Let’s say you’ve adopted every change outlined in this 10-post series on 2011 PR plans.  You’ve recognized the need to change the infrastructure of your plan, changed “Audiences to Communities,” upgraded your message bible for SEO, adopted the scientific method for communications,  discovered that to live your corporate values you MUST use social media, you have 20 new social media metrics, adopted a can-do attitude regarding regulatory issues for social media, have a plan for social media mistakes,  will be using perpetual press releases, and are planning to crack some silos to make social media work for your company. (Whew!)

Now ask yourself the three most critical questions you face in 2011:

1. The PR industry you grew up in has changed forever.  Has your skill set, responsibilities and goals changed as much?

2. The channels that your customers, investors and employees use to access information are completely different from two years ago.  Is your staff and budget re-allocated proportionately?

3. Your competitors are either behind on social media, upgrading their current efforts, or far ahead of you.  Does your 2011 plan enable you to leave them far behind, jump ahead or leapfrog them?

Can a PR department get through 2011 without working with sales, customer service, investor relations, research, compliance and legal departments on at least a few social media issues?  No. Will those issues be easier to manage if formal networks of coordination are set up now?  Absolutely.

And I’m not talking about the department head to department head network that already exists. But the execution folks that are on the ground, online, and know the cultural mores that present unique problems and opportunities.

So as you assemble your 2011 plan, how about reaching out to those other departments and proposing a little council be set up? As always, ask for volunteers. Only the people who want to try something new will raise their hands, and it’s that little oomph that will stir them to openly share questions and learnings about what they’re seeing in social media land.

Because no one department can master social media on it’s own. And the truly amazing things social media can deliver only happen when everyone’s at the table.

It’s fashionable to bash press releases in social media circles, but how about a constructive look at how to integrate them into your 2011 social media efforts? Surprise:  this decades-old tool is more useful than you think.

The critical conceptual change to embrace is that the news cycle doesn’t work the same way in social media.  With journalists, they get the release, there’s a spike in coverage and then the story becomes “old” in a few days, never to be reported on again.

But once they’re online, press releases start a wave of conversation that can go on for weeks, months, even years.  Why?  Because to customers, what’s “new” isn’t as important as what’s relevant, interesting, and useful.  This phenomenon is especially prevalent in B2B because the topics are more complex and sales cycles are much longer.

(literally, back of the napkin sketch)

Be prepared to see a steady trickle of chatter for several months, and a series of flare ups in conversation when someone asks a question, provokes debate or references your news with a link about something else.

Funny thing is, it’s probably already happening with your releases from years ago!  In this way, every press release has become a perpetual press release.

Here are five ways to manage perpetual press releases:

Mistakes?  Really?  You really want me to have a section of my 2011 plan that explains we’re going to make mistakes???

Yup.

Feel free to copy and paste the following into your plan. Or not and then say why you think it would be a mistake to do that in the comments.

Mistakes:

We’re going to make them. When we do, we’ll apologize, do everything reasonable to make it right, and then improve our procedures to make sure they don’t happen again. It’s important to recognize that even if we haven’t done something wrong, some people will think that we did.   Social media is too new and evolving too fast to eliminate that risk.  The unavoidable time lag between the “right now” demands of online communities and our ability to update our procedures will likely mean we’ll take some hits.  However, we recognize the potential damage of those hits is much smaller  than what we’ll incur by not engaging at all.

“Regulatory issues will have to be addressed.”

Too many 2011 PR plans are being written with the “have to” language, and it might as well be an epitaph for your social media efforts.  Are the words true?  Yes.  Do they incite insecurity that undermine organizational change? Yes again.

What if instead you were to say “regulatory issues will be addressed.”  The same limitations are there, but a sense of empowerment is too.

The power of this bit of language — all too common in articles and industry speeches — struck me in a story shared by a colleague who works in the health care sector.

Scrolling through Twitter yesterday, I saw the umpteenth list of “5 Ways to Do X” and “Three Rules that Every…”  So as a joke, I tweeted “2,356 reasons why I’m tired of lists http://bit.ly/makeYourNextBlogPostaPoemOrSomething.iamAhypocrite4doingLists2.

To be sure, I’ve done a few of these lists myself and I do it because they work.  I can tell by the click-throughs. But sometimes you need a break, even from your own writing style. So although it started out as a joke, I decided to write today’s post as a poem.

No, I don’t plan on this being a regular thing :)

An Ode to Living Corporate Values Through Social Media

There once was a flack from Nantucket,
who decided one day to chuck it.

Reporters wanted stories, and he was happy to pitch,
but there were opportunities online for the Inc. to get rich.

On Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook they came,
and always, each moment, they cried out the same:

“Join our group!  It’s about your stuff.”
“We discuss great ideas and there are never enough.”

Back at HQ, it was rough Q&A.
“Should we talk back?” “Is there something to say?”

“Do we want to engage? Are all of them sane?”
(Many had read ’99′s Clutrain.)

“Let’s check our values and if they align!”
Honest and transparency, those checked out fine.

Great service and growth, social media would help,
on blogs, on forums…perhaps even Yelp.

Stewardship made sense, as did innovation.
All would be furthered through participation.

In embracing their values, they had little to fear,
and suddenly 2011 became crystal clear.

“To live our values, we MUST engage!”
And so to their plans, they added a page.

It’s satisfying to fill in the list of “Key Audiences” in a PR plan. They’re pretty obvious and easy to prioritize. When well defined, the list serves as a north star for the rest of the document, guiding everything that comes next.

It’s such a big help because the term “audience” captures the power structure you’ll deploy. The company speaks and the audience listens. Oh sure, audiences sometimes talk back, but through customer service or letters. Not with a megaphone loud enough to think of them as anything but an audience.
By now you’re probably hearing alarm bells go off with this pre-social media mode of thinking. And yet many 2011 PR plans being drawn up now will include a section on “Audience” out of habit,  warping the company’s ability to see threats and opportunities.

Try this thought experiment:
1. Write “Key Audiences” and list them. Then jot down notes on all the things you want to do to that audience. Raise visibility, differentiate from peers, convince them to buy your stuff, apply to HR…that sort of thing.

2. Now write “Our Communities” and list them. Assemble a quick list of all the things you could do with them.

It’s September and PR departments ’round the world are thinking about their plans for 2011.  Problem is, the templates they’re breaking out and the old documents they’re flipping through look like they’re from 1986.

So if your 2010 plan didn’t include social media — or worse, it did, but things didn’t go well — let’s take the next two weeks to upgrade it.  First up in this 10-post series?  Changing “Key Audiences” to “Our Communities.”

Here’s a preview of the upcoming posts, followed by a moment of nostalgic reflection with the trailer from Hot Tub Time Machine.

Monday: Changing “Key Audiences” to “Our Communities”

Tuesday: Upgrading the Message Bible for Social SEO

Wednesday:  Applying the Experimental Method

Thursday:  Living Corporate Values Online

Friday:  Five Additional Metrics