Behind the Buzz - digital and interactive advertising and marketing

5 lessons in promoting your brand

by Rachel on June 18th, 2008

Stephanie Booth recently ran a conference for freelancers called Going Solo. As a follow up, she discussed 5 Lessons in Promoting Events Using Social Media. Taking the lessons to heart, she also promoted the post through various tools. Suw has looked at the points in relation to adopting social media tools in the enterprise and I though I’d see how they were applicable for promoting products in a mass market. In this case, the people doing the promotion could be PR professionals, customer service teams, brand teams or agencies.

1. The absolute best channel to promote anything is one-on-one personal conversation with somebody you already have some sort of relationship with.

The best PR people cultivate a relationship with their targets, which were traditionally press or other media. Get to know them, the stories they like, the freebies they react to and you have a better chance to get your story out there. With the rise of social media, there are more outlets than ever before and the connections required have increased.

As has been written about before, first contacts with social media writers need to connect, show that you understand what they write about and how your product/pitch is relevant to them. Once that hurdle is over, if they write about you, then there is a greater chance that other stories would be useful as the realtionship develops.

But if you really want to connect to your blog press, try building the relationship before you want something. Find out if your targets gather at meetings and conferences and go strike up a real life relationship; contribute to the message boards. Be a real member of the community, not just one who only pops when you want something.

2. Blogs and Twitter are essential, but don’t neglect less sexy forms of communication: newsletter, press release, printable material.

You never know where someone may stumble across your information or how they would prefer to receive it, so make sure it’s out there and accessible in multiple formats. On the subject of press releases, if you want to get online press, include online assets such as videos and images.

3. Don’t expect “viral” or “organic” spreading of your promotion to happen, but prepare the field so it can: the forwardable e-mail.

Or ensure your videos are embeddable, your sites are linkable if built in flash so people can link directly to the content that they want to share. Add the email your friend tools (yes, some people prefer them), add the one click buttons and make it easy for people to send content to their places, the Facebook, MySpace, blog or whatever. If you want your stuff to spread, make it EASY. Don’t expect people to just visit it where you want it to be seen.

As a consequence, you have to be really strong on your metrics. You have to be planning early on exactly how you are going to track the content as it spreads. Line up the tools and agree the methods, explain the limitations.

4. Go where people are. Be everywhere.

The is the outcome of the previous 3 items; work on those relationships where your audience is, look at all the methods that you can communicate through and make sure your content can be everywhere. Get it out there, you never quite know where it could take off from.

5. It’s a full-time job.

Social media promotion is not scalable for mass products, it cannot replace other methods if you want to let many, many people know about your product. But it does complement it and makes it stronger. If someone sees an ad they are likely to look up the product on the web to help make a decision about it, so being present and active in the media improves the chances of the product being considered. Of course, if you’re not present, he product may still be written about but you have no chance of ever being part of the conversation to reacting to it. But within a team, it needs to be seen as a full time job, someone needs to take responsibility for it and be working on it all the time (either long term as part of a strategy or short term tactical campaigns). Don’t just tack it on to another job, make the space for it (and the measurement).

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POSTED IN: Blogging and Blogs, Buzz Marketing