In the ten years since I started in PR, one of the biggest shifts I’ve seen has been the introduction of social media channels as a means of communication. Embracing blogs, Twitter and other social media channels has offered opportunities and challenges.

Deloitte’s experts are in demand to give their insights and thoughts on many issues. As a B2B organisation, our campaigns have a specific audience although our insights are often of broader interest. I look after Deloitte’s UK technology, media and telecoms practice. The audience for this industry includes Deloitte’s clients and potential clients as well as the broader tech, media and telco community. This year, when we planned for the launch of our annual global predictions report, we were keen to maximise the impact from social media. We decided that this predictions report was a good choice for social media because of its audience being so active on social channels.

We decided to use Twitter, bringing together digitally some of the discussions taking place offline at the nine UK launches and numerous events around the world, promoting our key spokespeople and highlighting content from the report and updates on marketing activities. The campaign is global and there was social media activity from different experts in each country to connect with their local audiences.

The UK campaign worked because of a close working relationship between Deloitte’s UK marketing and social media team and careful planning about what we wanted to say and how we were going to quickly respond to comments. We started Tweeting the week before the official launch and helped set the scene that the reports were coming with a series of short, shareable facts and teasers. We brought these conversations together using a global hash tag #TMTPred2011 – an easy way for people talking and listening for information about predictions and to join the conversation. We also used more generic hashtags such as #tech and #media to spread the message to those who are interested in these fields. By listening we could also identify people interested in the report, direct them to our website (which features easy-to-digest podcasts and videos), to key Deloitte experts and feedback ideas and comments to the team. Both before and after UK launch event we continued to share links and snippets of the report.

Social media monitoring helped us listen to the buzz around the launch. We used a combination of real-time listening, and a report which showed who and where buzz was happening around the digital space. Listening, participating and responding allowed us to engage more widely with the right people, as well as ensure that our views are accurately represented. Our social media manager Claire Sheehan kept everyone up to date about how people have been talking about both the TMT Predictions as a whole, and specific areas which most interest them.

An initial analysis highlighted one article that caught people’s imaginations that was on Techcrunch resulting in 52 comments, 124 reTweets on Twitter and 156 shares on Facebook. Overall, the launch led to a thousand mentions on blogs and Twitter. These may seem like baby steps compared with some of the large and big budget campaigns conducted by large FMCG and tech companies. However, this low-key approach has been really beneficial and complemented the long running PR efforts of face-to-face briefings, telephone calls and press releases.