News & Opinion

7 Tools to Help You Showcase Your Social Media Presence by @KellyeCrane Social media has become an integral tool for independent communication professionals and their clients. Most professionals use more than one platform to reach their audience adding to the challenge of managing and promoting a social presence. Fortunately there are tools to help you present a cohesive social presence and strategically tie together disparate social streams. Some tools provide ways to show these combined conversations on your website or blog, which can increase engagement and time on site. In fact, a Livefyre study showed that 73% of their survey respondents use some form of real-time, social application on their website and of those, 88% increased user engagement with their brand as a result.­­ Below are 7 tools that help you to centralize your social media presence and unify disparate networks into a cohesive social stream. All tools presented are free but some also have premium paid versions.  1. Brand Yourself (Free DIY version) Brand Yourself centralizes your social media links and gives you control over your digital reputation. You submit the links you want and Brand Yourself gives you steps to make those profiles and or links rank higher in Google search results. 2. About.Me (Free) Use About.Me to create a central point of contact for all of your social media profiles. Visitors do not have to sign up to see your About.Me profile making it a perfect tool to promote your social media presence, especially for those who don’t yet have a website or blog. Create an About.Me for brand spokespersons, or key stakeholders. Use the profile in place of multiple icons in email signatures, and marketing collateral. 3. Totally Dot (Free) With Totally Dot you can centralize your social updates. Create a public front page that integrates social updates from Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and more. Totally Dot also allows you to create Pinterest style boards around a specific topic which can be a good tool to add to client campaigns or to showcase multiple products and services. 4. Vizify (Free/ Premium $15 month or $120 annual) Vizify turns your social data into an interactive bio. It integrates data from Twitter, Facebook and your input to create a slick visual bio.  Vizify also creates a Twitter movie from your tweets, top influencers, top tweets and photos. Use for personal branding or for client speakers and/or key executives. 5. Flavors Me (Free / Premium $20/year) Flavors.Me allows you to unite all of your social media into one customizable profile. You get interactive audio and video and full screen photos in a customizable display. Can be used with an existing domain or you can purchase a new one through Flavors. 6. Rebel Mouse (Free / Enterprise must request quote) Rebel Mouse gives you a way to organize all of your social steams into a single social website, which you can showcase on their site or easily embed in a website or blog. We used this tool at the SoloPR Pro Summit in 2014 to organize all of the social mentions of the event into one organized social site. Rebel Mouse recently introduced an Enterprise version that enables brands and publishers to create dynamic digital content hubs and content-driven marketing campaigns. 7. Tint (Basic version is free) Bring all your social feeds together in one social hub that can be integrated onto a website, Facebook page or mobile app. Tint can be used for client contests or to serve up fresh content on a website. These tools can allow you to creatively curate multiple social streams and support client events and campaigns, but just a reminder: you don’t own your presence on social networks, so these tools are not a replacement for an owned/branded web presence, such as a website or blog (Posterous is fairly recent example of what can happen in the wild world of social). That said, if you’re already doing the work to actively participate in social media, you might as well show it off! Are you using any of these tools in your social media strategy? Let us know, and please feel free to share your own links and examples in the comments!  

by @PRDaily   When a crisis strikes, many attorneys have the same instinct: to clamp down on corporate communications and make as few public statements as possible (if any at all).   That’s because an attorney’s primary job is to minimize future financial payouts and, in cases of criminal wrongdoing, to reduce your culpability.   That’s a narrow prism through which to view a crisis, and it might not be sufficient to keep your business afloat. Too often, attorneys fail to take your long-term reputation into account. They also don’t consider the impact of a crisis on employee recruitment, retention, productivity, and morale, as well as customer, shareholder, and donor loyalty.   In some crises, the amount of damage to your reputation can exceed the legal payout. Sure, your lawyer’s legal strategy might result in a courthouse victory three years from now, but it may come at the steep cost of years of unflattering headlines.   Crises require you to make tough choices, occasionally ones that pit sound legal advice against sound communications advice.   For example, I once asked a top executive in crisis whether her top goal was to keep her job (which would be accompanied by a drawn-out legal case and severe damage to her reputation) or to maintain her reputation in the long term, which would require her to leave her job (but allow her to ditch the legal case).   Based on dozens of case studies and the predictable stages most crises follow, I counseled her that she would have to make a difficult choice: her job or her reputation. She insisted she could keep both, and she failed to act.   Within weeks, she lost her job—and her reputation.   When faced with such a choice, ask yourself:    What’s the right thing to do? Have I received input from legal and communications professionals and given both perspectives consideration? Can I develop a strategy that marries the best legal and PR advice? Better yet, can I find an attorney who excels in communications and fully supports the PR function? Insurance companies Like attorneys, insurance companies typically have the sole goal of reducing their payouts. Worse, many insurance policies actually prohibit you from doing the right thing. For example, my company’s insurance policy reads: “You must not admit liability for or settle or make or promise any payment in respect of any claim, loss or damage which may be covered under this Policy.”   In other words, if a crisis hits my firm and I determine that an admission of wrongdoing is the best way to minimize the crisis and keep my company out of the headlines, I can’t offer one. Doing so might result in a voided claim and a canceled policy.   Still, this isn’t always the case. Jonathan Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management, advises clients to find a company more enlightened in its approach to crisis communications. Speak to your carrier—some errors and omissions insurance contracts have a crisis-management component.   If worse comes to worst, you could always cancel your policy and go it alone, as long as the potential payout is low and the risk of inaction is high. That’s a risky strategy, so consult a lawyer and insurance professional before going “bare.”