Before Reaching Out on the Internet, Ask Yourself these Three Questions
By Bianca Prade, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity
Looking back on 2010, I realize that it was the year that things really began to come together for corporate communicators in the digital space. Facebook and Twitter, the current titans of social media, opened their doors even more to the needs of organizations and companies. They gave businesses unprecedented access to the 46 percent of Americans who use social networks, and the over 600 million people on Facebook and 190 million on Twitter worldwide.
A 2011 study from the Pew Internet & American Life project found that Internet users are much more likely to be active in community organizations, trade associations, and political groups than non-users. Businesses large and small are taking to the Internet to begin and affect conversations, realizing that people active on the Internet are also their best advocates offline.
The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) began 2010 with a belt full of well-tempered digital tools, from a growing series of Web videos, to well-followed social media presences, and an eye-catching website acting as the face of our digital efforts. All of this was crucial to our fully-integrated communications strategy for the year and we worked hard to get where we were. Yet as the year progressed we took a hard look at what we had done thus far and found that we could be doing even better.
So in 2010 we doubled down. Our Factuality Tour – a series of educational webisodes featuring cutting-edge coal technology – made three stops, filming nine videos. We continued to pioneer in emerging digital areas like geosocial, using Foursquare to coordinate and communicate the localized messages of six clean coal field outreach teams as they traveled the country. We kept ahead of the conversation online, ensuring our followers and readers knew us as the leading authority on advancements in clean coal technology by sharing a steady stream of gripping content.
And we realigned. Active on so many platforms, we began noticing that each was developing an individual voice. To make sure this did not lead to any one platform straying off message, we reorganized our 2010 digital tactics around the mandate of communicating a cohesive message everywhere we were – and would go – online. No matter the audience, the style or rapport we had developed on a platform in the past, we focused first on having our digital efforts work in concert.
So too should the coal industry as a whole.
One of the most enriching opportunities from last year was when we gathered senior communications staff from some of ACCCE’s member companies for a retreat at New Media Strategies, one of our digital consultants in Arlington, Va. ACCCE’s membership is quite diverse, and everyone who joined the retreat came with opportunities, risks and challenges unique to their company. The NMS team and I led a boot camp on how everyone in the coal industry can best approach the digital landscape confidently and in such a way that your company or organization isn’t leading with its chin.
For companies of any size, expanding your presence online doesn’t have to be difficult and it doesn’t have to require a large amount of resources. Whether your company or organization is looking to take its first real steps to communicate online, or is hoping to expand your influence digitally, proceed deliberately. Take a minute (or an hour, or more) to answer these questions:
Where do I want to be?
For almost every organization, from an international corporation to a little-league team, the essential foundation of an online communications strategy is a website. Your company’s website will be the first place many people meet you online, so it is worth the investment to make sure it is easily navigable and has all the pertinent resources a visitor may want.
Beyond that it gets trickier.
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