The emergence of social media has created huge opportunities for public relations/communications and marketing—traditionally known for their adversarial relationship due to competition for budgets and preferential treatment from the C-suite—to forge collaborative partnerships, both as departments within organizations and as cooperative outside agencies. The reason: It’s the common ground on which both disciplines can achieve their objectives of reaching and engaging highly targeted audiences.
Perhaps more compelling, though, is the availability of data made available by social media—data that can be used by both sides to better understand their stakeholders’ habits and preferences. The key, though, is learning to share. With that in mind, PR executives should consider the following best practices for facilitating effective collaboration with marketing in the realm of social media.
â–¶ Identify your objectives up front, and then compare them to those of your marketing counterpart to see where they overlap. According to Troy Kelley, executive vice president and chief digital officer of Arnold Worldwide, this stage is all about conducting a business and market assessment, and asking yourself, “What are our social business objectives?”
Often, for marketing and communications, these objectives will be to increase any one of the following:
• Awareness
• Consideration
• Preference
• Sales
• Retention
By identifying your shared objectives up front, you can begin developing integrated strategies from the outset of an initiative, instead of realizing halfway through that you are intersecting—or worse, actually competing.
Intuit serves as a good example of identifying shared objectives for its “Freeloader Nation” campaign around the TurboTax product’s “FREE” edition. Specifically, the campaign sought to “leverage social media to engage new friends and followers of our brand, and to encourage them to create conversations around our brand in a way that drives awareness and acquisition for TurboTax,” says Scott Gulbransen, senior manager of communications and social media for Intuit.
The campaign would be rolled out in multiple social media channels to get audiences talking about TurboTax and, in turn, to increase awareness and sales.
â–¶ Assess the online profile and user preferences of your target audiences. Once the objectives of a campaign have been established, it’s time to “understand the social habits of your target audience,” Kelley says.
For communications professionals, this means finding out where and how these audiences like to engage online; for marketers, it means understanding what will drive them to take a desired action. For both, it means identifying the target audiences in the first place, and gathering data to benchmark against down the road.
â–¶ Develop a concept and strategy around the brand. At this point, it’s important to note that the both the brand offering and the audience are immutable, in the sense that they cannot be completely changed to accommodate one another. (For example, a consumer packaging company can’t start selling professional services like consulting just because it is something they think their target audience might be interested in paying for.)
Communications and marketing professionals need to find a way to connect these two end points with messaging that initiates and subsequently builds viable, sustained relationships.
Of course, social media is the ideal place to make this connection, so communications and marketing executives need to work together to develop a brand concept and strategy that will resonate with the target audience. The “concept” is what the audience will ultimately latch onto; the strategy is how the executives plan to make this happen.
â–¶ Develop a brand experience plan. This is the point where communications and marketing collectively establish the experience they want to create for audiences, and the environment in which they want to do it. The tactics—a Twitter contest, Facebook community development, a blogger outreach campaign, etc.—will initiate the execution phase.
For the TurboTax campaign, tactics included the “SuperStatus Social Experiment” contest, which “leveraged the traffic and friends from MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to engage with TurboTax to win amazing prizes,” Gulbransen says.
â–¶ Analyze outcomes. Once the campaign has been executed, the team must assess how successful it was, which is easy thanks to the metrics offered by social media.
For the campaign around the TurboTax product, the team was able to analyze exposure and engagement—two key performance indicators that any communications and/or marketing department could take to the bank. Specifically, post-campaign analysis revealed increased equity and purchase intent among those who participated in the campaign.
When initiating any communications campaign, public relations executives should realize that the social media domain offers ample opportunities to collaborate with marketers to enhance both sides’ results. The guiding principles are simple.
“Listen first, then converse,” Kelley says. “Be authentic to the brand, the consumer and the platform. And always be conversation-worthy.”
CONTACTS:
Troy Kelley, [email protected]; Scott Gulbransen, [email protected]