Two weeks ago something amazing happened. Joyce Sullivan – a passionate social media professional and professor from New York – discovered my work and made me part of her social media talk during an All Women in Media NYC meeting at the AOL HQ in New York.
A day before the event, Joyce was looking for an infographic for her talk to show the attendees what's happening in public relations and social media.
When she googled “social media in public relations” my infographic about the results from my first dissertation on social media’s impact on PR that I had posted on visual.ly came up. (How amazing is that – to rank so high in SERP!)
After she discovered my infographic, she tweeted me and we started a conversation, which we eventually moved from Twitter to email and we even connected all over the internet – LinkedIn, Instagram, SlideShare etc.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t follow the talk live with #awmnyc on Twitter, because it was already 12am in Dublin, so I was asleep. Fortunately, Joyce made a Storify, so you can check out the Twitter activities here. She also recorded it so you can listen to it below. From minute 12 through to minute 14 is where she mentions me and talks about the results of my PR and social media dissertation. Pay attention to minute 13:35 – it’s quite funny, everyone laughs when Joyce explains that I’m already sleeping.
Joyce said afterwards that my story and slides had brought a real personal touch.
What I loved about Joyce’s presentation were her five questions that I too believe are essential for building and defining a brand today.
The five questions you need to ask to define your brand:
- Who are you? -> Brand
- What do you have to say? -> Message
- Who are you trying to reach? -> Audience
- How do they want to be reached? -> Tool
- Once you connect, what’s your plan? -> Journey
Particularly the last one is often forgotten or ignored. Companies focus on creating their content strategies, mapping out their brand identities and audience preferences to their messages, but forget that this needs to be happening all the time and it needs to evolve with the conversation. It’s a process that never stops, not a one-off push.
This ongoing conversation is what builds relationships, but it’s probably the hardest part because it involves consistency, effort and genuine interest and acknowledgment of what your audience is saying. It’s two-way, it’s participatory, it’s interactive – and it’s challenging.
The power of social media
I’m so happy that I live in such a connected world. Joyce and I have so many things in common and this is so great, because I can learn from her experiences and we can exchange ideas and collaborate, just as it happened with this event. But without social media, this wouldn’t have been possible.
And another thing that’s awesome: Joyce lives in New York – this is my dream city where I want to end up one day and as you can see I am already making some great contacts there.
I’m so grateful to Joyce for including my work and telling the story of how we e-met just a day before her talk. This is the power of social media. You can connect with like-minded individuals from all over the world and you never know when that would happen. Every day brings a surprise.
