3 things my $50,000 college degree didn’t teach me

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Amanda Shepherd

I’ve officially been a college graduate for 6 months. I know this because my financial aid repayment plan is about to start, which means my 6-month grace period is over. I’m superbly fortunate to have a job in my desired field, especially after spending the first 3 months post college applying to just about every public relations, social media and marketing job in the west coast I could find.

Now, being in the “real world” for the last 3 months, I’m starting to find that just about every class, every late night, every last minute cram session I did for 4 ½ years did not prepare me for the real world of public relations.

1. It’s not all about how much you know. WHO you know is just as important.

I knew for the most part in college that the people you know determine which raging parties you were going to attend on the weekends and who was going to help you pass that impossible class. However, my naïve self thought all that would end after college and I could finally use my brains and hard work ethic to land me that dream job. Wrong. So wrong. It didn’t matter that I had an impressive resume with multiple years of social media experience, a non-traditional yet exciting internship, a 3.6 GPA, and an entire life’s worth of philanthropic activities. None of that got me a face-to-face interview. In fact, the only reason I heard about the position at The Abbi Agency was because a friend I met at the very beginning of my college career referred me. Long story short, follow every single person you ever meet on Twitter and LinkedIn, because you never know when you’ll need them again down the road.

2. There are no “make-up” assignments. Deadlines are there for a reason.

Procrastination is my middle name. If there were an award for the best procrastinator on the planet, I’d be a gold medalist. That generally wasn’t an issue in college. Sure, I had the all nighters with coffee and Red Bull in tow. But I still got everything done. If it wasn’t done, most of my professors gave me a grace period and I was able to turn it in, but get docked a grade or two. Today, I wouldn’t even imagine trying that. There is no grace period in public relations. The deadline is there for a reason, and it has to get done, whether you stay up the entire night before to do it or not. You don’t get docked a grade or two in the real world – you get fired. Prioritization and organization are now my two best friends.

3. Do not underestimate the importance of persistence and drive.

Remember those “teacher’s pets” and “suck-ups” in school that you made fun of? They probably did pretty well in school, and are probably doing pretty well in the real world right now. Why? Because they stopped at nothing to make sure they succeeded, even if that meant kissing some butt on the way up. You can’t take the back seat in the PR world. If you want a certain reporter or writer to get your client published, you have to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Keep in mind, these people get thousands of pitches every single day. What are you going to do make sure your pitch gets read and not thrown in to the trash? Persistence, drive, and the will to succeed are everything when it comes to the wild and crazy world of public relations. Never give up.

I’m still a “freshman” in the world of public relations, and I’m learning every single day, but there are just some things that you can’t learn when confined to the walls of your university’s classroom.

What do you wish college taught you?

The State of Social Ads

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Constance Aguilar

What Social.com taught us about buying brand ads on social media

Social advertising is the hottest topic in advertising right now. Its impact is immense, and is forecasted to grow even more in the next 3-4 years. SalesForce reports that by 2017, the market will float around $11B worth of spending. That’s some serious advertising cash – and that’s in the U.S. alone.

This means it’s time for brands, both big and little, to strategize and capitalize on the power of social advertising. The customers are there; people are spending their time on social media, particularly on mobile (30% of the time spent on social media is on mobile, and those numbers continue to grow).

Ads are made for people AND created by people on social. As brands, we have the learn how to optimize what content is and can be created to deliver an effective message and call-to-action for our audiences. This sector of advertising is not aggressive like TV; it actually fits in with the way people absorb content on social media.

Facebook and Twitter have expanded their advertising options to suit budgets and goals. According to SalesForce and Social.com, here are the best ways to approach campaign creation and accomplishing your goals.

To begin: Determine your goals

The goals for social ads typically are:

Grow fans or followers
Distribute Content: videos, photos, items that live on the feeds of the network
Direct Response: e-commerce, app downloads, etc

But how do you set up your ads for success? Social has so many opportunities that making a choice can seem daunting. Here are some tips to set up your ads for success:

Content is king

Within social networks, you have access to a massive amount of data, charting your content’s effectiveness and how well it resonates with your audience. Promote and push the content that IS working. If you’ve got good content to push, then ultimately you’re a winner.

Look at the success of previous posts and promote the ones with a high amount of ‘likes’ or comments. Know that photos and videos work better than text-heavy posts, and focus on spending money to promote your original content, such as infographics, in-house videos, podcasts, etc.

A/B Test

Put your campaigns to the test. Assign funds to several ads and target groups in the beginning, and after one week or so, take a look at what is working.

Don’t go crazy; granular, but not too granular. Use any existing customer data you have to determine audiences and key demographics.

What is a good amount of ‘granular’?

If you have a light-up cooler similar to Coleman, targeting an audience that ‘likes’ Wal-Mart, camping, and is male would probably be ideal.

But if you have a durable, army-colored $200 cooler, targeting an audience that ‘likes’ Cabela’s, hunting, fishing, and are males over 30 would be ideal.

Lastly, if you have a fold-up cooler that weighs less than competitors, targeting an audience that ‘likes’ REI, hiking, and camping would be ideal.

Think about Placement

With Facebook, remember that the click through & engagement rate is 3x higher when you place an ad in the Newsfeed. Considering mobile use, our recommendation is to stick with the middle of page on Facebook; not to say other types of ads aren’t effective, though.

With Twitter, there is a higher engagement rate (greater than 3%) when you target ads specifically on mobile.

TIP: Video views don’t work well on mobile, but they work well on desktop.

Target well

Choosing the appropriate ways your ad content is delivered to your audience is imperative. You have several options when targeting audiences and paying for their responses. A few of those include:

CPC: Cost per Click (pay every time someone clicks on your ad)
CPA: Cost per Action (only pay for the action you want to get, such as likes, and no other engagement)
CPM: This is Facebook exclusive and you pay for impressions. Facebook will optimize your ad to show to the people who are most likely to help you meet your goal.

Twitter allows you to target on specific phone devices, desktops, laptops, and web on smartphones and tablets.

Thinking about what content you’re advertising and what kind of reaction you want from it is the most important aspect of targeting. When determining the audience, Facebook gives you a multitude of targeting and segmentation options, from demographics to custom interests, their pre-determined broad categories, lookalike audiences, and more. The two key factors to keep in mind when selecting audiences are:

Keep them focused, but not too focused. Again, using any existing data you have in order to determine the most applicable audience for your promotion is a smart way to target.
Test, test, test: Can’t stress it enough. The best way to find what works is to eliminate what doesn’t. Test different keywords, audiences/interests, and interaction options.

TIPS:

First time ad buyers: use the audience you already know is on social media and just target them in your first round of ads. If you know your customer base is females over 50 that live in Reno and love knitting, crafting, etc, then target only those to start with, and forget going after 20-somethings that have a much slimmer chance of interacting with your brand.

B2B: your potential clients and customers all work somewhere, right? Or a company you’re looking to set a meeting with has multiple employees that have Facebook profiles, correct? You can target by workplace and receive positive attention from the company’s personnel by sending them specific and applicable content through ads.

Use right metrics to measure success

Make sure you are collecting and analyzing your ad campaign data to see if it’s working for you.

The great thing with online advertising is you can track it in real time. No need to fork over $1,000 upfront and cross your fingers that it’s going to be successful. Because of this, monitoring is huge. You need to watch your ads daily and adjust as necessary to make sure your advertising campaign is successful. Each platform has its own advertising monitoring interface so you can keep track of the results on there. You’ll know if your advertising campaign is successful by creating your own metrics to measure by:

Are you trying to drive online sales? Then you’d better make sure you are using ads that drive people off Facebook and Twitter and convert into off-site sales. If this is the case, measure how much money you are spending on the advertising campaign based on how much money you are making in sales. This will show you your ROI and you can decrease or increase your spending as necessary. If the ads are not generating any traffic, you might want to consider changing the copy or design of the ad.
Are you trying to increase your fans or followers? The same goes for increasing your audience. How much is 1,000 fans worth to you? Put a price on it and follow the same methodology as #1.
Are you attempting to make a video go viral? Make sure you’re using desktop options more than mobile.

The key is to experiment. The opportunity social provides is incredible, but your must have some time to invest in the process and understanding of social ads. The best part of social ads is that they can user generated, too! You get to pick what content works and who sees it when spending your money. That’s the new wave of advertising and it’s a process worth investigating and investing in.

Download our eBook here

Trendspotters: May 2013

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Constance Aguilar

Client Spotlight: Post Planner

Do you ever have those days when you just aren’t feeling creative, and posting good content on Facebook seems harder than creating the cure for cancer? Thanks to our newest client, your creativity can be restored. Post Planner is an app that helps you find content faster and easier, plus boost your reach on your Facebook pages. It can be your Facebook library and basecamp. So far, we’ve seen some pretty impressive engagement results. It’s priced to afford, and definitely worth checking out. We are excited to work with a social media app yet again and will keep everyone updated on the Post Planner success!

What’s Hot: Snapchat

Snapchat is one of the world’s hottest, most talked about, and most controversial apps on the market right now. Snapchat users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a list of recipients. What separates it from traditional texting is the fact that users can choose how long the recipient can view the content for. Once that time has expired, it is automatically deleted from their phone. The controversy? The phenomenon of “sexting” now has its ideal solution. While the creators, four former Stanford students, argue that its intention is to put the fun back in communication, it only makes sense that the primary demographic of Snapchat users, between 13 years to 25 years of age, use it with alternative intentions. Now the app is under fire for its “deletion” methods. While tech writers and the founders are taking various sides on the issues, the simple fact is Snapchat is experiencing over three dozen images sent per second during peak hours. It’s a social platform that is impossible to ignore; if only to satisfy the clandestine photographer in all of us.

Toolbox: Instagram Tagging

It should come as no surprise that since being acquired by Facebook, the world’s most popular photo sharing app, Instagram, is slowly releasing features traditionally found on the Facebook platform. Instagram recently launched the ability to tag other Instagram users in your photos, just as you tag photos with other Facebook profiles on Facebook. They’ve made the feature “individual” to Instagram by branding it with the name “Photos of You”. Not to be confused with Facebook “tagging”, of course. Only the photographer can tag their photos with friends, places, and brands. “Photos of You” are currently private, but will go public starting May 16. It’s a great new marketing tool for brands looking to capitalize on their Instagram presence. We’ll see if Red Bull or Southwest launches a campaign first!

How to plan a press trip: tips and tricks

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Connie Anderson

Since I began at The Abbi Agency, I have two press trips preparations under my belt. Whether you call them a FAM tour, media tour, press tour or press trip there are a few overlooked steps that, I think, are important not to forget.

Specialize the press kit

Pull together a press kit together, specifically for this event, more than a day in advance. Many companies have an established press kit, but for a press trip there may be special releases, pictures, etc. you should include. My first experience was a ski resort press trip. To differentiate our press kit we added a weather report for the weekend and an individual itinerary for each participant. Many were treated to serene spa services while others traveled to a neighboring cross country skiing resort.

No preview stories? Try social media

One big mistake beginners make is getting caught up in planning the trip that they don’t pitch the story. This is especially important when planning a press trip for an event. Pre-coverage of an event is crucial for two reasons; 1) increase attendance 2)branding the client, and in turn impressing them. Some publications may not be able to do a preview story due to editorial calendars or publish timing; instead ask them to share pictures and details of the event on their social media sites.

Check out their Alexa ranking

It is easy to overlook niche bloggers and websites that reach your audience, but they can be very influential. Use a tool, like Vocus, to pull a list of writers to target and then you can check out their Alexa ranking- which will help you determine who is most influential. These tools help to justify spending money on airfare to your client.

Make it memorable

Most importantly, remember to have fun! From paying attention to the small details to picking up journalists at the airport in a bird suit, remember to keep the journalists entertained… after all this is somewhat of a vacation for them.

How to measure success online

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Nicole Rose Dion

So you’re managing a client’s online presence or reputation. Everything is going well … or at least you think? How do you measure all of your efforts and prove ROI to your client?

Measuring eCommerce

If your client’s end goal is ecommerce, whatever efforts you’re doing on your website should be geared toward getting people to make purchases. So how do you measure this? Through the use of Google Analytics you can determine:

How much money was made online
Where those people who purchased things came from
Where customers dropped off and decided not to buy anything

[Related: Google Analytics for PR]

Measuring a blog

If you’re running a blog on a platform that allows for email subscription, do it. RSS feeds are great and all, but email subscription is better. You’ll be provided with a list of all your email subscribers and they will get email notifications every time you blog. This is your audience. The more blog subscribers, the better. These are people who enjoy your content so much, they have decided to be notified every time you push out new content. That is way more valuable than a page view or site visit. An easy way to measure the success of a blog is how many people come to the site (you can use Google Analytics for this) versus how many people decided to subscribe (conversion!) within a month’s time.

Measuring a newsletter

Many people measure the success of a newsletter by open rate, thinking that as long as their email is being opened, it’s being read. True? Not necessarily. For example, I will often group a bunch of new messages together, mark them as read and never come back to them (usually emails from online stores that I’ve signed up to be on their mailing lists). So I’m completely skewing their numbers and never even looking at the email. You could also open it and close it immediately.

A better judge of email newsletter success is whether or not your content is being clicked. For example, you send out a newsletter that says 20 percent off bagels, click here. Then measure how many people click that button. Most email programs will list number of clicks for a campaign and you can also use Google Analytics for this. Or, if you’re promoting an event, include a link to the event RSVP page and track how many people RSVP after you send out your campaign.

Measuring social media

Engagement is just a fancy word that means whether or not people care about what you’re posting. Just because you have 10,000 fans on Facebook doesn’t mean you have a successful Facebook page. Just because you have 2,000 followers on Twitter, doesn’t mean people actually read the tweets you’re sending out. A better way to measure success on social media is how much and how often people are interacting with your content. This means liking, forwarding, sharing, commenting, Retweeting … etc. This can be found using third-party applications like Radian6 or the platform’s internal analytics.