All in all there were twelve different attendees and representatives from two different companies, not to mention three different parts of one company itself, and the spread throughout the room was impressively wide. We had everyone from Office Managers and Receptionists through to Production Staff, Program Managers, Comms Managers, Web Designers and IT Heads.

One of the really interesting things that came out of the day was the engagement levels of the attendees. The social graph was particularly scattered with some people only keeping up with children at university via facebook, others who eschewed the text based social space and preferred video chat, guys who use youtube as their primary channel and some people who used nothing at all. To top that off we also had some people in the room who had twigged on to the potential of the social web as a networking and professional development tool.

In Short then, a pretty excellent cross section of society.

I decided that, as there was so many different agendas from the attendees in the room, that to fill a six hour session with niche, techy, or geeky content was a losing strategy so I focussed the day loosely around three main themes:

• The characteristics of the Social Web: How sharing, rating and iterating changed everything.
• The power of the Social Web: How budget needn’t be a barrier and time vs. ROI.
• Promoting and managing engagement with the Social Web: Policy building to grow communities

I interspersed the session with some videos which broke things up nicely and ensured that I came loaded with biscuits to keep the sugar levels up. Also, I had a bit of a flash of inspiration at the very last minute and decided to add in The ABBA Challenge. Throughout the day I dropped in the titles of well known ABBA songs and the first person to ‘call’ these on the Ning network I set up to support the day got points which went towards the grand prize of £25 of Amazon vouchers. So it’s true what they say “if all else fails, try bribery”!

I probably delivered about half of the subject matter that I had actually prepared due to interesting discussions breaking out all over the place on copyright, the Digital Economy Bill, spam and how the Social Web impacts on brands. The main thing I learned from the day is to keep agile when doing training sessions of this size, be led by the group rather than your schedule.

Anyhow, I’ve already had some lovely feedback from the day and connected with some very, very interesting people. Thanks to Helen Philpot for arranging it all and I hope to be back across soon. Also, check out Channel7’s website if you haven’t already.

I have been involved in campaigns – and heard stories of ones – where the Corporate Communications or the PR Consultant blame their clients for the failings of the campaign, the standard excuses generally tend to be around people “going off brief” or legacy issues like “irredeemably damaged” brands. These issues should have been tackled, and strategies made for mitigating the issues, when the response to the initial brief was being developed. If they weren’t identified or tackled at that point then you both really are – to use a tired old cliche – preparing to fail by failing to prepare.These excuses were easy to trot out once upon a time but they are thankfully now becoming harder to make. The advent of Social Media has made it harder to trot out these standard get out clause lines now most campaigns have more of a social focus and the hub of any Social Media PR campaign is the Social Media Newsroom. As we’re constantly being told now, Social Media is moving the  goalposts of how campaigns now work and a good Social Media Newsroom will provide you with a map and compass as well as a yardstick for your campaigns.

So what exactly is a Social Media Newsroom? Well, the newsroom is a bringing together of several elements that already (should) exist disparately into one place on a corporate website. SM newsrooms do an important job of representing the breadth of a modern corporate presence, they bring together the old style Media Room (Press Releases, or in this case Social Media News Releases, contact details for key Press & PR contacts) with multimedia content like viral videos, pod/vodcasts and slideshare or prezi presentations. They also provide crucial Social Media service signposting information for corporate and professional Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious services.

Rather than just ‘frontending’ everything your company does though, the Social Media Newsroom should act as the springboard for your measurement of a story, item of content or campaign. Everything in your SN Newsroom should be monitored as much as practically possible. The content you are putting out there needs to be tracked and monitored for responses. You need to know where each item is going, what it is doing and what people are saying about it and there are great services available in today’s marketplace which allow you to see the reach of your content and gauge the respponses to it. If items receive negative feedback then that needs to be tackled, blogs panning your product need to be replied to and – if the feedback is serious enough to warrant it and budget allows it – changes to that content need to be made.

So what do they actually do? In contrast to old school Press Office/Media Centre areas of sites Social Media Newsrooms provide a more immersive and immediate experience for Press and PR contacts looking for information on a company, project or individual. They also allow a more iterative, longer lasting relationship with these key contacts – who are effectively key markets for corporate Press and PR staff -allowing a more personal, fertile relationship to start both on and off line. That said, SN Newsrooms don’t just serve a specific, media focussed niche but also work perfectly for the Social Media literate customer/client allowing them to sign up and receive information much in the same way as a journalist would.

The Social Media literate customer can be just as important as the journalist – in some cases more so – as they will be very likely to share news, content or new product information with their peers via reTweets, blog posts or Social Bookmarking Services thus boosting the Word of Mouth Marketing credentials of the company. It’s therefore very important to manage this relationship, these people will in all likelihood be promoting your company brand far beyond what can be achieved with normal press relationships. If you treat these people right, as we’ve seen with Apple, they can be the best evangelists for your product or service money (or rather no money, save your investment in a Social Media Newsroom) can buy. By the same token though, these “envangelists”can be the biggest threat to your brand image so, rather than treat them just like you would a journalist, they require their own strategy for cultivation. Keep them happy, keep them fed and above all keep them engaged. Listen to them, reply to them when they query you and above all make them feel special.

Resources:

GM Europe’s Social Media Newsroom:

Pretty much a case study in how a Social Media Newsroom should be, this nicely laid out SMNR agregates feeds, shows tags, signposts useful GM blogs and even feeds recent comments.

SHIFT Communications Social Media Newsroom:

Probably the grandaddy of them all when it comes to Social Media PR, SHIFT pretty much pioneered the idea of the SMNR. I was lucky enough to see a presentation by these guys a couple of years back and I’ve been amazed by how influential their thinking has been as I’ve been hearing it parroted back to me ever since.

First Direct Social Media Newsroom:

Banks generally get a lot of bad press and they dont help theirselves in perpeuating the stuffy image, apart from First Direct the only person who is trying to counter this image is Cristophe Langolis, former Social Evangelist at Lloyds TSB and author of the Visible Banking blog. First Direct are pretty much leading the vanguard action in changing this and can lay claim to the title of the UK’s only Social Bank.

Fathom SEO Social Media Newsroom:

Fathom are an ethical SEO and internet marketing company and they live the ethics right through to their Social Media News Room. They are so ‘right on’ in terms of being open and social they even provide you with a free Wordpress theme for you to have your own SMNR. Beautiful.