Zenith Social Media Marketing Conference Sneak Peak: Charting The Future of Social PR With Lisa Buyer

In an industry that’s continuously evolving, Lisa Buyer stays on top as a cutting-edge hybrid marketer– passionate about exploring the exciting mashup between traditional public relations and social media. Founder and CEO of The Buyer Group, a Florida-based interactive public relations agency, she works with brands from all types of industries – helping them make the most of this powerful technology and essential arm of brand management.

Last year, Lisa traveled out to Minnesota to speak at Zenith Social Media Marketing Conference, Duluth’s premier full-day social media conference. Glad to report she’ll be returning to the Twin Ports next month for the second coming of Zenith Social Media Marketing Conference – Thursday, May 30th – with a revamped edition of the ever-popular Twitter Marketing Fiesta! Cranking Up The TwitterSphere With Lisa & Lisa! session. AIMCLEAR had the chance to share a candid interview Ms. Buyer prior to the big show – read on for the goods.

| AIMCLEAR: Lisa! Hi and hello. Tell us a bit about yourself. Where do you come from? 

Lisa Buyer: I come from Planet Social PR, originating from traditional public relations background and have evolved my expertise using SEO and Social Media to generate publicity. You can find me most of the time residing in Celebration, Florida with my family but on the road through the year speaking at SES, PubCon and boutique conferences such as Zenith. 🙂 I’m currently writing the upcoming book, Social PR Secrets.

| aC: And how did you get here?

LB: I discovered the influence SEO could have on public relations results about 10 years ago and started learning how to optimize content for search and social media.

| aC: Groovy. Tell us, what does “inbound PR” mean to you?

LB: The cross section of paid, earned and owned media. It is common knowledge the fundamental concept of Inbound Marketing is the out put of excellent CONTENT and then  Inbound PR is your content party bus! It’s the mix of attracting earned media, getting the likes and shares in social, and publishing content on owned media that is newsworthy and what people care care about. That means creating content that consistently surprises, engages, informs and delights, all the while enhancing your precious brand experience. Also, making sure you are on all the platforms your customer is so people can find that brand experience.

| aC: Clever. Talk about four ways to use Twitter that wouldn’t immediately come to mind for most social media practitioners.

LB:  (1) Reporting/Sharing Company or Industry News.

(2) Driving traffic back to your blog – I like to go back to previous blog posts and use Buffer to Tweet out interesting stats and facts with links back to the article. This reinvigorates content that might not be getting much love, but is still extremely valuable to a new follower or someone that might have missed a tweet. You can see your Buffer stats what is working and what is not from past tweets and check out the Tweets that performed well and use those tweets again, maybe with some slight differences.

(3) Curating a spreading like minded content – I use a tool called Twitterfeed that let’s me set up a system to automatically tweet new blog posts from trusted sources and customize those tweets with a hashtag or Twitter ID. For example I have the AIMCLEAR RSS set-up on this platform so I automatically tweet your blog posts.

(4) Content Strategy – One blogpost can result in about 10 tweets, breakdown each piece of content into interesting standalone factoids from a blog post versus the standard – headline and link to the article. This will result in more RT because it serves as a standalone “story” as well as referring traffic back to the content.

| aC: Who are the top three people you follow and why? 🙂

LB: (1) @DalaiLama. We all need a reality check to give us a sense of calmness. Much of what @dalailama tweets can be related to our everyday PR and social media ethics and standards. Fave Tweet: “If you are honest, truthful, and transparent, people trust you. If people trust you, you have no grounds for fear, suspicion or jealousy.”

(2) @Ekaterina. Intelligent and brilliant and has a way of simplifying social media down to what matters most. A great writer and a speaker. Fave tweet: “Brands that can rock visual media will find themselves market leaders.”

(3) @PrSarahevans. We’ve shared panels in the past and also share many of the same Social PR mindsets, strategies and methodologies. Sarah’s personality shines through social media like a 10K diamond. She hosts #journchat on Mondays. Fave tweet: “If you work in journalism or #PR, jump in to #journchat, starting right now. http://t.co/UhvnbEsjlj”

| aC: At Zenith this year, you will co-host the second coming of the Twitter Marketing Fiesta! Cranking Up The TwitterSphere With Lisa & Lisa! People were pretty blown with last year’s session. What’s the magic sauce that makes it so memorable? 

LB: Lisa Grimm is so awesome, the two of us met for the first time IRL at Zenith last year and it seemed our Twitter PR ingredients did make for a Tweetful secret sauce. I think what made it special is we made our session interactive with each other and the audience. Tweeting is part art and part science. It is easy to teach the science part, but the art part is not as easy. Lisa and I like to use Twitter in creative ways that trigger positive publicity; and let’s not forget the KPIs that make the CEO, CMO and the #CFTW (Customer For The Win) happy. 🙂

| aC: And what can we expect new this year?

LB: Real time and real world ways to use Twitter for news, visuals, content strategy, apps and more.

| aC: Lightning round! Favorite ethnic cuisine, vacation spot, and adult beverage, go! 

LB: Thai, Costa Rica, Wine.

| aC: Fine choices indeed. Welp, thanks much for your time today, Lisa! Safe travels out to Duluth – we’ll be seein’ ya!

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Does the Zenith Social Media Marketing Conference sound like your cuppa tea? There’s still time to register!