eCommunications for global organisations

An eFluential is an online influential (or influencer) i.e. someone who matters online, someone people read and respect, and who can drive and influence an issue’s trajectory online.

For obvious reasons, communicators are often eager to identify eFluentials within their sector or issue. That’s all very well. Unfortunately, plenty of communicators then think it’s OK to pester them, assuming that of course they’ll be willing to spread a story and use their networks to promote anything from a take on an issue to a product launch. Think again. It barely works with traditional media, even less so online.

So as a communicator, what should you do? First, do identify these people. That’s not a crime. How? The basic tools work: look up keywords (brand, issue, legislation, organisation etc.) on Twitter search and Google blog search. Don’t forget blogrolls: finding bloggers via other bloggers works well. You can be even more sly. Look up your keywords on delicious, flickr, digg, reddit and check out if someone is tagging lots of good quality material. Google their names and see if they write blogs or where else they turn up (LinkedIn perhaps?)

OK so what do you now? DO NOT spam these people. Follow them, see what they have to say, learn from them, use them to gain an understanding of what’s driving your issue online. Then, if you’re really keen to build relationships with them, start engaging in their space e.g. go on Twitter or start blogging (or rather, advise your client to do so) and provide interesting and insightful material that they too will be interested in - and only then try to hook up with them. If they share your interests and you build a mutually beneficial relationship, they might, just might, refer to you at some point, follow you on Twitter or put you in their blogroll (but only because they really want to.) If at any point, however, it becomes clear that you’re trying to plug a product or promote a position, you’ll lose all credibility and you’ll need to start from scratch. Be warned.

As a side-note, I’d highlight that eInfluentials are not necessarily the people with most followers on Twitter or whose blogs are most read in your sector: “pitching social media creators who are influential but who are not really customer evangelists for a brand are the wrong people to target” (from a post by John Cass.) This is relevant for issues as well. If you’re engaging in online advocacy and want to, say, build relationships with bloggers in the hope that they might help you spread the word, focus on those who really share your interests and are most likely to join forces with you: if they have a huge following but only ever write about certain elements of your sector/issue which don’t involve you, that’ll remain the case no matter how many scoops you throw at them. Remember, online isn’t like traditional media. Getting an article in the FT will always be more valuable than getting a far better one into a small trade publication. Online, that’s not always the case. Via search, people can find anything that is relevant, while good quality content even on a low-profile site or blog can spread like wildfire if it captures the imagination.

This is a cross-post from Steffen’s blog.

I think I should start blogging. Twitter looks interesting. Think a Facebook fanpage will work wonders. Videos on YouTube are just up our alley. And so on. These are the kinds of things going through the minds of plenty of communicators at any sort of organisation in Brussels (and elsewhere for that matter) who work on issues and policy areas in which they want to exert some influence. And for good reason. The tools are cheap and cheerful, they’ve been proved to work, they fit an age of public relations in which engagement and humility are the order of the day, and what’s more, they’re fun.

However, as enticing as the tools may seem and as easy as you may think it will be to just try, test and see, I’d stress that rather than dive in and use the tools from the off, it’s imperative to have a long-term online engagement plan and to take a step-by-step approach that will help maximise the potential of your efforts.

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I picked up an interesting discussion on linkedin about free PR tools that could be used online.  I wanted to share them on this post so that you could use them or test them for your next campaign (I know I will).

Follow the link to this site (avangate) and you will find a list of 50 sites where you can submit your press release for free.  Someone also recommended three other sources on the forum:

http://www.article99.com/

http://www.1888articles.com/

http://www.free-press-release.com/

They also mentioned to be careful because submitted to some of these services could generate some spam emailing to your inbox, so perhaps it is worth doing an test with an alternative mailbox.

Keep me posted if you have any comments or insights on this - will report back when we have tried them out.

Another ‘plain english’ video that gives you a great simplified idea on how to do some PR on the web.  Part of the collection of youtube ‘plain english’ videos this gives you a quick introduction to how the web can be used to spread the message online.

This is a cross-post from Steffen’s blog.

Microblogging. Think a platform where you can publish a sentence from your PC or mobile phone in a few seconds; or think Facebook with status updates and nothing else. The use of microblogging services like Twitter for professional purposes have not taken off in Europe and yet they’re all the rage across the pond - could it be that we’re just late adopters in Europe, and that this will change once millions of people have signed up to Twitter and the like, or is it that it simply couldn’t work here?

So how is it being used in the US? I’m not going to analyse in depth, but a few of the uses are:

• As with other forms of social media, simply to listen. Using, say, tweetscan, companies are taking note of what people are saying about them, as are politicians.
• After having listened, interaction may be next, following the adage of open, honest, one-to-one communications which customers now expect. If people are writing stuff about them, companies are actually writing back. Or they can ask questions, or generally express an interest and be seen to engage.
• Providing news, like updates on product releases, events, special offers, or just anything people might be interested in. JetBlue do this. As does the Obama campaign, regularly updating people on campaign events via Twitter.
• Customer service. Some companies are actually keeping track of what’s being said about them, and when someone complains or needs some information about a product or service, the company responds on Twitter. Comcast are at the forefront of using Twitter for customer care.

But why are companies (or campaigns, as in the case of Obama) using Twitter? What’s wrong with just using email or other channels? Again, not an in-depth analysis, but the main reasons are:

• It’s another place where people are having conversations, and knowing what people are saying may be valuable, as a company (or organisation, politician, whatever) may want to take note and even do something about it!
• The medium as a message matters i.e. the type of conversation one can have. Messages are short and informal, obviously written by a person without scores of senior communications type people wondering whether the message fits the corporate mantra, meaning you’re personalising the way you communicate. Result? If done well, showing people you’re a decent human-being rather than a corporate puppet, that you’ve got soul, and it’ll help to build relationships.
• It’s just handy: it being quick and easy simply means it’s suited for providing quick updates to people.

For more in-depth analyses of the uses of Twitter, I’d recommend these three posts from Ogilvy’s excellent 360° Digital Influence blog: Twitter for customer relations, Twitter for crisis communications, and Twitter for corporate reputation management.

As to the central question: will microblogging for business or other professional purposes remain limited in Europe because of inherent barriers, or is it just a question of time? Assuming Twitter and the like do take off and there’ll be millions of daily users in a couple of years, some barriers one could think of might be that the language factor makes it difficult to track conversations in multiple countries, so is it really worth it? Or that Europeans are more reserved and don’t regard their roles as consumers as seriously as Americans. Will they really complain about a product, or sing its praises, on Twitter?

I think both points can safely be dismissed. So what if a conversation is not pan-European? The quality or importance of an online conversation is not just defined by how many millions of people are following it, but by the nature of its content and engagement. A company can learn a lot from following online conversations even if there aren’t huge numbers of people involved. And engaging, or providing updates to valued customers or supporters, can be extremely precious in building relationships, even if the numbers are small. Similarly, so what if Europeans tend to be a bit more reserved when it comes to letting off steam in social media? Again, it’s not the number of people, or how vociferous they might be when discussing, say, a brand, but what they’re saying that matters. In addition, I’d say that Europeans’ obsession with mobile phones could play a part here. Being able to update ones own Twitter by mobile phone after having been to an interesting place or seeing something out of the ordinary, or simply to carry on following a conversation when away from the PC, would entice quite a few people.

Plus, moving away from marketing and into a Brussels context, I can see a viable use for a microblogging platform as a near-instant monitoring tool. Dedicated monitoring providers and consultancies are paid a fortune to follow legislative issues that impact their clients, but the monitoring reports are usually sent via email the next day. Basic updates at crucial times, say during a plenary debate at the European Parliament or a key event, can be given via a microblogging platform so that people are updated in near-real time. Via a plug-in, these updates could be made to appear on a website or blog as well as the relevant twitter page, so you would not even need to send people somewhere new, just say: “check out the live updates on our site”. Live-blogging is not far removed from this, but that implies slightly longer entries and requires a laptop, whereas microblogging/monitoring could even be done from a mobile phone.

And will any MEPs or MEP hopefuls take a leaf out of Obama’s book and try to Twitter their way into constituents’ hearts in the upcoming campaigns?! It’d probably be a waste of time to send regular updates given the low profile of European elections (no I’m not contradicting myself: updates don’t mean you’re engaging in a conversation and should only be provided with a significant number of followers). But I would advise them to follow what people are saying in social media in general, including Twitter, and the blogosphere in particular. There won’t be much, but some of it could make interesting reading. And if they really want to start an online conversation, I’d recommend they resort to traditional blogging, but I’ll save that for another post.

While their efforts to remain in the communications stone age and withstand the onslaught of digital have been valiant - MEPs don’t use the web, they’ve often claimed - Public Affairs professionals in Brussels are slowly coming around to the fact that digital can work for their clients too. Next up is the clients themselves and convincing them to invest in online activities, which is no mean task. First, although their ability to radiate expertise on topics they’ve first heard about over lunch an hour before a meeting should never be underestimated, with limited experience of digital themselves, PA professionals might struggle to explain its full scope. Second, old-school clients who barely use the web and think no one other than their teenage grandchild does either will really take some convincing.

Here’s a few things that might, combined, win them over.

Fleishman-Hillard, one of Brussels’ premier Public Affairs agencies, publish a blog entitled Public Affairs 2.0 which recently carried an interview with our client, Helen Dunnett of ECPA. She is described here as “perhaps Brussels’ foremost trade association blogger” for her work on pesticideinformation.eu, which is part of our ongoing work with her on social media outreach initiatives for ECPA.

Most people will have noticed how over the last year especially, video is everywhere online - be it company sites showing their goods or services in action, or the CEO remarking on virtuous CSR initiatives; politicians’ sites showing (carefully selected!) interviews and speeches (Sarkozy’s site is practically a video vault); or news sites showing the type of footage we’re used to seeing on TV news. With video-editing tools being part of the standard Microsoft Windows package now (Windows Movie Maker) along with staples like Notepad and a calculator, and YouTube offering free hosting and a player, as well as an an endless source of existing videos, even the most humble blogger can use video to enrich a story.

We’ve gladly jumped on the bandwagon. Not because it’s a fad, but because the power of video can vastly enhance and humanise a story. At a time when even old-school corporate communicators are coming to terms with the fact that engaging and being open, honest and transparent is a) expected of them; and b) can help reach campaign goals or improve personal, company, industry or brand image (if done well!), video is becoming increasingly important. In particular, we’ve found that interviews with expert stakeholders are a great boost to campaigns. Even if the same content is expressed in text form on a site, or in a position paper or traditional press release, actually hearing it straight from the source has proven very effective, for obvious reasons: there’s no potential PR spin around a quote, and even if editing can embellish an interview by cutting out the “bad bits”, there’s less scope than in a press release, where one select quote is usually shown to represent an entire interview or statement. And in the interest of full transparency, what we’ve taken to doing when we’re showing snippets of interviews is uploading the full unedited interview to YouTube as well and letting people know it’s there if they’re interested.

To those who still think it all sounds a little complicated, think again. A simple recording on a hand-held camera can be transfered to a PC in a matter of minutes, edited using say Windows Movie Maker, and uploaded to YouTube. The whole process could take a few hours if you’re really in a rush. What about production values I hear? Some people have asked us why the footage does not look like it does on TV. We tell them what most people understand already: production values are not the point! YouTube (or other video sharing sites for that matter) do not allow for high-quality video (with 2+ billion views per month their servers are pretty busy as it is); but more importantly, say in an interview with a stakeholder, it’s the content that matters, not how grainy the footage is. Plus frankly, grainy footage with background noise appears more “‘real” i.e. less staged than a video filmed with high-end production resources: proper lighting, clean sound, make-up etc. Not great if you’re a high-tech company showing off your production plant; but much better if you’re interviewing a scientist about a highly contentious issue during a coffee break at at an event.

And finally, what do you do once you have your video uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing site? You embed it so it appears directly on a site or blog, meaning the user does not have to click through to YouTube; you simply send the link to people you think should see it; and once you have a few, you set up a channel on YouTube to collect all your videos in one place (an example: Barack Obama’s YouTube channel).

The adage goes that traditional PR doesn’t “get” digital. This probably remains true for a large number of agencies. Certainly, on the Brussels front, PR/PA agencies are going about business as usual, although I had high hopes for 2008! However, I spoke to someone recently who works on online campaigns for one of the larger Brussels agencies, and apparently 90% of his work is commissioned via London and New York, simply because none of the strategists in the Brussels office know much about the web and thus never recommend online solutions to clients. It appears that 2008 was probably a little optimistic.

So it’s comforting to see Richard Edelman’s vision of his industry really embracing digital. In a recent post on his blog, in which he explains how PR should hold its feet during the impending recession in the US, he makes 5 broad points which all contain strong elements of digital, whether it’s simply how to tap the medium (e.g. including bloggers in media outreach initiatives); or perhaps more interestingly, identifying developments that result in stakeholder expectations which digital is best placed to respond to (e.g. greater trust in peer recommendations and less in traditional advertising; giving employees a voice; respecting a broader set of opinion leaders; more listening, dialogue and feedback mechanisms etc.) Definitely worth a read.>

We all know how and why the web has revolutinised the nature of communications. Every new major medium that has been developed before, from the printing press to television, has been controlled by a small number of untouchables, meaning that you or I could not really influence what they published or broadcast, or make our opinion on what they were publishing or broadcasting known to anyone outside our own networks. The Internet has changed that and the top-down nature of communications in place pretty much since Guthenberg had his brainwave is under threat. Not just because anyone can be a journalist/publisher. People know they can answer back, and are not afraid to do so, sure, but as important is the effect this has had on traditional communicators themselves.