Page One Social Media Process

Many years ago, Cathy Cook, a friend of mine, told me that PR was a process, not a project or discrete set of activities. Since I was just starting in PR and Cathy is very smart, I believed her.

PR is a process. However, it is a process that many people have come to know and understand well. As we grew our PR business, it became difficult to different our services from the competition. Everyone described their process basically the same. Everyone claimed to have hired great people and could speak to stellar results.

We started to speak about discrete services such as speaking, analyst relations, business press media relations, technology trade media relations, and open source technology PR. In my opinion, the only things that really stands out as different are our strong relationships with the open source community and our knowledge of open source story angles we developed over the past decade.

When I started to draft our new Social Media brochure and web site content, I started to think about what Cathy Cook had said, "PR is a process." Social Media is a process, not a set of services or tasks.

Our new brochure reflects this position. Since social media is a new field, there is an opportunity to define the process, making our service offering more efficient and more effective than firms without an established process. There's a window of opportunity to establish ourselves as unique. The competition is trying a range of activities and seeing what works. For now, they are less efficient and sometimes miss the mark.

The process in this document does work. It's based on a year's worth of social media campaigns with Silicon Valley companies ranging from venture-funded startups like Appcelerator, to e-commerce sites like wine.com, to large technology companies like Cisco. Feel free to implement it at your own company. If you have questions, post them in the comments section of this blog post and I'm try to answer them.

Page One Social Media Process - Quick Overview

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