Last week I had the opportunity to present at a conference held by Insight Venture Partners in New York City. In preparation for my discussion, I began thinking about my own experience working for a start-up company and how the practice of public relations has changed in the last decade.

Twelve years ago I was working for a start-up in Seattle. The company was Tegic Communications, developers of T9 Text Input for mobile phones. We licensed the software to mobile phone hardware vendors and eventually 90 percent of the OEMs responsible for worldwide mobile phone production adopted it.

We worked non-stop to generate significant editorial coverage to drive awareness and demand with the OEMs as well as to educate consumers about the availability of this new text input feature.

In December 1999, AOL negotiated a $350-million buyout of the company. Later, one of the AOL executives revealed to my manager that they paid an additional $50 million just because of the buzz around the company.

I shared this story during my presentation at the Insight conference, because it is a great example of how buzz and PR around a company can impact customer demand as well as its valuation. Clearly, however, with the rise of social media how one goes about generating massive awareness for a company and its products and solutions has changed significantly.

I also shared the following six tips for leveraging social media to build buzz and drive awareness for a company.

1. Take an integrated approach. To do this, we highly recommend developing a story arc. Think of a story arc as a trajectory, extended storyline, or the ongoing narrative that highlights a company’s overarching vision and its journey toward achieving it. Each company announcement, press release, social media update or interview provides the company spokesperson with an opportunity, or an “episode” to put it in television terms, to support the broad narrative or story arc.

Anne Taylor is doing an excellent job in this department. For instance, Anne Taylor promoted its social media sites in a recent e-mail marketing campaign. They encouraged customers to visit them on Facebook in order to receive a special offer. The bottom line is that social media, PR, advertising and other campaigns need to be aligned and integrated.

Another example of a company doing it right is Off & Away, a startup offering amazing hotel suites at unheard of prices with Internet auctions. The company was founded by former Amazon.com and travel industry executives, and recently raised Series A funding led by Madrona Venture Group, the venture capital firm behind Amazon.com, Farecast.com (now Bing Travel) and VacationSpot (now a part of Expedia).

The company is doing an outstanding job of leveraging Facebook and Twitter and taking an integrated approach to communications. You’ll see they have had editorial coverage in The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Tech Crunch and several other media outlets.

2. Establish clear ownership. The second rule for leveraging social media to drive buzz is to make sure the right team owns it. We at Communiqué PR believe social media should be owned at a strategic level by the top corporate communications or public relations officer or manager in your organization.  Here’s why:

• Corporate communications and PR own the organization’s external communications and oftentimes the overarching positioning. This puts them in an ideal position for understanding how the company brand should behave on social media platforms.
• Social media is about engaging and developing direct one-on-one relationships with individuals. Typically, the PR team is already doing this with many audiences (e.g., journalists, analysts, investors and other influencers). Given this, the team has many of the skills and expertise required to build relationships via Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.
• PR needs to have a direct handle on how the company is perceived. Social media provides immediate access to this information. Thoughtful and well-managed engagement on social media platforms can provide tremendous positive PR for a company.
• PR often owns content that is ideal for sharing on social networks, including news they can break to their online communities.

3. Use SM to Build Relationships. Make sure you are using social media to build relationships with key influencers.  Social media can be a terrific way to reach reporters and garner earned media (e.g. editorial coverage).

When Communiqué PR helped Alaska Airlines with the launch of its Wi-Fi service, we tried to reach Ed Baig at USA Today numerous times via e-mail and over the phone – with no luck. Finally, I reached out via Facebook. He responded immediately and we were able to secure a timely and beneficial article for our client.

So each time you do an interview with a journalist or analyst, make sure you take a minute to connect with him or her on Facebook or Twitter. It is a wonderful, fast and effective way to build and maintain relationships with this community.

4. Merchandise Earned Media. You can and should merchandize editorial coverage that you garner for your company on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other places. With more competition between news outlets, journalists appreciate help promoting their articles. And we often find that positive editorial coverage leads to more positive coverage. Think about how print coverage in magazines and newspapers sometimes leads to broadcast coverage.

5. Don’t Forget about Blogs. As you think about the role that social media can play in driving public relations, don’t forget about blogs. Blogs are a good way to publish your own news, written the way you want, about the topics of your choosing, in your own words. They are unedited by reporters or anyone else and you can get your message out quickly to the entire  world

Off & Away has a blog and uses it to share news and information about enhancements to its site, comment on travel trends and establish leadership with consumers, journalists, analysts and other writers. Ann Taylor, the clothing retailer, is also going to launch a blog. Its aim is to help readers figure out how to dress for the big interview, share insight into what is inspiring them from books, music and popular culture. As you can imagine, both these blogs will be an excellent repository of information for journalists too.

6. Publicize Unique Activities. If you’re doing something unique or new on social media that may well be news itself; or if you have a unique promotion, you should publicize it with the mainstream media. How do you take the social Web by storm in a day, winning over even the coldest of hearts and gaining international acclaim – with commercials?

A couple of weeks ago, a team of ad executives gathered in Portland, Ore., and produced 87 funny YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time they leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. The videos went viral, and have been viewed millions of times, drawing strong editorial coverage.

At the time of my presentation, more than 240 outlets, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and many other news outlets, had been written about these videos. In a three-day period, the videos were viewed 52 million times and on Twitter, Old Spice went from 3,000 to 48,000 followers.

It was a sincere honor to have the opportunity to share my ideas with Insight Venture Partners’ portfolio companies.

If you have tips for integrating your social media activities with public relations or other marketing campaigns, I would love to hear from you. Clearly, there are significant changes taking place in the world of marketing.