You see a lot of talk on this blog about how companies are successfully (and sometimes unsuccessfully) leveraging social media to build their brand and engage in proactive outreach with the public. Often overlooked, though, is the fact that individuals have also been extremely successful in building their brand and identity through Twitter–and I’m not talking about the bevy of self-proclaimed “social media gurus” that have sprung up like weeds over the past few years, either. I’m talking about the most attention-starved, desperate-to-engage subset of society there is: celebrities, of course! What else but Twitter could have brought the spotlight (and a combined 3.5 million followers) back to the likes of MC Hammer, R.L. Stine (of Goosebumps fame) and Fred Durst?

While Twitter has been an effective medium for has-been celebrities to return to relevance (OK, I feel compelled to take R.L. Stine out of this group–his is actually one of my favorite Twitter handles out there, and who didn’t love Goosebumps?), it’s been even more effective for high-profile celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Lady Gaga aiming to build on their respective identities through “informal” engagement with fans.

Any discussion on the most popular and influential celebrities on Twitter inevitably brings you to one of the biggest (both literally and figuratively) names out there: Shaquille O’Neal, AKA THE_REAL_SHAQ.

One of the first celebrities to embrace Twitter, Shaq has built up a a strong following of over 3 million users; for perspective, the aggregate number of users following all other NBA players combined is 20 million. Early on, Shaq was known to Tweet his location just before game-time, offering free tickets to the first fan that could find him. He has also used Twitter to protect his reputation and dispute the notion that he is an aging star incapable of contributing on the court anymore. He engaged in a feud with outspoken ESPN commentator Jim Rome last month, when Rome claimed that it had been a mistake for the Boston Celtics to sign O’Neal to a multi-year contract earlier this summer. In previous eras (say, three years ago), Rome could have made his pithy comments about Shaq being over the hill and that would have been that, but mediums like Twitter and Facebook have allowed individuals to increase their voice and reach. Thus ensued a mini-feud between Shaq and Rome via Twitter that concluded with Shaq playfully challenging Rome to a charity boxing match at ESPN headquarters. Rome backed off his comments, and Shaq, ever the showman, emerged unscathed.

Boston Globe blogger Eric Wilbur wrote a great post exploring the impact Shaq’s arrival would have in a social media-savvy city like Boston and noted that no other celebrity has been as effective as Shaq in leveraging Twitter as a marketing vehicle, without explicitly seeming to do so. While he is known for joking around and interacting with fans in an extremely casual manner, it’s worth noting that after a summer of sporadic Tweeting, Shaq exploded onto the Twittersphere in early August, just before the season premiere of his ABC reality show “Shaq vs.” Coincidence? I think not. Also interesting was his decision around the same time to interact with other high-profile celebrities on Twitter–from Justin Bieber to Penn & Teller–and thus increase his potential reach. He may seem like he’s just goofing around on Twitter, but make no mistake: Shaq knows what he’s doing (and has the ratings to prove it).

Jim Rome may not have been totally off-base when he declared that Shaq is in the twilight of his basketball career (he’s 38, after all–though I’m still predicting the Celtics win the championship this year–call me a homer if you must). Over the hill, though? Hardly. Shaq has successfully established himself as a celebrity both on and off the basketball court, and is using Twitter to ensure that his celebrity continues long after his playing days are over.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that Page One was tapped to provide social media support for SAPPHIRE NOW, a global enterprise conference put on by SAP. The conference simultaneously took place in 3 locations: in Frankfurt, Orlando, and of course – online. The event also featured great keynote speakers such as Vice President Al Gore, Sir Richard Branson, and SAP founder Hasso Plattner. The global nature of SAPPHIRE NOW attracted lots of attention from traditional and online media outlets, but our job was to carve out a social media presence for the conference. We wanted people to feel like they were taking part in a large-scale international event, but also provide an intimate online community for them to have conversations with each other and voice opinions in order to build relationships. We set out to achieve this by establishing official Twitter and Facebook channels for the conference.

For marketing professionals, the great and sometimes most difficult thing about social media is that it never stops. Conversations don’t turn off during non-business hours. This is why it was essential to push out a steady flow of messaging on Twitter and Facebook 24 hours a day. Online monitoring was also a non-stop process that allowed us to respond rapidly to any pressing concerns that were expressed by those tweeting about the conference. As the content creator of both those channels, I made sure to follow the conference through the live streaming broadcasts around the clock so I could react in real-time to the day’s most important news and announcements. Yes, this meant waking up at 3am to tweet from my bed for the Frankfurt audience, but hey, it was all worth it!

SAPPHIRE NOW lasted for just three days, but the online buzz was strong for long after. At the end of the conference, we walked away with some impressive stats:
- #4 Twitter trending topic in the U.S.
- 10,478 mentions of the #sapphirenow hashtag
- 3,337 fans for the Facebook Page
- 21,561 Facebook Page views

If you’d like to learn more about our social media work with SAP, check out our SAPPHIRE NOW case study below.

Today, SAP launched a social media marketing campaign called Reportapalooza.  The campaign asks leading experts of SAP Crystal solutions to battle in a “Top Chef” style competition to create the best community-generated content using the SAP products.  The campaign is intended to increase online share of voice and generate new sales leads for the company.

Page One developed the campaign and the social media promotional strategy to tap into the viral nature of the community as well as build upon the 8,500 fan strong Facebook and Twitter channels we had already built.  We selected the top five community experts, from a wide range of global social media channels, to participate in the campaign.  The campaign will run through November 2010 and will consist of a series of challenges that require each expert to interact with their own community in order to create the best content and ultimately win the campaign.

Promotional activities include:

●      An interactive microsite specifically designed for the campaign;

●      Live streaming Twitter feed embedded on the site tracking the #reportapalooza hashtag;

●      Twitter and Facebook “share this” buttons on the site that auto populate content;

●      SAP Crystal solutions Twitter feed and Facebook Page dedicated to technical product information;

●      YouTube channel built to house video content produced during the campaign;

●      Influencer outreach  including top SAP Crystal solutions user groups and community members;

●      The five experts social media channels including LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, leading industry message boards and blogs;

●      Banner advertisements placed on technical media outlets and top forums;

●      Direct email campaigns and company newsletters and blog posts.

The five experts participating in the campaign are:

●      Jim Brogden (Twitter, MyXcelsius.com blog, Facebook, LinkedIn)

●      David  Deitch (Twitter, SDN blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, web site)

●      Brian Durning (Twitter, CrystalBlogger.com, LinkedIn)

●      Jamie Oswald (Twitter, SDN blog, ASUG blog, LinkedIn group)

●      Mico Yuk (Twitter, EverythingXcelsius.com, Facebook, LinkedIn group)

Additional Information:

●      Reportapalooza campaign Site;

●      “Reporting Artist” interactive quiz;

●      “Dashboard by Request” Challenge;

●      “Report Hero” Challenge;

●      Page One website.

Contact Page One: info@pageonepr.com

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Page One partnered with creative agency, White Rhino, on the campaign.

Social media has inevitably gravitated towards interaction on Twitter making it the 11^th most visited website and attracting an estimated 8% of the worlds Internet users. With so many people on it, its really no wonder that everyone from my mom to Coca Cola have jumped onto the band-wagon and are trying to milk the millions of Twitterers for all their worth.

At first glance, from a company’s perspective, the premise might seem simple enough; the goal is to attract as many followers as possible in order to get your product in front of as many faces as possible. This has led to numerous blog posts advising the novice starter on the best ways to increase follower count, some have even suggested adding your Twitter handle onto your email signature (Tip No. 9 here) and reprinting your business cards to reflect your Twitter persona.

Sounds like a valid enough argument right?… WRONG!

If your goal is to become the next Britney Spears of Twitter (at last count, 5.5 Million followers and No. 1 on Twitter Counter’s 1000 most popular) then by all means, spam away. For companies interested in increasing their influence and thought leadership, however, a very different approach is needed. Our clients at Page One are technology companies catering to specific communities of highly knowledgeable influencers, analysts, media, and all around tech-savvy folk. These clients use Twitter to disseminate a very particular kind of information and really couldn’t care less about Britney’s latest run-ins with the law (personally, however, I’m excited to catch her on Glee!). What’s more, there are only a handful of people with knowledge of something as obtuse as MySQL databases, preach it to people outside that community and your message will end up falling on deaf and uninterested ears.

Having a large number of followers also prevents you from catching the important nuggets of information that Twitter intended you to have. When you reach a couple thousand followers, their updates on your Twitter home page become a barrage that is nearly impossible to make sense of.

Most people confuse popularity with influence but these are two very different concepts in the Twittersphere. The difference between these two is at the forefront of a recently published study by the director of HP Lab’s Social Computing Lab, Dr. Bernardo A. Huberman.

Influence, as it turns out, is the ability to overcome people’s passivity enough to make them engage with you. In simple words, it means being relevant enough on Twitter for people to reply and retweet your tweets. This type of engagement requires a community of people that care about the same things enough to dialogue and hash out conversations (pun intended). To achieve this is no easy task, it requires paying constant attention to your Twitter account, setting up synergistic relationships by mutually following people in your community and Tweeting relevant and up-to-the-minute information that your community cares about.

According to Klout.com, a website that can tell you how influential one is in the Twittersphere, out of 5,560,927 total followers and 416,924 people Britney is following, there are 0 mutual followings. Imagine her standing in a room with her back turned to 5.5 Million people while she grooves to her own music through noise-cancelling head-phones. That’s what’s going on.

Popularity means nothing, at least for those interested in thought leadership and influence, if you can’t interact with your community. We at Page One PR understand that and encourage our clients to critically examine their social media campaigns. It’s not about looking up at the stars in silent admiration, it’s more about looking sideways and saying hi to the colleague standing right next to you.

We all know that social media offers marketing execs a great avenue to engage directly with their customers, but how do you go about doing it well without alienating your community?  We’ve been working with our clients to develop interactive marketing/social media campaigns, which allow marketers to use social media to stir up customer interaction and then funnel that activity into traditional marketing objectives, such as increases in product downloads, website traffic, etc.

For SAP we recently launched a campaign aimed at increasing interaction within the Crystal Reports community to drive website traffic and increases in free trial downloads.   On June 28, an online personality quiz launched and within the first four weeks had over 1,000 completions and 1,615 views.  The online “Reporting Artist” quiz asks the Crystal Reports community “what type of reporting artist are you?” through a series of humorous questions and then ends with one of four different personalities based on the responses.  Free trials for the Crystal products and whitepapers are baked into the personality responses.

To continue to build upon the success of the quiz, we are launching a new campaign on August 16 called “Reportapalooza”. You can check out the site now, but be sure to come back on the August 16 when the first challenge launches!  Through social media monitoring, we identified five of the top SAP Crystal Reports experts and are having them compete in a three month long challenge, similar to Bravo’s Top Chef.  During the campaign the experts will be asked to use the SAP Crystal solutions products as well as rely upon community involvement to complete a series of five challenges.  In November, we will crown the top Crystal Expert and shower him or her with prizes and recognition.  There are also a lot of incentives and prizes worked in for the community to participate along side the experts.

The goal of Reportapalooza and the interactive micro-site is to continue to build quality interaction within the community and ultimately increase Crystal product downloads.  Page One worked with White Rhino to develop the campaign concept and creative assets.  We designed the social media strategy to ensure that we tapped into the viral nature of the community and are using the SAP Crystal solutions Twitter and Facebook channels to drive traffic to the site.  Be sure to check out Reportapalooza in the coming weeks!

There are four metrics that most companies track to determine the success of social media campaigns and effectiveness of campaign management:

1. Increase in followers (Example: target 3,000 Facebook fans in 3 months)
2. Quantity of company content (Example: self-publish 50 Twitter posts a month)
3. Clicks to content (Example: 500 clicks on bit.ly link from Twitter to promotion web page)
4. Level of community interaction (Example: 200 interactions a month from community)

There are dozens of techniques to improve results for each metric.  The last two metrics are the most difficult to control.

The clicks to content may be dependent on the quality of the promotion, whether it is a contest with a cool prize, a unique discount, or a PDF of a report that would normally cost the customer money to buy.

In my opinion, increasing community interaction and community content is the most powerful metric.  However, it is a tricky metric to increase cost-effectively.  I want to emphasize the cost aspect.  Interaction can be increased through more staff and more time spent interacting with the community.  However, in many cases, this is not going to be cost-effective in the long-term.  People have a business to run, or a product to build.  Four hours of their time might be better spent building the product than reading Twitter messages.  However, in most business, Twitter or Facebook management is simply dumped onto people with schedules that are already full of work.  Sometimes this works.  Sometimes it doesn’t.

There are three pools of resources that marketers can tap into to increase community interaction:

1. internal staff - sales engineers, support staff, marketers, product developers.  Basically, any and all staff can and do interact with the community.  This can be increased through techniques such as training, guideline development, and channel promotion to your internal staff.  Unfortunately, this is often not enough to sustain progress over the course of a year.  In most cases, staff will be enthusiastic for three months and continue with their efforts for another three months.  However, interest may wane over the course of a year.
2. vendor or dedicated marketing resource – since internal staff may not interact with the community on a sustained basis, marketers will also turn to dedicated resources with clear targets for interaction.  This is either a marketing consulting vendor like Page One or a dedicated resource that has 25 percent of their job carved out for social media with specific metrics.  This will generally increase interaction because someone is being paid to do this.  There are several limitations.  The vendor will not know the product as well as internal staff.  On the other hand, the internal marketing resource will probably not have as extensive knowledge or real experience with social media techniques and campaigns.
3. manager from community – this type of resource is showing the best results for the best cost.  Page One actively recruits and manages the relationship with people from the community to improve the level of content and level of interaction.   After working with online communities like the Linux, open source, and developer communities for the past decade, we’ve developed techniques and work flows to identify super influencers from community and then work with them as partners to increase interaction and community content.  These influencers from the community are very knowledgeable about the product and also very knowledge about online interaction community techniques.

This just touches on the surface of explaining effective social media campaign management.  Feel free to contact me with any questions on increasing community interaction or any of the other metrics that we track to assess the effectiveness of a campaign.

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Craig Oda, Page One managing partner, fly fishing and surfing enthusiast