Social Media & SEO

Whom do you trust? Cisco’s Carmen Collins argues that brands ignore that their employees can be the most genuine and trusted voices. She discusses how Cisco has employed staffers on social media channels to help recruit potential employees.

It may be a little late to the party, but with its upcoming native video feature, LinkedIn is poised to provide brand communicators with a new way to capture attention on the platform. PR News asked Tatiana De Almeida, a member of LinkedIn’s corporate communications team, about LinkedIn video’s likely applications for professional communicators, how to measure its success and how it’s unique among video features on other social platforms.

Communicators know that paid Facebook ads are a requirement, not a luxury. But that doesn’t mean your brand will be buried unless you spend like Coca-Cola. Even a small budget can have a big impact, but you need to start with specific goals, said Michael Lamp, senior vice president of social and digital media at Hunter Public Relations, at PR News’ Facebook Boot Camp July 20 in New York.

Your organization finally has taken the plunge into podcasting. You’ve chosen a host, show title and theme music—you have the right equipment, too. Congratulations, but you’ve only just begun. If you expect to release a podcast weekly, biweekly or monthly, where can you find content on a regular basis? Think like a journalist and use your eyes and ears with the following three possibilities.

One of the most successful kinds of live stream videos is when the audience is waiting for something, some kind of countdown. Counterintuitively, nothing much is happening in these videos for most of the time; the audience is simply anticipating something happening. But the real action can be in the discussion around what’s on camera, not what’s actually on camera.

Reebok’s Twitter account took a satirical streak July 14 when it mocked President Trump’s comment to France’s first lady Brigitte Macron that she’s “in such good physical shape…beautiful.” The post has since gone viral, with more than 46,000 retweets and nearly 79,000 likes as of this morning. The tweet is a rare example of a big consumer brand challenging President Trump on his favorite social media platform. “We saw this as an opportunity—as a learning moment,” says Inga Stenta, senior director of brand management at Reebok.

There are many things even a supposedly staid brand can do on social media to enhance awareness. Here’s what the Chartered Financial Advisor Institute has been doing on social media to humanize its brand and make it a bit more human and fun.

Podcasts are becoming more mainstream and so are finding their place in the tool kits of brand communicators. Are they right for your brand? If so, what should the podcast cover? Should it be a thinly veiled sales pitch or a storytelling vehicle that barely mentions your brand by name? We ask a pair of podcast veterans for best practices.

Measuring reach on Facebook has become far more complex than simply using one metric to count how many people witnessed a piece of content. A mix of different KPIs must be considered in tandem to determine where, how and why users are seeing (or not seeing) your brand’s Facebook content, according to Karen Vega, senior director of social media activations and earned media at Viacom Velocity.

When Cisco’s Talent Brand team opened an Instagram account, it didn’t just throw a few photos into the feed, bedazzle them with hashtags and call it a day. The company knew that getting people to show up and remain engaged with the account would be a challenge. So, how did @WeAreCisco’s Instagram account grow from zero to 18,000 followers, with healthy engagement rates, without paying a dime? Here’s how.