Digital Strategy Briefing with Edelman VP Gary Goldhammer

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Aligning digital strategy with business objectives, unique risks for public companies and engaging in controversial conversations with Gary Goldhammer (@g24khamr), vice president for Interactive Solutions at Edelman Digital at the PRSA International Conference in San Diego.   

Gary has been blogging for five years about the convergence of journalism and new media at Below the Fold.  

00:55 – Aligning digital strategy with business strategy by listening to what people are saying online, and creating an engagement strategy based on existing perceptions.  

01:45 – What types of objectives cannot and should not be attempted with digital technology.  What cannot be achieved?  

02:30 – What are the risks public companies should be aware of when they create their digital strategy and what sort of guard rails should be in place before the launch a digital communications campaign?  

02:47 – Adverse event reporting and what pharmaceutical companies are required by Food and Drug Administration to do if someone leaves a comment about an adverse reaction to one of their drugs on the manufacturer’s Facebook page.  

03:25 – The duty to report the adverse effects of drug therapy extend beyond those pharmaceutical companies that maintain a social media presence.  If a company is listening and engaging in any other social media channel, they may still be liable.  

03:50 – Recent SEC Guidance on the Use of Company Websites to Satisfy Regulation Fair Disclosure and the notion that for public companies using social media, nonselective disclosure translates into nonselective engagement.  

05:41 – How the online destination of a social media web presence impacts a public company’s duty to update, and whether or not hosting a corporate on a third-party service like Blogger at a BlogSpot domain is any safer than hosting the blog at your own domain.  

07:11 – The duty to update as a strategic factor, rather than a legal factor, and the idea of looking at social media engagement as an ongoing conversation, rather than a one-time campaign.  

08:03 – How to decide what social media channels are right for your organization based on where an organization’s most desirable community members are interacting already online and building strategies around inputs instead of outputs.   

09:58 – The risks of segmenting communications by social media channel, saying one thing on Twitter and something else on Facebook and treating social media as a broadcast channel, versus an engagement channel.  

12:05 – Is dealing with controversy about a company exclusively on their Facebook page instead of at your corporate domain protect the organization from tipping off those disengaged from social media about the controversy?  

13:57 — The web has not always been social, but has all media become social?  A discussion of the Motrin Moms case study as an example of media that wasn’t intended to be social, and how it wound up provoking an adverse reaction via social media.  

15:01 – Why using social media as a mass media channel is ineffective, and testing pilot projects internally as way of establishing a comfort level inside the organizations before launching initiatives in these channels externally.  

18:29 – The 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer [PDF] rankings, which listed financial analysts and business magazines as the most trusted sources of company information, David Carr’s recent article about the state of the business magazine category, and whether or not business magazines will retain that level of trust on the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer, which at the time of release of this podcast was not yet available.  David Carr has appeared as a guest on this podcast before,  and his keynote speech at the Digital Impact Conference was also podcast.  

19:07 – The future of conventional journalism and the importance of niche and local news agencies.  

20:59 – End    

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash