Social Media Relations: Five Best Principles

This is a series of five posts to help you embark successfully on social media relations.  If you are hoping that you’ve found a quick “best practices” checklist, keep searching.  This is about creating a foundation for practicing social media relations.  Growing a new practice area requires an investment of a bit of time, but the payback is you’ll be exceptional at it.

This series is about best principles.  There are only five of them, they are actually quite simple and they will help you crystallize your social media decisions and practices.

These are article length posts.   They are full of the good (if not always sexy) stuff the professional communicator needs to start effectively practicing social media.  I hope you stick around for a read.  I welcome your comments, questions and ideas – but please speak quietly here.  We’re thinking.

Before moving on to the principles, let me first clarify the importance I assign to best principles over best practices.

Best Practices versus Best Principles

First, best practices are of limited value because they are “local.”  Meaning they only really apply to a specific organization with its own combination of organizational culture, people, needs, budget, resources, and most importantly, its individual specific goals.  Changing any one of these elements to fit your own situation removes a fundamental element that made them successful.   By way of illustrating my point: Spain’s annual Running of the Bulls event works beautifully in Pamplona, but won't transplant very well to Times Square in New York City.  Likely not a good set of best practices to build your next event around.

Best principles are universal.  These are the fundamentals from which appropriate best practices can be derived.  For example, one of the United Nations ten best principles is “business should support the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights.”  How that principle is best implemented will be quite different in each region of the world within each business.

Focusing on best principles means that as media tools change you aren’t out scrambling for new best practices.  Strategies and tactics built on social media best principles will translate when blogs morph into social nets, when social networks move from the web to the mobile phone – or into virtual worlds.  In other words, the platforms won’t matter much – the principles will hold true. 

Working inside of principles mean you create the best practices that fit your organization or situation and thus, have far better success for your efforts.

Although there is no official global body declaring social media best principles, the five I offer here are based on lots of years of experience in new media in the enterprise and have proved to be excellent guideposts in this era of shifting media practices.

Principle 1:  Go For Insight (because spaghetti is messy to clean up)

The most important thing you can do for “doing” social media is to get insight.  It will help you sell yourself - and your management - on exactly what about your communications you need to modernize.

Stop worrying about learning every new tool, site or technology.  Spend your valuable time gaining insights into those you should be using (not because it’s “cool”).   Pick one or two of those social media tools and start using them.  Doing so will lead you pretty quickly to any others that are important to your goals.

So, let’s go about getting social media relations insight with something every communications professional is intimate with – the news media. 

Even if you don’t depend directly on the news media in your practices – it simply stands to reason that whatever changes they are employing it is because their audience behaviors have changed.  Which means by extension your audiences’ behaviors are changing.   If the mass media is doing something differently, shouldn’t we look at it closely?

By following what media is doing you’ll organically be lead to where to start or expand your social media strategies.

With that, here are five key resources to use to help you go for insight.  Picking any one of them will tell you what you need to be doing.  Embracing all five?…a pathway to being an expert.

The Annual The State of the News Media Report
It is 180,000 words of pure wisdom brought to you by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.  The 2008 report is fully, freely available at a dedicated web site and conveniently broken up by media type: newspaper, local versus cable tv, online, magazines, radio, ethnic media, and network tv. An overview gives you the highpoints, and  “A Year in the News” gives you perspective on the important trends in just the last year. There are special reports on the changing newsroom, public attitudes, and the future of advertising.

The repot tells you things like:

“Aggregators like Sphere, Technorati and Newsgator help news sites keep up with the wave of online content that could be helpful links for readers.”

Here are a few other insights I randomly pulled out of the report:

"In 2007, there also are signs that Wikipedia is evolving into a new role: 'news source.'"

“A snapshot study by the Project found the top stories on popular user-driven news sites – Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us – were very different than those of the mainstream media.”

“Fully 95% of the top 100 newspapers included blogs from reporters in March 2007, up from 80% in 2006.”

“User sites like Digg have turned the tables on traditional media by allowing visitors to choose and share what they define as news.”

These few pull quotes alone point to tools that might be important to your communications.

Besides a deep look into the news environment, you can also get some snapshots of the opportunities. It tells you where news holes are.

“News consumers may have had more choices than ever for where to find news in 2007, but that does not mean they had more news to choose from. The news agenda for the year was, in fact, quite narrow, dominated by a few major general topic areas.”

Their chart accompanying this statement:

News Topics by Media Sector:

 

This is one speakes volumes: 

Public Interest versus Media Coverage.

In every case, the public interest outstrips the media coverage of the topic. 

That might be an “ah ha” moment as to the growing importance of alternative methods of getting news.

The PEJ gives you no excuse for not reading their report.  It’s well written, broken into digestible chunks.  You can print by chapter or page, it’s in Spanish, there are executive summaries or you can get a full PDF. 

Packaged insight for free, yet priceless.

Pew Center for the People and the Press
The two resources here you will likely find most relevant in your pursuit of insight is the Center’s People & The Press surveys and the Media Surveys.  These reveal the public’s attitudes toward media, what they are interested in as well as their usage of media.  You have access to the datasets, the surveys, news interest indexes and commentary.

Use it to find trends, news opportunities, those areas readers need information but are not being filled by the mainstream media and most importantly, how readers are getting information and filling news holes.

Valuable insight for the clicking.

“My Friends Could Be Dead”
With the unfolding story of the Virginia Tech shootings dramatically illustrating its thesis, iFocos identifies a dozen sweeping changes to how individuals and society as a whole experience media.

“The 800 reporters from the world’s news organizations who descended upon Blacksburg, Va., on April 16, 2007, to cover the shootings of students at Virginia Tech quickly discovered an inconvenient truth. Though remote, Blacksburg was hardly isolated. Students, educators and citizens reported the horrific events first-hand through long-established digital and social networks. The news reached the outside world well before the television crews found their way to the Blue Ridge. The story unfolded on the Internet and on cell-phones, the personal and preferred means of communication of an always-on generation. The story was in their hands.”

The report is a dramatic example of the growing citizen journalism movement and of how personal media empowers and defines communication in our connected society.

In “My Friends Could be Dead”, iFocos chronicles the Twitter microblogging of freshman Kevin Cupp on that day, which begins: 

“Trapped inside Pamplin, shooter on campus, they won’t let us leave.” 

Kevin is webmaster of the student-run news site Planet Blacksburg, and whose work was used extensively by mainstream media, as well as shared and redistributed throughout the world.

The twelve sweeping media shifts the report identifies and discusses are:
•    Media Catharsis
•    Social Networks: The New Local
•    Contribution Culture
•    Real-time Sociology
•    Derivative Myth Debunked
•    The News Spiral & The Organic Story Arc
•    The Manic Mainstream
•    Responsible Disclosure
•    A Place for News to Happen
•    SnoozePapers
•    Democratization of Media
•    Proliferation of Sources

“My Friends Could be Dead” is a project of iFocos’ Random Acts of Media initiative.  RAM is an emerging image gallery documenting media usage throughout the world.  It is digital ethnographic research collected from a network of global contributors.  RAM uses the research to report on the behaviors of a culture immersed in media.  Insights, observations and reports attached to the images often lead to more comprehensive research. 

iFocos is a media think tank and the organizer of the We Media conferences.  It is in partnership with The Associated Press and The Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California.

This report is a free PDF and is only 14 pages.

Moving and insightful.

Poynter Online
The Poynter Institute is a school for journalists, future journalists and teachers of journalists.  Their website is a veritable playground of resources giving you insight into news media practices and the technologies and formats they are using.   Plenty of insight into readers is also to be found here.

Just one of those insightful resources is Eyetracking the News: A Study of Print and Online Reading.  This is fascinating stuff from the design side, but more importantly for you, it is a rigorous study of what attracts attention and what doesn’t.  And this is scientific research that helps the pros make decisions about editorial and advertising.

“Do readers follow teasers? How deeply are they reading into the text? In what order do they look at photos, headlines, graphics and info boxes? And how do each of these vary from print to online?”

Check here for more golden insight for you to use in providing both the content and the formats that editors are looking for.  The findings in this report can be applied to your web site, blog or other content formats as well. The report (book) is currently $39 (U.S., reg. $60).

An ongoing feature at Poynter is WebSpeak that helps journalists learn the lingo of online news.  It can help you too – plus get insight into interesting ways to get attention or provide content for the new media landscape.  For example, last March WebSpeak had a segment on slideshows, highlighting a program called Soundslides.  This software program has become a standard tool for journalist-produced audio slides shows that may include interviews, natural sound, narration by a reporter or photographer, and/or music. 

Poynter also sponsors NewsU, an outstanding collection of free online courses (I've taken a few, so speaking from experience).  There are more than 60 of them covering things like insights on visual journalism, multimedia storytelling and ethics.  A new course about to be launched is called Beyond the Inverted Pyramid: Creating Alternative Story Forms - Write, edit and present information that engages time-crunched readers.

That title alone should tell us a thing or two about what journalists and readers are looking for in media today.  Even just a periodic perusal of the offerings at NewsU will provide insight into the shifts in media practices.

Or, follow the NewsU blog.  A recent post is all about Twitter, that seemingly everywhere micoblogging site, and how it is supporting serious journalism. 

Insight for the taking.

Cyberjournalist
This is another rich resource that gathers in one place a variety of commentary, news, tips and tools about Internet journalism specifically.

Cyberjournalist.net has a list of about 350 blogging journalists, a blogger’s code of ethics, a primer on RSS (really simple syndication) and other resources that tell you what journalists are tapping into.  It will even link you to the Cyberjounalist group on Facebook (FB login required).

Online media insight.

Taking the time to gain a little insight will save you social media meltdown, frustration and your sanity.  These resources will give you enormous amounts of it, informing you where to start with your social media relations initiatives.  Maybe more importantly, it will give you the fodder you might need to sell social media into your organization.  Every manager wants to know how “we can do it better” and these resources are huge signposts.

If you go where the media is going, you’ll be supporting your outbound communications strategies while prioritizing the tools you need to bring into your tactics.  And, you’ll be learning about what any audience wants from their media source (that would be you).

Of course you have targeted audiences you want to reach, and there are lots of other insight resources, but this is an excellent place to start, devoid of the noise out there.

Next post covers the best principle “Edit for More, Not Less.”  And watch for the three principles to follow:  Go Where You Will Touch People, Make Everything Shareable, and Everything You Need to Know About Social Media You Learned in Kindergarten.

Note:  I apologize that the comments were unavailable for early readers of this post.  If you are returning I hope you add your thoughts.

Comments

[Media Relation Montreal]

Those were some real good points. Thanks for sharing.

[Linda]

MarillaAnne,

I'm so touched by your kind comment and I thank you from the bottom of my heart that you took the time to tell me you are listening.

I visited your blog today and was equally touched by your posts there. I love the "voices." I happen to write another blog called "Modern Voices" so voices is a meaningful concept to me, but your voices are far more meaningful ones. :-)

Thanks for reading...I've subscribed to your blog.

[MarillaAnne]

Just letting you know ... I'm listening and looking forward to the rest. Thanks for a great piece!

[John Gerstner]

Linda, I really love your "best principles" vs "best practices" take on helping others to wrap our heads around this social media thing. I found this first one very insightful and a great resource to come back to. Looking forward to the next four! Keep up the good work. John