Harnessing Social Media: Transforming PR Strategies for Wider Reach (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So social media is relatively a new tool for the PR industry. Over the past three years, it has become a pretty valuable tool for us. Everything from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Clout, to Foursquare, it's a new media to reach more consumers, more people. It allows you to cast a wider net to get the message out there, and thus creating a buzz about the particular account you're working on. One of the things that social media has really kind of helped me is with brands. I mean, you can really get that celebrity endorsement through Twitter. You send a celebrity a product that you're pushing. They love it. They tweet a picture about it. It's golden. It's a way to kind of put that stamp of approval on whatever product you're promoting or whatever restaurant is your client. Another thing that I love about social media and how it's helped us in the PR world is the ability to take that article that you've gotten and spread it out to your fans and followers. If, on the day, let's say you received an article in the New York Post, it would be online. It would be in the Post, and whoever picked up the Post that day or whoever was online saw it. Now, you can tweet out that link to all your followers. You can put it on Facebook. You can put it on Instagram. That allows you to reach this wider audience and allows more viewership on the message that you're trying to spread. Another thing that I love about social media is just the access to mass people. When I started ages ago and I was inviting people to a party, it was hard invites and email invites. Now, I can go on to my company Facebook page or my personal Facebook page and send it directly into their inbox, handpick that crowd, even more so, because who knows? Someone may not open up their mail or their email. It's just another way to target your audience so specifically. Another thing that social media has done for me is, I wouldn't say you can do this all the time, but I was trying to get the attention of an editor about a story that they needed to be in the know about, and for some reason, they weren't responding to me over email. I basically tweeted at them a link because I knew that they were writing a story about this, and I knew that my client would be perfect for this story, but for some reason, they just weren't answering my emails or phone calls. I just tweeted them a little piece of information in time for their deadline, and they got back to me. It was funny. I couldn't break through to this editor through phone or email, and I knew they were writing this story that my client would be perfect for. I was able to send them a small tweet, and they got back to me, and my client was included in the story. Go figure.