Richard Giles

Today I’m giving a presentation at the National PRIA Conference. It’s a brief one, as part of their Generation Y panel: Where Now Generation Y?

Makes me feel young .

Last Friday I was also given a chance to present at a lecture at Edith Cowan University. PRN2121 – PR Techniques. They got a preview of the presentation. In fact, calling it a preview might be unfair, as they got the extended version.

So here is my slide deck and my notes for both presentations. Feel free to correct me, or add your own thoughts in the comments.

1. Public Relations just got harder.

Earlier in the year I gave a presentation at Bar Camp with Bronwen Clune of Norg Media. In it I made a statement that I’ve repeated several times since.

Social media is a life choice.

By that, I mean that social media is something you have to live. You have to embrace it as part of what you do, everyday. It’s not something you can do successfully by ducking in and out occasionally. You need to commit to it, and be consistent.

For those in the Public Relations industry, it means that your job just got harder. Because the Internet has made it so much easier for almost anyone to communicate, it means that PR people need to spend more time involved online.

The good news is that although more time is required, it’s really just a matter of engaging common sense.

There are a bunch of different tools that someone in PR can use to get involved. I’ll outline some of them here. But keep in mind that these are tools, and it doesn’t mean that every one is useful for every industry. It’s easy for me, given I live in the IT industry, and almost all of them are applicable to that. Other industries will vary in their contact with the online world.

2. News and Echo Searches.

Every morning I get up and check my email, and a couple of news sites. In fact I almost completely rely on Techmeme to stay up to date with what is happening online. It aggregates a bunch of other news sources, and determines what is currently popular. That can save me hours in keeping up to date with blogs, and other news sites.

Fortunately almost anyone can cut down the time it takes to scour online news by using a news aggregator. One example is Google Reader. Simply bookmark the web sites that provide you with news feeds (almost all online news sites do these days), and it will check these sites for updates automatically. When there is a new story, it’ll update your list with just that news item. It can save you hours going to each of these sites individually, so that now you can skim the new headlines.

Aggregators work great for scouring a large number of sites that you’d like to stay up to date with. If you have a collection of news sites for your industry, add them to an aggregator, and you’ll stay up to date in minutes each day.

For specific updates, like details for a particular company, product, brand, or person, you can also use “Echo Searches.” Everyone knows about “Vanity Searches:” doing a Google search for your own name. Echo searches, are similar, but are a great way to check what’s happening online with other items. For example, you can set a Google Alert for any search term, and it will email you daily, or even as soon as it finds a result.

Another Echo Search is Twitter’s own search tool: Twitter Search. Search it for stock market, earth quake, or apple, when any of these major events take place, and you’ll see conversations and thoughts on each topic.

3. Blogging. It’s the conversations stupid.

Blogging has been around long enough for it to widely know. But some people still can’t grasp what they’re really made off: conversations.

This means that if you’re going to start a blog, or even read a blog, the best results are generated when you start using the comments feature. Or at the very least replying to blog posts on your own weblog. That’s when blogs become powerful. That’s when blogs become a community.

There’s also a couple of other benefits from involvement in conversations: networking, and search engine optimisation (SEO).

4. Podcasting, streaming, and user generated content (UGC).

I’ve lumped these together, because they are loosely related, but mostly because I’ve only got 10 minutes to run through Social Media in a general sense. But they’re all very powerful mediums if they’re done well.

Podcasting whether audio, or video, is a great way to do several things: inform, network, build or strengthen a community.

The important thing to keep in mind is creating compelling content. It’s got to be content that useful for the communities that you want to reach, and that just means you’re allowed to think outside of the box: interview experts, create comedy, aggregate news, etc.

Streaming is also another interesting way to be involved in a community. By streaming live, it provides a great way to interact in real time with other people. It’s very niche at the moment, and might not be great for many industries, but it has potential to be very powerful in the future.

User generate content is probably the most difficult to harness. Though if it’s done it can be the most effective, especially when it goes viral. A great example happened for Mentos and Diet Coke when Eepybird created a video of Diet Coke and Mentos eruptions.

5. Social Networks.

I’ve signed up to a bunch of social networks. Depending on the industry, some are more useful that others.

Personally I find LinkedIn (here is my profile, Richard Giles) invaluable. I’m constantly using it to find people in companies that I’d like to contact regarding my business.

It’s useful for doing background research, as well as finding connections who might be willing to introduce you.

Also worth investigating, from a organisations perspective is Facebook groups, and Ning.

That’s unless you’re willing to create your own Social Network, like Oracle Mix (thanks to @chloe814 for pointing out Mix to me).

6. Microblogging. WTF, I don’t even have a blog yet.

My god, if there is one social network that’s been mentioned to death in the last year, it’s Twitter. Saying that, it’s also changed the way a lot of people network online.

Other than meeting some great people through Twitter, I’ve also made some REALLY valuable connections with people from a business point of view. A recent trip to China was incredibly valuable because of people I connected with via Twitter.

Not only that, when you combine it with their search tool, and use it for Echo Searches you can learn some amazing things about companies or topics.

The jury is still out, but @BigPondTeam recently joined the conversation, and have been showing that even Telstra can get it right. If they continue to embrace the medium they may actually show that they care.

There are also other microblogging platforms, like Plurk, and Seesmic.

Another interesting way of using microblogging is to roll your own. The Presets, an Australian dance band created their own as part of a viral campaign for their latest single: Talk Like That.

7. Other social media. Flickr, Wikis, FriendFeed etc.

I’ve only managed to cover a handful of social mediums, but it’s worth knowing that there are a vast range of ways of using any of them for public relations.

One example I love to use is meeting people through Flickr. If I attend I technology conference I like to take my camera and grab a bunch of snaps. If you take the right sorts of photos, and tag them well enough, you’ll manage to meet a few people at the conference through Flickr.

Check out Modofly on Flickr. Companies like them do an excellent job of using the photo sharing site.

Wikis can also be a powerful medium for public relations. Imagine turning a web sites control over to the customer. Image a Government department doing that. Might be some harsh words, but the lessons and information could be invaluable.

8. Face-to-Face.

I wonder if I put this one in to make sure I keep myself honest. It’s probably there because us lot that are involved online on a daily basis need a reality check once in a while. Most human interaction happens off-line.

It’s also worth repeating what I said at the start. Not all these online tools work for every industry. Some communities just don’t live online, and no matter how hard you try, you won’t reach them there.

9. Authenticity. Rule # 1: Be yourself.

If there is one thing I’d like people to remember when it comes to Public Relations and Social Media, it’s the word Authenticity: being real, honest, and genuine.

All you need to remember is to be yourself. It’s the easiest thing to do, though when we start communicating for an organisation, we often lose the ability. But when people hear from a company, or want to tell them something, they really want to speak to a person, not a corporate handbook.