Social Media & The Impact on Corporate Governance

In 2001, market regulators in Canada, Europe and the U.S. required public companies to simultaneously issue press releases to the Web and the newswire. In addition, any public meetings were to be broadcast to the Web via video feeds. All this before the rise of Social Media in a significant way. The bulletin boards (newsgroups) for discussion on public companies have been rampant for years, Stockhouse being among the pioneers.

My days running communications for a public company at the turn of the century saw us monitoring those newsgroups every day. Some days it was hard to not tap a condemning response to the idiocy of some of the comments and speculations made there. But other issues became apparent, among them was the damage that could happen when an employee spoke of something to a friend who then posted to the BullBoard on that company – this could wreak havoc on a stockprice; and nearly ended up in a line employee being fired once.

This was several years ago. It’s not about to get better. Public companies will face even greater challenges with Social Media in the years to come. Regulators may eventually require public companies to also post information to Social Networks, the same time they issue a press release. Video’s might have to be posted to several video networks and across mobile platforms as well.

Given how the content is both consumed, shared and managed across these channels, public companies are going to face complexities in shaping, distributing and monitoring those messages. What if the company must also issue notices across microblogging platforms like Twitter?

What will public relations and investor relations practitioners have to to consider if such issues arise? Increasingly, companies that thought they didn’t really have to concern themselves with the Web beyond marketing, will soon find out differently.

2010 will, I think, see some interesting changes to governance on communications issues for public companies.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)

Social Networking & The Enterprise: The Biggest Challenge

The biggest challenge on implementing Social Networking technologies in larger organizations is not the technology; it’s the people and the communications processes they use. We’ve found this in several instances now on consulting projects. Social Technologies are disruptive to current organizational communications. I’ve already posited about the potential decrease in the need for middle management earlier this year. Continue reading »

What Age Groups Consume the Most Media?

It’s a question we get almost every day from current and prospective clients. Usually it focuses on Social Media, but of late Social Media is getting lumped into “media consumption” as a whole. Let’s put this into perspective. Generationally speaking.We think the question is more appropriately posited as “What media is most popular by age group?” Different age groups consume media in different ways. Understanding this is vital to developing effective communications strategies, advertising or marketing. Continue reading »

Selling in Social Media Channels: Some Pitfalls

There’s a lot of discussion around “how to sell using Social Media” (we found 1,400 blog articles since July of 2009) and I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with and training over 100 salespeople over the past year. I’ve learned a lot and hopefully my clients have as well. I also do a fair bit of research into tactics used. Here’s some pitfalls I’d like share.

The Blunt Pitch: Those sales folks who put the hard pitch in right up front. These are tactics like putting in your newsfeed lines such as “if you’re looking for a home, I’m the guy from which to buy.” Says who? or “I sell life insurance so talk to me today.” Why? How’re you different? I don’t know you.

Misuse of Valuable Tools: I like taking polls in various places online. Mixx and LinkedIn offer various polls that users can create themselves. I’ve noticed a trend when it comes to sales people using these polling tools; they’ll tend to ask an all too onvious question like “what Social Media tool do you use most for marketing?” While I’ve noticed some very clever use of polling tools to ask broader questions and engage.

Then there’s setting up discussions in places like FastPitch, LinkedIn and ecademy. Here sales people will start discussions that are far too obviously attempts to discuss their product. If you check the comments, well, there are none, or it’s someone from their own company.

Social Media channels and networks are places to engage, and it doesn’t mean results overnight. It takes time. Blunt selling does say what you do and let’s be sure, honesty and transparency goes a long way in Social Media as it does in real life. But straight hard pitches is not engaging and uncovering the broader needs of the person, and so much of sales is how we relate to people. Blunt tactics immediately throw up a wall, one that may not come down like the Berlin Wall.

What do you think?

Content Chunking for Channels

Content chunking? A rather clunky phrase we use to describe breaking up your content for a press release or when promoting an important story about your business online. It helps when your building a story for release, to think of where you might be placing that story on various Web channels or how a press release might be broken up into fragments by bloggers or journalists or when “tweeted.”

Pick Up 2.0: These two words used to mean a reporter/journalist/editor at a newspaper/radio/TV got your story and then ran it or called for an interview. It still does, and that’s still important. But today it also means a blogger or regular citizen might send your story over Twitter or via their blog.

The Importance of the Headline: If it was important pre-Social Media then it’s even more important today. As you write a headline today, it’s not just to get the editors attention, you also want it to be “tweetable” on Twitter or a similar network. If its a good story, then be sure it can spread with a kicker headline.

The Content Chunks: Which brings us to the concept of “chunking” in that we have found that a press release or story should be written in a way that it can be broken down into chunks of content. Some blogs may only refer to a paragraph in the release or you may only be able to write a paragraph on some news seeding sites (i.e. newsvine). You may want to have a short bit for a Facebook company or group page or your LinkedIn company page.

The key is to know where you regularly “seed” your content from a press release or story and ensure the content can be adapted to each of the services you use. On average, we’ll “seed” a press release for clients to over 15 different online sources within relevant services. Yes, it adds work and puts ever more onus on the writer of the release, but it can help with SEO and generally getting to more of the right eyeballs wherever they may be in this vast media channel world.