Search for Social Media

Cross-posted in the Zeno Group blog, Acropolis.

As a member of the Zeno Group Digital Lifestyle team, I feel that it is my duty to help engrain social media into our everyday PR lifestyle. So, for this past week’s Zeno LA “Happy Half-Hour Friday,” it was my turn to put my party-planner hat on, creating our first ever Social Media Scavenger Hunt! I think the digital lifestyle team was a little more excited about this than, say, our business manager, but overall the event was a great success.

The scavenger hunt featured several different social networking tools (Facebook, Digg and Twitter, to name a few) and called for participants to not only learn about them, but take the extra step and interact with each other using these tools. For example:

1. Sign into Twitter and create a Tweet using the #ZenoLA hashtag.
2. Now, respond to one Tweet that another Zeno LA employee posted.
3. Post an insightful comment on one of your favorite PR blogs. Which blog did you choose to comment on?

Of course, this was not meant to be a full training on all the social media tools available, but rather a fun way to expose the office to some of the new tools and apps available. (For example, most PR professionals know about Twitter, but many might not be aware of the long – and growing – list of apps that are available for it).

Broadening the scope of this post a bit, we are entering into an era where it is important for everyone in PR to at least be familiar with the basic social media and networking tools. By now, many PR professionals are aware of the ‘biggies’ (i.e., what they should pay attention to), but many have not taken the time to actually learn about and understand them (let alone start using them). Simply creating a Twitter ID and tweeting once or twice isn’t enough anymore; smart PR people should take it one step further and engage with the community on a regular basis, especially if it’s something that might make sense for a client down the road. At the same time, it’s okay to focus your attention on a select number of tools after you’ve explored all of the options. If you try Friendster but realize, “hey, maybe this one isn’t for me,” that’s okay! At least you took the time to figure it out.

On a different note, I encourage you to implement a social media scavenger hunt in your own office and share the results in the comments section below!