I hosted a session at the Charity Comms Social Media conference on how to get your message out clearly amongst the noise of the social web, and I thought I’d share my slides.
Getting heard in_an_ever_louder_world
- 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each week
- 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute
- 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook,
- Over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute
- 100 million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc) every week
- 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generate content
- 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
- 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations, 70% from strangers, 14% trust advertisements
- 56% say they are more likely to recommend a brand after becoming a fan
- 3% of people return to a Facebook page after they’ve “liked” it
This is the video that the Dell team shared in their presentation, which also has a few useful nuggets:
Throughout the day there were a couple of clear themes: integration and being, rather than doing, social. The communications landscape is evolving at an ever increasing pace, with the proliferation of media channels and the seemingly unpredictable ways in which people jump from TV to Facebook to Google to online reviews to text messages to magazines … and so on.
The simplest way to look at this when planning a communications strategy is to put media into three categories: paid, owned and earned. The balance of these will vary depending on what your key objectives are. Broadly speaking, as the diagram at the end of the presentation shows:
- Paid jumpstarts owned by driving traffic to your website, social media accounts etc
- Owned sustains earned by providing detailed information, news releases etc
- Earned drives effectiveness and impact up by leveraging the networks of others to increase the reach of your story
The conversations on the social web never stop. We can’t just buy ad space then call it quits. We have to continue the conversation, engage consumers and really earn that earned media. We don’t want any ‘dead ends’ — that conversation should be cross-platform. The goal is to connect the dots and integrate all media for maximum results.
The important thing to remember is that social media is not a vertical, like advertising or PR. It’s a horizontal layer that wants to touch every part of your organization, from supporter acquisition to donor retention, from service delivery to volunteer communications and beyond. When we start thinking in that way is when we start being, not just doing, social.
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