Skip to main content

Social PR in Enterprise IT

The last ten months in EASTWEST PR I have dealt mainly with IT vendors in the Enterprise and Telecom space. I have learnt a few things about social media and why this space is different from their consumer counterparts.

Lesson #1: Their audience isn’t the bloggers

While most consumer Social PRist target other bloggers for their PR campaign, those in Enterprise IT and Telecom are not looking to engage other bloggers.

One of the problems is that the number of bloggers who actually blog about Enterprise IT and Telecoms in this part of Asia is almost zero. There could be some out there who blog in this space, but they choice of being anonymous makes it hard for me to engage them.

Hence the audience isn’t other bloggers, but their existing or potential clients. When you are looking to engage on Social PR activities for those in the Enterprise IT or Telecom, its all about helping get them in front of the clients.

Lesson #2: Clients want more impact

Say you got your client an interview and it was published, that’s a hit. You get a pat well done.

That used to be what happened yesterday.

Enterprise IT and Telecom clients want to know what’s next after that published interview. Yes, it came out in print, but what’s next?

Clients want to see how getting in print will get them more customers, or at least help close that impending deal faster.

Hence, my take is that PR agencies have to up that value add by providing clients with a marketing sales kit they can bring to their sales team.

You can do this by creating a LinkedIn account for the spokesperson. Get the spokesperson to connect as many as he can. When the article is out, shared it as a link. Get you spokesperson to also start a discussion over the article.

If you have any suggestions how those in the Enterprise IT and Telecom space can make use of the Social Media space, I hope you would share it with me.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Singapore radio personality in "hot soup" for reporting train delays based on Tweets?

Update - Hossan Leong has commented on this post to say " I'm not in trouble pls don't blow this out of proportion. Let it rest. It's getting silly. Thank you for your love and concern and I apologize for any misunderstanding." ~  Hossan Leong. Hossan Leong, a Singapore radio personality for The Gold Breakfast Show on Gold 90.5, was censured today for reporting on train delays on the Circle Line because he based the information on Tweets, rather than waiting for the official reports from the Circle Line operator, SMRT.  It is, however, unknown if the "warning" came from Mediacorp producers or SMRT. Tweeted Hossan Leong ,  OK...I reported it on air and now I'm getting into trouble for it?? The CC line is DOWN rite? I did nothing wrong rite? The SMRT Circle Line was reported to be down this morning during peak hours and started as early as 7am. However, local news only received official statement was received by the mainstream media at about 9...

DBS Bank – One Tweet too little too late.

(Updated post - DBS apologise with the 3Rs – Will social media bite? ) It was the bluest Monday for DBS/POS Bank in its entire banking history when more than 1000 of their ATM and online banking services were taken offline due to a software upgrade an outage (PR announced that it was down due to software upgrade, but the outsourcer, IBM, later claimed it was an outage). So on that Monday, DBS decided to sign up onto Twitter and post a 140 characters one-liner onto Twitter to post a one liner to inform the Twitterverse of the down time. Everybody knows that if you just create a new account on Twitter, you would start off with 0 friends. How would you be able to inform the Twitterverse if you start with 0 friends? DBS Bank did something smart to insert the #dbs and #posb and that probably drew some attention to this account. However, the effectiveness of the tweet was lacking as it drew only 28 retweets. As of this posting, DBS Bank attracted 274 followers. A letter to T...

New field in SocialPR: Social Media Crisis Communications

I have been busy with family for the Lunar New Year week but it seem the Singapore blog-o-sphere was active, and is still is, about recently formed Association of Bloggers (Singapore), ABS for short. To cut a long story short, the announcement of ABS via mainstream media didn’t go down well with Singapore bloggers and in the end resulted in some speculation to why ABS was set-up in the first place. A post by the ABS president defending herself against a harsh criticism from a blogger added to the bad start and created even more speculation that ABS was set-up with an ulterior motive. A week later, some founding members of the pro-team started posting up notice of resignation on their blogs and this just added fuel to fire. Again, a story of ABS appeared in mainstream media and this lead to even more disgruntled bloggers asking why the president isn’t responding via her blog or the association’s blog. I also responded to a post about the ABS incident. You can catch a summary of...