In April 2019, Instagram announced that it would be testing a new feature that would hide the likes under users’ posts. While many were skeptical about the idea, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said the new feature was an effort to “reduce anxiety and social comparison” on the platform.

The new feature was initially tested in Canada and then followed in six more countries to include Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand. In November 2019, Instagram began testing the new feature in the United Stated for some users. While the new feature has not affected all US accounts just yet, it’s on its way to expand to more users as time goes on.

So, what does this mean for your organization?

Pros:
– Focus is on your content, not your “likes”
– More authentic content
– Post more freely without being stuck in certain time windows
– Reduce pressure to keep up with competition

Cons:
– Risk of users going to another platform
– Could make it more difficult for brands to find influencers to work with
– Emphasis on other metrics such as follower count
– May lead to lower engagement

This change will create more authenticity on the platform, meaning that your organization’s content matters more than ever before. Real engagement has to happen beyond the number of likes. Businesses on Instagram will need to get more creative in analyzing metrics and determine what content is actually working. Interacting with other accounts will be a necessity to stay relevant on the platform since the algorithm is no longer based on likes. Organizations will need a comprehensive social media strategy that evaluates more than just likes. Using and understanding analytics can help social media content creators adjust the strategic plan according to metrics like reach, impressions and saves to determine the impact of its influence.

From a marketing standpoint, the removal of likes might be scary, but it also presents a unique opportunity to develop a strategic plan and start posting authentic content to engage with your organization’s followers, rather than posting something because you know it will get likes.

Using influencers has become a growing marketing strategy. An influencer is someone who has the ability to “influence” or sway the public to make a decision. Brands use influencers to promote their products or services to the influencer’s followers. These influencers are specialists in their niche markets. The influencer marketing industry is set to grow to approximately $9.7B in 2020, an increase from $6.6B in 2019.

You should think of these influencers as walking billboards for your brand and can provide outreach to their online audiences. A typical influencer has a significant following on various social media accounts and can provide a third-party validation to your business, product or effort. While most influencers are paid for the work that they do, there are ways to benefit from this type of notoriety by connecting with individuals who have an interest in your organization.

Types of Influencers

Bloggers and Vloggers: Bloggers and vloggers publish content on a regular basis. Most bloggers and vloggers have a loyal fan base on various platforms.

Social Media Influencers: Social Media influencers use their social platforms to connect with their followers.

Micro-influencers & Nano-influencers: These influencers have a significantly smaller following, but high engagement with their audiences. Micro and Nano influencers are seen as more authentic because they appear to be more devoted to the brand.

Activists: Activists are typically driven by a political or social cause. Brands should be cautious to ensure their vision and mission align with the influencer.

Celebrities: Mainstream celebrities are often used in campaigns because of their large and loyal following. Actors, athletes, and musicians often collaborate with large brands as ambassadors.

Why Use an Influencer?

• Influencers has a High Return on Investment (ROI): A study from 2016 showed that Influencer Marketing has an ROI that is 11 times higher than other digital marketing strategies.
• Influencer Marketing is Based on Trust: 87% of users say that authenticity is one of the most important aspects of marketing.
• Influencer Marketing has a Stronger Reach than Traditional Ads: Traditional advertisements such as banner ads, commercials and other forms of ads don’t have the reach or impact like they used to. Influencer marketing targets audiences with similar interests.

When Collaborating with an Influencer

• Be Authentic
• Comply with FTC Guidelines
• Review your marketing strategy to align with your goals

Effective and regular communication during COVID-19 is a must for any organization.

As COVID-19 changes the daily operations of organizations, so should your communication efforts. Not just your external communications with stakeholders and the general public, but also your internal communications with employees. Organizations are changing the way employees work, from working remotely to shorter in-office work weeks, to deal with the impacts of COVID-19. Even with employees reporting to a physical office location, their in-person communication, staff meetings and break room conversations have ended due to social distancing.

This lack of in-person communication with employees creates a need for regular, informative and engaging internal communications. Here are a few tips to consider before you send out your next internal email.

Be Aware of Your Tone

COVID-19 has created uncertainty for companies and their employees. With uncertainty comes fear, stress and many other emotions. Be mindful of employees’ emotions when developing internal messaging related to COVID. We all know that this pandemic is a serious situation and associated information should be taken seriously, but internal communications don’t have to be all business, all of the time. Take the time to add humor, words of appreciation or an inspirational story to separate the repetitiveness of COVID update emails. This change of tone can bring value to employees who haven’t had in-person interaction with co-workers.

Keep It Simple

The pandemic is already overwhelming – don’t make your internal emails more work for employees. With constantly changing guidelines and state/county regulations, organizations are continually sending out emails to keep employees informed. In addition to emails, consider developing an internal webpage for employees to find all COVID-19 related forms, policies and procedures. An updated repository of information is always easier than trying to dig through your inbox for an email sent two weeks ago.

Unified Internal and External Messaging

As your organization plans the right message to deliver to stakeholders on how you are handling COVID-19 impacts, make sure your employees are receiving the same message. You don’t want employees to hear about a new initiative or policy from someone outside of your organization. As you plan your next update email to stakeholders, make sure you have developed similar messaging for employees.

Every organization’s culture is different, but applying these tips can help improve your communication with employees, resulting in increased trust and productivity.

I’ve long been a fan of the insights of author Seth Godin. Last week, one of his blog posts spoke to me:

I used to ask, “If you stole Steven Spielberg’s address book, would it help you get a movie made?”

The point was that even if you had the phone numbers and names, calling them up and saying you’d stolen them wasn’t worth very much. The data has no value without trust and connection.

Now, twenty years later, all the address books have been stolen. Everyone has all the data. Identifying the right people (or spamming everyone) is easy and cheap.

Which makes the point even more urgent than ever: Without trust and connection, access to data is worthless.

– Seth Godin

The stolen address book

What are you doing to build trust and connection with your key stakeholders?

As the coronavirus has kept us all apart, finding creative ways to engage your stakeholders is more important than ever. Just because you may not be seeing them in person, does not mean they don’t need to hear from you.

Here are a few steps to make sure you are staying connected:

Identify

Take the time to identify your most important stakeholders. Are they your employees, board members, community advocates or donors? Key groups of individuals can make or break your success. Managing your key stakeholders includes identifying not only who to engage, but how and when to engage them. If you find yourself with some free time, make the most of it by reviewing your contact lists – and why not include social media friends and followers – to spark ideas. I bet you’ll find more than a few lost contacts or connections that could be worth rekindling.

Communicate

If you aren’t telling your story, someone else will. Whether positive or negative news, how you craft your story matters and people need to hear it directly from you, not someone else. Be factual, authentic and timely to earn the trust of your stakeholders – and the time of COVID-19 is no exception! Now is the perfect time to reconnect by checking up on old connections.

Measure

Finally, take a pulse of how you are doing. Seek input from others to see if your efforts are resonating. If they aren’t, you’ll need to retool your strategy. In lieu of in-person meetings, opt for video calls where you can. It’s always easier to read someone’s body language and expressions than trying to decipher over the telephone.

NP Strategy helps clients both large and small identify their key stakeholders and craft the right message for delivery to each unique audience. Let us know if we can help you!

If you are a business serving the public you know this all too well: there is no playbook for navigating COVID-19.  You are making decisions daily, with new information and changing circumstances.  This is especially true for restaurants.

In six short weeks we’ve helped clients navigate a myriad of COVID related circumstances.  Let’s begin with the ‘news maker.’

You’ve had an employee test positive for COVID-19. In the South, infection rates are skyrocketing.  It’s likely just a matter of time before most businesses face this situation. The crucial first step is protecting the privacy of the infected employee. This is a legal requirement.  But you also must notify any other colleagues who have had close contact with that individual (think in terms of 10-12 minutes of close contact). Business leaders need to notify colleagues without revealing the identity of the infected employee.

Your employee reveals his/her positive test result on social media.  True situation.  There is nothing you can do about it.  Don’t stifle an employee’s right to share his/her personal information. But DO have a plan in place for how to communicate about COVID with your employees, guests, clients, and if needed, the media.  We’ve helped clients put in place a “COVID Response Team.”  Similar to a crisis response team (CRT), this nucleus of company decision makers and subject matter experts, such as a lawyer or crisis communication professional, will huddle up, assess the facts, make decisions and monitor the situation.

Messaging must be honest and transparent.  We can’t hide from COVID.  We must face it head-on.  Your number one priority should be the health and safety of your employees and guests.  Consider ahead of time what health and safety measures, such as deep cleaning, masks, etc., you have in place. That top health priority, and those safety measures are message points to share publicly.  DO NOT reveal any information which may identify your infected employee, including describing a job duty.

Be flexible, put safety first and press on.  It’s possible some of you reading this article will have to temporarily close your businesses in the future to deep clean after a series of positive employee tests.  Be proactive.  Weigh the short term loss of revenue for a temporary closure, against the long term reputational harm from appearing reckless.  Again, there is no playbook, you are assessing each situation, making decisions and monitoring for future modifications.

About the only thing we do know, is there is no telling how long this COVID storm will last. So plan now for how the virus may continue to impact your business.  Be safe, stay healthy, and offer grace and patience to those navigating alongside you.

The new world we currently live in is changing a lot of what we do and how we do it. We are no longer just matching outfits before we head into work, but we’re also making sure our new face masks don’t clash with our office attire. Another big change we’ve seen with a number of our clients is adapting events to the “no gathering of large crowds,” rule that COVID-19 has enacted.

Our team recently worked with two clients that moved their large annual events online and they’ve both been a success. They are each very different and the way they virtually adapted was different, too. However, their efforts and achievements were similar.

Here are 5 steps to turn your in-person event into a virtual success:

1) Provide ample time for guests to plan for your online event.

This allows for you to make sure they are watching, listening and not distracted. One of the events we’ve taken online was an organization’s annual retreat. This is normally a three day conference with numerous speakers, breakout sessions and evening dinners. When the decision was made to cancel the in-person programming, we quickly announced our efforts to bring the scheduled speakers into a bi-monthly webinar for nearly three months.

2) Provide something your in-person event might not offer.

Being able to bring your events online can actually be a blessing. Your speaker line-up can grow due to the ability for them to do the program from their living room. You don’t have to work around as many schedules or travel accommodations. For one event we brought online, we previously invited Georgia’s former Minority Leader, Stacey Abrams, to be a speaker for two years. This year, we were able to secure her as a speaker because no travel was necessary and we worked around her schedule.

3) Keep people engaged

The scariest part about changing your events from in-person to online is the engagement. Your speakers can’t look in the eyes of the audience. Have you ever told a joke to a webinar audience? It’s excruciating. On Zoom and WebEx, when you host a webinar, you can’t see or hear the audience unless specifically allowed but this feature also provides security to your event. However, you can provide numerous ways for the audience to be engaged. You can let your audience take polls to get an understanding of the sentiment of the audience. You can allow for an open dialogue of questions and answers. However, you want to make sure you’re able to allow the audience to ask questions, provide feedback and feel engaged in the program.

4) The time at an in-person event doesn’t always correlate online

When you’re changing your programming from in-person to online, you can’t expect the time to adjust one to one. So, if you’re taking a 3-day conference virtual, you can’t expect people to go online for three days straight. In the instance of our client, we took those three days of programming and hosted a conversation every other Thursday for nearly three months.

5) Have fun!

This is the most important piece of advice. Online events can seem tedious and time-consuming. However, you can make them fun. You can let people interact with your speakers. You can present audio and video to break up the speeches. There are a lot of things you can do that make online events entertaining and worthy of hosting.

After three full months of navigating the coronavirus in the United States, let’s check in on how it has impacted the marketing landscape, and how you can adjust moving forward.

In late February, we saw a shift on social media as many were wondering how their brand would innovate with the challenges of COVID-19 ahead. As social media shifted from its usual role of brand promotion and instead became a primary information resource related to COVID-19, the types of content brands were posting changed as well.

We saw COVID-19-related posts dominate, while evergreen content took a significant decrease in engagement, with many brands pausing their pre-scheduled campaigns altogether. According to an April 2020 report by SocialBakers, brands started mentioning COVID-19 on social media in February, but by the beginning of March, posts mentioning COVID-19 skyrocketed – increasing. While we know that many social media users report social media as a means for receiving news, brands and businesses turned to Facebook especially as a means of updating customers and followers during COVID-19.

Back to business as usual?

As if social media isn’t already evolving fast enough – with trends and news affecting social messaging by the minute, here are a few tips to consider before your brand jumps back online.

1) Evaluate the Analytics

Take the time to deep dive into your company’s social media analytics. What audiences have you reached during the last few months – any new audiences or followers you never anticipated reaching? Have you seen an increase or a decrease in engagements? How has your message evolved?

While the analytics may not tell the full story, they are an indicator of what may or may not be working. By checking your analytics regularly, you can spot trends and opportunities for improvement. Take advantage of the embedded analytics pages for platforms, which help break down various metrics over varying time frames – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn all have this feature. And, did we mention that they’re free?

2) Review Your Paused Campaigns

Before publishing those evergreen posts that you saved as a draft, take the time to carefully review each. What was considered evergreen content in the past could be irrelevant today – if you’re sharing photos with employees or clientele, are they displaying proper safety protocol? Are posts promoting services that have been discontinued? Have business hours changed? With this “new normal” comes new evergreen content.

3) Trial and Error

Now more than ever, your timelines and feeds are being clogged with information – it’s a data overload out there. So, let me reinforce that it’s okay to test things right now. From graphics to videos to posts with or without photos – it’s going to take some retooling to find what works for your company and audiences. That’s okay, but don’t give up, even if you want to. People want to hear from your company now more than ever – just make sure it’s up-to-date with appropriate, relevant messaging.

Undoubtedly, COVID-19 has taught us a major lesson in adaptability. Part of my adjustment was dusting off my computer’s webcam and becoming Zoom-savvy overnight – and I’m not the only one. On the bright side, we’re all developing a new skill set every day! Here’s what I’ve learned about perfecting these conference calls, avoiding mistakes, and acing your next video conference. Remember the acronym BEST:

• B – background
• E – environment
• S – sound
• T – test

Background:

When taking part in a webinar, you want your audience to be focused on you, not your background. Choose a place in your home or office that has limited distractions behind you, and is as neat and organized as possible. If you’re in your office, be absolutely sure that no confidential client (or personal) information can be seen!

Additionally, never set up with a window behind you. A bring light behind you will make you look like a silhouette. Shut the blinds if possible, and adjust overhead or lamp lighting to ensure you are properly lit from all angles (this will decrease any shadows on your face).

Environment:

How likely are you to be interrupted during your video? Make sure all alarms, radios, TVs, and phones are turned off or muted. Let your family members or coworkers know you will be taking part in a video meeting and will be unavailable for some time (this includes pets, in case your fluffy coworker needs to be crated or kept in another room).

Finally, do a self-check and make sure your “personal environment” is ready to go. Just like in any meeting or interview, straighten your clothes and hair to ensure you look presentable.

Sound:

Sound is key. If you are doing a TV interview or hosting a webinar, consider investing in an additional computer microphone – or headset – with better sound quality.

If your only option is to use the computer’s microphone, no problem, but do not look away from the computer while speaking. This could cause your audio level to drop, and listeners won’t be able to hear from you. Keep the microphone directly in front of you, or attached to your shirt collar mid-chest. Avoid tapping on the desk or rustling papers, as your mic will pick it up.

Test:

It’s important to do a test run before going live! Test your internet connection, make sure any documents you need are easily accessible, and if you’re sharing your computer screen, make sure notifications are off and all other applications (and web tabs) are closed!

Set up a test meeting with a coworker or a friend to get feedback on your lighting, audio and presentation.

I hope that using these tips will help you have the BEST video call possible the next time you turn on your webcam.

Three NPS team members, each proud broadcast journalism alumni, participated in a webinar panel to share tips and best practices for online interviews. Whether it’s a live interview or recorded for later, we’re here to help you nail your next interview.