Online PR

Anyone churning their way through SEO and social media news lately is likely to notice an increasing amount of posts and news about Twitter beginning to fail its users on a regular basis. Now, for a lot of people that’s a few regained hours that would usually be spent procrastinating in the office and writing 140-character poetry to loved ones, or, alternatively, Stephen Fry. But for companies who use Twitter as their only source of new-age contact with a consumer base that’s increasingly going digital, and socially digital at that, this could be rather disruptive, and something of a worrying topic to bring up at the next board meeting.

The question is simple: why are companies choosing one social media outlet and running with it to the degree that, if it were to collapse, they would unwittingly cut themselves off from their entire target market? If you’re a company who Tweets, whether as a group, a select team of social media enthusiasts or even someone in Marketing/PR dedicated to the medium, then are you not only wasting your potential by only using one outlet, but putting your entire social media-related business presence at risk as well?

Too little, too late

Let’s be honest – this isn’t the first time we’ve seen businesses face disasters on any scale caused by bad sites or bad software, though software’s definitely the more damaging. CNET once posted an insightful, though rather shudder-worthy post discussing the impact a software failure had on the financial stability of a major company. The bottom line was that the company itself was not held to account for the failings of its infrastructure and its reliance on one piece of software.

Now, this is arguable from both sides of the fence. Yes, even in terms of Twitter (a google search for “fail whale” will give you an idea of the realistic scale of issues with it), the company running the software or website that businesses operate through are ultimately responsible if said companies suffer when the software/site fails. Of course, if this happens with a social media site, there’s a sudden drop in updates and therefore traffic to the blog, which over a day or a week can be rebuilt, steadily. When it goes really wrong is when their blog crashes and they lose all previous posts, or Twitter dies and prevents them from being the first to break industry news – a devastating and horrifying prospect for any business seen to be regularly “on the ball” in terms of new developments in their industry or sub-sector.

However, at the same time, companies are too reliant on one system of doing things, and this largely evolves as a result of the monopoly trend in the digital battle for web dominance. Twitter is never going to be bested when it comes to micro-blogging, and the Microsoft Exchange Server system is an obvious choice if everyone in the office is running to and from conferences with nothing but a netbook and a smartphone to hand.  But to be present in social media circles and rely on only one site, be it Twitter, Facebook or otherwise, is foolish at best. You wouldn’t rely on one leg and never bother having another given the option to have both, right? So why cripple your business in the same manner?

My name is Company A Ltd, and I’m a digital dependoholic

The first step to solving problems like this is simply to spread out. If you’re only running a Twitter, set up a Facebook, even a Flickr account (you never know, allowing the press easy access to pictures of your award-winning team of staff has its benefits, and wastes less of your time when it comes to the news-hounds sniffing around for something to colour their article about Employee 49 with). The same goes for software – if you’re only using TweetDeck and your entire staff roster follows suit, get them to have other options installed (or re-introduce them to their browser, if it comes to it) to prepare for the event that TweetDeck suddenly crashes and the entire tech support department stage a four-week walkout strike. You’d be surprised at the fallibility of online support for software – if Twitter went down and every single account requested support, that’s (judging by January’s statistics) over 75 million angry users. Not a weekend job.

The main issue you have to consider is the support in place in the event of a system/site-wide crash. Let’s take the Twitter example and run a few numbers:

• January 2010 number of Twitter users – 75,000,000.
• Twitter crashes, globally, everyone makes a tech request.
• Time taken to fill out forms on the part of the user, and deal with each request and give a form answer on the part of Twitter, even on auto reply: 10 seconds (thinking along the lines of writing “my twitter account doesn’t work, ” and hitting send, and the receipt page loading on a decent connection).
• Total amount of time to deal with all 75 million requests:
• 750,000,000 seconds
• 12,000,000 minutes
• 20,833.333 (recurring) hours
• 8,680 days
• 23.78 (rounded down, non-leap year) years.

Now, admittedly everyone would get their responses immediately, not one-by-one. But imagine the server capacity to respond, and take into account that almost 24 years of productivity has been lost – it’s enough to give any CEO a heart attack. But of course, if you tweet 50 times a day as a business PR attempt and twitter goes down for a day, that’s 50 tweets lost, and therefore 500 possible re-tweets – 550 tweets talking about your company lost, per day, the equivalent of one or two press releases. It’s a damaging thing to happen, and dependence like this means a lot of companies face a seriously blank afternoon if their means of doing business is lost. Scrooge would be ashamed – we should all still be keeping manual, physical records, but an over-reliance on digitised information, no need for filing cabinets (that new plant looks way better, anyway) and so-called “infallible” backup systems means we run the risk of losing everything.

Remember the Titanic? The “unsinkable” ship? Now apply that to MS Office, your email server, MSN, Facebook, Twitter, and even your phone network and the Royal Mail. Scary, right?

Have you ever submitted your well-written, thoroughly-researched article through to an aggregate site and watched it flounder as endless top-tens and ridiculous controversy soars to the top of people’s reading lists? I can identify with you if you’re one of the many suffering from what I’d like to call “aggregate aggravation syndrome.” It’s a tough disorder to crack, but with the right content and the right attitude to summarising and pitching your content to a global, news-hungry audience, this can all change easily enough.

Realistically, it’s just a case of making sure your article looks more interesting than all the others, and I’m sure we’d all love to think it was as simple as that. Unfortunately, it’s not. Your article remains a needle in a haystack, and it’s your job to make sure it reaches the eyes and ears of every single industry-related party and all the genre-disinterested browsers it can. It’s a tough gig but there are possibilities you may have overlooked, and of course, contraversial strategies you may be using that are, much to your shock, having the opposite effect.

Bigger than Elvis

So, say you’ve written a long, sprawling article on SEO, and it encompasses research, interviews, and a level of writing rarely seen since The Guardian was released that morning. You’re happy with the work, MS Word is letting it go without so much as a single squiggly red or green line, and you’re so into your own work that sharing it with the world seems like the only viable option. So where to go from here? Why, to an aggregate site, of course!

Let me explain this logic with a sobering fact. If you’re blogging, right now, on a WordPress.com account, there are over 300’000 new posts today alone. That’s somewhere in the region of thirty new books full of articles, and you know at least one of them is likely to be similar to yours over the course of the week. Three hundred thousand. Let that sink in for a moment. What chance does yours have, even with tags and that awesome graph you made in Excel? Not many. In fact, one of my highest-traffic articles of all time on my personal blog was a random rant about a LEGO version of a Harry Potter videogame. A year or more later, and it’s ranked thousands of hits, and it was never submitted.

The point I’m making is that the internet is a seriously fickle thing. Take a look at the front page of Digg and tell me what you see. Today, for example, there are a range of articles, but most of them focus on three key elements of global-appeal news: danger, drama and pictures. If we drift into the technology section, as this is where you’re far more likely to turn up (or browse – all news bar the exclusive is, to some degree, regurgitation), then we begin to see a different pattern: humour, heated debate, and leaked intel on new tech. The reason the pattens change is because as news and articles become more specialist, more niche, readers are absorbing writing whose mindset, tone and texture more closely reflect their target audience.

I’d just like to say a few words

Every time you write a new article, think of how you’d pitch it as a freelance piece. I’m serious. I know no one wants to voluntarily pitch freelance pieces ever again if they can avoid it, as it’s something of a humiliating, degrading, grinding process that kills the soul and maims the ego. But it’s also a brilliant acid test – if you could pitch your article to me in ten words, using as much or as little jargon as possible, I can tell you whether or not it’ll work. Let’s take a look at a few high-ranking examples of more opinion-based pieces.

Now, to start with, I found an article that I think is relevant to anyone who works on websites that use Adobe’s wonder-project, Flash. The title is “Is Flash Dead? The Future of Adobe’s Plug-In.” Now, this is a fairly controversial thing to say, but what’s clever is the question mark placed after the opening statement itself. This is key – if you’re debating something about social media, and you had the choice between “Twitter is Pointless” and “Is Twitter Pointless?”, choose the second option. The reason for this is you’re posing as a neutral party, even if this isn’t the case. The decision as to whether or not to invest ten minutes reading an article of considerable depth and debate, and then responding in the comments thread, is often one made in the opening few moments of reading an article’s title and subtitle. By phrasing the controversial statement as a question, it invites debate without inviting wrath or apathy and zero click-throughs from offended parties who see you as a prejudiced commentator.

The second example I’d like to give as a great example of effective aggregate-site-management is “Fortune 100 Companies Leveraging Social Media (Infographic)“. Now, this may seem a tad deep and a little too serious, but this is currently the top Digg article on a search for “social media”. Social media’s a relaxed sport, at best, and not something you can cover without being a little relaxed. This is also a graph site, which suits that industry perfectly – anyone using FaceBook and Twitter is going to want new-age ways of communicating information, and nothing does this better than indicating to them that all they’re in for is a slick diagram rather than 1000 words of prosaic musing on the subject.

It also has stick figures.

Seriously, though, it’s a great way of dragging people in. Entertain them. Tempt them. Make them curious or make them mad, and let them click through to shower you with praise or hatred. One of the most irritating sites in the universe, in my games journalism days, was also one of the most successful, because it kept encouraging heated, angry debate between Sony loyalists and Microsoft fan-soldiers. With social media, why not talk about the advantages of Twitter over Facebook, or why Bebo’s a lost, pointless art? Tempt them in with your tag-line the same way you would if you were designing a film poster, and watch your Diggs soar.

Twitter seems to be a rising star in the medium of new-age social communication. Everyone from major business CEOs to Stephen Fry are building large followings, and it’s all to see several sentences fly from their fingers a day as the world’s shortest blog format continues to take over the world. But what if we want to use this same technique not to inform people of where our band is playing next, or what we’re watching on TV at the moment, but what products and services we offer as a business? Of course, it’s tempting just to set up a Twitter account for your business and start following everyone in sight whilst posting your company’s homepage URL every five minutes, but that’ll just lead to an identity as a blocked online irritant, which isn’t what you’re after. Here’s a list of tips for engaging with the world run by the small blue birdie:

1. Network. Don’t expect people to follow you and retweet everything you say just because you’re a business they might deal with from time to time. Advertise what they’re saying to other people and discuss their tweets with them via replies and your own little @company is going to gain a reputation as a social, interested party.
2. Retweet. When thinking about how to best advertise concepts, ideas and news you’re interested in as a company, think about retweeting specific people. If you’re a business that specialises in finance and the Financial Times has just done a piece on the Base Rate changing, consider a quick “RT @financialtimes: “Base Interest Rate – our thoughts: [link]” and you’ll be surprised at how many people will start to view you as someone to follow for information as well as getting in touch.
3. Update. Don’t turn your Twitter page into a failed foray into social media: if you’re going to commit to a regularly updated Twitter account, even if it’s once a day, you have to meet the minimum you’ve set for yourself. Ideally it won’t just be 140 characters a day of information, but if your output begins to decrease, people will view your Twitter account as an experiment and not a reliable side of your company’s identity.
4. Ask. Ask questions – don’t feel that because you’re a company, you’re not entitled to be curious about other people’s ideas and activities. To have the Twitter account of an entire business ask an expert a question is often a flattering experience, and they’re not only likely to respond quickly and in detail, but their responses mean people following them are going to start seeing your company’s @username more frequently and investigate out of curiosity.
5. Link. In every tweet you send out into the digital realm, think about putting someone’s @username into the tweet. By connecting with someone every time you say something, you’re not only appearing as someone who’s aware of specific industry figureheads and sources of information, but you’re going to start appearing on hundreds, if not thousands of people’s Twitter readers every week.
6. Verify. If you’re looking into making announcements or predictions in your industry (or others, but this is risky for the following reason), then make sure you’ve got your facts straight. One typo or bad statistic and news of the mistake will fly around the Twitterverse fairly rapidly. Hell hath no fury like a web community scorned.
7. Smile. Be polite and friendly. I know this seems like a tall order in 140 characters, but simply sounding enthusiastic with the odd exclamation mark – or if you’re a person and not a company on Twitter, even a smiley – can lead to people viewing you as more than just another corporate face. There are people behind every company logo, and it’s important to bring this across in a medium where even sarcasm is difficult to get across.
8. Compact. If there’s one thing that people who rarely read individual Twitter pages can’t stand, it has to be messages that run on for several Tweets, as more often than not they’ll be broken up by other people’s – even if you’re Tweeting the next portion every twenty seconds. Try and keep everything compact and succinct – the ability to communicate in 140 characters is actually a skill, and one you’ll develop over time in Twitter, but the sooner the better.
9. Decorate. People will occasionally read your Twitter page individually, so make sure you’ve got a custom background that tiles well on higher resolution monitors and that represents your company. Silly pictures and bright, clashing colours are for teenager’s bedrooms. Keep it mature, and you’ll gain respect for making the effort to individualise your page.
10. Expand. Keep track of everything you’ve said and that people have said about you. I’m sure if everyone had the funds there’d be a Twitter-only employee for every company trying to gain a larger market share. Of course, try and get your employees to reference the company’s Tweets and Twitter page whenever they mention work, and encourage them to spread your identity as a company as far and wide as possible while remaining casual about the whole affair, lest they all seem too robotic and forced in their praise.

Here’s hoping some of this helps. Twitter is a mad, furious rush of energy condensed into 140 collections of pixels and fired out at a rate of thousands upon thousands every second of the day, and the numbers are increasing all the time. Gain your foothold and your following now, and you’ll never risk missing what could be the biggest boat in the history of online marketing.