Why headlines have become the story.

Pushed for time, I’m skim reading again. Glancing down the story list on BBC news on-line I take in the main news of the day without clicking. Now I’m flicking through the pages of the Evening Standard looking at the photos and then taking 30 seconds to scan the underlined bits of the school newsletter. It is much harder these days to get me to stop and read the full version because there is so much media competing for my attention. So, in this busy busy world the headlines have had to become the story. 

Ticker tape news headlines now run across the bottom of the TV screen, on mobile phones, on bill boards and in school/hospital/hotel receptions. Text alerts are the one sentence headline that has to tell the whole story.

Now think about the way you use social media – Twitter is just a series of headlines and those links on LinkedIn and Facebook – do you actually open them or just read the top few lines that display on the page?

Once you get this, you know that you are implicated too. It’s not just about how we consume, it also has to translate into how we produce – because we all ‘do’ content now.

So make your headlines count.

Confusingly there are 2 approaches here. One is to accept that your audience is going to want to swallow the information in one bite, so you need total transparency. This has to be upfront, honest and factual;

2 dead in Solent jet ski crash

The other way in is to tease the reader into opening the link. Here you can try clever, funny and irresistible. It’s hard and it’s a gamble - so good luck with that. Ideally you can be both witty and transparent, handing over both a piece of useful information and an invitation to find out more - like,

10 things you need to know about social media marketing

or, The New York Post’s,

Headless Body In Topless Bar

There are puns ; “Diageo reports spirited growth in whisky sales.”  

and then there are just times when punctuation causes confusion; “Hospital sued by 7 foot doctors.”

But nobody can rival The Sun for headlines. In Feb 2009 to accompany a picture of a Kestrel and a Barn Owl  fighting over food:

“Hawk Kestrel manoeuvres in the park”

or on the marriage of Elton John and David Furnish,

“Elton takes David up the aisle”

and finally a Yorkshire tale of foot and mouth disease – not the Sun I think,

“Sheepless in Settle”.

Something to think about while you’re composing your masterpieces. Do you have any favourites?

In search of the social media holy grail?

I’ve been at this social media marketing and pr a few years now, yet there are still times when I long for a quick fix, a universal panacea - an answer to all my problems.

Because, as I am sure you know, each social media project raises new issues and problems. This is not a one size fits all kind of game. Some clients need a dynamic Facebook presence while others are going to thrive on LinkedIn AND the landscape of social media itself keeps changing.

So every so often I go trawling the internet for answers. God what a frustrating business that can be! It seems that everyone today has become a how-to merchant and a ninja monger. At best you will find straight forward tech advice, at worst you will find badly spelled cut and paste jobs masquerading as top advice. It makes me wonder who I was taking advice from when I used to suck up all this stuff years ago.

Well it’s good to know that there are still some reliable refuges. Again and again I come back to The Social Media Examiner for a huge range of articles pitched at varying levels. I would also take a look at Social Media Today which aggregates thousands of articles from around the web and Hub Spot for a trawl through the archives. Next time you are stuck, try these resources and you are bound to find something of relevance.

What I’ve found is that even if you can’t locate the exact answer you’re looking for, you can get enough information here to set the brain ticking over and with a little thought, trial, error and effort the solution will come to you. Either that or you need to get a man/woman in!    

Is it ever ok to use jargon?

Jargon is unacceptable. Isn’t it?

Tell me this then, do you think there is ever a case for a certain level of business-speak in your communications?

I would genuinely like to know the answer. In journalism we were always taught to strip out anything that obscured the message, so interviewees referring to the governments RPIXY scheme would be challenged and asked to explain what they meant. But at the same time we had our own jargon with RJs and SBJs and DOGs   (Regional journalists, Senior broadcast journalists and digitally originated graphics) A great favourite in broadcasting at the moment is UGC – user-generated content and I have even heard social media types using that one, so you don’t have to be in the board room wearing a suit to be guilty.  In fact any plumber or electrician will reel off an entire dictionary of twobefour type slang.

A certain amount of shorthand can create an easy bond between equals and saves time when everyone knows what you mean.

So, if you are a business to business organisation – can your communications bear some jargon? KPIs and SLEs for example. Does it make you sound more professional – does spelling them out make you sound infantile? 

While you are pondering this, have a look at these posts from my back catalogue;  Top 10 jargon howlers  and Jargon to make you smile

Sweet irony for social media.

No one was more surprised than I when we learned this week that poker player and quizstress Victoria Coren is to marry Radio 4 panel show stalwart David Mitchell.

I don’t know why I was so surprised – they are both intelligent single people and probably perfectly suited, I think it was just that I had her down as a serial loner and him too for that matter. I don’t dwell on celebrities THAT much in my everyday life, but there is a little bit of Hello magazine in most of us (there isn’t? Oh ok, blokes.)

Anyway, they both have a reputation for being traditionalists and curmudgeons and what’s more they don’t approve of social media much, despite having twitter accounts, so they decided to announce the news in the old fashioned (posh) way with an announcement in the Times.

Lovely or luddite?

Well you really can’t turn back the clock and before long an eagle-eyed fan had spotted the news and it was all over twitter from where most people who cared were able to pick up the news.

By the end of the day Mitchell was quoted as saying that he had received so many lovely tweets of congratulations that he had quite come round to the idea of social media.

A sweet irony don’t you think?

How to be more efficient with social media.

Everyone wastes time on social media, but if you are running a business or acting for a client, then efficiency is vital.

But how much time is too much and what are the dangers of not enough? I think we need to look at that.

Browsing a PR agencies blurb the other day I came across the proud boast that they would update their client’s social media across all platforms – wait for it – once a week! With the prices they were charging that amounted to a whole lot of cash in exchange for very little.

I update my client’s social media every working day and I know that this will take me 15 minutes each time if I am going to do it properly. What do I mean by properly – here’s a check list.

• Posts should be well written.
• Posts should be accompanied by an attractive photo, link or other media.
• Posts should address an objective – whether that is simply creating a certain ambience or being helpful to a local business but don’t lose sight of your overall marketing and pr goals when you post.   

Surely you can get all that done in less than 15 minutes a day? If you post and go then maybe you can, but you also need to take time to look around. Post and go is not much different to broadcasting and maybe in those circumstances a targeted ad would be more effective?

I think you need to hang around social media a little to see what others are saying and while you do it you might perform these tasks;

• Check your @ messages to see if people are talking about you.
• Check your direct message to see if people are talking to you.
• Check your new follows and decide if you want to follow back. Send them a message and maybe check out the people they follow if they look really good. 
• Scan the tweet stream for conversations you would like to get involved with or use hashtag searches to home in on specific discussions.
• Do a good deed – promote someone elses blog, or product but do it mindfully and with an objective - even if you simply want to be their friend or their products chime in with your vibe.

Now you need to get out before you waste too much time but don’t forget that you can make yourself more efficient by linking Facebook to Twitter or any other combination that suits you. You can try a pre-planned schedule and automated tweets but I prefer to use those with a light touch – being present, relevant and flexible is much more important. Journalists know that if a better story comes along you must ditch the plan and make a new one.  

Now I’m out of here.

Why is PR and marketing a valuable use of journalism skills?

An ex BBC colleague e-mailed me a few days ago to ask me this question.

She’d been asked to deliver a lecture to 3rd year journalism students and wanted  quotes from people who had made the switch. So I sat down to ponder exactly why PR and marketing are a valuable use of our precious journalism skills.

This is what I came up with;

I should start by saying that all the PR and marketing I have picked up since I left the BBC has been of the ‘social media’ variety. This is apparently a good thing! So many industries are being re-made in the wake of social media that it has been an advantage to come in at a time when I really didn’t know what it was like before.

Journalists are needed in marketing and PR right now because we know about creating and curating content.

Social media marketing is all about content – creating original bits and pieces to pull in your audience, which can range from writing posts on Facebook and Twitter to longer blog posts through to selecting pictures and making video. Knowing how to get someone’s attention, story selection, structure, headline writing are all essential for this kind of content creation and they are all skills which I learned as a journalist.

Even when you are picking out other peoples’ work to retweet or re-blog, you are using your journalist’s eye for what works.

I know very little about recruitment, but one of my clients is a recruiter so I often have to sift through trade blogs and websites for interesting stories about the Fast Moving Consumer Goods sector for his LinkedIn group. I know that if a story interests me then it will probably also appeal to the group’s members because however specialized, a good tale is still a good tale.

 Good journalists don’t need to be frightened of the areas that PR and marketing might take them into because it has always been the job of the generalist journo to grasp a brief quickly and make it accessible to a mass audience, however complex.

Other things worth mentioning are the direction being taken by companies like Boden, who are effectively creating their own online communities – online magazines with an interactive element – which should not faze anyone who has worked for a woman’s magazine or supermarket publication. In the same way, other big companies are deciding that instead of trying to get their positive pr stories placed “out there” in the random world of newspapers and magazines, they will write them themselves on their blogs – look at this example from the food company General Mills http://www.blog.generalmills.com/category/life/ which has video interviews and articles.

 I hear some business types criticizing journalists in PR and marketing because we have a rather cavalier attitude towards things like Return on Investment and metrics. It is worth having some kind of smart answer to this but I don’t know what it is!  

So there you have it - journalists really are the best people to turn to when you need some social media marketing and PR and be sure to pick one with a sense of humour.

Go where you are wanted – find your niche and market to it using all your social media and online powers.

I was reading a book by the comedian Stewart Lee and came across this great example of niche marketing.

For those of you who don’t remember, Stewart Lee came to the fore during the dying days of ‘alternative comedy’ just as the whole stadium thing was taking off. He was part of Lee and Herring who did the TV show ‘Fist of Fun’.

If you are still not with me it may be because his first comedy career wasn’t particularly well handled by his ‘people’. Following the peaks of his TV show success and their subsequent dwindling his management continued to book him into venues that just weren’t working. Comedy audiences had changed and were now looking for the Baddiel and Skinner brand of laddish humour and football jokes.

Lee seems to have heroically weathered this storm and went on to achieve critical acclaim for some experimental noodlings that became ‘Jerry Springer the Opera’ – this is in turn gave him the opportunity to return to the comedy circuit on different terms.

This is where it gets interesting from a marketing point of view.

He decided that this time, rather than return to the audiences that had been so half hearted before, he would actively look for ‘his people’ – a smaller tribe perhaps, but people who actually wanted to hear what he had to say and would be a better fit for his bitter, lefty, post post modernist schtick. (He is all about deconstructing jokes, laying false trails, getting on his  high horse and sticking the boot into  establishment hypocrites – I love him!)

So with a niche firmly in view he set off with a sympathetic booker to find the venues that wanted him and by all accounts it seems to be working – I’m going to see him in Reading next month. His books sell and so do his shows – they are even on the telly sometimes. He also claims to have priced himself in such a way that he actually makes a bit of money without having to sell himself out either literally or metaphorically and all seems to be fine and dandy in his world.

So take a leaf out of Stew’s book – which is called “How I escaped my certain fate” by the way and go where you are wanted – find your niche and market to it using all your social media and online powers.

Bouquets and Benylin

It’s been a busy week and I need to reflect – can you spare a moment? There are ups and downs.

We’ve all had colds in our house and if you’ve had the same one you’ll know it makes you feel like you’re wading through mud. But I was pulled from the mire on Monday by the news that one of my clients had won a prestigious local food award.

After promoting furiously on social media all day – the cooking hour finally arrived and I sat at my computer, following the live tweets from the event several hundred miles away with my heart pounding. “Doing” live events on social media is ridiculously amusing – I really recommend it - next time you are at a conference or awards have a go - or if there is something you can’t get to, find out what the hash tag is and get stuck in. Pour a glass of wine and it’s like you’re there!

Anyway – we won! So then it was on to the whirlwind of promotion and publicity that flows from such a thing. It may sound obvious but you have to catch that wave while you can. The good will is tremendous and I spent a lot of time just compiling lists of Twitter people to thank.  

Cutting the BBC radio coverage into a format that can be used online and gathering the photos and quotes is my next task for a special Facebook posting.

In the midst of all this I caught a couple of posts on twitter that sent my mood plummeting - I picked up on a slight sneeriness with regards to social media newbies. It depressed me and made me realise how intimidating it can be out there. New folk are sucking up all these posts to try to learn stuff but end up feeling disheartened and excluded. I think we should all remember, me included, to be more positive sometimes. (I remember ditching a swathe of top American social media gurus because they thought they were rock stars and acted like it. You start off thinking you can learn from them and end up just feeling small and useless. They didn’t miss me either!)

So a busy time.

It reminded me that in order to use social media to capitalise on the good times you need to have all your ducks in a row. You need to make your  community in advance otherwise you can’t make hay. (Too many dodgy metaphors - ed)

And you also have to remember not to take what you read too seriously. We are all arm chair generals and you have to choose who you pay heed to. 

Right, that’s me – I’m going to take my meds now.

If you’re going to do it – do it right…..

Have you noticed how many people have made a new year’s resolution to ‘do’ social media this year?

The friend requests started to show up soon after my return to work.

And jolly well done too. A bit blinking late but not too late to join the party and get clued up (just in time to have a right royal row about Google plus - if you are interested read this .)

I really hope they stick at it because it is useful, fun and rewarding as well as being a potential time-suck!

I could offer reams of advice on how to do it, but my blogging back catalogue does that quite well, from how tos on Twitter and Facebook to blogging. But I will say one thing about LinkedIn, because so many people are doing this – please, please, please add a personal message when you ask to connect.

My husband, who takes an average amount of interest in social media says he never links up with someone if he doesn’t know who they are, and that includes lots of people he actually does know if he stops to think about it. If you are really busy you are not going to stop to realize that the person who has just asked to link with you is the woman from swimming who you know by her married name but don’t recognize from the photo because she is in her work clothes.

It doesn’t take much extra time to add a short personalized note with your request, reminding the person how they know you and why hooking up with you on social media is a good idea. I might not want to share my work life with a sporting acquaintance, but then I might be enticed by the idea that lots of their friends work in my field or that it will make sharing the results of sporting fixtures easier.

Cold approaches are always a bit awkward – why not apply some of the diplomacy to online connections that you would to real life?

 

Where is the social media on TV?

One day over Christmas, when the family had gone out to buy a tree or walk off dinner or whatever seasonal activity they’d embarked upon, I sat down to watch a movie.

The film was “You’ve Got Mail” and would be described today as old – but I remember going to see it in the cinema with high hopes that it was going to be as hilarious and seminal as “When Harry met Sally” – it wasn’t.

What this film is though – now – is a period piece about the early days of e-mail, where people met in chat rooms and carried on their anonymous friendships via dial-up connection e-mail. That whir and fizz as the internet connected will resonate with only some of us now – it was a tiny dot in the history of computer-based communication – a moment in time.

When the film came out we were hungry for media that reflected the new realities of the internet age and for Hollywood that meant stories about meeting partners online. ( I did in fact cement my own friendship with my future husband via a BBC internal messaging system very like msn messenger today.)

Now we have movies like “The Social Network” to give us a history lesson but I wonder how well Twitter fares on-screen? I kept my eyes open over the holidays and came up with a couple of mentions on TV which reflected a rather one-sided view of the social media revolution.

First up was Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe Review of the year which included a rant about trying to tweet along to Question Time. I don’t go in for tweet alongs personally but my husband quite often reads out funny quips during X Factor or The Apprentice and I think it adds to the enjoyment. Here we were invited to deride the tweeter as a mindless idiot who trumped his brain farts into the twittersphere only to lose the thread of the onscreen argument completely, leading to a very unsatisfactory viewing experience for all.

If you subscribe to the idea that social media makes an inane and impatient society even more so, then there is your proof. But it is not my experience.

Then there was Ab Fab which did make me laugh (just the once) with the implication that the art of PR is dead now that all you have to do is type – “shall we send out a press release, have a press conference, launch a poster campaign, book some ads – or shall we just tweet it darling?” – I paraphrase.

The fact of the matter is that using social media may look like instant gratification, but if you are going to get anywhere in the world of PR or even in enjoyment, you have to keep at it. You build up followers slowly – it takes a long time to nurture new relationships and if all you want is funny comments then you do actually have to follow people who make them.

You get out what you put in.

So, if anyone sees any interesting portrayals of social media on screen do let me know because I am collecting.