Executive Summary

PR News Big 4 Conference

August 6, 2015—Hyatt Regency, San Francisco

How to Tie Social Media Engagement to Business Objectives (Sales, Leads, Volunteers)

Veda Banerjee, Director, Communicaitons & Digital Marketing, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy

  • Launch social media ads directed to email signups and newsletters. This is a good way to advance sharing and engagement for both content types.
  • Emphasize concrete results from social to senior management. Be clear about social’s ability to drive website traffic, event signups and membership drives.
  • Create an editorial calendar for social posts. It’s important to plan ahead so you have the ability to easily refocus your efforts when something timely comes up.
  • Generate reports for your best and worst performing social posts to improve your work. Never forget to share success stories with senior staff.
  • Invest in software that allows you to listen to your community engagement on social channels so you can constantly improve.

Lauren Friedman, Head of Social Business Enablement, Adobe

  • Line up your corporate and social goals. Keep in mind that these may not always play nice, but that’s okay. What’s important is that you know which goals line up, how you’re going to achieve them and which KPIs you’ll follow.
  • Know what you’re looking for before you begin a program. Clear away the clutter and you’ll have a much better time tracking and reporting your work.
  • Your dashboards shouldn’t be 30 pages of unexplained data. At the end of the day, data means nothing if there isn’t a story behind it telling why its important, how you got there and what you can improve on.
  •  If you’re only looking social media’s benefits in terms of social marketing, you’re missing the bigger picture. Social media can prove indispensable for market research, brand reputation, talent acquisition and sales support.
  • Establish and leverage relationships with influencers and advocates to promote your message.

Case Studies: Brand Communications Success on Facebook

Derekh Froude, Associate Creative Director, Edelman

  • You don’t always need fancy analytics software to analyze your Facebook audience. It can be as simple as stalking them on Facebook to decipher what they like, how they interact with each other and how they interact with the brand.
  • Don’t fight the crowd. If your audience is engaging, but in ways that you may not be trying to elicit, try to find a way to work it into your strategy instead of swimming against the current.

Jen Martin Hall, Vice President, Communications, Sharecare

  • Find the right balance of quality and quantity when it comes to your content. This is going to be a different mix for every brand, but you’re always going to want to favor quality over quantity.
  • Always observe your competition, but don’t imitate them! There are plenty of lessons to learn for your competitors but to truly succeed you have to make the content your own.
  • Spend some time getting to know your audience. The best way to do this is by engaging with them regularly.
  • Experiment with your posts. Try out different times, types of content and uses of images and video. Just be careful not to force any one type of content or experiment over another.
  • Manage expectations in the C-suite. Facebook can be incredibly powerful, but with constant algorithm changes and tweaks, it’s a challenge to find a formula that consistently works. Make sure your higher-ups understand the limitations of the platform.
  • When you can’t use humor, inspiration travels really well on Facebook.
  • Keep your posts short. It’s a Facebook post, not a dissertation.
  • To get the most out of video, keep it under a minute. All videos shorter than 30 seconds had more than 55 percent completion rate.

Brenda Weigel, Manager, Social Media, Aflac

  • Leverage popular hashtags and seasonality to give your page more exposure, but it’s key to make sure the trends you join are representative of the content you post everyday.
  • Introduce user-generated content to your page. Surprise and delight your followers by reposting their content.
  • Use cross-engagement reports to find out what other brands your engaged fans interact with and use these insights on your own page.
  • Utilize Facebook Insights and other analytics platforms to get a feel for your post performance and try to replicate what works.

Case Studies: Brand Communications Success on Instagram

Nicol Addison, Director of Corporate Communications, Lithium Technologies

  • Decide why you’re using Instagram. The platform may not make sense for your brand, so knowing what you want out of your efforts will lead to more targeted content.
  • Know your audience and how they use other social networks and tools.
  • Remain active and responsive. Instagram has the most engaged users out of the big 4 social networks.
  • Be aware, clutter is coming. Instagram’s user base has doubled in the past 13 months. The platform will start to filter out brand posts in an attempt to show users the best content. So, make sure you’re posting high-quality content to stand above the clutter.

Katie Keating, Program Manager for Social Brand Strategy, IBM

  • Instagram has a unique aesthetic. Make sure you’re true to the platform and the community. Otherwise you’ll get called out, and then cast out.
  • Create content that is designed to subtly reach your key audience segments. Leave the heavy branding elsewhere, this is a space to showoff your creativity and culture.
  • Unite your audience around hashtags, you can create them or join in on previously existing hashtags. But be sure to sprinkle them in over time, hashtag overload is a very real, very dangerous thing.
  • Use a custom bit.ly as your Instagram URL to conserve space.
  • Try adding additional hashtags as a comment to increase a post’s search visibility and to avoid cluttering the caption.

Charlene Macielag, Social Media Strategist of Corporate Communications, FedEx

  • Ask your partners to tag you. Use the relationships you already have to reach new audiences and promote your content beyond its traditional reach.
  • Keep your followers engaged by reposting their content and allowing them to show their own perspectives of your brand.
  • Try everything on Instagram. The best way to find out what works is by seeing what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to fail often, just be sure to fail fast and keep moving.
  • Don’t showcase your product; showcase the people that bring your brand to life. Be relatable, you can’t have social without the human factor.
  • Don’t just show your subscribers, go further and provoke them. Post content that begs a question and elicits response.

Luncheon Keynote Presentation: Why Some Brands Captivate—and Some Don’t

Ben Parr, Author, “Captivology;” Founder and Managing Partner, DominateFund

  • For immediate attention, use the right colors for the job. Blues and teals score the highest for competency while yellow and orange score the lowest.
  • Choose your framing wisely. Getting attention means relating to your audience’s existing frame of reference and reframing the conversation to change people’s perceptions.
  • Bizarre, quirky and out-of-place information draws attention. However, disruption has to be positive to work for your brand.
  • To sustain the attention of your audience, use intrinsic rewards like fulfillment and sense of purpose. Surprising rewards and surprising people gets attention and creates motivation.
  • Are you a credible source to your audience? Smart brands use both internal and external experts to build their credibility.
  • Human being crave acknowledgement. Your audience will pay more attention to you, if you pay more attention to them.
  • Remember: Attention masters don’t draw attention to themselves, they draw attention to their causes.

Case Studies: Brand Communications Success on Snapchat

Haley Herbert, VP, Digital Marketing, Lewis Pulse

  • 71 percent of Snapchat users are under the age of 25, yet only 1 percent of marketers are using the platform.
  • Stories are live for 24 hours; they can be viewed more than once and are longer versions of a regular Snap. They are typically used to highlight events throughout your day.
  • No matter who you are, some subset of your audience is active on Snapchat.
  • Segment your existing social audience to determine if they’re likely to be on Snapchat. Do this by posting your Snapchat ID on other platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
  • Start with a pilot program. With a platform as new as this, it is important to test the waters before devoting too many resources to it.
  • Stories at large industry events are an ideal launch pad for your account.
  • Snapchat has a myriad of geofilters that can bring an interesting location-specific angle to your content.
  • Determine your brand’s visual stories and experiment with different types of content. Snapchat is great for behind-the-scenes looks and fun, unpolished images.

Case Studies: Brand Communications Success on Twitter

Krisleigh Hoermann, Director of Operations/Digital and Social Media Consultant, American Heart Association/American Stroke Association

  • Determine what really matters: Are you after awareness, engagement, influencer identification, affinity to the brand, consumer cultivation, or all of the above?
  • Twitter users are unique in the social media space, 49 percent of monthly users follow brands or companies, compared to just 16 percent of social networks overall. This makes Twitter the ideal space for brands to reach their audiences.
  • When using promoted Tweets, set a budget, place and bid and analyze your results. Tracking promoted posts throughout their lifecycle will lead to better results on future campaigns.
  • Use Periscope to offer a behind-the-scenes look at your brand, broadcast announcements and events, or offer your audience and live Q&A. This platform is ideal for in the moment, reactive storytelling.

Michelle Wright, Senior Manager, Digital Content, Levi Strauss & Co.

  • It never hurts to ask on Twitter. If you’re looking for influencers or other brands in your industry to help promote your content, be courteous and ask. You will be surprised by the response!
  • Always experiment with your Tweet content. Never settle and always analyze your work from beginning to end.
  • Don’t forget about hashtags. They’re for more than tracking your content; they serve as a rally cry for your audience and the wider Twitter-sphere.
  • Focus on what you can control and move on. Engage with the users who are eager to join your conversations. Don’t waste time on haters, they are always going to be there and there isn’t much you can do about them. Do not feed the trolls.
  • Most importantly, show up and be consistent with your presence on Twitter.

Serena Ehrlich, Director of Social Media, Business Wire

  • Before you Tweet:
    • Establish your goals.
    • Select a team. Do not let interns handle your Twitter presence.
    • Determine your desired brand voice.
    • Craft response programing.
    • Build decision trees.
  • Fill out your Twitter profile with a 160-character description with URLs and hashtags. Upload artwork for your page including a profile picture, exciting banner art and a custom background that showcases your team members.
  • Tweet content should be text, link and thoughts. Never start with “@.”
  • Test different headlines and headline styles to find what works with your audience.
  • Always try to add multimedia to your posts.
  • Content that works on Twitter: brand updates, ideas and feedback, how to content, quotes and statistics and facts.
  • Always halt tweets during a crisis. You’re always one tweet away from destroying your brand’s reputation.
  • Always use hashtags, but research them first. Keep your hashtag use to three or 4 in each post.
  • Pin your most engaging Tweets to the top of your page.

What’s Next for the Big 4—and What’s the Next Big 4? New Features, New Directions, New Applications

Christopher Penn, Vice President, Marketing Technologies, SHIFT Communications

  • Content marketing is still trying to figure out a concrete strategy to guide future work. The foundation to evolving your content strategy to higher levels is based on the accurate collection of data, thorough analysis of the data and the development of insights from that analysis.
  • There are two types of social: community and broadcast. More and more social networks are beginning to work like broadcast media. Twitter looks more like a news ticker than conversations, so start to parcel your social activity into community and broadcast categories.
  • It’s no secret that video is essential right now. But the social platforms that support video are beginning to segment. What works on YouTube may not work on Vine or Instagram. Know the strengths of each and line them up with your goals to get the most out of your video content.
  • You can no longer just make good content and expect it to stick. Now, you have to get out and make it stick.
  • Know the algorithms that each platform uses to rank content, and then make them work for you. A relatively mall amount of paid posts can give you an added boost by gaming the algorithms and making your content stickier.