All of that participants in Edelman Digital 101 at JMU would like to extend a huge THANK YOU to Edelman professionals Kate, Erin, Jenna, Monte, Dave, Kaitlyn, and Patrick for taking the time out of their weekend to teach us about social media. You all provided us with the invaluable experience of gaining first hand knowledge about using social media to meet a clients specific needs.
We also wanted to thank Dr. Frank Kalupa and Dr. Corey Hickerson, as well as their SCOM 461 and SCOM 367 classes.
Monte sums up a couple of main points to take away from the weekend:
1. Be personal
2. Be authenticity
3. Creating relationships through social media, listening and talking to people, engaging in the two-way conversation
4. Credibility, aligning yourself with credible groups that can help your cause in a two-way dialogic way
5. Using existing platforms but extending them as a campaign strategy, taking what you are already doing and making it work better
6. Tapping into the existing conversations, you don’t have to start these conversations
7. Importance of seeing how all things are tied together, online and offline effect each other in many ways
8. Long term strategy, taking short term tactics and extending them to continue the program, keeping people engaged
9. The importance of research with social media tools (checkusernames, for example), companies need to understand whether they own their own name, this is important for you as a public relations professional as well (register your own url, use tinyurl, and own your own brand and online identity)
Thank you to all the Edelman instructors for teaching us so much and for a great weekend!
The Ford Hybrid Taxi group presented ideas for their campaign strategy. We decided to launch The Great Escape Campaign. The goal would be to motivate people to come out to an event on Earth Day to find out how green this vehicle is. We feel that this event would combat the negative ideas that are out there about this car and would show people that it is in fact, very safe. We want to promote the event through blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
Our best practice, what we think is most important about this, is building relationships early on with both positive and negative bloggers. It is important because we want them to know that we care about what they think. If they are positive, we want to help them continue writing posts by providing them with more positive information. If they are negative, we want to work them to understand why and help them understand the beneficial aspects of this vehicle.
We think this event would be very sucessful. It has been a lot of fun “planning” it!
In the Kettle Foods group we have decided to focus on creating a blog strategy. We already know that our client has a lot of positive feedback in the blogosphere, so we think they should join the conversation. Our goal for the campaign is to create awareness about the sustainability efforts of the company, including recent developments in wind power. The community that would be engaged on the site would connect Kettle Foods with other organizations who are also supporting sustainability.
The blog should also involve features that will connect Kettle Foods to individuals concerned with sustainability. A video series of one of the Kettle Foods biodiesel VW Beetles going cross country to cities that focus on environmentalism is one of our ideas. We also would create a Facebook and Twitter presence for Kettle Foods. It is important for Kettle Foods to communicate with the individuals involved in environmental efforts as well as the organizations who share their dedication to sustainability.
So you have launched your product…what do you do now? We learned from Edelman that the one thing that you cannot do is forget about it! It is really important to constantly be monitoring the success of each stage because this can impact the success of larger campaign.
This next stage is just as important as the tactic launch itself. You need to track all conversation about it. It could be helpful to know what people like and what they don’t like, in the overall strategy. Going along with this, you also need to make the necessary updates. If something is lacking on the website, for example, it needs to be changed. The quality of your efforts need to remain as high as they possibly can be throughout the entire process. You need to try and stay fresh as well. Planning is also very important. You have to get ready for the next tactic as well as the greater overall strategy.
