The Value Of Social Media To Corporate PR

The Value of Social Media to Corporate Public Relations

The Conversation

Social media can perhaps best be defined as the interactive relationships through which information is exchanged and democratized

With increasing accessibility to internet tools, the world is becoming ever-more connected; thus exponentially disempowering the traditional media

As a result, news now spreads through conversation and personal information exchange. We went from discussing the news to making it

Because news is being generated through social media, those who seek to shape the news must participate in social media. You can’t win the game if your team isn’t on the field

The Primary Tools

Wikipedia: the primary online encyclopedia with socially generated and edited content

Facebook: the premier social networking site where users upload photos, make fan groups, have discussions, and “add friends

Twitter: a “microblogging” service where users frequently “follow” friends as a means for aggregating news, links and information

YouTube: the foremost online service for uploading and sharing videos. Users can subscribe to “channels,” and “add friends”

LinkedIn: a networking site aimed primarily at business interaction and professional relationships

MySpace: a social networking site known mostly for its multimedia functions and customizability which make it uniquely suited as a multimedia aggregate

Digg: the premier social bookmarking service which allows users to create accounts and “digg” stories they like – the more “diggs” a story gets, the more exposure it gets through the website

Blogs: an informal means for generating unique content

Reach of Those Tools

Wikipedia and all of its subsidiaries see about 327 million unique world-wide visitors, giving Wikipedia a “reach” of close to 30% ( comScore )

Facebook brings in 200 million unique world-wide visitors and over 80 billion monthly page views ( TechCrunch )

Twitter has over 32 million unique monthly visitors, and over 2.08 million active users who post an average of over 9 “tweets” per day ( Tech Crunch and GigaTweet )

YouTube reached 100 million viewers this past March, and its users viewed 14.8 billion online videos in January alone ( YouTube Report )

LinkedIn has perhaps the most affluent and educated user demographic of any social medium; of its 16 million unique monthly visitors, over 80% have attained a college degree and just under 70% make $60,000 a year or more ( Tech Crunch and Quantcast )

MySpace brings in just under 100 million unique visitors per month and over 43 billion page views ( TechCrunch )

Digg brings in 23 million unique visitors per month, and 4.5 billion page views – which is more traffic than NYTimes.com sees ( Tech Crunch and Federated Media )

Of the 5 million+ blogs tracked by Technorati in 2008, 12% were run by “corporate bloggers” (i.e. they blog for their company in an official capacity) – which means there were at least 600,000 corporate blogs in 2008 ( Technorati )

Traditional by Media Comparison

The most widely circulated newspaper in America is USA Today , with a daily circulation of just over 2.1 million ( Audit Bureau of Circulation )

Even if this daily circulation equated to the paper reaching a new set of 2.1 million people each day of every month (which is not the case at all), the resulting monthly circulation of 63.4 million would still be 3x smaller than Facebook’s unique monthly visitors ( TechCrunch )

The most widely circulated magazine in America, AARP Bulletin , has a circulation of 24.5 million, which is just slightly larger than the monthly unique visitors attracted by Digg ( Audit Bureau of Circulation )

The FOX News Channel, which has been the highest-rated cable news network for 90 months, has a total-day average viewing audience of 1.3 million viewers per hour and 15.6 million daily; which is less than the 16 million unique visitors LinkedIn sees monthly ( Huffington Post )

Rush Limbaugh has the largest audience in all of talk radio with 14.75 million listeners, which is less than half the number of unique monthly visitors Twitter attracts ( Talkers Magazine ).

While 50% of the US internet population blogged in 2008, 40% got their news from online sources and just 35% got their news from newspapers ( Technorati and PEW Research )

Corporations and Blogs

81 of the Fortune 500, 39% of the Inc. 500, 41% of the higher education sector and 57% of the nation’s top 200 charities currently have blogs ( Society for New Communications Research )

Half of the nation’s top ten companies have public blogs: Wal-Mart, Chevron, General Motors, Ford, and Bank of America ( SNCR )

Of the Fortune 500 companies blogs, 90% have the comments feature enabled ( SNCR )

The computer software/hardware technology industry has the most blogs, followed by the food and drug industry, financial services, internet services, semi-conductors, retail and automotive respectively ( SNCR )

Ten percent of Fortune 500 blogs link to podcasts; 21% incorporate video ( SNCR )

Corporate Bloggers Technorati

Corporations and

It is practically impossible to enter a generic word search into Google and not get a Wikipedia article as one of the primary results on the first page. For example, Wikipedia articles are the primary Google results for “SEO,” “marketing,” “industry,” “RFID” and “health care”

The English version of Wikipedia has nearly 3 million articles, perhaps explaining why Wikipedia is so comprehensive ( Mashable )

For this reason, Wikipedia is arguably the most powerful SEO tool available, if utilized properly

All links in Wikipedia use “nofollow” coding, which means traffic can be driven from Wikipedia to your site but that traffic does not affect your website’s ranking on the search engine results page (SERP) – making Wikipedia an excellent PR tool for SEO and message control/influence but not effective in generating direct advertising revenue

Wikipedia Content Growth Mashable

Corporations and

There are more than 950,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries currently using Facebook ( Facebook )

There are more than 30 million active Facebook “groups,” and over six million users become fans of Facebook “pages” every day ( Facebook )

Companies that use social-networking websites like Facebook are 17 times more likely to improve customer satisfaction than companies that don’t use the sites ( Aberdeen )

According to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use social media to interact with consumers ( Cone ). According to that same study:

60% said they regularly interact with companies through social media

43% said companies should use social networks to solve consumer problems

41% said companies should solicit feedback on products and services through social media

37% said companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand

Facebook vs CNN and NYT Compete

Corporations and

Twitter provides the opportunity to listen and respond to what people are saying about your brand and market

Twitter users are often referred to as the “super amplifiers” of the social media world – meaning Twitter is almost a necessary component of any “viral” trend

What a B2B organization can do with Twitter:

Increase number of people reading blog posts, releases and publicity

Alert customers of new product features and upcoming events

Collect competitive and industry information

Update analysts on new market information

Meet and converse with new prospects

Share information from tradeshows or events

Of the Fortune 500 companies that have blogs, 28% link the blog to a twitter account ( SNCR )

Some B2B organizations using Twitter: Deloitte , Sun Microsystems , Oracle , CapGemini , BearingPoint

The Twitter “Boom” TechCrunch

Corporations and

Online video usage is up by 53% since this time last year ( Nielson )

Americans viewed a record 16.8 billion videos online in April, a 16% increase over March ( ComScore )

In April, nearly 79% of the entire U.S. internet population watched online video and YouTube accounted for about 99%, or 107 million, of that viewing audience ( ComScore )

Behind Google and Yahoo, YouTube.com is the 3 rd most globally viewed website (Facebook is 4 th , Wikipedia 7 th , Blogger 8 th , MySpace 11 th , Twitter 34 th , CNN.com 56 th ,Linked in is 93 rd and FoxNews.com is 255 th )( Alexa )

Here are some corporations which waited too long to make YouTube accounts and now have no control over how their brand name is represented on YouTube: McDonalds, MTV, Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, BMW, Disney, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo

What Americans are Watching Nielsen

Corporations and

The PR value of MySpace is relative to the campaign, but MySpace is an excellent multimedia aggregate and it’s high traffic rate presents yet another SEO opportunity

Roughly 49 million viewers watched 387 million videos on MySpace.com in April ( ComScore )

The average MySpace visitor is on the site for over 20 minutes a day – meaning your page has a higher likelihood of being discovered on MySpace than does a news story on CNN, where the average viewer only stays for 5½ minutes ( Alexa )

MySpace recently partnered with Citysearch to launch “MySpace Local,” a small business directory that allows the community to review, rate and share content from local businesses nationwide

Advertisers Value MySpace The Strategy Web

Corporations and

Digg is the premier social bookmarking mechanism, and as such is largely responsible for the extrapolated popularity of the stories favored by its community

Digg has several PR values; you can:

Increase visibility of stories about (or important to) your organization

Attain better awareness of the popular stories germane to your market

Help increase the visibility of your business partners by “digging” stories about them

Increase your social networking opportunities

Every article you “Digg” isn’t guaranteed to become wildly popular… but if you aren’t on Digg, you’re robbing yourself of creating that possibility

Social Bookmarking by Comparison Compete

Corporations and

LinkedIn is primarily a social networking site, but it does represent certain SEO value for your organization and your employees

By creating a LinkedIn account, you get yet another opportunity to control the messaging someone sees when they search for you, your company or key terms relevant to your company

Moreover, LinkedIn makes your organization and your employees more accessible for potential business opportunities – not to mention the profile format that lets your employees display their experience in the field, which gives your organization more credibility

Because of LinkedIn’s affluent community, social groups are considered “high value” because the people joining those groups have a greater capacity to directly impact your business

LinkedIn Still Growing CNET

Social Media Marketing Industry Report Marketers Using Social Media

Social Media Marketing Industry Report The ROI of Social Media

Conclusion

As with any PR strategy, social media PR is about “messaging,” but “messaging” entails a lot more than just composition – it also requires efficient delivery. And on the internet, efficient delivery requires SEO – and SEO now requires social media optimization (SMO)

When someone is searching for your company (or a term relevant to your company), you want to control or influence their results as much as possible. If you adequately represent yourself through social media, you could have complete control over the first seven or eight results of their search

If you do not join the social media conversation, it WILL take place without you; those organizations which neglect social media are not only neglecting the lion’s share of PR outreach opportunities, but they also risk being misrepresented by a competitor or a disgruntled consumer

More importantly, public relations involves more than just propagation – it’s a boundary spanning process through which an organization and its publics interact. There’s no better current means for practicing sound PR than social media