A recent McKinsey & Company survey found that 55% of marketing executives planned to cut spending on traditional media.  In lockstep, Marketing and Public Relations departments at companies are moving their dollars online.  Startups and large companies are increasing spending for email campaigns, online advertising and social media, as well as online search analytics.  Mashable recently reported that even while some are slashing budgets, dollars are still being thrown at social media. 

Despite the economic woes, it’s still essential for companies to find ways to create and maintain brand awareness and mindshare.  This blog post points out that Marketing and PR efforts during a down economy extends awareness with customers and drives sales, and suggests this can be done by using a small, lean and mean outside agency.  One key point from a recent survey by Aberdeen Group notes that in previous downturns, the firms that learned to market smarter fared better than those that decreased their marketing budgets. Further, after the economy bounced back, those firms that marketed during the downturn also yielded better profits.

Here’s a relevant and timely article in the Wall Street Journal that talks about how startups and board members are clashing over whether to save or spend in down times. One insightful quote from the article comes from a board member of a startup noting, “”Companies can’t just save their way to success.”

For tech startups, in particular, or for any company comfortable navigating the social web, there are a plethora of online vehicles to meld with your company’s Marketing and Public Relations efforts that won’t break the bank.  At Ignite PR, we are helping our clients,which range from startups to established public tech companies, undertake various social media activities to stretch their marketing dollars more effectively. 

Which camp does your company fall into on this debate: the save or spend camp?  Equally important, what are your competitors currently doing to expand their business amid this lingering recession?

 
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Twitter’s greatest value is that it is a place for conversations.  Where brevity rules, a pitch in 140 characters is just too limiting and cannot typically provide enough context. Clearly, there might be an exception here - perhaps with a breaking news announcement and the public relations rep reaching out to targeted press and bloggers that are visibly available on Twitter.  The norm, however, is more likely to be a simple tweet to a journalist that could potentially spur interest, but for the idea to become anything bigger, then the conversation would eventually have to transition over to email or phone. Additionally, most workflow productivity occurs around email, and Twitter is nowhere near supplanting email as the preferred communication tool to drive business.  Lastly, while conversations on Twitter can suggest sentiment around a topic, the signal to noise ratio on Twitter is so high it is difficult to sift through.  The odds are just much greater for a pitch to get lost in the heavy volume of tweet streams than via email.

There are, however, appropriate ways public relations people can use Twitter to interact with press and bloggers.  Here a few examples.  Follow key influencers who cover your clients’ industries (i.e.: mobile, cloud computing, online search, etc.).  Monitor their tweets and read the articles they link to.  Share links or participate in discussions they’re tweeting about from a market-centric standpoint and not a vendor-centric one.  If a bi-directional relationship is established, send the reporter that specifically covers your client’s space a heads up on a pending news announcement.  Show reciprocity and retweet (RT) a journalist’s article or blogger’s post that you found insightful or provocative.  

However, using Twitter to blindly spam journalists with off-target tweet pitches will kill PR people’s opportunity to engage with media and bloggers in a meaningful way.  Twitter’s novelty has opened up new opportunities for key influencers and public relations folks to connect.  If poor pitching practices carry over to Twitter, media will quickly find a way to disconnect PR from this channel.  We remain hopeful that Twitter doesn’t become a hotspot for unsolicited, endless public relations pitches polluting the micro-blogging channel.  Leave that dirty work to the spammers who push seedy content and get-rich overnight schemes.

A special shout-out and thank you to Kristen Nicole (@KristenNicole2), Nick Hoover (@iweeknick) and Anthony Ha (@anthonyha) for sharing their thoughts with us on this topic. If you’re not following these bloggers and reporters on Twitter, we highly recommend that you do.

Steve Rubel previously blogged about the social media job landscape, which at that time - circa 2006 - the highest trending opportunities were in podcasting, blogging, RSS, and wikis.  Fast-forward to today and there’s a new landscape of job opportunities under the “social media” term. Blogging, podcasting, RSS and wikis are still valuable social media components, but the migration of companies moving to understand and tackle social media more holistically seems to be taking root. 

Social Media Job Opps On Rise

With Twitter expected to swell to 50 million users by this summer (that’s 60 days from now!), you can appreciate why companies want their new social media hires to be fluent in Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, community building, etc.  Equally important for marketing and public relations teams is building and managing communities and networks in social news and bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Newsvine, etc., developing and sharing creative content across multimedia channels like YouTube or UStream, and attracting fans or building out groups on Facebook and MySpace, and so on.

Companies need to first identify where their customers and prospects are “hanging out” online and what type of social media tools they are using. Are they active in a particular forum? Are they participating in a Yahoo group or a Friendfeed room?  Is your target market one that would be receptive to consuming online videos or are downloadable reports and presentations more appropriate?  It’s important to weigh, prioritize and focus your social media efforts around that to ensure your Marketing, Internet marketing and public relations messages and activities are strategically integrated with your offline, traditional efforts and activities.  For example, an automaker showing off its fastest car can convey its speed much better in an online video uploaded to YouTube.  Talking about how fast the car goes via a tweet on Twitter just isn’t as compelling.  On the other hand, a company such as AAA would benefit from using Twitter, and not YouTube, to update customers on say transportation discounts.  The point nonetheless is: now is the time to act. Establishing a social media strategy and then selecting the right mix of social media tools to integrate with your traditional marketing and public relations efforts is absolutely a step in the right direction.

Still don’t get Twitter? Send us a tweet @IgnitePR and we’ll be happy to send you 10 ways to leverage Twitter for Marketing & PR.

The Twitter phenomenon is growing at breakneck speed, reaching nearly 10 million users in February 2009, up more than 700% from a year ago.  Twitter’s runaway growth points to people’s behavior and preference to proactively communicate with others in real-time. FriendFeed most recently rolled out a major new UI and service enhancement, overhauling their static users’ comments to emulate Twitter’s real-time updates.  Clearly, it’s just a matter of time for other sites (ie: MySpace, LinkedIn, Yelp) to recognize this shift and meet users’ preferences for real-time information — not static data. The arrival of the real-time web will impact a host of players in the businesses of information.  Net/net: the real-time web has arrived so strap in your seat belts for an interesting ride that is about to take off.

As PR professionals we agree and see tremendous value in engaging both our clients and ourselves in real-time conversations that are happening 24/7 through Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc.  Over the past year, startups and the biggest brand name companies have begun to harness social media tools in order to stay connected with customers, employees and constituents online, pay attention to what customers, partners, and employees are saying, and be part of these conversations.  If this is all new to you and perhaps moving too fast, or you don’t know where to start, we’ll point you to Scoble’s twitter @scobleizer, suggest subscribing to his friendfeed, or check out their upcoming Building43 online community.  Arguably Scoble is one of the biggest early adopters and users of the ticker tape of web-based tools and mobile apps surfacing so just following him is a good step to staying in the know.

For example, if a client’s CEO is participating in a panel along with a number of highly regarded industry experts, it is a good idea to inform the public relations team and not keep them in the dark until the day the panel is taking place.  Another example might be having advance knowledge about a significant partner’s plans to do a major initiative in which the company can ride the cocktails of the announcement either by offering perspective or invaluable insight. Marketing needs to be highly attuned to all of the various activities planned and understand that they might also be solid opportunities that the public relations team could tap, so it’s important to at least run it by PR early on.  No harm done with good planning.  At worst, PR will tell you that there is not enough substantive “meat on the bone” so to speak.  The art of being sensitive, opportunistic and agile to potential news opportunities and working closely with your public relations team can a) beat your competitor to the punch when media seek additional or insightful perspective and b) enable the company to exploit an unfolding opportunity before it happens and successfully wire itself into the subsequent news and blog posts that unfold.

Staying highly attuned to market-centric opportunities can payoff handsomely in building greater awareness for the spokesperson as a thought-leader or keeping the company top-of-mind with media and bloggers that cover certain beats, be it security, social networking, online paid search, etc.  That’s why you want to have your PR fully aware of even the most mundane of upcoming corporate and marketing activities, because they are the most attuned to recognize strong news potential; if there’s nothing there-there, they will tell you that it’s too fluffy, but at least they can easily inform you early on and not after the opportunity has been largely missed.  Certainly not all marketing activities are going to be newsworthy, but your public relations team should know about it in advance and will be able to counsel the company on whether it merits doing any proactive outbound activity or guerilla marketing to successfully leverage the opportunity.

Today MySpace announced a deal with CitySearch where the social network site will introduce MySpace Local, which is essential a social directory for local businesses and venues powered by CitySearch.  The power of the new offering will allow MySpace users to peruse local businesses and venues and see their friends’ reviews.  Additionally, it will provide MySpace with a bonanza of new ad inventory where it can run geotargeted advertising.  It’s no wonder that this deal was a wise one for MySpace to strike given that the local internet-advertising market has accounted for some of the fastest growth in Internet advertising in recent years, as small businesses take their marketing online.  Another new example of a hyperlocal website that today also unveiled a beta version of its service is from client, A Day’s Outing, an online search tool for discovering short-distance day trips and weekend outings.  A Day’s Outing takes the proximity of where someone is starting from to deliver a comprehensive list of outings and events personalized around their preferences.  It currently focuses on the Mid-Atlantic region and will continue to expand regionally. A Day’s Outing represents a growing number of tech high tech startups popping up to introduce new services that deliver highly relevant, personalized, local information to users when they seek it.

Hyperlocal websites as well as smartphones are increasingly helping users access geolocation-based content such as information, advertising, events, and entertainment centered on a user’s locaton and time.  While local information is abundantly available, getting it quickly and easily still leaves a lot to be desired and users seeking a better way.  Expect to see more innovative partnerships such as the MySpace/CitySearch deal as well as many other innovative companies such as A Day’s Outing move to better address users’ need for getting the right information when they want it.

The following exchange captures the f-bombs and tweets going back and forth between the two parties. April, the PR rep, wasn’t naming the reporter directly when she posted a tweet, venting her frustration, just as many of us do on Twitter (yours truly included). The reporter clearly had a bad day, noticed the PR rep’s tweet and followed up in a highly abusive way with her. After the Twitter throw-down, it seemed like the reporter wanted to forget about the whole exchange and consequently tried to erase his tweets. Unfortunately, the public journo/PR fight got retweeted and suddenly it was all over. Lesson to be learned here. Before you go dropping any F-bombs via a tweet, digg post, IM, blog comment, facebook post, etc., do remember you can’t erase what is out there on the ether. A public record exists and there is no turning back.