Minding Your Media:
A Checklist for the New Year

By Renee Dexter

With the new year upon us, what better time to focus on the marketing efforts you will implement in 2012? Doing so need not be daunting or time consuming. A short, organized checklist will put you on the right track in a snap.

To create your list, think in terms of four. Just as many things in life come in groups of four — the four earth elements, four food groups, four seasons — so do the types of media to include on your checklist: owned, paid, social and earned.  

Owned Media

Owned media is something you control — your website, blog or newsletter. No doubt, you’ve invested a lot of time, money and resources into these assets, so be sure to use them to their fullest potential. For the new year, make it a point to:

• Update your website content — review the About Us section, change the copyright date, and archive newsletters.    
• Refresh a few photos and/or graphics on your website and/or newsletter.
• Add one new feature, such as a video on your website or a column to your newsletter.

Paid Media

Maximize the impact of paid media efforts — including both traditional and online advertising — by considering their role in the larger outreach plan. Make sure you support paid media with earned, social and owned media. Here is your paid media checklist for the new year:

• Research the basics of buying and measuring traditional and digital media. Google AdWords has a thorough and easy-to-understand training module on online search and display advertising and analytics.
• Schedule a meeting with a strategic media company to determine if theirs is a service you need. Ask how fees are paid, how strategies are developed and what types of clients use their services.  
• Define your target audience, and interview your customers to see how they make their purchase decisions. Make it a point to ask new customers where they heard about your company.

Social Media

If you don't use social media or only use it for your personal use, it's time to develop a social media strategy for your business. Your social media strategy doesn't have to be elaborate, it just needs to work to create awareness, provide information and encourage the audience to take an action. These goals all lead back to one component — content. Timely, useful information goes a long way in building a solid social media plan. And keep in mind that by its nature, social media is interactive. Make two-way communication the goal of your strategy. Be sure you engage your audience; don't just inundate them with promotional content.

Before proceeding with the social media checklist, see what your competitors are doing. This will help you gauge their involvement and identify who is engaged with them.

• Twitter — Develop a one-month calendar of topics that you can tweet, and review the results. Tweets should inform, initiate a conversation or drive an action. Look for relevant news hooks and holidays. You can also use Google Trends to see how often certain topics have been searched and in what regions those topics are popular. To help you identify the heavy influencers on Twitter, utilize its new feature that identifies and ranks the top 25 influencers for almost any topic. Klout.com also will help you identify top influencers on Twitter and Facebook in certain categories.

• Facebook — Your Facebook page will serve as a mini website, but remember that the corporate side of social media is about connecting with influencers. Your goal on Facebook shouldn't be to get as many "likes" as possible; it should be to engage with influential people, as well as current and potential customers. Influencers share content and help spread your message. Once you identify the notable influencers, you can entice them with discounts or contests, provide them with special offers in exchange for reaching out to your audience, or reward them through some other type of loyalty program.

• LinkedIn — Whether you accept the occasional LinkedIn invitation or you have 500 or more connections,  your network is much larger than you think. Think in terms of “Six Degrees of Separation,” the theory that that everyone is approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth. If you have 100 LinkedIn connections, your second-degree connections might total more than 14,000 people, and you might have more than a million third-degree connections. Because LinkedIn represents your professional identity, use it to announce product launches, answer questions about a variety of topics, post white papers to show your expertise in a specific area and recruit new customers.

If you have visual content to share, check out sites such as Pinterest and SlideShare. Pinterest enables you to share photos, and SlideShare enables you to share PowerPoint slides. You also can link to your online assets with these sites, and because they encourage comments, you can engage with your audience quickly.

Earned Media

As opposed to media that you purchase, earned media is publicity you receive as a result of efforts to build relationships with the press. With the advent of social media, connecting with journalists is easier than ever. That said, it is important that you leverage the topical content through your owned and social media activities to show that you are a thought leader, that you have timely information, and that your company is worthy of publicity. In other words, while frequent contact with your press contacts is essential to building your relationships, nothing sours the relationship more quickly than bombarding your contacts with non-newsworthy releases. Completing the following checklist will give you a good introduction to earned media.

• Learn how to write an effective press release. (see Mark Nelson's Hop To It article, "Essentials for Newsworthy Press Releases".)

• Do some research to find out which reporters write about topics that relate to your business. Check out Muck Rack (muckrack.com) to see what journalists have to say about top news stories. Muck Rack also identifies which journalists are tweeting/blogging about certain topics.

• Create a press list of reporters who would be interested in writing about your company's initiatives/products/events, and keep this list up-to-date.

Ready, Set, Check

Even if you check off only a few items on the list, don't let that work go to waste. If you update your website, refresh your Facebook page or implement a new paid media campaign, let your customers know. This is an excellent opportunity to talk with current and potential customers and ask what they think about the changes. In other words, it’s the perfect opportunity to interact with your target audience. And it’s the first step to minding your media in 2012!

Renee Dexter has over 20 years of marketing experience that includes managing integrated campaigns. She also has hands-on experience in print production, graphic design, direct mail, co-op advertising, writing, and editing. 

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