• by Michael Volpatt , June 1, 2009

As more people log on and search for ways to keep themselves and others informed of their daily whereabouts and musings, social media properties are experiencing exponential growth

ComScore reported that worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February 2009, up a astounding 700+% vs. a year ago. Another social media success, Facebook, as reported by Mashable, has more than 39 million visitors and growing daily.

Social bookmarking sites are also experiencing rapid growth. In the social bookmarking world users save links to Web pages that they want to remember and/or share. The more popular sites include Digg, StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz! and Reddit.

As these new tools become increasingly popular, how can marketers and PR executives work together to ensure that their message is extending beyond traditional media placements and also pushing them higher up in search listings?

We liken social media PR to planting and nurturing a healthy garden. All of the right tools need to be in place to ensure optimal success and overgrowth, which is a good thing online.

Tilling the Soil
As with any traditional media outreach campaign, preparing your tools (or tilling the soil) for outreach is of the utmost importance. Developing the key messages is an important element in this phase; because once your outreach efforts go viral it is next to difficult to control what others will say. This is the nature of the game with social media PR and something that all marketers must accept before committing to this strategy.

Crafting the media list is also important and requires marketing and PR execs to segment by embargo contacts, post-embargo contacts and primary and secondary bloggers (more on this later).

And last but not least, the creation of your press release and pitch to the embargo and post-embargo media and bloggers should always use the approved messaging as a guideline.

Planting the Seed, Pollinating the Community and Watering Vigorously
In social media PR you "plant the seed" by sending the release and compelling pitch to selected media targets a few days prior to the announcement. Recently, Hearst Magazines Digital Media announced a partnership with Coupons.com to launch a coupon gallery on the fifth most popular food site online, Delish.com (owned by Hearst Magazines Digital Media and MSN).

The PR team "planted the seed" with the media by segmenting 15 media targets to receive the announcement on embargo two days prior to the official release date. This resulted in three pre-announcement interviews, which all turned into news stories on the day of the release. Once the stories went live the announcement was sent to other trade media and primary bloggers, which resulted in additional placements. This is what is considered "pollinating the community."

The rest of the targeted trade reporters and secondary bloggers were "watered vigorously" by using popular social bookmarking sites and Twitter. A link to the story was also sent to secondary bloggers.

As mentioned above, a solid messaging platform at the onset of the announcement is of the utmost importance. Once you begin "watering vigorously" your news will virally spread and people with opinions may pick up on your news and comment in ways that are not always flattering. Many PR and marketing execs monitor these postings and craft responses using the comment sections common on most blogs and traditional sites.

Hearst Magazines Digital Media usually sees about 8-10 trade placements when they send out a release. When social media PR tactics were added into the mix that number improved by more than 150%.

Following the steps above helps to spread the message beyond traditional PR and media outreach and places announcements right in the center of the social media landscape.