Health advocates who promote safe sex to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS have to be pretty darn creative to garner 2.1 million views of a video.
Not the case, though, when @KensingtonPalace, the official Twitter account for the Royal Family, tweets.
To promote this week’s 21st International AIDS Conference, Prince Harry made social media history. The fifth-in-line to the throne underwent an HIV test live to show the ease—and importance—of being checked.
Video of the test, which included an unidentified health worker walking him through the procedure, was streamed live on the British royal family’s Facebook page. “It is amazing how quick it is,” the 31-year-old Harry said during his appointment at a London hospital. The famously red-headed royal added: “So whether you’re a man, woman, gay, straight, black or white—even ginger—why wouldn’t you come and have a test?”
Ian Green, chief executive of Terrence Higgins Trust, said in a statement: “Prince Harry’s decision to take an HIV test, live on social media, is a groundbreaking moment in the fight against HIV.”
Prince Harry appeared relieved in the video when the test was completed and the negative result was delivered.
The prince was praised for his “genuine and personal commitment” to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS. His advocacy is being compared to his mother’s legacy. Many news reports recalled images of Princess Diana in the 1980s hugging children suffering from the disease.
According to the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1.2 million people are living with HIV. One in eight don’t know they have the condition. Over the last decade, the annual number of new HIV diagnoses dropped nearly 20 percent in the U.S.
Consistent marketing and public awareness efforts—like that of Prince Harry’s—can help further reduce the spread of the disease.
Facebook offers great opportunities to attract, engage and convert would-be customers, but building a high-converting Facebook page has been elusive for many organizations.
It’s important to know the elements of a successful Facebook page; it’s even more crucial to recognize the reasons your Facebook page is failing.
If you want your ideal customers to “like” your page and follow you, you have to continually reward them with great content and build an engaged community. This means employing a content strategy that works for your business both culturally and operationally.
You also have to incorporate Facebook ads to promote your content, increase clicks to your website and turn fans into customers.
Is achieving consistent engagement and conversions on Facebook a struggle for your company? Here’s a list of 10 reasons why your Facebook page is failing, along with tips to make it work for you rather than against you:
1. You don’t publish regularly.
Consistency is a cornerstone of Facebook (or any other) marketing approach. Users must see your posts in their newsfeeds for you to stay relevant.
It’s a battle right now for attention. Posting a few times per week or per month is not going to capture anyone’s attention.
2. Your page lacks the human touch.
Facebook pages fail when the posts focus on products instead of people. Content that demonstrates why people choose a given brand seems to be nonexistent on many Facebook pages.
If you approach Facebook with the sole mindset of “making money,” you will end up wasting your time. Facebook is first and foremost a social network, not a business network.
“In this ever-changing society, the most powerful and enduring brands are built from the heart. They are real and sustainable. Their foundations are stronger because they are built with the strength of the human spirit, not an ad campaign. The companies that are lasting are those that are authentic.” -Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks
3. You’re not using the three-stage content approach.
Content marketing (a component to Facebook and all other forms of marketing) is a powerful tool for driving qualified traffic and leads. The challenge lies in consistently producing high-quality, original content.
Content must reach all aspects of the buying cycle:
Entertain. Crazy as it seems, most people who engage with your page are not immediately in-market. The inability to engage this type of prospect is where many pages fail.
Educate. Fans who either are thinking about a purchase (or who have friends who are) appreciate answers to their questions.
Excite. Facebook posts and ads must offer something worth their time. Exciting content compels people to click in anticipation.
4. Your posts look and feel counterfeit.
Every company brand has a unique personality.
People are looking for authentic brands—brands that communicate exactly who they are and what impact they want to have in their customers’ lives.
Publishing banal content will mean a quick trip to the bottom. This is obvious when companies hire outside providers (and sometimes shady vendors) to “do social media” for them. The provider’s branding comes through on your Facebook posts, and it looks like someone other than you is doing the work, so fans will scroll right past your content.
Real people are behind your brand, so let that shine through in your content.
5. You don’t fully understand your target audience.
Creating a content strategy without a clear understanding of your audience is like setting sail without navigational tools. You’re out there, you’re taking action, but you’re not working toward a specific goal. Pretty soon, huge amounts of time and money have been spent without any clear return on investment.
Facebook’s deep data help companies and marketers to laser-target ideal users. Building target audience profiles improves your Facebook marketing tenfold.
Determining the “buyer personas” of your core audience improves the way you solve problems for your customers. Useful, high-quality content increases engagement and builds your social media presence. Website content (such as blog posts) published on Facebook and clicked through to your site increases search ranking.
6. You don’t regularly conduct a Facebook page audit.
Whether your social media marketing is done in-house or outsourced, it’s often difficult to know where the gaps are between your current successes and where you want to be. Your inbox is full of tips and tools for mastering Facebook, and it’s exhausting.
There are a host of ways you benefit from an audit or review of your social media. Given today’s accelerated rate of potential failure with Facebook marketing, a social media conversion review can help your page achieve your goals faster.
7. You’re ignoring comments and messages.
Facebook is a communication channel, just like email and the telephone. Customer service via social media is hugely important, but if you don’t have a process to monitor, listen and respond to messages, you’re dead in the water.
Nobody likes being ignored. If you’re looking for a competitive advantage, social media customer service is the answer. Here’s why:
71 percent of consumers who experience positive social media customer care are likely to recommend the brand to others, compared with just 19 percent of customers who do not get a response. (Sentiment)
Today’s tech-savvy consumers want their online questions to be addressed promptly; 42 percent expect a response within one hour. (Gigya)
33 percent of users prefer to contact brands via social media rather than by telephone. (Nielsen)
83 percent of respondents in a recent survey said they liked—or even loved—when a company responded to them on social media. (Convince and Convert)
8. You have no defined goals.
High-converting Facebook pages have well-defined marketing goals.
Begin with an outline of three goals, and build out specific strategies to help each client achieve them:
Attract. Likability and relevancy are huge in attracting new and established customers to your Facebook page. Add value to their lives by delivering high-quality content.
Engage. Many companies fall flat when determining what to do with their fans once they’ve become connected.
Convert. Attracting and engaging the right audience lays the groundwork. Drive conversions by providing information and value that help them finalize their purchase decision.
9. You’re not using the power of Facebook ads.
Facebook has become a powerful platform to market and advertise a business. Facebook pages fail because they aren’t using Facebook ads correctly or they’re not using Facebook ads at all.
No Facebook page will work without Facebook ads. You must pay Facebook to reach your target audience and deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time.
No pay, no play.
10. You’re not measuring and analyzing your results.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Organizations that don’t review their Facebook results are doomed to repeat their mistakes over and over.
Facebook Insights is your best friend. It gives you all the metrics you need to judge how your page is doing. You can see which content got the most organic and paid interaction, what you did right, and what didn’t work so well. Analyzing results helps you deliver a better experience for fans, make better decisions on your content, and determine whether you’ve reached your goals.
In Trump University Branding 101, by one Donald Trump and Donald Sexton, our business guru advises that while “you do not need a graphic design house to develop your logo … you do need to be sure that your logo leads to the attributes you want associated with your brand.” Sage advice, surely, and the kind of Trumpian insight we can see on full display in the new logo for his campaign with vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence, released [Friday].
The logo—which featured a T intertwined with (and seemingly penetrating) a P, quickly gained notoriety as social media users derided the design.
“In minutes, it seemed, one logo turned all of the Internet into 12-year-olds,” NPR’s Sam Sanders wrote.
Political commentator and comedian Samantha Bee even reproduced the logo in a NSFW gif.
The jokes weren’t limited to Twitter, either. “Trumps new campaign logo penetrates the GOP,” Co.Design reported. Wired’s headline read, “The ins and outs of the new Trump-Pence logo” and Slate titled its piece, “A hard look at the Trump-Pence campaign’s penetrating new logo.”
By the time Trump officially named Pence as his vice presidential running mate during a press conference on Saturday, the logo had been removed.
The image no longer appears on the Trump campaign’s website—nor on the Republican National Committee’s website. CNet reported that a fundraising email from Pence sent during Trump’s press conference also “sported a somewhat different logo from the one revealed on Friday.”
“The file name is actually “tp_newer_logo” on the site,” Co.Design reported.
Trump isn’t the only one to receive backlash over his campaign logo. When presidential candidate Hillary Clinton announced her campaign, many criticized her logo as appearing too “corporate.”
Though the Trump campaign has replaced the now-infamous logo, it’s remaining tight-lipped about the faux pas.
Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, told CNN: “We have a number of logos. The final one won’t be unveiled until the convention.”
If you don’t have a mobile communications strategy, you’re behind the curve.
Don’t stress—we’ve put together a virtual summit packed with mobile communications experts who want share their best practices with you. Join us for The Mobile Comms Virtual Master Class, on Wednesday, July 20, from 11 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. Central time, and learn how to reach employees and customers on this crucial platform.
Shift your publications from computers to mobile devices.
Embrace apps and instant messaging to speed your deployment of mobile content.
Produce and distribute video on mobile devices for all your audiences.
Create a mobile strategy that delivers what your employees and customers need.
Get hands-on, how-to instruction you can put to use immediately from experts at IBM, RedeApp and Ruckus Factory Digital Studios.
It’s high time for some good news out there in CommunicatorLand.
BREAKING: You’re looking great in the storytelling department, folks, says Steve Crescenzo of Crescenzo Communications.
“Everybody is getting better at this,” the popular consultant says. “Everybody. Organizations are finally figuring out that in order to tell their stories and get people to pay attention to them, they’ve got to do a better job.”
That’s because if you’re boring, you’re sunk in this age of instant online gratification. Crescenzo levels his assessment in a new Ragan Training video, “7 ways to make sure you’re relevant five years from now.”
“In a content-saturated culture, we’ve got to define new roles for ourselves,” he says.
Here are three of the seven roles he says communicators must assume in their organizations:
1. Storyteller
This is where Crescenzo sees huge improvements. Organizations are figuring out that where there are human beings, there is drama.
Still, you might protest, that’s fine for Disney or Red Bull. What about our outfit making boring old aluminum shelving or cardboard accordion files? The secret is people. Consider the example of Kleenex.
“Where’s the drama in Kleenex?” Crescenzo says. “You blow your nose in Kleenex. How can you tell a story about Kleenex?”
Yet Kleenex communicators asked themselves, Why do people reach for a tissue? At least some of the time, it’s because they’re teary-eyed. This means emotion-human drama. So the company developed a “Messages of Care” campaign of emotional videos that make viewers reach for a tissue.
One of them is about a Chicago school chorus teacher who came back to work after beating cancer, only to find herself welcomed by choir alums singing “Amazing Grace.”
“Get your Kleenex ready,” Crescenzo says as he plays the clip.
The video doesn’t even mention Kleenex until the end, he notes.
“It’s not about Kleenex,” he says. The company “pulls people to their content rather than pushing it at people. Only works if the content is superb—which it is.”
The video also scored Kleenex all kinds of positive coverage—the kind few press releases would ever get secure. The video sparked stories in news media outlets as far-flung as Chicago’s WGN TV and the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
2. Content gatherer
Not everyone has the time or budget to produce professional videos. User-generated content, though, involves getting your employees and customers to tell their stories.
At Stantec, an urban planning company, they took inspiration from Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”). Stantec told employees, “I want you to tell me a six-word story about your experience in this company.”
The company made it a contest , asking employees to encapsulate their work experience and the organization’s mission and values. They thought they might get 50 or 60 to post on the intranet; they got 1,500.
“That’s how hungry people are to contribute,” Crescenzo says. “They want to generate content. They want to be heard.”
One staffer wrote, “My projects make my community better,” while another offered, “Driven by community, creativity, and passion!” The winner was, “Needed a job. Found a home.”
Stantec posted it all on the internet, along with portraits of the people, and it has become the company’s biggest recruiting tool, Crescenzo says. It kept going from there. iPhone videos. Walls in the conference rooms. Bigwigs giving six-word reports each from their annual shindig. The CEO relates the best stories in his presentations to investors. Marketers use them in trade-show booths.
“You can’t just dump stuff on the intranet,” Crescenzo says. “You can’t just push out press releases. … We need to be able to find the content people will talk about.”
3. Alchemist
You recall the alchemists of yore, who claimed to be able to turn lead into gold.
It’s worse than that in corporate comms on some days. How often do you feel, Crescenzo asks, that you “have to turn corporate crap into gold”? Have you ever been bored by something you’re writing—while you’re writing it? Bad sign.
Much of what communicators find themselves doing, however, is making the important interesting. Safety is certainly important; so are marketing and values. But interesting? Less so.
“No child will ever ask you to read them a press release at bedtime,” Crescenzo says, quoting a poster from Shift Communications. “They want you to tell them a story. So do your customers.”
“So do your employees,” he adds. “ So does the media. So does anybody you’re communicating with right now.”
Roche, the pharmaceutical giant, offers an example. You might think that accountants—however terrific they might be as individuals—wouldn’t make the most exciting employee profiles. Roche proves otherwise.
Communicators started out video-recording an accountant in the green room. He was nervous, red-faced, stammering. So they got a brown bag lunch, settled him down, and interviewed him at his workplace. He relaxed.
Turned out he had a story. His father died at an early age of an aggressive cancer, he says in a video Crescenzo played. His mother has been suffering from multiple sclerosis and uses a walker to get around. This focuses the accountant on what’s important. He said that when he comes to work every day, he keeps that patient in the center of his mind, even though he works in finance.
“It allows me to take on my skills and interests and abilities in finance and analytics, and apply that to something that makes a difference in people’s lives,” the accountant says.
You have to keep digging for the gold, Crescenzo says. Your subject might be shy at first. Next, they’ll talk in corporate platitudes. Then finally, they start to open up, and you hit pay dirt.
“That’s the beauty of being an alchemist,” Crescenzo says. “It’s finding those stories.”
Ask any journalist about their preferred channels for receiving pitches, and for most, “phone call” will be at the very bottom of the list.
It’s not that we don’t use our phones; we have no problem scheduling phone interviews or taking a quick call to follow up on an email thread. But just about every reporter I know—myself included—silently (or not so silently) curses the poor PR rep who interrupts their day with a cold phone pitch.
Many of us take to Twitter to lament the phone pitches we receive, including a few in this excellent tweet roundup by Michelle Garrett.
Journalist and digital media expert Elizabeth Spiers said it best: Phone pitches are “intrusive, disruptive to existing work; they suck up more time, and they’re horribly inefficient.”
Once a journalist has gotten into writing mode, the slightest distraction can throw off their groove. What could be more irritating than someone tacitly demanding that you stop what you’re doing, right now, to listen to a pitch you probably can’t even use?
What we find most difficult about phone pitches, aside from their disruptive nature, is that it’s hard to properly process and analyze all the information the caller is saying. Most reporters deal primarily in the written word. We retain information much better when it’s written out and we can read it at our own pace (multiple times, if needed).
We’ll lose a good chunk of a PR rep’s mile-a-minute phone pitch, and if we’re even remotely interested, we’ll probably end up asking you to email us the information anyway.
A former PR pro once told me her boss expected her to “smile and dial,” using phone outreach to journalists as the primary measure of success. I imagine the boss saw very poor results, and it was no personal reflection on the PR pro.
In many cases, cold calls are the least effective way to land coverage. Still, when used in the right context, calling a journalist could be the best way to get your story on their radar.
There are three scenarios in which cold-calling reporters is acceptable and effective.
1. Your client has urgent, breaking news relevant to their beat. This typically works only with reporters who cover breaking stories. In this case, a phone call about a developing story could mean you’re the first person to offer a source.
Proceed with caution, though, because it’s likely that you and the journalist you’re trying to reach have a different idea of what’s “urgent” and “relevant.” Be absolutely certain about the person’s beat and typical story turnaround time.
2. The journalist put out a source request and is on a tight deadline. Consider a HARO query or a call-out on social media. This person is in need of an expert source and wants to make something happen quickly. A phone call is a much faster and more direct way to reach the reporter than an email or tweet-which could get lost in the flood of other messages.
3. The journalist has publicly expressed a preference for phone pitches. They’re rare, but they do exist: Some journalists prefer getting pitched via cold call. If they’ve written in a bio or, at some point, shared that they’re OK with phone calls, you’re in the clear.
If you decide that a cold call is the right pitching method, be clear, concise and respectful of the journalist’s schedule. Make sure you ask up front if the person has a few minutes to chat, and if they say they’re busy or they’d prefer that you email them, don’t push to take up more of their time. Some might hang up on you or berate you, but in most cases, a little professional courtesy goes a very long way.
Nicole Fallon Tayloris the managing editor ofBusiness News Daily, a resource for small business owners, entrepreneurs and job seekers. Follow her on Twitter@nfallontaylor.A version ofthis articleoriginally appeared onMuck Rack,a service that enables you to find journalists to pitch, build media lists, get press alerts and create coverage reports with social media data.
