IABC Houston hosted it’s latest workshop for PR professionals: Commo at the Speed of WARP.
The workshop was led by award-winning communications consultant Shonali Burke, and PR professionals from varying disciplines in the Houston-area gathered at HTC for the training.
Community-centered public relations was the focus of the workshop along with, tools to make your Social Media time more effective, and a real-time tweetchat with Klout.
Community Centered Public Relations – Three Case Studies
Burke highlighted three case studies as examples of organizations who effectively implemented the strategy to grow their brands.
In “The Case of the OKC Jeweler” the Samuel Gordon Jewelers team was able to increase their revenue, drop their ad spending and increase foot-traffic to their brick-and-mortar location by interacting with their audience. Samuel Gordon Jewelers doesn’t sell their product online, so being able to engage an audience online in a way that increased revenue is perhaps the most interesting part of the case study.
Pledge to End Hunger was an example of combining an online community with an actual event to highlight child hunger. The campaign was primarily goal driven: 1,000 pledges in 7 days. It was a Twitter-based campaign, so the target audience was active Twitter users. The offline event was SXSW – so timing was a significant component as well. The organization collected more than four thousand pledges with the call to action “1 click feeds 140 children.” The end result was 560,000 servings of food to foodbanks in four cities.
Finally, The Blue Key Campaign relied on a community of bloggers to drive the conversation around raising funds to help refugees and displaced people. One goal of the campaign was to get sign-ups for 1000 keys a week for six weeks. Fifty percent of the goal was met in a single event: a 24hr tweetathon. Because the campaign relied on decentralized components (bloggers in different parts of the U.S.), determining which factors to measure was essential to the success of the campaign. Tweets tagged with #bluekey were tracked, and the team used a Google Analytics campaign to measure and review traffic sources to the main website.
Tools
The common factor in the case studies were tools used to track, measure, and monitor online outreach. Our favorites from Burke’s list include:
Google Analytics – Provides in-dept site statistics and campaign monitoring tools. Free.
WP Editorial Calendar Plugin – WordPress plug-in for planning content. Free.
WP Touch – WordPress plug-in that creates a mobile template version of your WordPress site for easy reading.
LiveFyre – Blog commenting application that connects commenters with with Facebook and Twitter.
Tungle – Scheduling tool that integrates with Outlook calendars.
Post Planner – Strictly for Facebook. Allows users to schedule post and preview exactly how the scheduled post will appear on your Facebook wall.
Major Takeaway
One major takeaway from Burke’s workshop is that when you implement community-driven PR outreach, you build trust. And that’s part of what motivates people to action.
Shonali Burke offers additional insights on blogging, PR, and social media on her site Waxing Unlyrical.