Social Capital Ottawa Conference

The Social Capital Conference blends formal presentations with community/unconference style sessions on topics ranging from content marketing, influencer relations, intellectual copyright in a digital age, video strategies and lots more. There is a fantastic line up of speakers and sessions including those run by Thornley Fallis team members Sherrilynne Starkie, Diane Begin and Martin Waxman.  In addition, Inside PR co-host Gini Dietrich is the keynote speaker.

How to win

Just leave a comment below saying why you’d like to attend #socapott and what you hope to learn. The winner will be chosen at random. The competition closes Monday May 27th at 12 noon.  The winner will be announced on this blog.

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Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and Joseph Thornley chew over this topic in this week’s episode of Inside PR. You can listen to the complete conversation in Inside PR 3.32.

The post Inside PR 3.32: Credibility and trust in breaking news appeared first on Thornley Fallis.

Step 1: Listening

Chances are people are already using social media to comment on and share information about your issues. Social media provides you with the opportunity to listen and learn about people’s levels of awareness of and their perspectives on the issues under consideration. Traditionally, this kind of information had been the purview of public opinion research – focus groups and surveys. If you haven’t got the time or the money for public opinion research, a social media scan can help you understand who’s engaged on your issues and what they are saying.

One more thing on listening, if you are about to engage people digitally, it helps to learn about them digitally – odds are the digital natives will be the ones who participate in your program.

Step 2: Planning

You need a plan that will serve as a roadmap for your process. Planning is about asking the big questions and then using the answers to these to create your plan. At the start of any project, it’s best to ask people to describe what success will look like at the end of the process. Often, half the team will tell you that success is about hosting an open and informed process where people can share their opinions and discuss the issues and the other half will tell you that success is a function of the number of participants. The key benefit of a plan is ensuring that everyone is on the same page before you get started.

Lastly, some clients will argue that a plan is not needed or that they don’t have money for a plan. In these cases, focus on creating an abbreviated (PowerPoint format) plan and getting them to sign off on it. This will help you understand and manage expectations.

Step 3: Deploy your online presence

The objectives, tactics and reporting requirements outlined in your plan are used to identify the elements of your online presence. Typically, the hub or nucleus of your online presence will be an online survey, a dialogue platform, or an ideation platform. Your social media websites will serve as the spokes or electrons of your presence, driving people to your survey or dialogue. You need to think about online media and news sites as part of your presence and look for ways to connect them to your online hub. For a description of the hub and spoke ecosystem you can view my previous post on the public participation ecosystem.

The keys to deploying your online presence involve:

• developing your website and social media policies (acceptable use, privacy, access to information);
• aligning your online presence with your organizational policies and procedures (IT requirements, privacy, legal, accessibility, communications etc..); and,
• developing the required content for each element of your online presence.

Step 4: Managing your online program

Online public participation programs are labour intensive – this is because there’s always something happening. Online, people can participate at any time and the process can take weeks from start to finish. The key to managing your program is having a clear statement on what people can expect from this process and a set of use policies governing what is acceptable and unacceptable from participants. Rules of participation, accessible from your consultation website(s) and approved by decision-makers in your organization, provide you with the ability to manage process in an open and transparent manner.

Another thing to consider is your voice or your organization’s voice in the online process. Are you the moderator, stepping in to manage discussions that have become too heated? Are you the facilitator, tasked with helping people with different opinions find common ground? I have found that most organizations see their voice as that of the moderator, stepping in only when required, comfortable to let the conversations happen. Typically, the moderator function is given to a consultant outside of the organization hosting the participation project. Why? Because of the time commitment, the unique skills required and the perception that an outside moderator contributes to a transparent process.

Social media outreach is the final piece of your online program management. Once the process has been launched for public input, you need to have a constant stream of content being shared on your social channels. This content will help raise awareness and drive participation in your process. For more on this, you can read my blog post on social media for marketing your public participation program.

In terms of a level of effort required for managing an online program, my experience has been that two hours per day are the minimum required to moderate a dialogue and manage the social media presence

Step 5: Reporting

This process involves exporting the data and analyzing the results in order to prepare a report on the process. When it comes to online public participation processes, the reporting methodology is a function of the online presence and how it was used. Once you have committed to a particular online presence – data, dialogue, social media, ideation – you have to work with the data that it produces. Put another way, if the report calls for survey results, you best be using a survey platform. If the report calls for a narrative overview with qualitative information, you’re best served with a dialogue platform. When it comes to reporting methodology, it is critical to insure that the nature of the report, what it contains and how it is presented, is taken into consideration during your planning process. With a clear idea of the report format and requirements, you will be able to ensure that your online presence will give you the data you need.

Thanks for taking the time to read. I’d welcome your thoughts or be happy to chat. You can follow me Twitter at @pierre.killeen or send me a note at Killeen<at>thornleyfallis.ca.

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Currently, Craig is director of content for Spundge, a collaborative and intelligent content platform used by knowledge professionals, journalists, marketers and others to discover, filter, create and share content, and publish this to existing digital and social media platforms.

How does it work?

Spundge track the best information, organized into Notebooks by topics, events, people or any structure that fits your needs. Also, the Spundge browser extension will even suggest the best Notebooks for the references you discover online.

Spundge Notebooks are social and collaborative, allowing you to learn with and from contributors with shared interests. Followers and contributors receive a formatted digest of content curated by the group, keeping everyone in sync.

Next week Craig Silverman will be in Ottawa to talk about Spundge and the importance of curation in content marketing. Click here for more information.

Check out our other post on Spundge here and drop us a note if you’re interested in learning more about social research.

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Twee-Q is an experiment from a Swedish organization called Crossing Boarders that works to promote equal participation. Among their goals is the promotion of female role models.

Twee-Q calculates a Twitter Equality Quotient that they describe as a simple score derived from how often you retweet men or women.

The tool takes your last 100 tweets to come up with a score. The closer you are to 50-50, the higher your Twee-Q.

Because gender is not included in profiles, the scan compares first names for men and women (individual accounts only) against US and Swedish census data to determine a gender. So if you retweet a guy named Kim, he’ll be counted as a woman.

The creators also say the tool shows its “swedishness.” (e.g. ”Jan” is as common among women in North America and men in Scandinavia. In that case, the Swedish data takes precedence.)

While the tool has some limitations, it’s fun for water cooler talk.

My TF colleague Jennifer Fox actually scored a perfect 10. She joins Oprah.

Most people however don’t have that perfect balance. At an 8, I pay a little too much attention to men.

The most surprising were a number of news media accounts that I follow. All were way more heavily weighted towards men, with one major city daily in particular scoring a 3.8.

Want to learn more about who you’re chatting with online? TF can help you with tracking and measurement.

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So why bring these elements together to help tell a brand’s story?

It’s flexible – If you have a complex idea or concept to communicate, a motion graphics video can help re-create those elements and environments that may be impossible to film.

It’s engaging – It can make video footage more colourful, informative and dynamic.

It’s popular – There are all kinds of creative commercials circulating the web right now that use motion graphics. People are comfortable watching and sharing.

Today, consumers are bombarded with content.  Brands are pushing to be more creative. While live action video footage is arguably the best way to humanize a brand, viewers also want something that is visually appealing, entertaining and informative.

Check out this video for a small sample of the motion graphics video services Thornley Fallis can provide you!

Click here to find out how Thornley Fallis can help you produce videos for brands.

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Listen to Inside PR Episode 3.31 here and see below for a summary of the episode from InsidePR.ca:

We’re living in a period of profound change in communications channels and tools. How will you change your communications practices to reflect these underlying changes in the communications networks, expectations and participants? What are the opportunities? What are the challenges?

Gini says that the current set of changes are accelerating a move to agency consolidation that she has been observing since the turn of the century. But while we as professionals are finding ourselves in integrated agencies, we are feeling pressure to become expert in related fields – SEO, content marketing, paid promotion. We have to be able to operated above and across the silos as they break down.

Martin Waxman feels that the greatest challenge for PR practitioners is to break out of the publicist mode once and for all. The move to content journalism and content marketing plays to the PR practitioner’s traditional storytelling strengths. And if you’re looking at your career, don’t disregard this path to the future.

Joe points to the trend to anchor integrated communications in marketing departments and marketing programs, places and activities that measure real results against defined objectives. PR practitioners must become platform agnostic, married not solely to earned media, but open to paid media as well as owned media.

Gini notes that she has seen search firms competing for some of these assignments. The challenge for these firms is that they are great at writing for robots, not for human beings. The complete firm will write for both human beings and the search robots. The success of PR firms or any firm will rest on their ability to pull together in one team the analytic and storytelling skills to offer truly compelling, effective content marketing.

Finally, Martin asks how people will be able to make a living as content creators when online outlets like Huffington Post and Forbes.com pay nothing or very little for quality content. Joe suggests that most won’t. There are few Mathew Ingrams or Om Maliks, few people who have something to say, day in and day out. Most of us write more infrequently on a narrower range of topics. As it ever was, few will make a living directly from their content creation. Most of us will of necessity rely on earning our living in jobs in which we benefit from reputations enhanced by creating and publishing smart content.

Also in this episode, Martin gives a plug to the digital communications class at University of Toronto. The next course starts in May. So, if you’d interested in taking this, contact Martin.

What do you think? Are you equipped to work in a world of integrated communications?

A version of this post was originally published on Inside PR.

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The research aimed to determine what aspects of social media are considered most valuable by the Mass Affluent. In particular, the survey asked questions that relate to financial education and decision making.

Image via CrunchBase

Some key findings from the survey include:

• There are major gaps between what the “Mass Affluent” hope to get from social media and what they are actually receiving
• The “Mass Affluent” value “improved customer service, timely updates, and relevant content”
• Nearly half of the “Mass Affluent” interact with financial institutions on social media
• 63% of the “Mass Affluent” who use social media to learn about financial options, or to evaluate what they’ve learned, are driven to take action, i.e., to open an account or invest in a company
• Nearly one in four of the “Mass Affluent” expect banks to have a presence on social media
• There is a 25-40% opportunity gap between the information the “Mass Affluent” want and the information actually provided by banks, brokerages and credit cards
• Information on new products is most desired by the “Mass Affluent” on social

The most important thing that any company or organization can do on social media is be relevant by providing value in the form of information. It is important that companies constantly reassess and evaluate what they are producing online and take note of what their customers want.

Are you providing enough value to your audience? Send us a note! We’d love to chat about your social media strategy. 

Report Referenced: 

Influencing the Mass Affluent: Building Relationships on Social Media. LinkedIn and Cogent Research. Accessed online May 14, 2013 at  http://el.linkedin.com/forms/LMS_LP_Mass_Affluent. 

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He’s the commander of the international space station and has been in orbit since last fall.  His use of Twitter is a space PR coup rivalled only by the antics of Landon Percival, a fictional character who goes to the space station after winning a lottery in Up and Down, the best-selling novel written by my colleague Terry Fallis.

NASA Astronaut Chris Hadfield (Photo credit: gnews pics)

Hadfield boasts more than 751,000 Twitter followers, more than half million YouTube views and has a Klout score of 86.

He uses social media to share photographs from space and shares his experiences of life on the space station as they happen.  He’s taken questions from school children and even had a tweetchat with Captain Kirk, Canadian actor William Shatner and a hero to space geeks the world over.

Canadians, and people around the globe, are more than engaged…they are enthralled. They feel as though they have been part of the mission and they adore Hadfield for taking them along.

As a public relations venture, Commander Chris Hadfield’s mission is an unqualified success for the Canadian Space Agency and for science in general, thanks to Twitter.

But was Twitter good for Chris Hadfield’s PR or was the commander better for Twitter’s?

At a time when the the world’s second favourite social network is courting the corporate world in its bid to establish a viable monetization strategy, Hadfield has reawakened some of the excitement created in the the early days of Twitter and he did it by tweeting in the moment.

He is at once engaging, entertaining, educating, personable and fun. He is himself. He is real.

He has lifted his message and his followers above the white noise of endless boring auto tweets to demonstrate the real power of 140 characters….to show, to tell, to teach and to engage.

Thank you Commander Hadfield for taking us with you and sharing the most incredible adventure. Thank you reminding us of the magic of social media. Have a safe journey home.

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Colleen founded the Canadian version of the global health care social media chat (#hcsm), which is held Sunday evenings at 9pm @HealthSocMed. Similar to @hcsmca, the global chat seeks to provide a collaborative space for individuals (including doctors, caregivers, patients and more) to discuss issues and best practices in the changing landscape of health care and health care communications.

Tweet chats like #hcsm and #hcsmca provide a great opportunity to learn, share and collaborate with a passionate group of health care providers and communicators.

Here are the instructions for participating in the weekly chats from Colleen Young’s website:

1. Get a Twitter account.
2. Go to TweetChat.com.
3. Enter the hcsmca in the box that says “Enter hashtag to follow” and click Go.
4. Sign in to participate in the chat. (note the hashtag #hcsmca will automatically be added to your tweets.
5. Review this week’s topics. Feel free to add a topic yourself.
6. Be online at 1 pm EST (2 pm AST, noon CST, 11 am MST, 10 am PST).
7. Chat! Be sure to add #hcsmca to your comments so they show up in the stream.

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