Speaker 1: Social media for public relations. I'm about 15 minutes from logging on to a webinar that I'll be facilitating around the idea of using social media instead of marketing, using it for public relations and crisis mitigation and crisis communication if necessary. So many of us, when we think of social media, especially for communicators, I feel this way. All you think about is stress. You have to come up with content. It has to be original content. We need video. We need graphics. We need design. We need all these different elements to make it seem right. Like, what is the right thing to post? I will be the first to admit that's stressful and it adds a lot of stress to the communicator. If you're a communicator, you know precisely what I'm talking about. If you're not a communicator, take the time to tell the communicator of your organization, I appreciate what you do and I can empathize how much work it is. So that being said, the next piece of it is understanding how social media can be used as a tool. Certainly the biggies, Twitter and Facebook. A lot of the reporters are on Twitter. Journalists are there to source their stories, to find out information about stories. Facebook, we think of a lot of our customers are on Facebook. We don't think of journalists so much as on there, but they certainly source on Facebook and they find information on Facebook. But really, you can use any social media channel to create news and to use it for a public relations point of view and for public relations purposes. Reporters, editors, producers, they are constantly scouring the internet looking for interesting stories. Just Google a story about TikTok and then put in today's date for the news and you will see a story that was likely generated from a user on TikTok. Now imagine if you can take a story like that and harness it and use it to promote your business or your product or your service, whatever it is. On the other hand, it is also a tool where there can be a lot of issues that can be caused on social media as well. So the indestructible PR tip relating to social media is this. Use social media for PR. If you're a communicator, instead of worrying about the marketing, just let that go by the side for a moment so it's not quite as stressful. But think of it as a public relations tool to make your job easier, to make it easier to reach reporters, to make it easier to share your content, your story ideas, points of contact at your organization, sharing video, sharing B-roll, all those things. If you worked in the business like I did 20, 25 years ago, when you remember you had a project where you had to compile B-roll, like I remember having to do B-roll on a cruise ship, oh my gosh, the project, the undertaking that it was. But all of that can be done like this now. You just film. You just go and you film it. So that's it. That's your indestructible PR tip. Use social media as a tool for PR, proactive communications, crisis mitigation, and of course, crisis communications.