Giving Back: Win a Ticket to SxSW and Advice From Social Media Community

 

Sometimes an certain ideas are just good and survive the test of time. When I served on the PRSA Board in San Antonio, every year we dedicated one of our luncheons to helping smaller non-profits put together a PR plan. The Gift of Guidance was always a great community service project.

When Beth Kanter, Geoff Livingston and I started to discuss a potential launch party for our new company, Zoetica, we chose SxSW as a venue. But we wanted it to be a little different from the common ethos that pervades that conference.

We thought it might better reflect the culture of our company to make our party about someone else instead of about simply having fun and being known. As such, we decided to start our own mini social change project timed around our company launch party.

 

Today we launched the Zoetica Charity Challenge for non-profits (501c3) who might be interested in getting social media counseling from people who will be attending the Zoetica launch party, including the Zoetica founders, Robert Scoble, Liz Strauss, and more. They would also win one Gold pass to SxSW Interactive.

 

The deadline is this Sunday February 28, 2010, 12 midnight PST.

We are looking for three things:

1. A description of your mission in less than 150 words
2. Your goals for social media in less than 150 words
3. Why you want to win this prize in less than 150 words

We will then ask for some contact info and for the URLs of all your current social media properties (Twitter, Facebok, Blogs, etc.). We are serious about keeping each section under 150 words.

 

Beth, Geoff and I will choose the charity to be featured based on their answers to our online form, which can be found here. We will make our selection no later than March 2, midnight PST.

 

So if you are interested, or you know a charity that might be interested, please send them a link to this post and they can ENTER HERE!

 

Credit: Awesome artwork by Faith Goble used from Flickr on a Creative Commons license.

Social Media Ecosystem: When Business Lives Among the People

 

 

Part of what ails the public relations profession is its insistence on measuring its success by clip counting (counting the number of articles or mentions), with audience impressions or reach (how many people might have seen this) and with Ad Value Equivalency (how much would this coverage be worth if I had to buy it). This kind of thinking has extended into social media.

 

The problem with this kind of orientation toward success is that it puts the focus on quantity vs, quality, and on activity vs. results.  It also isolates the success of a program or outreach to a measure that has been proven to be ineffective and ignores the Ecosystem that produces these results.

 

There has been much written on how PR professionals can tie their activities to business results (pdf). Mashable ran a pretty good post on how to measure the ROI of Social Media last year. And Oliver Blanchard has a great series of videos about how to define and measure the ROI (read: revenue) of social media for the business crowd.

 

Intro to Social Media Ecosystem

 

I am not going to talk about ROI here but what Olivier talks about as the “stuff inside the box.” One of those things that I think is more important than things like social mentions and traffic is relationships. For any company involved in social media, the relationships are the glue to everything, including eventual sales and ROI. I call this the Social Media Ecosystem because your outreach in online media should go well beyond pitching to a more symbiotic relationship. From this base, or Platform, you can launch all kinds of communication, programs and events.

 

As you can see in the diagram, there is a multilevel interchange between an organization through its social media channels, both the owned (platform) and partially owned (social networks) channels. Each of these areas have impact on the others. So, calling for a blogger relations outreach also means forming relationships (good or bad) with the communities that participate in these channels.

 

It’s All About the Relationships

 

Today, I am participating in a teleseminar with PRSA and Fran Stephenson of Rackspace, Matthew from Childsplayx2 and Jason Avant from DadCentric, to explore this.

 

Here are the tips that we came up with when you are doing outreach. This is only one piece of the puzzle in the Social Media Ecosystem, but if you don’t get this piece right, I would suggest that you won’t be very successful.

 

Tips for working with Digerati

1. Time: Blogger relationships take time to build.
2. Building Blocks: Don’t expect overnight results from blogger outreach. It might take several campaigns, promotions or ideas for the right one to stick.
3. Free Stuff: Swag is nice as a thank you, but inappropriate as bait.
4. Relationship Metrics: Don’t look only at the number of Tweets or posts from a campaign, instead focus on the number of relationships built
5. Fanbase: Over time, a base of loyal fans will deliver more results than a one-off campaign
6. Outsourcing: Don’t hire a PR agency to build relationships for you, instead, use them for introductions and/or research.

 

Resources for Finding Digerati

1. Authorities: Look to the voices in your industry and find out who they read, listen to or comment on. Follow the breadcrumbs and start reading and building relationships with those people.
2. Search: Make a new search term on Google Alerts or Stumble Upon and see who comes up….the ones who come up repeatedly may be your nearest targets.
3. Scanning: Scan different social media properties and save common search terms to see what might come up. For example, if you are launching a consumer product that will be used by forty-somethings, Save a Twitter search with that term and watch it for a couple of weeks.
4. Lists: Find a list of bloggers or Tweeters that cover your, or a related, topic and watch them a few weeks, also follow who they refer to in posts and tweets. Good lists are on Alltop for blogs and Listorious for Twitter. You can see what they write about at PostRank.
5. Conferences: Meeting face-to-face is where it is at, even in a digital world. You can check out the upcoming Web Conferences list. For parenting bloggers you might try BlogHer, Mom 2.0 Summit or Blissdom. Watch to see what the bloggers covering your area attend, or what they say they wish they could attend. Be there!
6. Events and Access: Often the best way to “meet” bloggers is to invite them to an event or give them access to already-planned events. If you would consider having media at an event, also invite bloggers from the local area, too.

 

Please add your ideas in the comments. How do you build better relationships with online influencers? Do you see anything missing from the ecosystem? I would love to hear from you.