Below are some great tips on continuing the momentum and conversation post-special event.

• Continue to upload pictures from the event even after it has occurred.  This will spur conversations about memories and highlights from the event  - and most importantly, conversations about your brand.
• Spread out the distribution of post-event follow-ups throughout multiple forms of social media.  This will not only spread the reach of your conversation, but it will provide for easy-to-create content.
• Take your time.  Instead of pushing all of your event re-cap photos and conversations out immediately, spread it out over the course of a week so that you can continue the conversation about your brand over an extended period of time.  One week is also the perfect amount of time to begin to move on to the next great conversation topic.

What are your strategies for post-event conversations online?   We would love to hear them.  Until then, cheers – and have a great weekend.

But for all of the advancements we’ve made in technology, I’m happy to report, the human brain is still irreplaceable.

In the marketing world, there are lots of tools available to you now to help quantify and qualify mentions of your brand (either online mentions or offline in the form of newspaper, television or radio coverage).

Companies like Radian 6, Critical Mention, Burrelles Luce, Cision and Vocus (to name a few) tout the benefits of their various technologies to help you manage your brand mentions faster, better, more effectively. (Full disclosure: we use services like Burrelles Luce, Cision and Metro Monitor). 

If you just watch the demos, you might even fall to the conclusion that you don’t even have to lift a finger once you start using one of these services because it will do it all for you. You can just sit back, relax, and wait for the computer to do your job.

Wrong. Well, partly wrong. I’m not here to say that mention-gathering resources aren’t valuable. They are. But if you think plugging in some search terms and then sitting back to wait for the computer to do the work for you is the way to go, you’re going to end up with a lot of really incorrect data.

Why? Because the computer isn’t you. It might find the search term you told it to find for you and put it into the bucket labeled with that term. But upon closer review, you find that while yes, the search term was indeed included, the article was actually about something completely different. It may not have been the key message you were hoping for, or it might’ve been about an entirely different topic from what the search term was intended. The computer wouldn’t know that. You would.

My advice is to use the mention collection services for what they can do for you: gather large amounts of content quickly and serve as a starting point of your analysis. But then go back through that content with a fine-tooth comb to analyze what it means for you and your brand. Come up with a measuring stick that works for your brand’s bottom line. And then compare the mentions against that to see if you hit (or missed) the mark.

It can be time consuming and laborious, sure. But would you rather take more time to have a report that actually means something to your company, or pages filled with meaningless, inflated data?

We often have clients come to us for advice on how to help them better measure what’s being said about them. They may be using tools like Burrelles Luce or other sources but have never had the time to be able to actually sort through the material to see if the messages they’re trying to communicate are hitting the mark. That’s where we come in. We sit down with hundreds – sometimes thousands – of pieces of content and look at them one by one until each one is in the right place. That’s when we can show the client whether or not the message they shared is engaging the right people.

It’s tempting sometimes to want to buy into the notion that a computer can automate everything and make your life easier. But when it comes to measuring your PR results, take the time and use your brain to qualify the messages you’re sharing. Only then will you truly be able to know whether or not your efforts are impacting your business’s bottom line.

Mollie and I are attending HD Expo (Hospitality Design) 2012 this year, alongside one of our clients, Milliken floor covering.

Yesterday they were recognized with three (THREE!) IIDA product design awards during the show:

• Best of Show
• Best Booth
• Best Flooring

We are so proud to work with our clients who are innovative, creative and enthusiastic champions of their respective industries – to continually offer products and services that meet the unique needs of their audiences.

Crisis communications in social media offers a new set of possibilities. A compliant can start with one comment and spread like wildfire, but brands also have a greater chance of catching the conflict and addressing than before online forums existed.

So, what’s an A&D brand (or any brand, for that matter) to do?

To start, I highly recommend setting up a monitoring system so you know when your company or brand is mentioned online. Google Alerts and HootSuite searches are great tools to see what things are being said about you online – both good and bad.

And if you do come across a complaint about your company, as with any crisis communications strategy, you’ll want to:

• Address the source. Acknowledge the individual that made the negative comment and apologize for their trouble. Let them know that you’re looking into their issue and will offer an update as soon as possible.

• Find a solution. Make it a priority to get to the bottom of their situation and find a solution quickly.

• Follow up. Once you have offered a resolution, follow up and make sure the conflict has been completely resolved to avoid having a similar issue come up again.

Listening to a person and offering a real solution will often turn a negative customer experience into a positive one. And quick action on your part, as a social media manager, can help avoid the wildfire effect when others spread the first negative compliant.

Crisis communications and customer service is often a sensitive subject in public relations. It can be a natural instinct to stick your head in the sand and pretend like the issue isn’t happening. However, the beauty of social media is that it allows us, as PR and brand managers, to not only catch these issues but solve them quickly and effectively.

To other social media managers: what’s your crisis communications plan? Would you add any actions to this list, or do you have examples to share? Let’s hear your thoughts.

The media list is at the core of getting your clients’ messages into the right hands. Listed below are ways to enhance your media lists and make them one of the strongest aspects of your media relations services.

1. Take time to perform preliminary research to find your target audience. Find out if you already have contacts on file that may be useful for the upcoming event.
2. Online magazines and bloggers have become an excellent resource – use them! However, read some of their previous online articles and blog posts to ensure that your news is something they typically write about.
3. Use programming, such as CisionPoint, as a starting point for your contacts. CisionPoint is a great way to search, organize and create contact list. It allows you to search by type of media and location with one of the largest databases around.  For more information, check out their website. 

It can be easy to just throw a list together based on previous lists and a quick Google search of journalists. Take the time to actually pick up the phone and call the newspapers, radio stations and television producers. I have found that human to human interaction can result in great new contacts, or a lead to someone who is an even better resource for your message.

A targeted media list will ensure that your pitch will be put in the right hands. Going through the list with a fine tooth comb is time consuming but worth all of the effort. Media coverage is so crucial to building up a brand. Being able to show your clients’ proof that their messages are being received will continually put you in front of your competitors.

Do you think your media lists create better results than others? If so, we’d love to know how you put them together.

But say what you will about the love/hate relationship between public relations practitioners and members of the working media, there is a time and place where they work together harmoniously. It happens when PR professionals do their research, familiarize themselves with the publications or broadcast outlets they’re interested in approaching and position information that’s truly relevant to the journalist’s audience.

We proved this theory again recently working with B.A.S.S., the professional authority and advocacy group on bass fishing. Their publication, Bassmaster Magazine, released its first annual 100 best bass fishing lakes in the U.S.

Falcon Lake in Texas deemed best bass fishing lake in U.S.

Rather than just blasting the release out “over the wire” (do ‘wires’ even exist anymore?), we took a considerable amount of time to research the journalists covering stories near each of the 100 lake locations across the country. It was time consuming. It was laborious. But it was thorough.

We sent every email one by one (not as a mass email). And when we sent the list out to these journalists, we made sure to point out in the very first sentence the relevance the list had to them. We didn’t assume the media would take the time to see where their local lake placed on the list. We gave it to them right up front, along with a personalized note.

Since the list came out on April 29, we’ve seen more than 100 newspaper articles, television stories and blog posts from local media covering their lake being included in the list. From a media relations perspective, it was a slam dunk.

Often times with news releases, there’s a tendency to want to blast information out as quickly as possible without taking the time to customize the content for the journalist on the other end. But in doing so just perpetuates the “hate” portion of the love/hate relationship journalists have with us. The “love” comes in when journalists see you actually took the time to research their stories and target information to them they can actually use.

Picture from a recent team building day at FCPR - salsa dance lessons!

Liza and I are always asking: How can we communicate our culture to our team?

So when I read the article When Choosing a Job, Culture Matters, I immediately thought of our growing agency and how Full Circle PR stacks up.

The article encourages candidates to understand the organization’s purpose and learn everything they can about the company – to make an informed decision on whether or not their goals and values fit within a company’s culture.  This, ultimately, can set both the employer and employee up for success.

As employers, we communicate our culture in job interviews, team status meetings and company outings, while supporting the message through materials like our internal handbook and external blog.  I feel confident that a candidate trying to learn more about our culture could – just by doing a little research.

I’m proud of our agency’s culture, how we work together and the high expectations we have of everyone (including Liza and me) to product quality work for our clients.  But this isn’t just by accident.  Liza and I include communicating culture in our strategic planning sessions – and out of these, come ideas that we then implement throughout the year.

In our planning sessions, we ask:

• What is our overall goal for the agency?  Are we on track and doing the things we need to meet our goals?
• How do our employees fit into this goal?  Are they on board?  Do they fully understand the goals of our agency?
• What can we do to support our company culture, enhance it and make our employees feel part of the journey?
• Are all team members on board with our goals?
• What activities can we take part in that allows us to not only communicate our culture, but get to know one another better?

Liza and I always encourage new candidates to talk with other members of our team – to learn about company culture from their perspectives.  It’s our hope that the team members we have on board are here at Full Circle PR to stay.  By offering a unique and supportive (yet challenging) environment, we know we can offer a fulfilling and motivating career to all team members, which ultimately allows us to provide the best service to our clients.

Google’s algorithms don’t appreciate wit, irony, humor, or style – in fact, they look for literal terms. But it doesn’t mean your headlines have to be stale. Consider these practices:

• Don’t write the same headline for both the article and the page. The difference is that an article title is what you show your readers, and a page title is what you show search engines. (Bad example: “The Woman Who Knew Too Much”)

• Craft headlines that are both self-explanatory and catchy. (Example: “15 Case Studies to Get Your Client on Board With Social Media”)

• Consider giving your article a title and sub-title to grab attention and give a great first impression of the content. (Example: “Deliverance. U.S. Postal Service: Will It Survive?”)

• Even better, add a meta description as well. This where Google will pull your two-line “snippet” displayed for each webpage. (Example: “Ray Kelly has built the best police force in the country. Now it is turning on him.”)

SEO is best considered as a form of art and best done with a strategy. Your headline might be the most important tool in the quest to reach the top of Google’s search rankings – and having the right balance of literal keywords and your own creativity is key.

Source: Mashable.com

With that on my to-do list, I started thinking how lucky I am to be able to do so in a collaborative environment. So, what can you do to optimize your collaborative skills to be a fantastic team player in the office?

Let’s look at some of the ways in which you can optimize your talent to better your performance at work.

• Build a strong relationship of trust with your colleagues. The sooner they see how efficient and skilled you are, the more likely they will bring you on to new projects.
• Listen more than you talk. There should always be a time during the day where you are soaking up others’ ideas, suggestions and opinions.
• Share your ideas. Collaboration will lead to great things more often than not.
• Ask questions – they are necessary. When working outside of your comfort zone don’t be afraid to approach a team member for help. This will show an admiration for their work, as well as build collaboration between the two of you.

By consistently having a positive attitude others in the office will take notice and hopefully catch on – attitudes can be contagious!

Blogger Ashley Zeckman makes an excellent point when she writes about having a positive attitude at work. She says, “Always have an attitude that says I’m lucky to be here versus the company is lucky to have me.” Having this perspective can tremendously impact your work.

Starting the week with more collaboration, trust building and an encouraging attitude will set you on the path to a great work week. How do you facilitate collaboration in your office? I would love to know.

Well, my friends, I’m not the first one to say it but it is here to stay.

And it is a great thing.

Social media is breaking the boundaries between stiff B2C and B2B communication.  It allows companies to put a cultural spin on their brand and share their educated opinions in real time.  It encourages conversations between brands and clients/customers, which will ultimately result in the most coveted kind of customer  - the brand advocate.

It is especially a great tool to use in the architecture and design world.  What a great way to share pictures, industry knowledge and inspire others?  What a fabulous way to showcase your work and hopefully get new projects from it.

If social media wasn’t such a big deal in the business world, it wouldn’t be people’s jobs to manage it.  So, as a word of advice to the traditionalists who are reading, social media is becoming the new “traditional.”  Begin to embrace all that it can offer your company and watch as new relationships and opportunities are formed.

If I still haven’t swayed you, then check out Jeff Bullas’ reasons on why not to join in on the social media phenomena.  I’m sure you can relate.