Unless reporters already knock at your door it can be difficult to win their attention. Expensive consultants and PR firms might help but few guarantee results. How to get attention when you’re not already a headline act remains a challenge.
A growing option for you is social media. The best known platforms like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter are all available to send messages, post pictures or video.
Social-casting is a new option in this space. And a new platform – TrakVu TV – offers you your own social-casting channel to program as you like. TrakVu TV operates like a TV talk show where the audience can talk back to and ask questions.
Invite your audience to log-on to the special page attached to your website where the guests watch and hear your live discussion, panel presentation, or launch party. But much more than just log-on, your guests join the event, interacting with you, asking questions in real-time and getting individual answers.
This gives you the chance to build the new relationships that you can then use to promote your idea or your brand. The mechanics are simple. TV cameras shoot your live event and transmit the pictures and sound to your specially built social-casting page. Guests then send their questions and comments to you through platforms like Twitter and you respond – all in real-time.
You set the discussion focus, date and time, and invite the audience of your choice. TrakVu TV costs a fraction of what you might pay to televise your live event along conventional lines. Further, your audience is drawn to your website, boosting traffic, and at the end of the program you have the names and addresses of the guests who logged on.
TrakVu TV is not a substitute for conventional promotion but it can serve as an effective add-on, helping you expand into social media with a live interactive event that builds attention and drives buzz.
Remember: Social Media is Social
Imagine that I meet you at some event like a cocktail party or business meeting. I shake your hand, tell you that “I’m a very smart and handsome man, a skilled athlete loved by women, envied by men, and someone who can really help you out.” At this point I sweep my hand across the room and add that, “of all these people gathered here, I am the best.”
Described another way that’s advertising. Whether it’s on a billboard, TV screen or website, the message is “I’m the best. Buy me.” And it’s a one-way message. The billboard never sees you react.
Social media is different. It’s a conversation. You can talk about yourself at this cocktail party but you need to do more than just that if you want to be invited back. It helps if you’re interesting, polite, ask about me, and show me that you’re honest.
And here is the confusion. Conventional advertising and PR firms as well as news divisions are beginning to use social media but they apply conventional media rules. They talk at you on Twitter the way they’re accustomed to talking at you on a website. In many cases their “message-points” are barely veiled spam. A mistake. These self-described “communicators” are more likely to be invited back to the party if they learn to converse instead of pontificate.
When it’s your turn to talk on a social platform, whether Twitter or your high-school reunion the same rules will endear or repel you. Think about who you’re talking to. Try to engage them in a discussion that interests them. That probably means talking about more than just yourself.
AK
This past week, Chancellor Oral Roberts passed away. Oral Roberts University (“ORU”) is a client of TrakVu, and TrakVu co-founder Brian Boyd is a graduate of their Communication Arts program. On Monday 12/21, TrakVu will produce the official ORU webcast to be located at http://memorial.oru.edu. We extend our condolences to the family and friends of Chancellor Roberts.
