Summertime Sadness

Welcome to my last post for a while! I plan on taking the blog on a summer hiatus and hopefully will return in the Fall. Until then though, I wanted to wrap up these past few months and tie in everything we’ve talked about since March. We started off talking about how innovations spread within a social system. Then we talked about opinion leadership, social media, how we talk to internal and external groups, and how to develop strategies to target those various groups. We also talked about how leaders need to have a vision, be active in their communication endeavors at all times, particularly during crises, and how to measure the success of those endeavors. So what do all these things have in common? I think the big takeaway from the last few weeks (for me personally) has been that without true vision and leadership none of our best laid plans will come to full fruition. Sure there may be the fluke here and there but without a true guiding force behind our communication our organizations, companies, and clients will be at a loss. Having a good vision is valuable even if you aren’t in a leadership position. Thinking about where you want to be and what you hope to achieve in your own career is so important and maintaining that vision for our futures is vital to our individual successes as well as the future success of any organization we may be a part of. I plan on taking these skills I have learned, particularly in regards to vision and how to use that vision to develop strategies, and applying them to my job in higher education. I see very few women in leadership roles in my company and I would love to change that. I hope that through understanding concepts such as Diffusion of Innovations theory and opinion leadership I can begin to demonstrate leadership skills that will make my personal vision for my future a reality. I hope you enjoyed reading and learning with me over these past few months! It has certainly been an adventure and I hope to see you in the Fall! Have a great summer everybody!

The Value in Measurement

I’m going to start this week’s post off with a little story. In my undergraduate Communication Arts program, there was a capstone course that was available for just 10 students every Spring semester. It was a very big deal to be chosen.  I was lucky enough to be selected for that course in my final semester. It was simply titled “Public Relations Campaigns” and the entire class was centered on researching, writing, and developing a campaign for a local non-profit in the area. We worked hard the entire semester on understanding what our non-profit needed and what we could do to help. We conducted in depth interviews with all the people who worked for the non-profit, as well as held focus groups and submitted surveys to other non-profits in the area trying to understand what the market was like for non-profits in Escambia County, FL. Once we had researched and written the campaign, we knew we had to include ways to measure the effectiveness of the campaign. What good would it be to hand over this beautifully researched and crafted plan if nobody could figure out if it worked or not? That will always stick with me personally as a reason why we should always take time to go back and review what works and what doesn’t. Not only is it valuable to us as communicators, but also to the people we work for as well. I still utilize measurements of success in my job today. If I know I have a solid plan for reaching 75 students and I don’t make the goal how will I know which part of the plan needs tweaking and which don’t if I don’t take the time to go back and review the measurements of success I have put in place for myself? As the saying goes, “Don’t reinvent the wheel,” and that is certainly true for measuring and evaluating the success and failure of strategic communication campaigns.

The end results of any strategic communications plan or campaign are often used to demonstrate ROI for public relations clients or organizations. The term ROI, or return on investment, is often used throughout the business world. It’s an expression that’s used to show how much profit you actually gain from the efforts you expend. Public Relations has certainly borrowed the word and utilize it quite often to “indicate the results of [an] activity” (Return on Investment in public relations: A critique of concepts used by practitioners from communication and management sciences perspectives.)  It seems that the community of public relations practitioners and scholars can agree to disagree on the term. While practitioners tend to view the term as a sort of catch-all through the definition I provided above, most scholars seem to be of the mind that the term should be more thoroughly defined for Public Relations. Some argue that it should be about measuring objectives rather than investment, others that the term should stand for identifying which part of traditional ROI is influenced by PR.  However all can agree that it’s the “complex nature of public relations activity that challenges ROI…as it can be difficult to disaggregate public relations from other communication and business effects” (Return on investment in public relations.)  The matter of proving ROI for a public relations plan or campaign can either help or hurt us and our client or organization. Understanding how we can show our worth and knowing where we are winning and failing when we deliver a plan or campaign is vital to continuing not only our individual careers, but the profession itself.

Just like anything else, you have to prove something works in order have it be considered a success. Proving your point can be difficult though for strategic communicators. Our value is inherent for just about every type of organization in the world but yet only recently has the job market and prospects for strategic communicators begun to improve (In recovery: Recruiters say PR job market is improving.)  Showcasing our successes and understanding how to evaluate our plans or campaigns is key to maintaining this positive momentum. In this day and age everybody is concerned over online public image. Companies are finally seeing the value in building actual, tangible relationships with their customers not just merely targeting them, as they have done in marketing activities of the past. Recently public relations professionals have realized that they can quantify “this abstract notion of relationship management as a means of contributing to the success and well being of an organization, as well as organizational financial success” (Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes.)  Taking the time to dissect the ins and outs of relationship building and applying those to our campaigns or plans can be crucial. And once the plan or campaign has been carefully drafted and carried out, how can we be sure it worked? There are various ways to measure the impact of digital campaigns today. Web traffic, referrals, social media shares, press release engagement, and outputs and outcomes are just a few of the variety of ways we can quantifiably and tangibly measure digital campaigns (5 ways to measure the impact of a digital PR campaign.)  There are also other desirable results we should keep in mind as we evaluate our campaigns and attempt to demonstrate our work’s ROI. Intangible results can be just as beneficial as tangible ones, like web traffic hits (Measuring ‘Intangibles’.) Customer satisfaction can’t be seen or touched but it can be measured and as such is a crucial intangible measurement that can translate to real ROI for a client or organization. What good does it do to focus on relationship building if we can’t show that that relationship building yielded real results? Measuring results are a huge part of what we do as strategic communicators and I think sometimes we can lose sight of why we need to do it. It may seem like it’s all about the bottom line for our organizations or clients but it’s also about demonstrating our work’s worth and showing why doing what we do is so important and valuable.

One last post to go before I take the blog on summer hiatus! I hope you have enjoyed these past few weeks as much as I have and I’ll “see” you soon!

O Captain! My Captain!

Unless you’ve been living under a social media-less rock the past few weeks you will have noticed that United Airlines is going through a bit of a rough patch. Communication failures, employees acting out, press making a laughing stock of you…needless to say they aren’t having the best time right now. I can’t help but feel bad for whoever is responsible for their public relations department. That poor soul is now responsible for taking a serious crisis, responding and addressing it while also dealing with smaller crises daily it seems. What started out as an awful enough crisis situation (a flight attendant and security guards are accused of dragging a passenger off a flight that was overbooked and it was all caught on video) has now been relegated to the cherry on top of a pretty horrendous sundae. A valuable 3 foot tall rabbit mysteriously passed away on one of their flights, a scorpion fell on a man from the overhead bin and bit him…you can’t make this stuff up and the media have been having an absolute field day with it (And then…a scorpion: United Airlines and how [not] to handle a crisis.)   And to make matters worse the CEO of United has come off worse for wear during this valuable time for his company. In a huge snafu it was discovered that while, publicly, he showed sympathy and empathy with the passenger and promised to do whatever it took to remedy the situation (This will never happen again” he stated live on ABC News Morning Show,) privately and internally to his employees he was singing a different tune. “"While I deeply regret this situation arose, I also emphatically stand behind all of you, and I want to commend you for continuing to go above and beyond to ensure we fly right” his internal memo read (United’s staff memo makes the internet even angrier.) The memo goes on to call the passenger “disruptive” and “belligerent,” which you can see in the video, the guy clearly didn’t start that way. This is a classic case of social media crisis management and why it’s so important for companies and organizations to have a plan for such times. But not only is the actual crisis communication plan and execution valuable and an absolute must for companies but so too is leadership and their response to a crisis. You can’t have a company attempting damage control while its leader is off in left field, creating more fires than they are putting out.

You’ll remember a few weeks back we talked about leadership and vison. We also talked a little bit about management functions and how those functions differ from true leadership roles. A leader in a crisis is invaluable. Throughout history various accounts of leaders standing up during times of extreme stress have been recorded. “During the Great Fire of London in 1666, King Charles II ‘joined the firefighters…handling spade and bucket’” attempting to help put out the great blaze with help from his subjects (Communicating throughout Katrina: Competing and Complementary Conceptual Lenses on Crisis Communication.)  Crises can help or significantly hurt leaders in the long run. While cities, companies, and organizations can heal or recover over time, sometimes reputations cannot. An example of a crisis significantly damaging someone’s reputation is President George W. Bush during Hurricane Katrina. Not only was he “distracted with other issues when Katrina struck” he also allowed the Bush administration to form a “blaming strategy” to “take heat off the federal failures over Katrina” (Communicating throughout Katrina: Competing and Complementary Conceptual Lenses on Crisis Communication.)  He placed blame on local officials rather than stepping up and acknowledging that key departments needed to help those in Katrina’s wake were ill equipped and had serious communication problems between them before the crisis even began. Any good leader should be prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of their company or organization. In a crisis, “if there are sacrifices to be made – and there will be – then the leaders should step up and make the greatest sacrifices themselves” (Leadership in a Crisis – How to be a leader.)  Leadership in a crisis situation is defined as a “collective and dynamic” process and it “requires perception and sense-making skills by leaders in order for them to determine appropriate courses of action” (Linking Crisis Management and Leadership Competencies: the Role of Human Resource Department.) When you are responsible for an organization, especially as its core leader, you have to be ready to take responsibility even if you think your organization has done nothing wrong. As FDR once said “The buck stops here.” Leaders in today’s world have to be ready for anything and be prepared that a crisis can – and usually does – get worse before it gets better.  In order to be prepared for that event, when and if it comes, it helps to have a leader with a realistic vision. Again, I spoke about vision in a post a few weeks back. To me, part of having vision is being able to see not only the best of times for your organization or company but also the worst. You have to be realistic and acknowledge the reality of the times we live in. Anyone, anywhere can be caught on video or in a picture doing something that may hurt their organization. A good leader with a solid, realistic vison of the future of their organization will be able to see those possible threats and let his team in charge of developing a crisis communication plan know what they see. Without a leader willing to “go down with the ship” how can employees be expected to do the same when the time comes? When crisis hits, you have to trust in your Captain and know that they have not only their best interests in mind, but even more so the organizations.

I hope you guys enjoyed this week’s post and I’ll see you guys next week! Only a couple more weeks left, and then I will be taking the blog on a summer hiatus! Hope you all have a pleasant week!

False Advertising?

Have you ever been watching something and noticed that something seemed a bit…off? Something as seemingly innocent as the main character drinking a beer at a bar, but you notice that the label is a little too nicely lit…that label is a little too noticeable? This character may have gone to this bar in every episode for 3 seasons, has been ordering or been handed a beer every single time, but up until now you never knew the exact brand they were drinking. Now all of a sudden you can clearly see the Bud Light logo and the character even mentions the brand by name in passing several times in the scene. What’s your first thought? If you’re anything like me it’s usually “Wonder how much they paid for that?” As marketers and strategic communicators we typically are responsible for promoting our organizations (be it a client, brand, etc.) How we go about doing this though is a big topic for discussion, especially in today’s “viral” happy market. Everybody is looking for the next big thing…that next big marketing strategy that’s going to make your brand/client stand out, that will appeal to consumers based off authentic acts and likeability. But how do we get there without abusing that inherent trust from the public? And as consumers ourselves should we be a bit more cynical about what we see in our newsfeeds and TV screens when it comes to advertising?

If you have a tweenager (yes that’s a legitimate term) or are like me, and sometimes enjoy reveling in seeing “what the kids are up to,” you may have heard the term “Youtuber.” I’ve mentioned them briefly before here on the blog (shoutout to Caroline Hirons.) The typical Youtuber is usually aged between 18-32 years of age. They make videos for a living and post them to YouTube. Thus the name “youtuber.” Most of these creators have been doing this for almost a decade. The idea of having a channel and posting regular videos first became popular in 2009, with a lot of popular bloggers taking to the platform and utilizing it as an extension of their blogs. Now roughly 80% of Internet users in the US access YouTube in some capacity each year (The Demographics of YouTube.) There are all kinds of categories to choose from to watch: music and news, beauty and lifestyle, gaming and hunting. All types of channels are present on the platform making sure to appeal to just about everyone. Brands and other organizations didn’t turn a blind eye to this. Rather than just inserting ads before certain videos, much like TV ad buys, they saw an opportunity. These channels rack up million and millions of views monthly.  The audience for each channel listens and values what the creator of that channel has to say. And so advertisers started paying them to promote certain products and as the old saying goes “it all hit the fan.”

We all know about product placement (see my beer example from earlier.) Product placement is defined as a “combination of advertising and publicity designed to influence the audience by unobtrusively inserting branded products in entertainment programs such that the view is unlikely to be aware of the persuasive intent” (When Product Placement goes Wrong.)  While TV shows like Seinfeld and Frasier experimented with different methods of product placement in the 1990s, YouTube has taken it to an entirely different level in the 2010s.  Youtubers are appealing for both audiences and marketers because they are authentic. These people don’t have agents or people telling them want to say. There are no directors or script writers. It’s usually just some person in their bedroom showing you the latest clothes purchase they made or showing you how to cheat this certain level of a video game.  Brands were quick to understand that buy sending these content creators certain products to try they would likely get that product exposed to a wider audience for much less expense. It was a much bigger bang for their buck, if you will. Cue the FTC. In 2014 they made it clear that content creators could be in violation of FTC laws if they failed to disclose that they were solicited by brands to promote products (Youtubers in breach of FTC if they fail to disclose sponsorships.) This has made Youtubers now be required to put #ad, or the ever dreaded #spon, on just about every video they make now. There are some people who think this is good and others who think this is ridiculously out of line. Most days if you scroll through the trending page of YouTube, a little over half will have the dreaded #ad. A lot of advertisers and creators alike think this is “a move that could make the posts seem less authentic, reducing their impact” (FTC to crack down on paid celebrity posts.) 

This leads me back to my ethical dilemma I stated earlier…is this an abuse of the public’s trust or should we have been expecting this all along? In Your Ad Here, the author talks about the inherent untrustworthiness types of marketing like this without really saying it. “It cannot be denied that requiring disclosure introduces an element of awkwardness – a stilted sponsorship caveat – into everyday interaction.”  The jury is still out on how much this has effected Youtubers and their ability to be authentic marketers to their audiences. Some Youtubers have been outspoken that if they work with a brand it’s because they genuinely like them not just because they’re getting paid. But that grey area continues to get hazier. As strategic communicators we have to be willing to see both sides of the coin. Both points of view of both the consumer and the organization are valid but bringing both points together in an ethical, non-misleading way is key. Strategic communicators are already fighting off the PR “spin doctor” role and the new means and ways of marketing and product placement only make it that much trickier to navigate.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s post! I enjoyed writing it! Hopefully I will see you guys back here next Sunday! Have a great week!

To Lead or not to Lead-that is the Question

Last week I talked a lot about the organization I work for and how important internal communications can and should be. This week I want to keep that topic going and add a bit more to it. As you’ll recall, I work in higher education, specifically in enrollment management and admissions.  I deal with an external audience daily (students, their family members, their employers, etc.) and recently have been getting adjusted to a new type of internal audience within my organization. If you want to know more about that experience, click here for last week’s post.  Within this internal audience I have noticed that there are some people who work in my organization who are clearly leaders in their departments. They are respected, their opinions are valued. These are the people who you go to when you need advice or help on an issue. They are invaluable members of the team and I, personally, am very grateful to them. Without them, I would not feel as confident with this new internal audience as I have been. But what makes a good leader? Who are these people and what makes them tick? And most importantly, how can we become a good leader ourselves?

According to some folks, a good leader is all about “being forward looking…[this] is the attribute that most distinguishes leaders from non-leaders” (To Lead, Create a Shared Vision.)  I would tend to agree. Leaders are those people who are able to see the “big picture.” These are the visionaries, the ones who can see the finish line before we even know we’re in the race. A quick Google search of “best leaders in America” shows some interesting results.  You have some obvious contenders like Oprah and Bill Gates, but then there are some you might not have ever heard of, like Jeff Bezos and Mohamed Nasheed. What makes a good leader is ultimately this: do they have the ability to not only envision the future but get other people to envision with them? A leader is by definition “the person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country.” And you can’t lead without followers. You have to have people buy in with you in order to lead effectively and to achieve that “big picture.” Yet this is also what leaders struggle with the most. “The data tell us that what leaders struggle with most is communicating an image of the future that draws others in - that speaks to what others see and feel” (To Lead, Create a Shared Vision.)  The best way to connect with people and to get people to buy in with you is to connect with them in the here and now – and you go about doing that through communication. It all comes full circle.

Communication is vital to all aspects of organizational life. Literally everything hinges on it. Without good communication outside or inside your organization, your organization will not thrive as well as it could or should.  This concept is vital. “Arguably more so than resources, policies, or organizational structure, our success or failure boils down to the individuals who lead us and their ability to communicate” (Strategic Leader as Strategic Communicator.)  Good leaders are expert communicators. They are able to tell stories, to relay their passion for whatever dream or goal they have in mind and relay it so well that others want to help them achieve that dream. An example that comes to mind for this is Former President Obama. He was able to articulate his passion and belief in his hope for the future of America. He was able to turn that unified dream of his into a rallying cry of “Yes we can” that lasted for two terms. Even if you don’t agree with him on policy, party, etc. you can’t deny that the man is an expert communicator. Being able to communicate is so crucial for any leader’s success. You have to be able to “educate, inspire, and build advocacy” (Strategic Leader as Strategic Communicator) for your “big picture” within your organization.

We all deal with leaders on a daily basis. Be they our co-workers, bosses, president of your Home Owners Association, or that one mom at PTA, leaders are everywhere. They must be because they are vital to furthering our world into the future. Without leaders where would this world be? Would we have put a man on the moon? Would Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream be a reality? In my organization, the biggest leader in my department is a co-worker. She has been with the company for decades, loves what she does, and does it well. When any of us are feeling down or having a bad day, she is right there to remind us what we are doing this all for – the students. She is a constant pillar of strength for all of us, and we could not look up to her more. Yet she is an admissions counselor by trade, just like me. She doesn’t have a fancy title, a corner office, or a higher salary. She is not a manager, nor is she over anybody. She is the same level hierarchally as the rest of us in the department and yet she is a leader. Too often leadership is confused for management. Management is not leadership, though the two must happen together to truly make any organization great. Management tends to focus on the more day-to-day aspects, the nitty gritty of running an organization – these aren’t the “big picture” people. Too often I think we see organizations who are “over-managed and under-led” (Management is [still] not leadership.)  By focusing on communication, and really harnessing it, we all have the potential in us to be great leaders. We may not all have the charisma of Oprah or the brains of Bill Gates but we all do have the capacity for becoming great communicators – communicators who can tell stories, educate our peers, inspire passion in others to help us achieve whatever “big picture” result we want. What a world we live in, knowing that that’s a possibility for all of us.

Thanks so much for sticking this one out with me! See you all next week!

Internally Yours

In case I haven’t talked about it before, allow me a few moments to give you a little synopsis of my working life. I work for a state university here in Alabama and have done for over 5 years now. I originally started out working in what we call “satellite locations,” smaller locations outside the state of Alabama that housed 4-7 employees and facilitated online learning at the university for students located near the satellite locations. I handled everything from recruitment, to admissions, from testing to graduation. Anything a student who was, say, 3 hours away from the main campus, needed from the university I was their girl. I worked for two different satellite locations with similar operations up until last November. That’s when my now fiancé and I moved to Alabama for his job and I was transferred to our main campus. My job functions are still very much the same. I still help students navigate from recruitment stage, through admissions. But now I don’t have to also focus on graduation and retention. I have an office located in my administration building that handles that. I don’t have to come up with creative flyers for my recruitment events. I have a dedicated department that is able to do that for me now. It’s been quite an adjustment, going from working with the same 4-7 people day in, day out, to working in a building with literally hundreds of employees working on different aspects of student management every day, aspects that before I had handled myself. It’s tested my communication skills and allowed me to see how even though I have worked at this same university for 5 years, I had no idea just how different it is between the out-of-state locations and what goes on at the campus. This week, I wanted to talk a little bit about communication itself, particularly internal communication. I’ve noticed over the last 6 months that I depend on it more and more to get my daily tasks done and have learned so much about different strategies to improve it, if and when the need arises.

Working in higher education, and in management functions within higher education, I can tell you firsthand how important communication is in day to day operations. Without good internal and external communications you lose out on a lot of valuable time. Communication is at the heart of what we do but too often I think we can all get bogged down in the external and lose sight of the internal. Internal is proven to be just as important as external communication, particularly in crisis situations. You have to let your employees know what’s going on often times before the public knows so they can be prepared. But if you don’t have a good foundation for facilitating internal communication you can’t do that effectively.  Having good strategies in place to facilitate internal communication is a key component to ensuring you don’t get bogged down in office “politics” when the time comes to really get down to business. So let’s dive in to some tactics that can help you and yours when and if the time ever comes when you have to re-evaluate how you are communicating within your organization.

First things first…what is your company culture? I think a lot of us when we hear the words “company culture” think about Silicon Valley. Facebook and Google in particular are notorious for their inspiring company cultures (Facebook vs. Google.) They focus not only on the work but on the people they employ- one big aspect of this that you’ll notice is that they trust their employees. They have some of the most amazing benefits packages in the world and everybody knows once you get a job with them you don’t ever leave. These companies have fostered and maintained a company culture that is “a climate of openness that encourages the free flow of communication and information in all directions” (Promoting Internal Communication.) If you have an organization who is secretive, who only tells certain employees what’s going on and expects it to filter down to everybody else, that is not a very open culture. My university is sometimes guilty of this. Certain employees will hear something in a meeting and then the next thing you know that statement has filtered down until it doesn’t even resemble the true statement anymore. Instances like this create panic amongst employees and often lead to poor decisions. Having good systems in place during the training and hiring portions of an employee’s tenure will ensure that good communication and open company culture are promoted. You want people to know right off the bat what their getting themselves into and who and wear to go for correct information.

Secondly, you want to make sure everybody has a chance to be heard. Feedback is a great way to do this at the managerial level. Asking for the type of feedback you want or expect and scheduling specific times when employees can voice that feedback is critical for any organization’s internal audience (Communication and Leadership.) It allows that open company culture to thrive and continue to grow. It also let’s your employees feel like they are valuable members of the organization. Dysfunctional communication is a killer for any organization or company. And as with all things it “occurs the most as the number of people involved grows” (Recognizing Dysfunctional Communications.)  This is something I have been adjusting to in my new location. There are so many more people to interact with daily than there ever were before. I find myself asking “Is this ok?” a lot more than I ever have before. I am still learning what everybody does and asking for feedback about how I am interacting with them and if I am helping or hindering their work has been invaluable. It has helped me strengthen my communication skills and has hopefully helped my coworkers just as much as it has myself.

Last but not least, once you have achieved a good internal communication system or level, you want to maintain it. Constant observation is crucial for maintaining a positive company culture and a positive internal communication experience (Promoting Internal Communication.) Identifying any sticking point that may have occurred recently is a good place to start. Is somebody unhappy at work and self-sabotaging their projects? Is there a system that isn’t working for your company that you thought was working just fine? This has happened to my university in recent months.  A simple process we thought was helping admissions was actually hindering it. Luckily our higher ups were able to recognize that we had a problem and have since been able to re-work the process in a manner that works for all parties involved. Like everything, evaluation is needed and shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly when it comes to communication.

I have really taken these three processes to heart in regards to internal communication and I hope they help you as much as they have me. Have a great week and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Big Fish, Big Pond

Public relations always sounded pretty simple to me in my Freshmen year of college. “It’s just talking to people about your company or organization”, I said. It’s basically just a lot of press release writing and maybe giving a couple of interviews or two a week. No big deal, I thought. By my senior year, I was interning with a county Economic Development office and had no idea what I was about to find myself in. About halfway through my internship, scandal hit. Our Director was facing accusations that she had mishandled and gotten rid of very important documents regarding a local land deal that would prove to have very large implications for the county and its Economic Development. I’m not going to go into details for privacy reasons, but let’s just say she no longer works for the county or anywhere in Economic Development. It was a huge ordeal not only for us as an organization but also for me personally as I had never experienced a crisis like this before. Suddenly I went from writing pretty frivolous press releases and blog posts to typing out transcripts of taped local talk radio interviews with people who were saying pretty negative things about us in the press. These transcripts I later found out were used in the subsequent court case as well as in response interviews given by our Public Relations Director. That experience taught me just how quickly you can go from “OK” to “Oh No” in an organization. And it all started with a negative article in the paper.

I hope you enjoyed that little anecdote because it helps me segue way into our topic this week: Public Relations. I personally majored in Communications/PR in my undergraduate and so I know a few things about how PR works. I also work in a very outreach heavy, Public Relations-esque capacity for my job now.   I recruit and deal directly with Enrollment for a higher education institution. Dealing with students, their families, and their various issues as well as dealing with the general public and their inquiries has made me a much more patient and attentive person. 

One of my campus’s big selling points that makes my job pretty easy: nature trails!

I have also been in charge of certain aspects of social media for my organization before. That job was one of the more stressful if you can believe it. Being responsible for representing my organization was a big task and one that I did not take lightly. I was always aware, and still am, of what is going on with my organization not just internally but outside as well. What did people do before Google Alerts?! I am hyper aware of how my organization is being represented out there in the "big pond" and I think most people with Public Relations backgrounds are. It’s a big piece of the puzzle to making sure that your organization runs smoothly, and is able to maintain itself if crisis hits.

While my organization has been lucky in that we have had no major scandals directly impact us in recent memory, others are not so lucky and need the help of established pros when the time comes. Public Relations is a steadily growing industry. From 2008 to 2009 it increased in revenue by a combined 7% (Why journalists don’t make the best PR pros.)  Public relations practitioners are crucial members of any organization. These are the people who help you not only when your “down and out” but when you’re on top too, to make sure the “down and out” doesn’t stick around forever.  In today’s tech heavy world, that means more and more PR practitioners find themselves on social media almost constantly. All it takes is one blog post, video, or tweet to make a nightmare for your organization. Take SeaWorld for instance. Once the critical documentary Blackfish hit, you were hard pressed to find anything positive about SeaWorld for years to come. They are still feeling the effects well over four years later and have instituted heavy change to maintain what little credibility they have left (Anatomy of “The Blackfish Effect.”) The Blackfish Effect is a lesson to any and all organizations. It might as well be a “how-to” on effectively taking down an organization with a viral campaign. There is truly no protection from social media, no matter how big or small you are. But there are ways to handle your organization’s position and presence on social media so you are ready when and if the time comes.

As strategic communicators we need to be aware of how to handle our position and presence on social media. The big things that I think any strategic communicator should be aware of when handling their organization’s social media platforms are branding, engagement, and learning (Managing Yourself: What’s Your Personal Social Media Strategy?)   Building the personal brand of your organization is crucial. It helps you tell the story about who you are, why you do what you do, and how you do it. It’s the thing that makes you different from all the other fish in the sea and what keeps your audience loyal year and year. Engaging on social media is another huge factor. The whole point of social media is engagement. We want to talk to people rapidly and simultaneously and when we post to an organization we expect a response fairly immediately. PR practitioners have to be aware that whoever is responsible for engagement of their organization’s social media platforms has to be on call 24/7/365. Social media never takes a day off. Learning is another key tenant to managing your organization’s social presence. You can’t just talk to people and expect them not to talk back. Being open to learning about your audience or customers, really hearing what they have to say, and taking those lessons back to the powers that be is a great way to utilize social media to further your organization. It will also serve you well should crisis ever hit. Understanding how your customer thinks and expects to be talked to online is a great indicator of how they expect to be treated and talked to in the real world. It allows you insight PR practitioners have never had access to prior to the invention of the Internet and an opportunity we should never take for granted. Being able to talk to your audience or customers and take responsibility to fix the situation is key to handling a crisis, big or small, and we now have the capability to do all that in seconds through social media. Understanding that your brand, how you engage and learn with them, will all serve you and your organization well should your own personal Blackfish ever occur.

Hoe you guys liked this week’s post! See you next Sunday!

Sources:

Managing Yourself: What's Your Personal Social Media Strategy? 
Nach: Dutta, Soumitra, Harvard Business Review, 00178012, Nov2010, Bd./Jhrg. 88, Ausgabe 11