As part of the Expert Q&A section of PR Week's Product & Tools Newsletter, I was interviewed recently to talk about the role of social media in PR, marketing and media, and how the media landscape is evolving.
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Here is an excerpt:
How can communications professionals most effectively use video in their PR campaigns?
MS: There are three primary areas [where] we work closely with PR professionals, agencies, and major brands. One is to leverage rich, social media as part of a larger conversational marketing strategy to create brand awareness through uploading, rating, reviewing, commenting, sharing and an underlying contest for most popular/interesting/ viral content. For example, this is a link to a blog I wrote about a campaign called "laidback legends" that we did with Fosters Lager and their interactive agency, Chunk, which allows consumers to upload videos of the different characters that you encounter at a bar. Weekly winners get their bar tab covered for the week. The grand prize winner gets a dream trip with their bar buddies.
The second is the use of these technologies to supplant the type of community engagement that previously was dependent on a face-to-face event or was relegated to an email list.
The last is to test new social media services very rapidly without the high cost, high execution risk and long time to market. In this case, we enabled Disney, by working with their interactive agency, avenue a/razorfish, to create a new virtual theater concept that has the potential to reinvent the way companies market new DVD releases. Here is a blog post on that service which went from storyboard to first pilot in a few weeks.
