Social PR: Meetup to Tweetup
This column was written in November 2009 for Smart Business Network.
In 2004, Howard Dean, then a presidential contender, made headlines by using the Internet to raise money. His innovative campaign advisors then used short text messages called SMS and other Internet technologies to create instant rallies for supporters. These meetups were successful and opened new avenues for political marketing.
In the early 2000s, a Web service called MeetUp.com provided online tools for anyone to organize a disparate group of people with a common interest to come together. A person with a fondness for dachshunds could use MeetUp.com to organize a dachshund play day at a public park. At first, MeetUp.com was a free service. Then the company began to charge a fee, and that provided a spark that set fire to free services. MeetUp.com is attracting about 2.5 million unique visitors each month, and it still offers a range of useful services.
Yelp.com is a fast-growing social information service. Yelp.com began as service that allowed anyone to write a review of a restaurant. The grassroots Zagat’s guide idea took off. Now Yelp.com tallies more than 25 million unique visitors each month. In August 2008, Yelp.com attracted about 18 million unique visitors. The company is on a fast track.
Because Yelp.com collects and organizes users’ recommendations in one convenient place, it has become a convenient way to locate functions, events, services, and get information provided by users. Unlike a traditional directory, Yelp.com is updated continuously.
Now the Yelp.com service line up has evolved into a comprehensive directory and review service. If you are not familiar with Yelp.com or if you looked at the service last year, you will want to navigate to Yelp.com (http://www.yelp.com) and explore the site. You will find that Yelp.com offers unique information and reviews across two dozen subject areas. Topics range from restaurants to home services and include real estate, professional services, and financial services.
Yelp.com works best for large cities. If you want to locate an automotive repair service in a small town in the US, Yelp.com will not be of much use. If you live in a large urban area like Chicago, Manhattan, San Francisco, or Washington, DC, Yelp.com is a valuable resource.
Plug in a city. I used Cincinnati. I then clicked on Professional Services. Yelp provided me with a Google Map that identified some service firms. The result display offered one-click access to services by Cincinnati neighborhood. The results were so-so. When I ran the same query for Washington, DC, Yelp.com hit an information home run.
If you want to create some buzz for your company’s event in a large city, Yelp.com has become an important site on which to place information about an event. Because the service is free, you can get exposure in large metro areas. Yelp.com, on the other hand, won’t deliver much of a punch in a smaller city. Yelp.com offers a no cost service which can make information readily available to individuals seeking ideas or recommendations on a range of activities.
A second useful social information service is Craigslist.org. The company provides a classified advertising service and a public online forum service. Craislist.com attracted about five million unique visitors in July 2009, up 113 percent from traffic in July 2008.
Some online observers and I point to Craigslist.org as a service that the traditional newspaper industry should have developed. An entrepreneur named Craig Newmark rolled out the service in 1995. From its relatively basic listing of local events in the San Francisco area, Craigslist.org has grown to span 570 cities in 50 countries. You can access the service at http://www.craigslist.org.
The company took a punch to the nose about some of the “personal” postings on the free service. As a result, Craigslist.org has made some changes in its posting policies, but for business-related announcements, information can be added to the Craigslist.org site in a particular city. Like Yelp.com, Craigslist.org is most effective in larger urban areas and the service is free.
The company charges for employment advertisements in large cities. For other types of postings on the service, no charge is assessed. Not surprisingly, in markets like New York City, renting an apartment requires a portable device to check Craigslist.org’s rental listings. The potential renter with $1,000 in cash for an on-the-spot security deposit goes directly to the property. Traditional rental listings simply cannot compete on speed or price.
The good news is that Craigslist.org can be used to promote events. Like Yelp.com, the user can submit a news item. Craigslist.org has a monitoring system in place, but most legitimate announcements are posted quickly, often within a matter of hours even at peak times.
The third service – Twitter.com – is one I have written about in previous SBN columns. Twitter.com is also a widely-used information service. Twitter.com has, within the last 12 months, emerged as a distant cousin of MeetUp.com. In San Francisco and other tech hot beds like Austin, Texas, savvy people are using Twitter.com.com to publicize “tweet ups”. Not familiar with this new buzz words? You are not alone. Both Twitter.com.com and meet ups are new tools in the world of social public relations or social PR.
Twitter.com is a service that allows millions of users to send short, 140 byte maximum text messages to everyone with a Twitter.com.com account. Twitter.com is a text messaging broadcasting service. Twitter.com allows any registered user to blast a text message to every Twitter.com user. Tweets, as Twitter.com messages are called, are filtered by key word or retrieved using the Twitter.com search system. You can search the Twitter.com-stream at http://search.Twitter.com.com.
The Twitter.com service allows users to use the hash character that is the familiar # or pound sign on your telephone to signal a topic. You can “follow” people or hash tags. Combining the broadcast method of Twitter.com with followers gives marketers and public relations professionals some useful, low-cost promotional and research tools.
Because Twitter.com.com is free, the service is not 100 percent reliable. Nevertheless, Compete.com reports that Twitter.com had more than four million unique users in July 2009. You can see what’s hot in the Twitter-verse by navigating to Surchur.com, “the dashboard to right now” and browsing the list of Hot Topics. There is also a list of topics that are Catching Fire. Try it by pointing your browser to http://surchur.com/.
With these three ingredients, any sized business has the opportunity to add horsepower to a traditional marketing and public relations campaign. These services fuel an important new marketing opportunity which I call “social PR”. The idea is that individuals “discover” information within a social software environment. Instead of hard copy advertisements or radio and television ads, these services are 100 percent digital and flip the top down information “push” model upside down.
Let’s look at an example of how a “tweetup” can be orchestrated using these three services. The example I will describe is one used by Somat Engineering, a professional services firm in Detroit, Michigan (http://tech.somateng.com). The 8A firm recently opened a new office in Washington, DC, and it wanted to make a media splash, generate buzz, and get some sales leads. The firm’s managing director of the Washington, DC office is adept in social PR. Let me describe that campaign.
Traditional direct mail, public relations, and conference presentations are expensive and losing steam. The reason is that the cost, effectiveness, and fuzzy focus makes it difficult to justify spending thousands of dollars for little or no return.
Arpan Patel, the managing director of Somat DC told me: “I knew we could use social media tools to get people to attend out media briefing. I wanted to have a Tweetup to call attention to our new office.”
His reasoning was that a tweetup could be used to “pull interested people” to a single location. He said: “I thought we could hold a tweetup in a Starbuck’s, but I did not want to crowd a retail store. We decided to hold our meet up at the National Press Club. The meeting room rate was reasonable, and the NPC is within walking distance of many government offices and literally in the middle of the working journalists in Washington.”
He continued: “I knew that one mall multimedia company held a successful spontaneous meet ups at this year’s South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. What made this use of Twitter.com and meet ups interesting is that the firm using this method was not a big exhibitor, which gave me the idea that Somat could use the same model to gain visibility.”
In my conversation with Mr. Patel, who holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, I learned that he used Yelp.com, Craigslist.org, and Twitter.com tweets.
The method of promotion, which you can examine online included distribution of a basic information via a posting on Yelp.com and Craigslist.org. In addition, Somat Engineering posted the details of the event on its Web site and sent out automated Twitter.com messages about the program.
What happened?
The “news” of the meet up was picked up by other electronic information services, including a specialist service Daily Rotation and a number of bloggers. The announcement found its way into the Google index.
Mr. Patel said, “We received our first sign up within minutes of the first postings on Yelp.com and Craigslist.org.”
“Once the reservations began flowing,” he added, “we had to call the National Press Club and get a larger meeting room. We wanted to reach the decision makers who were in touch with social media. That’s our market, and I think the social PR tactics worked quite well for us.”
Let me wrap up with four suggestions. First, you may want to invest a few minutes looking at the social information and dissemination sites mentioned in this column. Social PR is not for every organization, but knowing what’s available is useful. Second, if social PR fits into your organization’s way of doing business, experiment. You may want to try a small-scale test. Third, social PR at this time is a low cost adjunct to existing public relations campaigns. If momentum continues to build, some of the services that are free today, may institute fees in the future. Finally, keep your radar on scan for new social media services that can provide a boost to your current marketing activities.
Stephen Arnold, ArnoldIT.com
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Mr. Arnold is an independent consultant residing in Harrod's Creek, Kentucky. He is the author of more than 10 monographs. His most recent is Google: The Digital Gutenberg, available from www.infonortics.com. He writes monthly columns for Information World Review, and the Smart Business Network. His informal writings about information appear in his Web log, Beyond Search.