My conclusions about the usefulness of Twitter and Facebook for marketing are likely a product of my personal experiences as a user. I learned Facebook when I was a sophomore in college about four years ago. Facebook was about sustaining relationships with people whom I had met in person. Some of these were “friends” in the true sense of the word. Facebook also nurtured early relationships formed initially with acquaintances face-to-face and subsequently helped transform them into real world friendships. I believe this is still true today, although I admittedly do not use Facebook nearly as much as before. Facebook helps people facilitate their social lives through the sharing of personal information, as well as information about physical events. I’d argue for most people, Facebook was not, and is still generally not today, about the intellectual exchange of ideas directly through the platform.

I learned Twitter at Page One PR. Twitter’s prompt, “What are you doing?” (before Twitter changed it) never reflected well how people use Twitter. In the minds of Twitter users, I think the prompt was always closer to “what are you thinking about?” or “what are you reading that’s interesting?” or “what’s your opinion on the things that matter to you most?” On Twitter, unlike Facebook, the threshold for following or being followed is low. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never met the person before face-to-face. In many cases, you never will. But if you share a mutual interest and find mutual benefit in conversation, it makes sense to connect. Running corporate Twitter feeds on behalf of clients at Page One, it’s not all too difficult to find people who care about the same issues as my clients, since people on Twitter are more or less defined by their profile, which is a public stream of content and ideas.

These norms that inform how the typical user (I’d argue I’m typical) acts on Facebook and Twitter have consequences for marketers who are looking to leverage these tools. Because Twitter places emphasis on the exchange of ideas and has a low threshold for personal interaction, the platform is more intuitive and easier to use for marketers who want to discuss their messages with a target audience. Because Facebook is generally used as an avenue for social connections with real world acquaintances and friends and has a high threshold for personal interaction, the platform is more difficult to use successfully for marketing purposes.

There are certainly examples of companies that have had successful marketing campaigns on both Twitter and Facebook. I’m arguing that the act of marketing companies (in an engaging, interesting way that puts the “social” in social media of course) aligns better with the fundamental values of Twitter than it does with those of Facebook, and is therefore easier.

Facebook has taken specific actions to appeal to marketers. Examples include corporate Fan Pages, advertisements, more Twitter-like “Walls,” the “News Feed,” and (controversially) the reduction of privacy. It’s true that some people are beginning to treat Facebook Wall posts the way they would Tweets. However, marketers face two problems on Facebook that don’t exist in the same way on Twitter – 1) how do you discover people who would be interested in your Fan Page? 2) how do you influence people to become your fans?

Answering the first question on Twitter requires technique and strategy, but put simply, just find the people who are talking about the things you talk about. On Facebook, this often is not possible because many people choose to keep their personal conversations with groups of friends, as well as their personal information, private to outsiders.

Answering the second question is difficult if you don’t have an answer to the first. Several techniques on Facebook include advertisements and the “Suggest to Friends” button, but it’s difficult for the manager of a Page to target strangers who share specific interests. Contrast this with the free-for-all of people and information on Twitter, where barriers to strangers connecting by virtue of their shared interests and ideas are few.

My bet is that Facebook will continue to become more like an idea-sharing platform in the fundamental areas that will help the company bring in revenue from marketers. Although changes to the interface and various applications further this end, the norms by which people model their behavior on Facebook won’t change anytime soon.

Let’s end the fantasy. Social media monitoring tools (and I’ve seen a lot of them) do not produce comprehensive “reports” or “dashboards” that are all that useful to marketing executives. At least not to the type of marketing executives who have a deep understanding of social media. Tools don’t determine strategy or provide usable analysis. People do. Tools dig up a ton of data and information. In order to build a strategy around a set of findings from that information, you need to drive your own process informed by ultimate business goals.

At Page One PR, we’ve assisted companies like SAP and Cisco with their various monitoring campaigns. We’ve learned over time that useful “monitoring” really means in-depth analysis of a problem, using data from our own manual observations and social media keyword searches, to achieve a specific result or make a strategy recommendation to a client. While these campaigns come in all shapes and sizes – from an assessment of a client’s existing social media implementation to an analysis of a competitor’s online marketing programs – we believe that most monitoring projects can be performed according to a five-step process. Blame our public relations pedigree, but we believe a message-driven approach to monitoring will produce the best results.

Step 1: Audience Segmentation

At the beginning of the monitoring project, whether your focus is your own company or your competitors, it’s important to gain an understanding of the various audiences that the observed marketing or PR activity is attempting to reach. Ultimately, you will want to know whether or not content is positioned and delivered effectively for specific target audiences.

Step 2: Message Categories

Dividing monitoring parameters by major conversation themes and marketing messages focuses the monitoring project on organized, actionable data. You don’t need to know about every John Doe or spam bot that happened to mention your new product. You do need to turn a wild social media jungle into key findings that lead to specific strategic recommendations.

Step 3: Origination and Delivery

After discovering and building a list of key themes and messages, it is important to determine the location of those messages, who originated specific conversations, and how messages were distributed. For example, some of the questions you may ask yourself include:

– How is your company driving messages through its own social media channels?
– What social media channels contain important conversations?
– Do conversations link across multiple channels?
– How are external actors changing the focus of conversations or seeding new message themes?
– How are messages spreading virally?

Step 4: Goals

What are you or your competitors trying to achieve through marketing or PR activities? In order to determine the effectiveness of messages, it’s important to understand the purpose of those messages. At the end of the day, social media needs to achieve a business goal or it’s not worth doing.

Step 5: Effectiveness of Marketing/PR Messages

Try and answer two questions: did the messages reach the right target audience and what action did the target audience take upon exposure to the messages? These questions will help you determine if your campaign or a competitor’s was effective. If key influencers are commenting on blogs, “retweeting” messages, and making content go viral across multiple social media channels, you need to have a deep understanding of this process and how conversations are framed in specific contexts. Understanding effectiveness in this sense requires the kind of careful analysis that an automated tool simply cannot perform by itself.

The Page One social media team now starts every social media campaign with some form of monitoring to ensure our developed strategy and plan is based upon detailed research and analysis. Although this process seems simple enough, monitoring is by no means an easy task. Especially on complex projects, it’s important to have a team that carefully deliberates on analysis and strategy and remains vigilant in linking the findings to the ultimate goal of the project.

What do you think of this process? Have you used a different approach successfully for in-depth analysis of social media campaigns and monitoring results? I’ll even invite the plethora of tool-makers in the space to share their thoughts. Although if you say your tool is a cure-all for PR and marketing professionals, expect a robust debate!

Social media embodies Silicon Valley values. Social media communities are collaborating in innovative ways to create entirely new approaches to business and communication problems. It’s no wonder then that many Silicon Valley companies have embraced social media as a platform to engage with users and customers. But Silicon Valley also values pragmatism and ROI. Many PR professionals and social media marketers shudder at the thought of fielding this question in a new business pitch: “Social media sounds like something we should be doing, but how does it measure up to other marketing activities that I use to support critical business goals?” At Page One PR, headquartered in Silicon Valley, we understand that this question should not only be expected, it should be welcomed.

From a public relations perspective, the value of social media is greater than any one ROI metric can capture. Digital communities are providing avenues for scaling the kinds of close customer relationships that weren’t possible just a decade ago. But especially in today’s economy, we need to reach for more defined metrics in discussions with marketers who prefer to speak in terms of ROI.

There’s another field that has made this shift with a great deal of success, moving from more abstract impression estimates to more concrete action-based metrics: advertising. Internet advertisers understand the power of the click. With the advent of Google Adwords and other search ad networks, the Cost per Click (CPC) metric has become a common method for determining the success of campaigns in influencing target audiences to take specific desired actions.

At Page One, we have started the process of converting Twitter and YouTube ROI into CPC metrics. My colleague Craig Oda wrote on his personal blog about this topic recently. A major goal of social media promotional campaigns is to drive traffic to content pages where potential customers can gain rich information about the company. The content pages may include corporate websites, registration pages, blogs, and videos. To give marketers a comparison to advertising activities, we can use the cost of Twitter and YouTube campaigns along with the number of clicks on unique URLs or video views to determine social media CPC. While I’m not saying social media campaigns should replace advertising, the comparison will be highly useful to marketers attempting to justify spending a portion of limited budgets on social media.

Let’s first compare advertising to Twitter CPC. Our client base is largely business to business high tech software companies. Although CPC in search ads for this sector can vary widely depending on the competitiveness of the bidding process for keywords, the $1 – $2 range is typical. In the month of May, one of our clients, an open source software company, averaged about $1.50 CPC for Google Adwords. For a fair comparison with Twitter ROI, it is important to include the entire cost that companies incur for ad campaigns – this includes the initial set up and testing of messages, keyword selection, and management over time. Many service firms charge about 15% of the advertising spend for basic management costs. This number can increase depending on the level of testing and analytics. Companies with small ad spends often pay up to 30-40% due to minimum fee policies. Including management fees, a $1.50 CPC could easily increase to $1.72 – $2.10.

Since Twitter is a free tool, the cost of a Twitter campaign is solely comprised of the people-hours that go into activities such as determining strategy and voice, updating the feed, engaging with followers, monitoring the Twittersphere, and reporting results to clients. We include all these services within the cost for the CPC, because even Twitter activities not related to unique URL linking can grow the feed and contribute positively to click rates. To make a fair comparison to the content of advertisements when calculating Twitter CPC, we only include clicks on unique URLs that point to the client’s corporate website, blog or other content that gives a prominent impression of the client in a positive light (e.g. a feature story on an external news website).

We are in the process of collecting data across several accounts, and an initial measurement based on the Twitter feed of the Linux Foundation, the non-profit Linux consortium, yields a $0.12 CPC. The Linux Foundation Twitter feed is highly popular and has been in existence since July 2008. We’d expect that younger feeds for less well known companies would yield more costly CPC rates. Rudimentary and partial data from June for the Twitter feed of Appcelerator, an open source application development platform, shows an approximate $1.00 CPC. The Appcelerator feed is another popular, high quality feed.

Now, let’s compare advertising to YouTube video CPC. Page One offers professional video production services. In the past, projects have included short client vision videos and comical videos at technical conferences. We host these videos on YouTube and other platforms, and track the number of times that people view each video. This process is similar to tracking clicks on a search network advertisement or interactive ad, but the content in YouTube videos is arguably richer than that of internet ads. The cost of a video campaign includes messaging strategy, scripting, professional videographer production costs, direction and promotion. In some cases, the cost of promotion may be difficult to determine when the campaign blends with more traditional PR services, resulting in overlapping costs. For instance, media relations activities may result in an article that links to the video. Since this increases the number of views, these activities should at least be considered in the CPC metric. We’ve seen that campaigns are most successful when PR is integrated with social media activities, creating a multiplier effect.

Our initial measurement of video CPC across several accounts shows an approximate $0.32 CPC for strongly developed campaigns. A vision video for Appcelerator yielded $0.14. A vision video for Cloudera, a high-end data storage and processing system, yielded $0.32. Both of these videos were associated with major product launches, so we’d expect relatively high view counts. Conversational videos at a developer conference yielded $0.50. A big difference between CPC for video campaigns and CPC for ad campaigns is that the former tends to decrease over time while the latter tends to remain relatively flat assuming that market conditions remain steady. Whereas the cost of a video is incurred at the beginning of the project, the cost of an ad campaign increases with time. To be sure, clicks for ads also increase over time but in proportion with the ad spend. On the other hand, if a YouTube video goes viral, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. You continue to get clicks without additional cost.

Since Craig’s initial blog post on this topic, we’ve collected more data and can now update our CPC comparison chart. We’ll continue to refine these metrics going forward, especially as we gain more Twitter data from our client accounts. We’d appreciate your comments and thoughts on social media ROI.

Facebook has changed a lot since I first started using it in college four years ago. New users may be shocked to learn that the “News Feed” didn’t even exist back then.  While college students may have a legitimate complaint about Facebook being usurped and transformed since the “good old days,” I can say that this popular social networking app is becoming increasingly useful for social media, PR and marketing professionals. With each update, Facebook increases the opportunities for content and conversations to go viral and to reach more users.

One of the key things for marketers to understand about Facebook is when to use Groups or Pages to organize a community. When organizations join Facebook, they have to decide between starting a Group or a Page. In basic terms, both Groups and Pages are forums for self-selected users to connect around a common interest. Pages are specifically designed for companies and organizations to reach their “fans.” Groups can be organized around virtually any topic, although there’s nothing stopping an organization from starting a Group as well.

Just a few months ago, I would have declared a toss up between Groups and Pages in terms of their relative effectiveness for marketers looking to make an impact in the social media space. While Groups are more antiquated and less customizable than Pages, Groups allow administrators to send messages to all members, which are sent as emails. Pages, on the other hand, only allow “Updates” to be sent through Facebook itself to the homepages of fans. When Page One PR ran a social media campaign for Wine.com in late 2008, we created a Page and found only limited features available that would be useful for reaching potential new fans (save paid advertisements). The Page was an important part of our campaign, but I wanted more.

Since our Wine.com campaign, Page One PR has set up both Pages and Groups for our company and for our clients. After working on several campaigns, I would now recommend that organizations choose Pages over Groups for their effectiveness in marketing campaigns.

What’s changed? In the most recent alteration of Facebook, Pages took on the appearance and functionality of a personal profile. This means that a Page comes fully equipped with a “Wall” where the administrators of the Page as well as fans can post comments, links, videos, and pictures. Fans can also comment on wall posts, “Like” posts or share them on their personal profiles or through direct messages. Most of these Page interactions will show up on users’ “News Feeds,” making the information more viral.  If fans share information from Pages on their own profiles or engage in conversations on the Wall, their friends see this information on their own News Feeds. Hence, another viral effect is born. Pages also come with traditional applications like “Events” and “Notes”.

Another benefit of Pages is the analytical capability called “Insights”. Measuring the results of social media is crucial if social media campaigns are to demonstrate value and ROI. With “Insights,” organizations can track growth of their fan base over time, unique views of the Page and specific areas such as pictures, demographics of the fans, and even how fans are engaging with the site over time. For one of our current clients, Meltwater, we’re discovering that Insights actually does yield interesting data about fan interaction with the Page. In particular, we’ve noticed the popularity of rich content such as pictures by tracking clicks and views over time.

Finally, the coup de gras that sold me on Pages over Groups was a vital feature improvement called “Suggest to Friends.” Previously, it was difficult for Page administrators and fans to get the word out to other Facebook users. Now, any administrator or fan can suggest the Page to their friend networks AND these suggestion notices are sent as emails.

With all of these new Facebook updates, Pages have become more useful for marketers and PR professionals. Groups have the same largely static characteristics as before. There is no Wall that interconnects content and people through the News Feeds, although Groups include pictures, videos, discussion boards, and events capabilities. This means it is more difficult to spread content virally. The best feature of Groups, from the perspective of marketers, is the ability to send messages that are sent as emails to members. However, this feature, along with Events, is the only way that members learn of Group activities without having to revisit the Group itself.

I’m not saying that the Facebook Page is the best social media tool for every organization, but I am finding that Facebook can play a helpful role in larger social media efforts.

What do you think about the transformation of Pages? Please feel free to comment on personal experiences or give your own take on Facebook as a marketing/PR vehicle.

In September, I wrote a post on Page One’s search for a social media monitoring service. After exploring several commercial solutions, we decided on Radian6 because the functions of the tool and pricing scheme best fit our needs. Since that time, Page One has continued to engage in innovative social media campaigns. Monitoring social media such as blogs, forums, Twitter, and rich media has been a key component in many of these campaigns.

When discussing social media monitoring, many people talk in broad terms about the need for companies to listen and engage in this space. New media channels are becoming more important than ever. In late January Advertising Age reported on a study by the CMO Council which found that many CMOs do not feel they’re effectively tracking social media.

But how does social media monitoring work in practice? Can a tool like Radian6 work magic for companies looking to make headway in this new frontier?

My answer, although it may not be satisfying to some, is that the value of the tool depends on the goals you set and the metrics you’re trying to track. No one tool is sufficient for a successful campaign.

In fact, while the best features of Radian6 are its analytical graphing components, during day-to-day operations I’ll often find myself going elsewhere to monitor social media in real time. For instance, in a lightweight blog campaign, a combination of Google Blog searches may be adequate (and in some cases, even more useful than Radian6 searches, since Google has Page Rank and relevance functionality). For Twitter, hybrid desktop applications like TweetDeck and simple, yet intuitive monitoring interfaces like TweetGrid can do the trick. For determining influencers, I’ve found it essential to complement Radian6 with Google or Technorati searches.

Tools like Radian6 certainly do have strengths that you can’t get for free elsewhere. Radian6 provides the ability to process and analyze information to determine key trends and drill down on contextual information. For example, using the Topic Trends widget, you can not only track trends in social media mentions of keywords through a period of time, but you can also zero in on a particular point of interest and perform additional analysis.

Sure, Radian6 can aggregate diverse information sources into one interface, but its display features are not necessarily optimal for all activities. More importantly, the metrics it tracks are not necessarily the ones that are most useful or relevant to every social media campaign.

This is the big point – Radian6 is a good monitoring tool, but it doesn’t have all the answers (nor do the creators of Radian6 pretend that it does). When engaging in a social media campaign, it’s essential that you drive the metrics and not depend on a tool to do it for you. Fundamentally, Radian6 tracks the number of key word mentions in social media, but you may be interested in different kinds of values or metrics – for instance, how your campaign efforts have affected website traffic, or in the PR world, how successful you’ve been in securing placements in top identified publications or blogs.

Buying a tool like Radian6 is a step in the right direction but success in social media requires smart planning and identifying metrics that are appropriate to the unique circumstances of the individual campaign. There’s no silver bullet in this world, which may explain why it’s so exciting and challenging at the same time.

Social media is radically transforming the PR business. But like anything in PR, one of the biggest challenges is measuring and metrics. One of my first jobs at Page One PR was figuring out the best way to help our clients measure the value of social media programs.

Tapping into social media in a meaningful way for clients is not as easy as a Google Blog, Technorati, and Twitter search. To narrow in on the right conversations, we needed an automated system for monitoring all types of social media. I recently led a project to find the best commercial social media monitoring service for our purposes, which we could use to tailor comprehensive analysis and services according to our clients’ needs.

Here’s a brief summary of what I found:
Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Visible Technologies service large clients and charge correspondingly large fees. A Visible Technologies product called Trucast uses sophisticated web crawlers to stay current with the most influential voices on the web and provides an easy platform for engaging social media communities directly through the software. One downside to TruCast – it is difficult to filter information according to different categories of social media. The lack of flexibility in that case, along with the high price tag for both of these services, told us that these are not good options for PR and marketing firms that deal with startups on a limited budget or larger companies with small-scale social media campaigns.

BuzzLogic is a more reasonable value option for startups and smaller campaigns. The interface allows you to divide tasks across workers and search results are easy to filter by influence metrics for blogs and the posts that appear as subheadings. The service includes other useful features like social mapping and recording engagements with bloggers. Downsides – they only offer yearly pricing schemes (too rigid for us) and it is difficult to narrow in on categories of social media.

The Radian6 interface is intuitive and allows you to filter results based on categories of social media, including rich media sites and microblogs (but not social networks). However, the “Influence Viewer” widget requires some manual follow-up. While the widget uses criteria such as number and length of comments and votes on social bookmarking services to determine “influence,” it doesn’t do enough to highlight the blogs that have power or authority in general on the web (as opposed to the ones that have a few comments and are on topic). Other downsides – search results track back only about 30 days prior to the query (other products allow you to get better historical data), and while the product might be affordable for primary research, buying many separate topic profiles after the seven day grace period would become cost prohibitive for many small firms.

There are a few other products I’ve checked out but haven’t mentioned here. But right now, we’re going with Radian6. Any suggestions? Something we’re missing? Feel free to comment below.