Learning new tricks: how social media is revolutionising the role of the PR professional in Higher Education
Yesterday I delivered two workshops to a number of delegates at the EUPRIO annual conference in Averio, Portugal. My session was one of seven on the progamme, all running twice that morning. Across the two workshops I seem to have been joined by more than half the conference delegation. This staggered me but just goes to show that European university PR professionals are beginning to take social media more seriously and are keen to learn more.
One of the things I mentioned in the workshop was slideshare. In my usual style I have uploaded the slides to slideshare, and embedded them here for you to view at your leisure.
Please note that the images used in these slides are not for reproduction, but many are available for you to purchase and download inexpensively on istockphoto, another resource that I mentioned to the delegates.
How are journalists using new media?
My approach to using new and social media as a PR tool is to forget about everything that traditional PR approaches might have taught us (well, perhaps not everything, but many things) and view it as something altogether very very different from media relations. Never sending a press release designed for a journalist to a blogger is a good example of this.
I thrive on the fact that new and social media generates opportunities to communicate direct to key stakeholders without having to hope that a journalist will pick up your story and run with it. However, I often get asked how PR folks can use new media to enhance their traditional media relations aproaches, particularly how new media can help them engage more effectively with journalists. This morning an interesting insight popped up on my Twitter feed.
I follow (follow – not stalk!) a few journalists on Twitter. A particularly prolific ‘tweeter’ is Joanna Geary from the Birmingham Post. This morning she tweeted about the order in which she checks on everything when she gets into work every day. I thought it provided a particularly interesting insight into a technically-savvy journalist’s communication preferences. Here’s the order in which she says she checks things, check-out the high prority she gives to online communities:
- Personal email
- RSS Reader
- Work Email
I suspect that many journalists aren’t as ‘into’ new media as Joanna is, but this is an interesting insight nevertheless. Many thanks for sharing this with us Joanna!
‘Best Answer’ on LinkedIn
I’m delighted. I’m chuffed to bits. I’m estatic … I’m now an ‘expert’ on PR on LinkedIn!
If you’ve been following my blog this week, you might have spotted my post earlier this week pondering just how many questions one should actually answer on LinkedIn. This is because I’ve began answering questions on LinkedIn in the subject areas that I know best. It’s part of my own committment to a) establishing myself and my company as an ‘expert’ in communications and PR and b) sharing best practice and ideas with other communications and PR professionals, and those engaging with PR, comms and marketing.
So, after answering just a few questions on LinkedIn, I’m somewhat delighted to have had my answer selected as the ‘best answer’ in a recent question. Then when looking at the question page to see what others had said, I spotted against that this answer gets ranked as ‘best answer’ in the Change Management category too. Bonus!
I guess what I’m trying to do in this blog post, therefore, is share with you my own journey of how using a service like LinkedIn can help to raise one’s profile. In itself, it is a PR/marketing tactic with an altruistic edge.
The outcome of my answer to the PR question is that the person answering the question, Justin Foster of The Tricycle, has also now included my answer in his blog post about the question with a link through to the PJC website (the shiny new PJC website I might add!). It’s a great blog post in its own right, so go ahead and take a look.
Just how many questions should you answer on LinkedIn?
I use LinkedIn fairly regularly as a means of maintaining and extending my professional network. I’ve also more recently stepped up my activity on there by answering questions that other members of the community post. I’ve already had one person tell me that they would like to include my answer in their blog along with a link to my blog and my website, so it clearly does have some merit from a marketing point of view, although I’m as much as interested in just sharing best practice where I can.
However, I thought I was pushing it a bit when I answered three questions on there yesterday afternoon. I thought I ought to calm it otherwise I would be viewed as a serial question-answerer!! Then I checked out the rankings for the number of answers other members of the community had given and one guy had answered 144 questions this week alone (it was only Monday!). So, this begs the question as to whether one can overdo it on this. Surely answering that volume of questions (even though many of his answers were short) means you can be spending more time perusing questions on LinkedIn that actually doing any work or following up new, real leads. Is it possible to become addicted?
