04 May The Friday Five: May the Fourth Be With You
Happy Friday and happy Star Wars Day! (May 4th– may the fourth be with you. Get it?) Welcome to another edition of the BRG Communications Friday Five. Each week we share some of the more important, interesting and heartwarming public relations and social media stories of the week.
The Facebook IPO is near
Yesterday Facebook announced the price of its initial public offering of $28 to $35 a share. That means the company valuation will be between $85 billion and $95 billion. Mark Zuckerburg will pocket around $1.1 billion before taxes. Not a bad payday.
Sign up to be an organ donor on Facebook
Speaking of Facebook, on Tuesday they announced that they added an option for users to sign up to be an organ donor. Over 100,000 people signed up by Tuesday night.
The changing role of public relations
Today, David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, posted an opinionated blog about the changing role of public relations. He spoke to the fact that PR pros should go beyond media relations and also use social networks to speak directly to their audience. We agree and thought the post was worth sharing.
Fighting Hunger Together featured on Convince and Convert
On Wednesday, Convince & Convert shared a social media case study for Walmart’s Fighting Hunger Together Facebook Campaign. (Full disclosure: we worked on this campaign and were stoked to see this blog post.) Our favorite part of the blog was where they praised that in addition to the social tactics; there was a lot of media coverage at the local level. This was important to us because we truly believe that the most successful social media campaigns have a traditional public relations element. In this case, local communities voted together to win grants for their local communities to fight hunger. The campaign was a success, in part, because of the awareness raised on a local level. Traditional PR certainly made that happen.
Optimize your news releases for social media
Since we’re already talking about the importance of communications having a social and traditional element, we really liked this article by PR news sharing six tips for optimizing news releases for social media. Are you considering adding images and video to your press releases? Do you think about keywords and Pinterest when you draft a release? This article provides compelling reasons to do so.
Bonus: Jimmy Fallon coaches Mick Jagger to be more like… Mick Jagger
We got such a kick out of this that we had to add a bonus item this week. If you’ve ever coached an executive prior to a media briefing you will get a kick out of this. Here is Jimmy Fallon coaching Mick Jagger to be more like… Mick Jagger. Can you imagine doing an impression of your client while you coach them? We can’t, but we think this is hilarious.
