As part of your overall marketing mix it has many benefits over traditional offline public relations. The speed and efficiency of communications on the Internet, together with the exposure provided by search engines, make it an ideal platform for delivering online PR.

Consequently a wide range of distributions services and options are now available – and you don’t have to break the bank to get started.  Many of the paid distribution platforms are affordable and offer a low-cost entry option.

Craft and Distribute Your Release

Once you (or your marketing communications expert) have crafted your media release, you can use one of the many free or paid distribution services to help get your release out there. You can even publish it yourself, although small business owners often don’t have the time and resources to go down this path.

As always, what you get out is directly proportional to the effort and money you put in. If you write an uninspiring or overly-gushing press release, and then use a poor distribution service, you shouldn’t be surprised when the results are equally lacklustre.

However, with a well written release and leveraging a professional distribution service, you’re off to a much better start. By also sending your release to your clients and further publicising your release using social media channels – including your blog if you have one – you are more likely to start getting the results and exposure that you are looking for.

Clear Objectives and Measurable Goals

As with all online marketing, you need to have clear objectives and measurable goals. Who do you want to reach – and do you know where to locate these target audiences?  What about your message and story will be relevant and of interest to them?

And once your media release is published, there are plenty of tools and services to help measure the success of your campaign.  Online public relations, like all internet marketing, is highly measurable so that you can track your return on marketing investment.

Have you used or are you planning to use online PR?

As we’re told repeatedly by media and business commentators, the internet has created a level playing field for small and medium businesses, equipping them with the capability to reach out to new markets and audiences.

A professional website is your storefront to the world and the range of free or low-cost online services and tactics on offer to SMEs offers almost unlimited potential for growth, revenue and customer interaction.

Your audiences are online and they’re not just teenagers and 20-somethings.  The potential returns are significant with Facebook reaching half a billion members mid-2010, Twitter reporting a five-fold membership increase in the past year, one in every four minutes online now spent on social media sites, an 82% year-on-year increase in social media uptake and the fastest-growing social media demographics in the 30+ and 50+ age groups.

So it’s ironic that this business sector sees both huge uptake, but a parallel paralysis as we head into the last months of the 2010 year. While many SMEs are rolling out their online, social media and digital marketing strategies, other small businesses, from tourism operators, to retailers, service providers and consultants, ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses and start-up ventures are finding themselves coming up against a fundamental problem…they simply don’t have the time.

Time, not marketing funds, is the biggest cost of both online marketing, whether email marketing, online advertising or the hot world of social media marketing, but for many small business owners, time is a precious resource – one that’s in very short supply on a daily and weekly basis.

The learning curve to researching, creating and executing an online strategy is time-intensive.  Once launched, there is the ongoing work of maintaining activity, creating fresh content, updating and upgrading; and measuring your campaign’s results.

Even finding the time to do your homework on the best strategic social media or online channels for your venture is difficult for managers or entrepreneurs, who are often bewildered by where to even start.

Should you consult the experts?  The clamour of local and international suppliers and advisors promising to help guide you through the online maze is even more time-consuming and daunting to sift through.  Who is telling it like it is and who is pushing their own agenda?

Once you’ve identified where you need to apply effort, outsourcing is an obvious answer, but online and digital marketing agencies and freelance contractors are often beyond SME budgets.

Small business doubled its presence on social media in 2009, with New Zealand trends following the international shift online.  In the highly-measurable online world, results are positive, with 73 percent reporting their online efforts are identifying & attracting customers, 56 percent increasing target market awareness,  46 percent using online methods to engage with customers; and 78 percent generating top sales via customer reviews (Source: eMarketer.com).

Judging from attendance and interest at recent online and social media marketing presentations and workshops I’ve given around the country, and the 2010 avalanche of media commentary on social media marketing, NZ businesses want to take advantage of online opportunities and keep up with their competition, who may have leveraged more robust marketing budgets or internet knowledge to edge ahead.

There is a sizeable Australasian audience for local businesses to target, with well-over 1.5 million New Zealanders on Facebook, hot on the heels of our Australian neighbours, who are the world’s heaviest Facebook users.  There are north of 350 NZ organisations and 55,000 NZ users on Twitter; while NZ membership is growing steadily on LinkedIn, the world’s largest business network with more than 80 million members.

Heading towards 2011, it remains a frustrating challenge that with their target audiences already online and receptive to marketing messages, many smaller local businesses can’t afford to ignore the opportunity, but will continue to struggle to find the time to get started.

Teri Sawers

Teri is a seasoned online marketing communicator who works on a daily basis across online campaigns and leading social media platforms.

http://communicationsinsights.wordpress.com

So here’s a quick ‘how to set up Twitter’ run-down, before you even get to the part about building up followers.

Set up your core Twitter account to get started, with logo, color match for branding, your background artwork, and your bio information.

You need:

• Your chosen profile name/s
• To select the best possible profile name: go to Twitter.com and select the strongest (and most search-relevant) name for your profile that the upper character limit for names (15 characters) will allow.  Given that many names are already taken, this may involve some creativity and testing several options.  Think about how people will search for you on the platform and get the most search-friendly name that you can.
• Password
• Contact email
• Alternate email
• Security question / answer
• Thumbnail sized pic or version of your logo or image for your profile pic
• A second pic or graphic for background artwork – either a vertical banner for the left-hand side, or a version that fills the background (behind the tweet stream/sidebar in the centre). This is your chance to brand your page, either visually or via factual information eg. contact details, key selling points, promotional text etc.
• 140-160 character short bio – a short snapshot that sums you up to a visitor

Once you’ve set up a profile, it’s live on the system, so can be found by anyone seeking you out, or searching for generic words that contain your name. Make sure that even if you start a profile, then have to leave it for a week or so, that the basics are in place, if people do find it while you’re still setting up.

You can now keep changing and improving it as you like over weeks and months ahead.  Branding is important, but there is plenty of latitude for experimentation and testing out what works for you.  Profile pages on social media are often less formal than your own site, think corporate but conversational.

Now to start building your early tweets and followers, so the profile isn’t deserted when you seriously start your Twitter activity. People will follow if you have interesting and relevant things to say and if your Twitter profile is not too aggressively promotional.

Start tweeting.  You need to have at least 10-20 tweets in place so that new visitors will see something when they land on the page, then possibly flip over to find earlier pages of your tweets.

After about another week of patiently adding to these early efforts, the profile will look suitably ‘populated’ to give it repeat strong bursts of audience-building.

Preparation and organisation help keep social media implementation quick and efficient.  Given the immediacy of the web and the multitude of other work for businesses of any size to accomplish, you ideally want a well-organised system that fits into daily work routines.

And which can be assigned across various staff members, to share the fun, learnings; and the workload…as you and your team get used to integrating this work into other responsibilities and starts to understand what channels and input will work for you, often with just short sharp bursts of time and energy once or twice daily; or even every second day for 10-30 minutes.

Profile set-up and maintenance is easier if you have everything you need rapidly accessible.  You will also be consistent with representing your brand/business and uploading images, information and graphics that complement your various social media profiles.

Keep both a computer and offline folder (for back-up) with:

• Log-in names and passwords (both online and offline)

• Basic corporate information regularly required for online forms, including corporate IDs and abbreviations, tax and GST numbers (if relevant for buying into subscription services, small software/app purchases etc), street address, telephone etc

• All email addresses being used for this project. You can easily use your current emails, but over time, may decide you need 2-3 stand-alone minimum – to keep any social media mail received separate from regular business email

• Images in several sizes and vertical/horizontal formats. From a small square thumbnail of logos for profile pics, to photos and graphics for photo galleries, background Twitter designs, etc.  You need variety so visitors don’t see the same single image each time, except of course for your branding and logo.

Visitors online have short attention spans and expect variety and fresh content on repeat visits.  Don’t have many images?  Get royalty-free suitable pics and graphics from Google Images or an affordable online photo-library.

• A file of any videos suitable for social media, eg. made for YouTube, corporate or promotional videos; and fresh/decent quality user-generated videos by colleagues, contacts, fans and friends.

• Titles, sub-titles and taglines written. Also both short summary descriptions (150 – 200 characters or words) and longer descriptions (1000 – 2000 characters) for use.

• Keywords/Tags list – what are the main keywords that drive visitors to your site? You’ll frequently have to drop these into tags and keyword lists, so have them close at hand.

• Copy of current ‘About Us’ or summary information about your business and what you’re offering new customers and clients – your key selling points and benefits.

Yes it sounds basic, but inventing the wheel every time you have a new field to fill out is hardly good use of your valuable time.   Be prepared, as the boy scouts always advise.

Some week’s growth will be slower than others, some sites and announcements will be more popular and drive traffic and bookings than others.

Expect results and trends in 2-3 months rather than astonishing growth within the first month… be realistic about growing your social media visibility and fitting into online communities as a new brand and marketing entrant.

As you will hear all over the web, you need to ‘join the community’ and become an interactive regular participant over weeks and months.

- It can take between 15 minutes and approximately up to an hour daily to maintain a successful social media program.

- If different staff take responsibility for a separate component of your online strategy, then the workload is shared across less than 15-30 minutes daily for anyone; and no-one is deluged.

- Everyone also gets to enjoy a slice of ownership of the overall online marketing project and see their efforts turn into wins – and hopefully sales and new clients.

Some days will only involve quick updates or posts, or checks for messages, on others staff will be adding new material to profiles, posting up pictures or videos; or setting up a coordinated campaign across all of your social media sites.

Let people know how to find you online:

• Add your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook badges to your site’s home page.  You’ll find them either through your social profile’s account dashboards, or often on the bottom menu bar – Twitter calls them ‘Goodies’ and offers widgets, tweet buttons and badge options, Facebook has both widgets and buttons
• Add your social media links to your Contact Us and home pages, email signature, and wherever appropriate on marketing materials and all of your online ‘touch points’
• Start to think about all appropriate onsite and offsite ways to promote and integrate your social media profiles and activity, eg. the back of your next new business card runs, onsite information; and any promotional information, on brochure materials or flyers etc.
• Share tools – www.Sharethis.com – one of the leading ‘share’ buttons. Install on your site and blog so visitors can quickly and immediately share what they find with others online
• Streamline and scheduling – www.SocialOoomph.com – one of many ‘share’ services and tools to automate and streamline all of your social media and online activity, but a very good one. A suite of services to browse, at varying buy-in and price points

More on paid audience-building tools in another post – on the pros and cons and what’s out there at reasonable rates to help you boost audiences over and above your organic efforts.

So right in the middle of the GFC, there are not-so-subtle shifts occurring, most noticiably along demographic fault-lines:

Gen Y work least hours and SME owners work the most – but survey shows we’re all working less – http://bit.ly/clFJcB

Not employing any Gen Y workers right now, I can’t add in my own anecdotal feedback on their supposed unwillingness to pull the kind of insane hours others in some industries and countries consider normal. I look back and shudder at some of the hours I’ve put in over the years on consultancy projects and deadlines.

The work-life balance equation is headed into a new era perhaps, but this survey still confirms what those of us who’ve struck out for self-employment or SME businesses already know – we’re still putting in substantial hours in our businesses and that hasn’t changed and probably won’t in the foreseeable future. It’s up to us individually to structure in balance, exercise, health, sanity, deadlines and what we’re chasing on the work and income front.

But wait, there’s more…Twitter Redesign Moving To A Consumption Platform – http://bit.ly/crYCgU

They’re right too, this certainly does serve it up to the main players in the Twitter desktop apps. market, taking back onsite much of the functionality that previously we’ve had to go offsite to leverage.

Given the number of apps that many of us are working with and the features we’re dipping into across multiple desktop and mobile apps, any degree of simplification is going to be welcomed.

One-stop efficiencies will convert many online marketers and their clients who are time poor and struggling to streamline their online marketing at the best of times. Except perhaps by the likes of HootSuite, Tweetdeck and Seesmic who’ve built up their business platforms on their third-party services and will now be working smart and fast to develop new suites of services and revenue streams. The roll-out is very much still in process as of early October, so they’ll be doing their behind-the-scenes homework before it hits for the masses.

But given that the vast majority of individuals and organisations are just now piling onto social media in mid-late 2010 – and that many of them will never even know there was an ‘old Twitter’ before their time – the new format and its sidebar ‘site within a site’ options will soon be mainstream for most of us.

Reading what the tech and social media leaders have to say in their first passes on what’s shifting and changing:

From BNet: http://bit.ly/aDjG4M
Mashable:Google Instant Predictions From A to Z – http://bit.ly/dySazz
The folks @ Techcrunch:  http://tcrn.ch/boleUC

The instant capability will have SEO professionals moving rapidly to assess its impact on their advisory to clients, while those clients themselves will be either approvingly or otherwise coming to new conclusions about their search strategies and spend.

Off to do my own research on day one…for those of us on the marketing and communications sides of the SEO equations, it matters just as much that our projects and client sites and social media marketing know how to integrate and work with this major shift.