How we interact with our customers has changed a great deal over the last century and a half and is morphing even more rapidly than ever before.

Once upon a time, if your customers had an issue with your products or services, they would hop on their horse and gallop to the local store and speak to someone face to face. This very personal interaction would encourage the business to work closely with the customer to resolve the issue or face the possibility of that person telling the whole town how bad the store is.

Then along came the telephone and businesses had to establish call centers to stay connected to their patrons. The customers now had a choice - visit a physical location for help or just pick up the phone from the comfort of their own home. While this new era of options was a positive development overall, it gave some companies the option to hide from their customers behind a menu system and switchboard. They no longer had to look a customer in the eye and tell them that they couldn’t help them with their issue. However, the customer still had the option to tell their friends about their bad experience so the risk to the business of not assisting their customers was still relatively high. The only difference is that those conversations would happen one-to-one in person or during a phone chat so the risk of a lot of people finding out about poor service was relatively low.

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Pitching journalists and bloggers for placements in a social media world requires keeping up with the ever-changing rules of engagement.

I’ve collected nuggets of wisdom along my PR career and put together a set of tips and guidelines to help you avoid a deleted press release and score that coveted placement.

TWITTER/FACEBOOK
While I believe the ideal way to build a relationship with a journalist is through a meet and greet, it can be tough given busy schedules.  Twitter and Facebook are great platforms to learn a writer’s beat, personality, channel/contact preference, subjects they’re interested in covering, and their deadline dates.   Most of the journalists I’ve worked with prefer email pitches.  I use Twitter and Facebook as a way to get to know a reporter so that when a client comes along that might be relevant to the journalist, I can help make a meaningful and authentic connection.

BLOGGERS
Pitching bloggers is different than pitching journalists.  They aren’t paid to write about something specific at a certain time and aren’t under any obligation to cover your brand.  They care more about what is of interest to their readers.   Giveaways, contests, photos, and exclusive content all provide incentive for bloggers to feature your product or brand because it in turn engages their audience.

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I believe that the best stories out there are ones that are from personal experience, filled with the joys and anguish we get ourselves into.  This is one of those.

Since I got my 73 year-old father to join Facebook and Twitter, he has had a ton of questions on how to use it.

“What is the difference between my Homepage and my Profile?”

“If I write on your wall, does everyone see it?”

“How do I tell just you that you are an amazing son?”

OK, I stretched the truth a bit oh that one but you get the idea.  Answering these questions for him took a lot of patience and some revisiting of previous lessons but I think I got him to good place on how to communicate appropriately on these platforms.  Luckily, my dad does not have a smartphone so would not need additional lessons on how to not embarrass oneself while out and about.

So, you might think that since I am such an active user and have the ability to teach others, I would be a master of all the nuances of the websites, as well as their slick iPhone applications.

Not so fast.

While I was on the iPhone app recently, I received a Facebook email, that I thought was just for my eyes only.  It was not a very complex email, and actually contained an invite to a nice party on the weekend.  Sweet – I’ll have something to do this weekend instead of catching up on episodes of 30 Rock.  I hit reply and went into detail about my week, what was going on this weekend, and some little quips that only my friend would have been able to understand.  I believed that my friend would respond with a smartass reply and all would be well in the world once I got back to my computer.

OOPS.

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I was thinking today about how we used to communicate before computers and email and blogs and cell phones and text messages and social networks.  In general, we had 3 big options:

Option 1: Walk up to a person and open our traps.  That person would then open theirs and so on, and so on. Presto. An in-person conversation. If you were lucky, you would avoid an argument and end with a nice hand shake or a warm hug.

Option 2: Write a letter on a piece of paper – most appropriate when traveling or after receiving that “great” gift from Grandma (Dear Nana – Thank you so much for the peach polyester sweater with the pink elephants on it.  I will wear it to high school every day.  Love you!).  You actually had to sit down, think about your thoughts and either write them exactly as they appeared in your head or utilize a pencil with an eraser to correct bad spelling and grammar on the fly.  Address the envelope, stamp it, fold your letter, insert, seal and drop it in the mailbox.

Option 3: That  involved the telephone – not the one that travels with us no matter where we go. This one might have had a rotary dial and could have been the Princess model, with hopefully a nice long twisted cord so you could stretch it across the room and behind the door to the basement in order to chat with the boy that drove you absolutely crazy at school.  You couldn’t even leave a message on a machine – if no one answered, you tried again a little later hoping they would have arrived back home.  But you would keep trying and eventually, you would have an actual conversation with the person you wanted to talk to.

Now, while all of these options are still available, we have become a very different society, where people can be reached pretty much any place they are and if they are not there, we can leave them a message to force them to get back to us ASAP.

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