Expert Essentials: Rebecca Wardlow

Rebecca Wardlow,  a digital marketing professional who runs her own six-figure business, spoke today at Olivet Nazarene University. During my Social Media Strategies course, her topic was: Creating a Promotional Calendar. Here is her process for creating a promo calendar:

1. Roadmap and Budget
You need to figure out how you're going to communicate with your audience and how much revenue you estimate your promotion will generate.

2. What is a Promotion?

Picking a product service + offer + scarcity = Promotion

Three Key Promotional Categories:

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Monetization

3. Step One: Acquisition

This includes areas like free giveaways where contact information is entered to win a prize and lead magnets, an irresistible bribe offering a specific chunk of value.

There is also a program called Woobox where users can enter a contest with a hashtag and once they are entered it gives the company their email address as well (to create an email list).

Goals of Acquisition: Take users from social media to becomes a lead magnet then get email subscribers

4. Step Two: Activation

This includes areas like flash sales, which are a big discount sale companies can offer and member-only specials, which can make subscribers feel special.

Goals of Activation: Move email subscribers to low dollar offer, then to a customer

5. Step Three: Monetization

This includes area like activation, which means offering the new product or core offer and high dollar sales. This is the bread of butter of the format leading into a promotional calendar.

6. Steps to Building Your Promotion

1) Determine Product/Market Fit

2) Choose a Traffic Source

3) Offer a Lead Magnet

4) Offer a Tripwire

5) Offer a Core Product

6) Offer a Profit Maximizer

7) Create a Return Path

If you don't know what a tripwire is, it's where there is a low-cost offer made to a customer that can lead to a larger purchase later on.

6. When and Who...12 Month Plan and Monthly Planning Worksheet

Things to include: month, goals, set projections, revenue goals, monetization strategy

Things to include in monthly planning: month, name of promo, goal of promo, who will receive promo emails, start date, number of emails, projected revenue, back-up promo

7. Plan Your Promotion Content

The content funnel stages are awareness, evaluation and conversion.

• Awareness Content-freely available that entertains, educates or inspires (blog, social media, videos, infographics, photos, podcasts)
• Evaluation Content-incentivized content asking readers for contact information (education resources, downloads, etc)
• Conversion Content-building a relationship with the reader to help them make an informed purchases (demo, free trial, customer story, comparison)

*Bonus Tip!: Have your company write down 100 questions they receive or are most often asked...these can be converted into blog posts!

Expert Essentials: Matt Kelly

Last Monday guest speaker Matt Kelly, a senior manager at Golin, spoke at Olivet Nazarene University. Here are some of the key things I took away from his presentation:

1. Social Media Influencers
SMI's are the people who grew to fame and influence from social media...think YouTube or Vine famous. It's important to realize not all influencers are ones you should reach out to for a campaign, especially because most of them ask for payment now. But you can use platforms like Tapinfluence (check it out) to find influencers related to the company you're working for.

Key note: It's more important to tap into a relevant following of 100 who would be interested over a huge following of 10,000 that might not care.

2. #puppymonkeybaby and McDonald's All Day Breakfast Social Media
Kelly is one of the people who was a part of Mountain Dew's PuppyMonkeyBaby initiative (that crazy SuperBowl ad, check it out here), and he was on the team who created an algorithm to message every person who had ever asked McDonald's for All Day Breakfast. Yeah, hearing about those case studies was AMAZING.

3. Know up and coming Social Media Tools
You're not expected to go into the professional world knowing EVERYTHING kid (I gotta tell myself that too). It is important to know what tools businesses are using and to at least be aware of them/how they work. Here are two more important ones to look into:

• Sprinklr
• Tapinfluence

4. Clean up social media, send a thank you card (no, seriously)
You can ace your interview over and over, but if you have a bad social media presence it doesn't matter. Yes, businesses do check those out. And many businesses look at LinkedIn first (WOW)! Also, Kelly explained how he could interview 20 equally qualified people for a position, but the one who leaves a thank-you card is the one who gets the job. Again, kind of a big deal to know.

5. He's a RAPPER
No caption necessary. Check this link out here.

4 More Things I Learned from Hootsuite (refer to previous post)

7. Four Things to Include in a Social Media Policy

1) How employees use social media
2) What kind of use is discouraged
3) Process to follow if unsure of what is appropriate
4) Consequences of social media misuse

Remember to state who they contact if they have any questions in this policy as well as have correct and incorrect examples they can reference.

8. Four Steps to a Critical Response Plan

1) Social listening protocol (how to look for and find negative feedback, you can use Hootsuite for this too!)
2) List of designated decision makers
3) Step by step action plan (what to do if an emergency happens)
4) Pre-approved messages (based on what emergency happened)

9. Difference Between Quantitive and Qualitative Data for PR

Quantitative=numerical values. Qualitative=collect insight and best when used on a post by post basis. The four areas of measurement for quantitive data are base, reach, engagement, and conversion. Some of the ways you can measure this is follow growth, engagement rate, conversions, email sign-ups, qualified leads, sales transactions, etc. The best advice for qualitative measurement is looking at the posts that didn't perform successfully and analyzing why.

10. What the heck are KPIs?

ANSWER-Key Performance Indicators! This is the measurable value or person once your campaign has started you want to evaluate.

*Bonus Info*
Hootsuite has a bomb analytics area where you can customize what you want to see on a function called Boards. This is useful if you have certain data you need to show your employer or client.

6 Things I Learned from Hootsuite Academy (after just taking three classes!)

This week as an assignment we had to go to Hootsuite Academy and take a few of their free online training courses (highly recommend). One is focused on the benefits of Hootsuite itself while the other is a social media training. Little naive college Rachel did not expect to learn as much as I did from just going three three of the many lessons....but wow was I wrong! Here I'm going to share some of the tops tips I picked up or things I did not know yet.

1. If you're a small business or organization check out Hootsuite Campaigns

For those who don't know what Hootsuite is, it is a social media management platform. If you want more information, check it out here. Hootsuite Campaigns are tools businesses can use to basically to help launch their own PR/Marketing campaigns for their businesses without involving outside help (which costs extra $). For example, if you are doing a giveaway, you can host a campaign for it through Hootsuite and then your audience can go to your unique URL for it and sign-up. You could change what kind of information you collect based on your preferences...it's all very customizable.

2. Download Hootlet

Hootlet is a program you can download on your computer where if you find an amazing article you want to share on one of your platforms connected to Hootsuite you can click a button near your bookmarks to share it directly from there (and of course, you can customize what you say and where you're sending it). How convenient!

3. When you create a content calendar...highlight KEY DATES!

Remember these dates and work with them! Nuff said here.

4. Three Steps to a Social Media Audit

This is so important to figure out what the voice your brand or self is on social media. What value is your social media adding to your audience? What are your competitors doing and what can you learn from them? Remember to meet your audience where they're at when it comes to what platforms you are using. Here are the three steps:

 -Create an itemized list of current social media networks and their activity rates

-Follower counts per social networks

-Competitive analysis (refer to question above)

5. SMART Goals people!!!

If you are trying to figure out where you want your company to go or what you want to do for a client, make sure your goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely. Ask yourself if you would be able to tell when your goal was half complete. If you can't answer this, it's probably not a SMART goal.

6. Create a document for your business or business you are working with that defines the brand's voice.

Ask yourself, what adjectives describe "x" brand? Let your social media voice reflect that. Is ione of those adjectives "quirky?" Well then play around with humor. If it's something like "reliable," then maybe keep your tone more professional.

Periscope, Meerkat...Houseparty?

Hopefully by now you've heard of Periscope. You know, the app where you can live-stream from anywhere, anytime, literally to anyone who wants to watch.

For those who don't know, Periscope was named the "iPhone App of the Year" in 2015 by Apple. It was created by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein who saw the need for a live-streaming app while traveling in Istanbul in 2013. A protest broke out, and Beykpour wanted to see what was happening so he turned to Twitter...but he could only READ about it there. He wanted to SEE it.

Fast forward a few years and Twitter bought-out their app with a relaunch in March 2015. After just four months, Periscope had passed 10 million accounts with around "40 years per day" of video being streamed.

Around the same time Periscope came out, so did a similar rival: Meerkat. This was also a live-streaming app that had its "15 seconds of fame" at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March 2015. Users here had the option to connect their Twitter and Facebook accounts to stream to their followers and friends, but after Twitter purchased Periscope, well, things changed for Meerkat.

Twitter focused a majority of their attention of pushing Periscope to its followers and limited Meerkat's access to it's social graph, no longer allowing users to connect Meerkat to Twitter. Meerkat beat Periscope by becoming an Android app first, but once Facebook Live was launched, Meerkat's chances of growth became slim to none.

On October 4, 2016, Meerkat was shut down.

But wait...you don't want to miss this part.

The company who owned Meerkat has been in the process of developing a new app called Houseparty. With this, users can create or join video chat rooms of up to eight people. Participants can also switch between "rooms" (name of the chats) with just a swipe of the finger. Remember the days when you wanted to talk to all your friends at once but didn't want to pay Skype (video chat) to do it? Well now there is a specific app for iOS and Andoid in the works that could change the game in just my own life.

As a young PR professional, how this app can benefit my life ranges from having conversations with my team out of my university's student-run firm, Inspired Strategies Agency, to just being able to chat with my friends all over the United States.

Keep your eyes out for Houseparty friends...and if you haven't checked out Periscope, get a feel for what live-streaming is all about.

The Internet is Unforgiving

Take a second and think about the title of this blog. Can you remember something you may have posted when you first created a Facebook account (hello "OMG sooooooo excited to go to the movies xoxoxo <333" from 2009)? What about that crazy embarrassing photo of you your mom posted of you friends seem to find five years later?

Let's get more serious...think about all the stories of celebrity nudes or sex tapes getting released because they were somehow hacked or sent over Snapchat. There have been companies where employees accidentally tweeted inappropriate things on their accounts, quotes from politicians being brought up during this debate from months ago, and company reputations with PR campaigns going down the drain from public criticism. Truly, the Internet is unforgiving.

We recently had guest speaker Debra Bethard-Caplick speak to our social media strategies class at my university, and this is one of the main points that stuck with me. We are all too lenient these days with what we post on social media, especially my generation (Gen Z), and we continually see others face the consequences (yet think we're still untouchable ourselves).

Another key point she made related to this idea was: ”Somebody has to be the adult in the room and unfortunately too many people on social media are not."

Wow. Let that one sink in and just TRY to tell me it's not 100 percent accurate.

Even if you are not attempting to be "professional" on social media, it is ESSENTIAL to remember it is not made to be a platform of vulgarity, arguments, or post every area of your life for the entire world to have access to. Just because you may think marijuana should be legalized doesn't mean it's appropriate to post a picture of yourself smoking online.

Let me leave you with three things (LOOK HERE BEFORE YOU LEAVE) if you have zoned out for most of this blog:

1. The benefit and PROBLEM with social media is that it's instantaneous
2. Somebody has to be the adult in the room and unfortunately too many people on social media are not
3. THE INTERNET IS UNFORGIVING

Trump vs. Clinton Debate 2016-Round 1

*Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to round one of the 2016 presidential debates! In this corner we have Republican candidate Donald Trump...and in this corner we have Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton! Let the battle begin!*

If you needed a metaphor comparing how the first presidential debate went last Tuesday, look no further. But this post isn't about politics or picking a side, this post is about the public relations aspect to this debate. Specifically let's discuss Twitter and how Trump and Clinton's teams handled their social media account.

Again, taking the politics out of this blog post, Clinton's team was more impressive on Twitter during the campaign while Trump was mentioned more on social media throughout the debate.

One significant thing I learned about political PR teams during this debate was that they have multiple tweets set up and prepared throughout the night with cues to send them when key topics are brought up/phrases said. I'm sure I "knew" the candidates in debates have specific content prepped out to discuss, but actually seeing that happen live on screen then a tweet going out a second later relating perfectly made my lightbulb go off.

One of the best tweets of the night was when Clinton's team pulled up something Trump said regarding China and then his team preceded to delete the tweet. There were multiple jokes about how Clinton's team had fact checkers while Trump's had tweet deleters.

I was left with truly one question after the debate: why wasn't Hillary Clinton wearing a flag pin but Trump was?

From a PR standpoint, will there or have there been repercussions from this small incident?