Today’s guest post comes from one of our favorite customers, Adria Saracino. Adria is the head of outreach at Distilled, a digital marketing firm with offices in London, Seattle, and NYC. When not consulting on outreach or content strategies, you can find her managing a team of outreach warriors or writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet.
If your outreach strategy still relies solely on a Google search, it’s time to catch up with the times and start leveraging today’s social media landscape.
From Facebook to Pinterest and everything in between, social media has become by far the best way to build relationships and community while also establishing authenticity and expertise. But while there’s a lot out there about how businesses should leverage social media for their overall business functions, there’s less so about how individual employees can use social media to be more efficient specifically at outreach.
The following five tips seek to remedy that. Here are a few creative ways to build relationships with site owners in unexpected places.
1. Monitor Influencer Conversations on Twitter
As a place where authentic conversations flow naturally and oversharing is the norm, Twitter is a great place for finding not just customers but site owners, too. Why? Because site owners and contributors are just as hyped about social media as you are, and tend to tweet frequently as a means of driving traffic.
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Yeah, I Foursquare. I even have a Foursquare profile for BuzzStream. You can watch me check into one of three coffee shops in the morning, the office for the afternoon, maybe a happy hour spot around 6pm and then a couple random spots at night. Am I always at where I check in? No. I try to Fakesquare a few places when I’m stuck at a stop light. Foursquare is doing its best to catch cheaters like me. This begs the questions, why do I Foursquare? I’m not sure yet, but I keep doing it and now that Twitter “Places” is live many more will be joining me in the location game.
What does this mean for PR? What’s compelling is the opportunity to integrate location data into a relationship management service. Think of a SCRM or like platform keeps tabs on the location of your contacts in proximity to you. What if you got alerts when specific contacts came with in “range”. A kind of “set it and forget it” option that thinks for you in the background.
Twitter says, “By turning on this feature, you can include location information like neighborhood, town, or exact point when you tweet.” Exact point? That might be a little much. It feels a bit too “big brother” and I see the opportunity for a whole new level of stalking. But the advantage of knowing the proximity of your contacts provides for possible offline interaction. A more memorable and personal interaction that builds the relationship in ways that phone calls, emails and Tweets can not. It builds trust, faster.
For this to make sense we need mass adoption. Twitter is the first step, especially for B2B and last month Facebook said they were getting into the location game. If that’s true for Facebook then the lever for mass adoption will be pulled and with it comes a profound increase in location accuracy because it’s not a game. There’s nothing to win, so trying to game the game goes away. No more random check-in’s but specific locations attached to everyday communication. If done right, this information could be a boon to the busy PR pro wanting to efficiently connect with their contacts offline. Perhaps my Fakesquaring days are over.
