Good Evening,
As of tonight I am now the Media & Communications officer on my squadron because I felt it was being ignored and it has such great potential. Apart from the usual Facebook page, Twitter feed and website, are there any other good ideas? I wish to get my unit ‘on the map’ so to speak because it has been quiet recently when it comes to social network PR.
Thank you.
Having the websites and social media is all well and good, but you need the stories to go with it. Make sure your unit gets to local events and photograph them there. Do you have a camera?
Get someone on your squadron that is technically inclined to make some sort of PR video. Really got for YouTube and good to show school kids if you go to assemblies etc.
When you go to events, have somebody (competent) whose primary role is to capture high quality still and video images. I can’t count the number of times we have been at something and have been too busy with one thing or another to take photos then find we can’t do up a good article due to lack of photos.
On a related point, ensure that you don’t use photos of incorrectly dressed people or of unsafe or unapproved practices. The best way to achieve this is to not have any incorrectly dressed people and to not take part in unsafe or unapproved practices 
Don’t forget to also pass on news stories to your Wing Media Officer, you should also look at newspapers if you have a particularly good news story
I feel that the ACO is running in the wrong direction with PR currently. Unless online media has a cohesive national policy it will not have consistent success rate.
People underestimate the power of the local news paper. If you get repeated articles in the local rag you will have a greater return than any tweet, post, Instagram or website article. All the online media requires people to go to it to see it unless trending of high levels is achieved. At Sqn and Wing level trending and sharing is very much a self licking lollipop and has its place. When it comes to recruitment and community presence you will have a tough job to make it work. Local papers are getting through the door with your story without the public choosing to look for it. They get the paper for other reasons and see the article, you don’t have to get them to the information, the information goes to them. Also its easier to get a kid in the door when the parents are brining them and encouraged them as apposed to the kid dragging the parent along.
Firstly Scroll through the local papers and free media rags which go out to your local area/local villages etc. Grab as many email addresses as you can and stick them into an email list. Sounds simple but takes time.
Contact the bigger local papers and speak to or email editor and see if they have a dedicated reporter for all Military/youth organisations.
The get the email addresses for the Wing and Region media officers in order to put them on Air cadet sites.
Get the email address for a local RFCA site and add this to the list.
Then comes reporting. Look at stories and see how they read… Big headline. Hit hard with big information first./. Local group WINS first place!! etc… Then add why/what happened, then put in a quote by a Cadet and follow this up with a quote from the OC. Don’t write war and peace… it will get truncated big style… Keep to the facts… keep it jolly… make it interesting to read…
Finally put in the contact details for the Sqn… When you meet, Sqn email address and contact number for the Sqn phone/answerphone etc.
Try and get a story in there each week… especially during the busy periods… If you’ve done two things then hold one of these back for the following weeks… Phrases like, Last weekend… Recently… etc all help… But if you’ve taken part in a carnival, you MUST get this into the papers the same or the next day… No point leaving these till the following week as its old news by then…
Last year we hit the Local papers hard and we got LOTS of new recruits out of it… I had one friend say 'I don’t need to ask what your cadets have been up to, as I read about them every week!! ’ This was great to hear…
Get the Parents and the Grand Parents on side… this will get you the support to get the kids in… Good luck…
Oh… one last thing… Seek advice from the Wing Media officer… or if their no good, the Region one… Go direct… ask for help and advice… see what you get… Can’t harm to ask.
Have a distribution list through Bader email of all of your media contacts that you send the press releases to - saves time.
Link your Sqn website to your social media feeds so the site is constantly displaying relevant information. Don’t under-estimate the power of social media and keep the feeds active as regularly as possible - we are putting stuff on ours daily. Get a small budget to play with so you can target social media campaigns - well worth the money and amazing for coverage and raising the profile.
Other Squadrons websites are a great source of inspiration - pinch with pride 
[quote=“flago” post=25747]I feel that the ACO is running in the wrong direction with PR currently. Unless online media has a cohesive national policy it will not have consistent success rate.
People underestimate the power of the local news paper. If you get repeated articles in the local rag you will have a greater return than any tweet, post, Instagram or website article. All the online media requires people to go to it to see it unless trending of high levels is achieved. At Sqn and Wing level trending and sharing is very much a self licking lollipop and has its place. When it comes to recruitment and community presence you will have a tough job to make it work. Local papers are getting through the door with your story without the public choosing to look for it. They get the paper for other reasons and see the article, you don’t have to get them to the information, the information goes to them. Also its easier to get a kid in the door when the parents are brining them and encouraged them as apposed to the kid dragging the parent along.[/quote]
Give this man a medal.
I despair at the hype around social media and how kids use it etc, a number of cadets seem (speaking to some sqn cdrs) to use sqn FB as a way of deciding if they are going to attend that night or not.
As stated we need to get parents and other relations “on message” and encouraging their youngsters, and picking up a local rag and just scanning it gets a much broader readership than anything online. Plus people have a tendency to put a paper down and then pick it up again and have another look. I often pick up on stories on the second or third look. People looking at social media, I imagine, only look at what’s new so if you use a local town FB site and people have been busy it will get miissed and if there is nothing new won’t look at old stuff. Also social media needs a lot of time for little or no return, and people dedicated to keep updating and using what is ever new/flavour of the month. Which all takes time for a very limited audience. There is also a lot of rubbish. I’ve been sent emals with the ramblings of various ATC twitters and my God these people need to get a proper job, if they’ve got the time to do this they are seriously under-employed. You can understand celebs and public figures who feel they need to keep in the public eye, but people in the ATC do not fit either category. Another problem with social media not so much at squadron level perhaps, is including cadets in a picture whose parents have not given permission for their offspring to be in photos.
Many local papers are free and in our area hit several thousand doormats or get picked up while doing the shopping. I can’t imagine the average social media content reaching more than a few dozen already converted.
I wouldn’t do an email list for papers. A chap in the village is an editor of a paper (not our local one) and he has said if he gets a whiff that something has been sent to several other papers he doesn’t use it as why should he waste print if someone else is goiing to use it. He said the giveaway is the blind copy feel from the email. He said it’s not about exclusivity of the story but a personal feel in the ‘to’ address is nice. He has given us in the village advice on when and what to send. If you want an event advertised give at least 4 weeks lead time and include no more than 2 photos, as this gives them options and if you get a big story that week that takes up several pages and you’ve only really given it a week to advertise the event, you would be very lucky at gettiing something in that week.
Also give schools something to include in newsletters. Schools from my experience are very isolationist bubbles and like to only promote internally, but I’ve had a couple of thing get into them of the more than a couple of things I’ve sent to schools.
Two people who have zero idea about target audiences. If online media is so innefective, how come it now dwarfs printed media? How come printed media try and supplement their audiences by producing online editions? How come so many printing presses have closed down in the last 6 years? It has it’s place, down’t get me wrong, but to suggest that all 35 year old’s upwards only read printed press is utterly wrong and will continue to be wrong. As time goes on, the society that grew up with digitil media will mostly use digital media and that becomes an exponential trend…
Publishing on social media relies very much on an individual following that particular feed or a related feed that decides to re-publish the information on their own feed. As an extension of the “word of mouth” method of publicity that has served us well in the past it is excellent; it is not very good at spreading your news outside the sphere of interest and therefore bringing new people in.
The local rag excels at reaching new people in the local area and can be far more effective at selling the organisation than any social media can be. The new generation are more likely to see this as in electronic form but the printed form will be prevalent for many years to come because of the way it carries its advertising.
Of course the trick is to use both but to use them differently. Build up a large base of information and provide regular updates on social media to keep parents informed and to help by word of “mouth”. Supplement this with targeted released to the local papers and advertise key events of particular interest, while referring people to the unit website and/or FB page for more information. This is where you can have extensive photo galleries, niche press releases which may not work well in a professional publication, video content and so on.
The only reason online has increased is cost, our editor chap said as much.
But the printed format still gets poked through doors and picked up in shops. People use it, even youngsters (ie under 35s if our kids are anything to go by) because it is easier to read. As said it gets across to a much wider audience as social media requires joe public to be looking at it constantly and ‘buying in’ to your pages and as much as people might not like it, Air Cadets will have a very, very small audience, even putting it on ‘town’ sites won’t reach the masses.
I’ve tried reading online content on my kid’s phones and what a palava, too small and too little text in one go. Make it bigger - forget it and same with photos. I can see why idiot level social media like Twitter appeals to people as they don’t have to be able spell correctly and it’s so few words. Mind you what I’ve seen some put on it, definitely aimed at the lower end of the intelligence spectrum.
Totally depends on who you want to follow!
Totally depends on who you want to follow![/quote]
Unfortunately some in the ACO are in this group, it’s like people are being trying to be spontaneous (as in bar / office etc banter) but go to the effort of typing it which loses something and loses even more if you don’t read it immediately. You see it at work, people doing little text conversations and giggling like schoolkids as they think it’s amusing. It’s not anywhere as amusing as the spontaneity we get in the office.
Getting into the local rag only works if you are in an area where the press are pro-military or pro-cadet, if you are in an inner city lefty stronghold this is next to impossible. Online media is the future and it works well if used correctly, we are followed on Twitter by most of our local schools and they retweet all of our recruitment events. (It seems that their social media SPOCs are younger and as such more pro-cadet than the heads of year we need to let us in to recruit).
The other thing to take into account is that most parents and young people will google the unit before they attend even if you have recruited them through a different means. A strong online presence is important, I have had as many new cadets through Twitter in the last 12 months as I have through grabbing kids/parents at local fairs etc.
I’d be careful dissing Twitter, as the Comdt is a big user (and I don’t think she’ll mind me mentioning she may be pushing 35…)
It has to be about audience and I agree that parents are as good an audience as potential cadets - you need to target both. I’ve seen some pretty impressive PR stuff in the local newspaper recently from all our local ‘community’ cadet units, all of whom seem to be doing a good job in that respect, but I doubt any potential cadets are reading; but it will look impresive to parents.
Sadly the local ATC Sqn Twitter account is effectively dormant - I suspect it was run by a senior cadet who has left. That said, my pupils in my day job tell me Twitter is for their parents, they are all on Facebook…
Thank you for your help everyone! It’s greatly appreciated!