Web PR Team
One of the Asper Institute for New Media Diplomacy's ongoing mission is exploring and researching the current trends of the World Wide Web and other new media platforms, while promoting genuine dialog between Israel and the rest of the world.
The Institute sponsors several workshops at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications at IDC Herzliya targeted as producing quality web content regarding Israel. The PR team uses traditional PR and marketing techniques to distribute this content around the world, along with more web-based approaches such as guerrilla marketing, forums and discussion groups marketing, viral ads, affiliates cooperation and cross-media promotion.
The focus of the group is both outwards – distributing the materials to different platforms- and inwards – providing the information of each content team's success to its members.
The team began with extensive learning of the World Wide Web and its' current trends, including, among other thing:
Social Networks (Facebook, linkedIn, MySpace, etc.)
Forums: Forum behavior and ethics, locating and cataloging relevant forums, infiltrating a community without being a "troll"
The Blogosphere: Tools for finding blogs connected with relevant themes, addressing bloggers and conversation within the blogosphere
Twitter: Getting familiar with the platform and its' use, including guest lecture by David Saranga
Social Bookmarking sites (digg, delicious, reddit)
Learning monitoring and trend recognition tools, traffic analytics and user behavior patterns
The students in the PR Team worked with content production teams from other workshops. Their main activities were learning each product, advising the teams on distribution matters, and giving their remarks according to the pre-determined strategy.
The PR Team has created profiles for all the content projects. Each project had a complete web presence on several platforms. Those profiles were updated on a daily basis, while constantly linked to new people and groups and provided new pieces of content.
They also carried out an offline campaign on campus, creating awareness and attention to the projects carried out by the Asper Institute. The offline campaign was tied to the online one in a way that people were encouraged to not only sign up for the different content shows, but also to become the carriers of the massages themselves, spreading them forward to their social circles. The result was 250 signed-up students who later sent the different episodes to their friends and families.
Some of the other strategies used were:
Several coordinated social bookmarking campaigns betweens the team members and outside friends.
Designing and sending a newsletter for our audience.
Constant use of creative posts/ titles and so on to draw attention to the projects.
The final results provided greater exposure to the different projects, each of them foreshowing Israel and the Israeli life in unique and various ways. The PR Team has done a good job in increasing the exposure of the different videos and in particular:
Creating twitter presence for all the content projects, particularly 162 followers for "Hire Me BBC" and 165 for the "Virtual studio show"
Enhancing viewership for the "Virtual studio show" from several dozens to several hundred per episode
Providing live support to the live panel events that took place on the show, such as discussion about the future of Israel