Finally had a chance to catch my breath after the most intense PR campaign I’ve ever been part of wrapped up a few weeks ago. From March to July 2010 it was nonstop action, as the stats below indicate.
What I take away from this report of our PR and Social Media Campaign at my current employer is a few things:
- The mainstream media (particularly TV) still has a HUGE reach, and in some ways our story was over-exposed and covered too much. (As a PR guy I never thought I’d hear myself say such a thing!)
- I was shocked a few different times to see the mainstream media almost willingly let itself be manipulated by one side to the detriment of the other. (As a former journalist I never wanted to believe that could ever happen, but as a PR guy I saw it happen a few times during this campaign.)
- People are still talking about how our Facebook page took on a life/culture/conversation of its own (0 to 11,000+ fans in 120 days) and how to harness that audience and energy moving forward.
- It was amazing to me how often the “mainstream” media would poach stories and run “rank and file member response” quotes straight from our MNA Facebook Page and put them on TV or in the newspaper without doing any real fact checking to confirm that person was a MNA Member. I think many mainstream journalists are still trying to figure out how to source stories when quoting Social Media postings, and that some are just plain lazy about it.
- That our most popular YouTube video was the one with the least amount of production and editing.
- That our most effective and well-received YouTube videos member-wise were the personal video updates we shared with nurses.
- That Twitter mostly fell flat (at least in terms of the number of followers) as a tool and that Facebook and YouTube dwarfed it in terms of followers, interest and chatter. By the end I was only using Twitter to spit out automated updates that drove traffic to our Facebook/YouTube/MNA Blog/MNA Web site updates.
- How popular live streaming some of our bigger press conferences became, with thousands of people watching, and how even out of town media would watch the presser online and pull quotes from it.
- That our MNA Blog became at times quite heated with debate among nurses and others. I did very little censorship of the comments and in turn it sparked some very lengthy and lively debates. It was amazing to me as site administrator to see how many people would subscribe via e-mail to a particular Blog post’s comment feed so they could track the back-and-forth.
- It surprised me that the official MNA Web site more or less became a secondary source of information for our nurses, the media and the general public. All of those groups often visited our Social Media pages first, then went to the MNA site for more details.
What do you think? Do any of these numbers or stats surprise you?
