Traditional comms is as dead as the boozy lunch with the Town Hall reporter.
Back in the old days a few beers with the right person may have been enough.
Not in 2011 it isn’t.
Not just because that reporter may now be based in an industrial estate 20 miles away.
The changing face of communications is something I’ve blogged about before.
There’s a whole list of things a press officer needs to do.
For some nice people at LG Comms Scotland I distilled much of this thinking into a presentation.
At their seminar in Dalkeith it was good to see people realising times have changed.
There were some excellent resources posted afterwards to the Communities of Practice site – log in is required.
Here’s my presentation too.
Basically, it covers the following ground:
- Basic principles – What is social media? How does it work. Some basics.
- Creating your media map – to see how things have changed on your patch. So you can work out where to put your resources. Not least a cunning way to get stats from Facebook.
- Some case studies – What works in Twitter, Flickr and Foursquare and Facebook.
It’s not about abandoning the traditional approach that puts print journalists first. More it’s a long overdue re-calibration.
Social media should be part of everything that we do and the last thing it should be is an obstacle.
Or a bit scary.
It should be part of everything that we do.