools into their PR strategy and planning.

Q: How much research did Marketwire conduct prior to offering clients social media tools?

A: We didn't do formal research studies. Informally and on a fairly regular basis, we are in touch with our clients of all types and sizes: public companies, private companies, nonprofits, IR and PR agencies, and so on. Much of what we do through our sales force is a kind of 'on the ground' discussion about what clients look for and what kinds of problems they are trying to solve if they do not easily see services or solutions available, whether it's from us or other providers they work with. We started to see a lot of this sort of questioning or commentary coming from our clients late in 2004. In early 2005, we released our SEO Basic and SEO Enhanced products, which are our products for search engine optimizing news releases. I think for a long time folks just thought SEO was only useful for their Web sites and not for any other form of communication.

Following that, in early 2006, we began social media tagging news releases for clients as well. The whole idea of social bookmarking, community outreach, and the ways you could reach those communities came quite a bit later than just basic search engine optimization of news.

Q: What would you say are the most popular social media tools that brands are using through Marketwire?

A: This is a two-pronged answer. The most popular social media tools are both what they are using now and what they should be using. They are absolutely using hyperlinks, various landing pages on their Web sites, newsrooms, and the like. They are also experimenting in many places with writing corporate blogs, as you know. I would also say they're involved with MySpace and other social communities. What they should be doing, in our opinion, the thing we work very hard to encourage our clients to do, is building topic-specific Del.icio.us pages, for example, networking with influential bloggers, and basically just getting involved. Like with anything, it's hard to understand something unless you try it. Overall, we're finding that agency communications professionals, corporate communications groups, PR professionals, and even investor relations professionals, are paying attention to social media a little bit more than in the past.

We encourage clients to build their own social media mash-ups^[4] and social media newsrooms, or at least to work with service providers whether it's their newswire like Marketwire, or their agency, or others who are capable of helping them design and develop these kinds of resources. We also think companies should be distributing social media releases, both to traditional media and of course to the blogosphere and online social communities. They should be using strategic hyperlinks in their social media releases to give their audience a complete look at the story. Gone are the days of "tell it all" in your 400-word news release. Use strategic linking to your advantage. You can send somebody to another destination right from that traditional news release that really enables the story to expand and gives a fuller or bigger picture. These are things people should be doing more of. We're starting to see that there are always Early Adopters. You have the Early Adopters and then you have the folks who are the Laggards—or the critics—forever procrastinating on what's new and what's next.

Q: Would you say that B2C are Early Adopters of social media and B2B brands are a little slower?

A: From our perspective, there's obvious utility to both markets, but what you've seen is that consumer brands really leveraged social media earlier. This largely occurred because, if you think about it, even in the traditional sense, consumer brands are typically more interested in pushing their messages to the public because of the benefits of word-of-mouth and viral marketing. What we suggest is that this is every bit as important for B2B brands, and there are a couple ways that we look at this. Obviously both B2B and B2C can benefit from social media, but, from our perspectives, in different ways. B2C brands should be using all the elements of social media to distribute their content whether that's photos and images, videos, podcasts, audio files, news, and other information in as many forms as possible so that they can generate word-of-mouth buzz. B2B brands, we believe, should use social media for two purposes. First, as a means of presenting themselves differently—not always relying on the tested, tried, and true 'traditional media' standard via a traditional press release and traditional distribution of that release. And, second, as a way of making their message a bit more user friendly in a world that is adopting social media elements in the mainstream—effectively 'consumerizing' complex B2B brands through new media approaches.

When you think about communication to consumers, the idea here is that you're communicating at the most basic level. Anyone can understand your message because you make your message digestible. And sadly, in many cases, a lot of B2B brands haven't learned that the way to drive pull-through and demand is for their brands and/or products to use a consumer communication approach. The idea of helping the end user understand how your B2B product or service can help them creates the dialogue between the consumer and your channel (whether online, retail, or otherwise) to ensure that the products the channel is embedding into their end-user products have been requested, talked about, blogged about, and so forth by the consumers who will use those products. They can equally make their story easier to digest and recognize that they're no longer just telling their story to channel partners, or technology and/or system aggregators, or other types of companies who can do their translating for them. So, from our perspective, what this means is B2B brands ought to be using RSS, wiki technology, blogs and social media press releases, networks, and online communities to do a lot of their 'storytelling' for them.

A good example might be a company that frequently changes prices and wants to allow its distributors to subscribe, maybe via RSS, to receive automatic notification of price changes. B2B brands could also use wiki as an alternative to e-mail. Instead of having multiple strands of e-mails around a specific project, set up a wiki. Everybody goes there, contributes their content, their ideas, their thoughts, argues with one another, has an open, spirited discussion about the content and subject matter, and goes on from there. This is where a lot of process improvement can happen, and external audiences can be exposed to the extent you want them to and also give them the opportunity to participate. Then, of course, use a blog for an internal communications newsletter. Save yourself some paper, save yourself some HTML e-mail traffic, and send people to a destination where you are not only delivering news one direction, but also people are commenting and providing real-time feedback. IBM obviously is a clear market leader in allowing their employee base around the world to leverage blogs as a means of communicating with one another and discussing important company information.

Q: How reluctant are communications professionals to use the new social media tools that you have to offer?

A: In general, I think this goes beyond what we have to offer. We have this basic tenet that's tried and true to just about every facet of our lives, and that is how much you use something personally. Whether it's an automobile, a certain kind of food, whatever your personal experience is with a product, a service, a thing...whatever that brand means to you...whatever that category means to you on a personal level will, in many cases, drive whether you adapt to it or adopt it. A Pew study recently indicated that professionals who have experimented with blogs (roughly 39 or 40 percent of Americans) are likelier to use these tools in their work because they've used them in their personal lives. When you think about it, the biggest issue is that individuals who avoid these kinds of things are either afraid social media isn't appropriate for their audience or doesn't reach their audience, or because they haven't tried to engage in using a social media tool and are afraid they either don't or won't know how; although we could argue that the population is shrinking pretty fast. A recent Inc. 500 survey said 66 percent of the respondents indicated that social media is important to their business. That's a pretty remarkable statistic.

Other interesting stats that we share with our clients appeared in Time magazine. Approximately 9 of the top 20 Web sites in the United States alone are social media sites. And, 68 percent of American Internet users trust a person like themselves opposed to 17 percent who say they trust a PR person, or 28 percent who say they actually trust the company's CEO. The whole idea of why this is so proliferate in our marketplace is because people trust each other more than they trust messengers. This speaks to the broader topic of how does the use of social media among online audiences change the way communications professionals work? From our perspective, you look at fast-growing companies and the communications professionals who support those companies, whether they are agency or in-house practitioners. It is those Early Adopters and forbearers of this kind of technology who are driving the dialogue. What we've learned is that with the exception of technology companies, larger blue chip organizations, in many cases, are a little bit slower to adopt a little warier because they have so much more information to protect and steward; they can be a little slower to adopt because of the fear of the unknown.

Q: Do you feel that social media tools are easy to grasp?

A: Yes. To reinforce the point from earlier, it's all about use. The more you work with these kinds of resources, which is no different from working with your personal computer, laptop, VCR, or DVD player, the better you will get at it. With practice, you will be more comfortable.

Q: With a higher comfort level, are communications professionals incorporating new social media tools into strategy and planning?

A: I would say that there's an underlying element of peer pressure in our lives. Nobody wants to be the last kid in the neighborhood to get the new Xbox and to know how to use it and game on it effectively. Among PR pros, there's a pervasive approach around reaching audiences; that's what we're taught as communications professionals when we get out of school. You need to reach your audience. That would largely indicate that we're still one-way communicators. Social media has sort of flipped that model on its head because the communication comes from the other direction. What we're finding is that more and more communications professionals are being forced to plan social media into their tactical media relations and communications plans because they have to engage their audiences now. Communications professionals are doing a lot less 'telling' today than they are encouraging dialogue and discourse among the influencers (in most cases, consumers and other advocates) that are important to them. It's a very different ballgame today.

Q: Now that consumers are driving the communication, and social media is direct to consumer, does this make PR professionals nervous?

A: I think it makes us nervous, not because it's a new thing, only because it's different from how we're conditioned. When you're conditioned to wash your clothes a certain way because that's how your mother taught you and that's how you've been doing it since you were 12, and someone else comes into your life, your husband or significant other, and says, 'Hey, I wash my clothes like this,' or 'I like my clothes to be washed this way,' your conditioning is challenged. You either bristle or you're nervous or you send the wash out to be laundered for a while until you feel you can comfortably wash your clothes this new way. It's about personal experience. The more you wash clothes a different way because now you have a different perspective, the more comfortable you become with it.

What we're finding is that, when you look at the workflow of a communications professional, typically the way it has always worked, the news release or news alert or communications tool that's used to communicate happens at the end of the cycle. You can measure it, monitor it, and you can hope that the media and influencing community you sent that communication to is actually going to do something with it, publish it, reprint it, write a story about it. With social media, what happens now is that news release, that news alert, that tool comes first. Then, the conversation starts and the real dialogue begins as you're engaging people or communities, at the beginning versus at the end of the life cycle of that particular communication. Workflow is changing a bit and any time you change a person's process—their procedure or their workflow—you're absolutely going to get people who are immediately engaged by that and they're riveted. Why? They engage because it's something new and it's something different that they want to embrace. Then, there are the rest of us who say, 'Wait a minute, that's not the way I've done this all these years; it's going to take me a little while. Let me settle it with myself and think about how I can adapt, if at all.'

Q: What advice do you offer to communications professionals about social media tools?

A: Do it! Start experimenting with these tools in your personal life. Go to Wikipedia. Use a wiki. Create your own blog using a free online blog tool or participate in your corporate blog, if there is one you can participate in. Go to YouTube and watch or upload a video. Take a look at Flicker, download a podcast, create a podcast, use an RSS reader, sign up to receive something from an RSS feed, so you know what the distribution mechanisms look and feel like. Use these tools so you're clear about what you can and cannot use them for, and recognize that these forums aren't going away. The more familiar you are with them, the better prepared you'll be to engage them. Think about it from this perspective: If you're a traditional communications professional, a PR professional, even an investor relations professional, if you never read a newspaper or have never seen a broadcast, would you be good at what you do? Probably not. If you don't do any of these things social media-wise, you probably won't catch up either. Among my younger communications contemporaries I might well be considered a dinosaur when it comes to using these kinds of technologies and tools, and I'm only in my late 30s. I find them less intimidating when I understand what's under the hood though. The only way to get under the hood is to open up the hood and start looking and tinkering. And, you can always ask others who are good mechanics about their experiences as well.

Moving Forward Through Understanding and Experience

The way your brand communicates is morphing into a new experience for both the consumer and the PR professional. As you move forward with social media for your programs, you should keep in mind:

• You're a consumer too. Get involved and engage in social media so you understand the nature of the resources. With comfort and understanding, you'll be better prepared to deliver PR 2.0 strategies.
• Every audience has a certain level of social media sophistication. Be aware of this level and degree of usage and introduce the tools that groups will react and respond to with enthusiasm.
• When consumers are social networking in your backyard, it's an opportunity for you to hear their intimate conversations and understand their needs. You can listen and develop information (products/services) to solve their problems and satisfy their needs.
• Social networking and social media are relatively inexpensive. For a small investment you can get closer to your audience, and it's much more labor intensive than dollar intensive.
• You should establish relationships in the social networking community similar to the manner in which you strive to develop relationships with traditional influencers. The blogging community is growing and targeting influential bloggers who can be an active part of your communications strategy.
• Realize that you might be conditioned to operate in a specific manner and your workflow process hasn't changed in years. Social media will shift your workflow because it alters the timing of the communication tool. News releases, for instance, are no longer at the end of the cycle when the consumer or B2B audience receives information via a third party. Instead, with social media, the communication is at the beginning of the cycle.
• Take the time to develop your social media skills so that you don't get left behind. As a communicator, you need to be tapped into what's in the news, and social media is making the news. It's also the way audiences are receiving their daily news and information. Grow with it!

Endnotes

1. Belzer, Doug. Fast Company; Next Tech. "Email is Dead. July/August 2007.

2. Deloitte & Touche USA LLP, "The Future of Media: Profiting from Generational Differences." Provided to emarketer on April 16, 2007.

3. You can review the full Q&A interview with Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, at the close of Chapter 12, "The Pro's Use of PR 2.0."

4. According to Wikipedia, a mash-up is "a Web site or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience," July 2007.