sym·pho·ny (s m f -n ) n. pl. sym·pho·nies
- Music.
- An extended piece in three or more movements for symphony orchestra.
- An instrumental passage in a vocal or choral composition.
- An instrumental overture or interlude, as in early opera.
- Music.
- A symphony orchestra.
- An orchestral concert.
- Harmony, especially of sound or color.
- Something characterized by a harmonious combination of elements.
Imagine the modern communications professional as the conductor of this orchestra. The goal? To present a complete experience to all relevant audiences using all of the tools at his or her disposal. What are those instruments or tools at his or her disposal?
- The percussion section: Distribution over a newswire, such as PR Newswire, Business Wire or Market Wire, which drives everything else.
- The horns: Properly optimizing that news release using keywords and phrases.
- The strings: Posting that news release on your website or media room section.
- The woodwinds: All of the social tools that are available, including tags, print, email to a friend, add to Digg, add to Deli.cio.us, Technorati this!, RSS and email subscriptions.
- And here comes the Maestro himself belting out the operatic melody line: The content!
Now imagine today’s modern audience participant, who can consume this content in any way he or she chooses. Using our symphony analogy, that audience (or audiences):
· May choose to sit and enjoy this music live on the banks of the Charles River … under the stars on a blanket with a bottle of wine.
· May watch it on their local PBS affiliate live in the comfort of their home.
· May TIVO it for later viewing on a schedule of their choice.
· May listen to it in the car on their NPR affiliate.
· May subscribe to an audio podcast from the website and listen to it on their treadmill during the morning workout.
· Or, if they like it, might blog about it and reference the original content.
· Might submit the podcast to their shared iPod list for their friend’s enjoyment.
· Might make a comment on the NPR or symphony website, if available.
· Might hear about it from a friend via a forwarded email or a blog post.
· Might find it months later by Googling and downloading it via RSS out of an archive.
Back to our dictionary definition: “something characterized by a harmonious combination of elements.” The Internet is made up of elements that are hardly harmonious and are at many times acrimonious. The challenge for communications professionals today is not only distribution, but also monitoring and management—a daunting task knowing that audiences can take Internet content and push it around, re-invent it, mash it up as their own, comment on it, post about it, and otherwise generally manhandle it with no knowledge by the company. This highly viral and dangerous Internet marketplace is beyond the grasp and control of most of us. So, what’s the answer?
Transparency as a concept
You must embrace transparency. By being completely accurate and open with content at times, by attempting to make this content available and findable in as many ways as possible in the company’s own voice, by attempting to be immediately and honestly responsive to audience participation and potential criticism when necessary, a company has at least a fighting chance of getting and maintaining respect amongst the Internet eFluencers. But it is a fearful step for most.
The truth about news wires
PR Newswire has market leadership in news distribution, but all of the wires get your news out on a widespread basis. Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure) in 2000 helped cement the press release as one of the “compliant” forms of disclosure. Reg. FD did NOT factor in the widespread folksonomy of the Internet and the newfound ability of audiences to find information on their own quite so easily. Bleeding-edge evangelists perceive the traditional “press release” to be dead and the big wire services to be hampering progress rather than participating in an evolution. In fact, there are those out there that are actively soliciting the SEC to change Reg. FD to allow corporate websites, media rooms and even blogs to be compliant vehicles WITHOUT requiring the distribution of a press release. There are similar regulations in place in the nonprofit world.
The fear is real
Most communications pros—certainly those within the 5,500 or so public companies in this country or within highly sensitive nonprofit organizations—have a healthy fear of this type of information exchange. They DON’T want their CEO or executive director blogging. They certainly don’t want him or her blogging without a filter or an approval mechanism in place. For a corporate communications professional, this environment is a little too Wild, Wild West for them. The press release, distributed through traditional means, at least allows communications professionals to make sure that the information is 100 percent accurate and is in the organization’s own voice.
How can you help?
1. Distribution: How do I get my organization’s information out there in the first place?
a. Pick a news wire service and send your news releases over the wire, choosing one of the many distribution options they offer—either by geographical area, by trade or by a specifically-built custom list.
b. Highlight key words and phrases for optimization of the news release. What words or sentences are important for your organization? Create live hyperlinks in the body text of the release to locations on your website that discuss those things.
c. Take advantage of social tagging capabilities from the wire services, such as Deli.cio.us, Technorati, Digg, RSS or email to a friend.
d. Post that news release onto the media section of your website. Many of the wire services offer a seamless MediaRoom product that allows for automatic posting of all releases directly from the wire onto your site. Each release generates a dynamic page on the site that is indexed by the search engines.
e. Further optimize the pages and sections within your organization’s website by adding Title Tags and keyword meta tags to the various pages. Again, many of the wire service’s offerings do this automatically for you.
f. Add RSS feeds of your news releases to your website. This not only allows for people to subscribe to receive your news, but it also turbo-charges your search engine performance. Many experts believe that adding RSS feeds is the single most important step to improving your overall search engine performance.
g. Set up email notifications so that media and other audiences can subscribe to get your news via email.
h. Consider adding social elements to the pages of your website, including Technorati, Digg, Del.ico.us, StumbleUpon, etc.
i. Add a registration form or comments box in order to receive direct feedback from end users of the website or media section.
2. Targeting: Who are the people receiving your news?
Because these press releases can now be “tagged” as favorites or subscribed to by end users in the variety of ways mentioned above, the client knows that the releases are not only cutting a wider swath through the world but, more importantly, they are being delivered directly to those that ask for it. The media knows that once they subscribe to the RSS feeds on your organization’s website or media section, they will get all of your news instantly once it’s distributed. You know that your audiences are being served directly because of these tools.
3. Monitoring and measurement: What are people saying about you out there—and is it a potential problem?
a. Ewatch, Factiva, Magenta and other monitoring services now track blogs.
b. Your website should allow you to track all visitor traffic to your site, including navigation, page views, downloads, etc. You can determine referrals, such as where a user came from prior to landing on your site. Did that user click through from a news wire-distributed press release? Google? Yahoo Biz? A blog posting? You can actually determine whether or not your “social” efforts amount to anything via site tracking.
c. Protect parts of your pages or entire sections with passwords. Add registration forms to any page. These tools allow you to allow access to only special interest groups or exclusive journalists, etc.
d. Most news clips can be pulled automatically from your Factiva, Magenta or Ewatch account and published on your website pages, so that you can automatically post what others in the media are saying about the company.
e. Using your website’s content manager, you can respond in the company’s voice to anything that happens to be floating around out in the blogosphere that you feel you need to respond to “officially.” Build out a section to deal just with that issue and then link to it from any “official” statement or news release.
f. Using some of these tools in conjunction, you can monitor what is being said about your organization, as well as who is coming to your website to check facts, hear what the company has to say and view your official “take” on the matter.
4. Multimedia: No one wants just text anymore … sorry!
a. Post related images to your site following the distribution of a news release. Produce and post a podcast to your site. Add rich imagery that supports your messages.
b. Depending upon your content management system, pages should be dynamically created within your site for each multimedia asset posted to the site, whether it is a photo, a video or a podcast. The URL to these pages is indexed by the search engines, making it much easier to find.
c. Multimedia can be “pulled” via opt-in RSS feed subscriptions to any user, including media, customers, etc.
d. Each image or piece of media can be “alt-tagged.”
e. Each image or piece of media posted to the site’s multimedia gallery can be emailed to a friend, added to Del.icio.us, added to Digg, added to Technorati, downloaded or saved as a favorite. Remember that you enabled these capabilities in your site earlier!
f. Streaming video links can be added to your site’s gallery pages.
g. Low-resolution downloadable video clips can be directly loaded onto the pages of your website.
h. A comments box or registration form can be added to the multimedia gallery to solicit feedback from media and consumers.
Summary
We are all making efforts to be more socially acceptable in this new environment. The perception is far worse than the reality. While new Internet evangelists want to kill news release and wire services and their profitable business model, the reality is that these two worlds will and should coexist. Any new technology has early adopters and evangelists. Then, maybe there’s a tipping point towards mass adoption. But not always—and certainly not at the pace desired by evangelists.
A well-structured website and media section is an essential step for your organization in adopting a more “social” attitude about your information dissemination. Always keep in mind that a blog is a media section is a website. It doesn’t really matter what the Web “vehicle” is, as long as it is under the direct content control of YOU without reliance upon your IT group. Blogs by perception are still scary to us because they represent the great “unwashed.” Corporate websites are mostly NOT under the control of the communications team, because they are handcuffed by the IT group.
Make the Web team part of your social symphony by bringing the different elements together.
By Dee Rambeau, managing partner of The Fuel Team, a company that helps nonprofit executives manage their online communications. Contact him at drambeau@thefuelteam.com.
