Social media effective in your communications campaign

By Emma McCleary

Turns out, if you say the same thing long enough to enough people they’ll start to listen. In PR we call that ‘reiterating key messages.’ At home my husband calls that nagging.

I was a late comer to the online world. I remember sitting around our first at-home internet with the family like it was some kind of campfire, staring for minutes at its flame-bright screen wondering what we should look up. It wasn’t until university that my brother set me up with a hotmail account and explained the concept of email and realistically, I didn’t use a computer daily until 2000.

With social media it’s a different story though – since coming to it five years ago I’ve been a keen blogger, tweeter, facebooker and enjoy talking to people about how social media can become part of their business, and an effective tool in their communications.

That’s why I was so happy to see the recent social media revolution video, which gives the facts and figures behind why social media isn’t a fad and backs up my experience that,

• Social media is an effective way to communicate key messages,
• Democratising information – letting everyone have their say – strengthens what you’re trying to achieve,
• Social media is not just for young people, and
• Being present online will build community and encourage others to participate if you communicate in an informal, personable way.

This year the Cancer Society approached Ideas Shop to help them use social media tools to promote Daffodil Day. Like any good communications plan, our use of social media had an aim, a plan and a risk assessment.

We established guidelines for how we aimed to use Facebook, which we chose as our platform for 2009 and set up a  number of Facebook-savvy administrators who had full control over the page – sharing the workload.

Then we went with the flow – responding to fans as they added content and shared their stories, adding photos as they came to hand and using Twitter to get events photos from locations we couldn’t access.

In just over a week, the Cancer Society’s Daffodil Day Facebook page numbers over 560 fans and while I’m rapt with the following, here’s an outline of what we did and how Facebook can work for you:

• I created a welcome screen so that when people entered the Cancer Society Daffodil Day page for the first time they saw key messages and the logos of the organisations behind the page, which demonstrated credibility.
• I built an application that let people send free daffodils to their friends. Each daffodil carried the message about how to donate using text messaging. With over 1000 daffodil gifts sent during the week, that was excellent coverage of messages around giving,
• I customised a page for donations where people could find out how to donate online, and
• I relaxed all the page’s settings to ensure fans could add photos, videos, messages and whatever else they wanted to make the page their own.

However, what proved to me most that our Facebook page was successful was that people shared their stories about their own experiences with Cancer and how it had affected them, their families and friends. We’ve started an online community through Facebook that will be built on, and added to for 2010. It’s never too late to join either either search ‘Cancer Society Daffodil Day’ on Facebook or click this text to go straight there.

Social media working for wagamama too

My client wagamama is reporting Twitter.com/wagamama as working really well in their marketing mix as a promotions tool. They love it for getting key messages out to fans and as a format for connecting with customers and answering feedback. This year they’ve watched their National Noodle Day (28 July) tweets and Random Acts of Kindness Day (1 Sept) offers go viral and do the work for them being retweeted across New Zealand gaining maximum people-coverage for their Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch stores.

Tags: communication, emma mccleary, social media