The Page One team is growing. We added two new staff members to our roster this week (welcome Katherine and Jessica!) and we have at least two more new hires on the way. And on top of that, two very special people have joined the Page One family – I am pleased to introduce to you, Penelope and Percival, the Page One Penguins.

Penny and Percy (as they are known in the office) will be traveling with the Page Wonders on our various social media adventures. You can follow them every step of the way on our Facebook Page. Photos will be added regularly to The Adventures of Penny and Percy photo album, and they’ll also soon be checking-in from Foursquare.

Currently, Percy is away on an important social media business trip to Vancouver. Want to know how he’s doing? Become our fan on Facebook to receive updates!

Two weeks ago (I know, in social media time this translates into two years), I attended the Building Brands on Social Networks event sponsored by Sprout as a part of San Francisco’s Social Media Week 2010.

During the half-day summit, representatives from companies such as Facebook, Altimeter Group, and Technorati gave presos that illustrated great examples of marketing and creative advertising campaigns that implemented social media tactics to yield significant metrics and results. But I recognized a trend in the case studies: they were all campaigns focused around consumer products.

Much of the consumer strategy discussed could not be directly applied to B2B companies. In fact, when an audience member asked the Building Brands panel if they could offer any successful examples of B2B social media campaigns, no one could give an answer. After a few moments of shifty silence, the best the panel could do was, “We’ll get back to you on that.”

Perhaps I should have jumped up from my seat and rattled off our clients to that audience member, but instead I will provide an answer in the form of this blog post. Page One specializes in social media strategy for B2B companies. So if anyone from the Building Brands event is still waiting for a response, take a look at the following case study videos to see the social media work we’ve done for B2B companies such as Cisco:

For two more Cisco examples, head over to Page One’s Case Study page to access videos about the IT Innovations Forum and the ISR Product Launch: Cisco Case Studies.

12/21 Update: It was announced yesterday (12/20) that Yelp walked away from the $550 million dollar deal with Google.

Yesterday evening, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch reported that Google was in advanced talks to acquire Yelp for at least $500 million dollars. It seems like a big business move, even for Google, so let’s try to break it down. Why does this potential purchase matter?

For Google, the benefit of the acquisition would be ad revenue. If this deal is confirmed, Google will inherit Yelp’s extensive network of local ad-buying businesses. They’ll also be able to take Yelp’s 8 million+ user reviews and integrate them into Google’s Place Pages – which will give Google even more opportunity for ad revenue with keyword searches.

For Yelp, a buyout from Google means that direct links to Yelp listings will show up in Google’s search results. These are not just links to Yelp’s search results page, but links taking you directly to the Yelp page for say, Bi-Rite Creamery. Oh, and of course, there’s the money. Yelp is reporting $30 million in revenue this year, but rumor has it that Google will purchase the company for half a billion dollars.

For local businesses, the acquisition is important because with Google’s backing, Yelp reviews will have the potential to reach much larger audiences. If your business isn’t already on Yelp, what are you waiting for? You can use your Yelp listing to serve as the landing page for your company if you don’t have the budget to build your own personal website. Customer reviews have always been a popular social activity on the Internet, and Yelp has fostered an intimate community of reviewers who could be spreading the news about your business for you.

For social media users, the acquisition ties together the two popular trends of location-based social networking and mobile devices. Consumers could use their mobile phones to locate information through Google about nearby businesses on Yelp. Now armed with a large arsenal of local content, Google could push for more advanced mobile apps that allow users to instantly connect with others in local spaces – much like Foursquare.

With this move, Google is illustrating their play for acquiring community-based websites, and trying to magnify their presence in social networking. It’ll be interesting to see if this deal pulls through. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for confirmation.

By now, most of you have heard about the launch of Google’s real-time search, which pulls live updates from websites like Twitter and Facebook and features them alongside traditional search results.

From a social media professional’s vantage point, Google’s real-time search is a big step forward in illustrating the true impact of social media. Inclusions of live Twitter and Facebook mentions for a Google search stresses the value of having a social media presence to foster positive conversations about a brand or product. Hopefully this will convince companies who have not yet dove into the social media pool to jump in head-first off the high dive.

As real-time searches become accessible to a much wider audience, monitoring and tracking also becomes an invaluable service provided by social media professionals. Social media was once believed to be a setting for casual conversation. More and more, it’s becoming an official space for brand management and monitoring. If a person searching on Google instantly sees a negative comment about their search term, they will form an initial impression about the term before visiting its official website. It’s also noteworthy that people are more inclined to be influenced by a fellow customer than a corporate website.

Google’s real-time search is definitely a legitimizing move for the social media industry. Now it’s up to the social media professionals to develop the best strategies to leverage these new functions, and of course, be prepared for the next thing in social media.

Social media makes a lot of noise. In order to sift through all this noise smart marketers need to use monitoring tools to prioritize the most relevant information. I recently conducted a review of four monitoring tools for Page One PR: eCairn, Overtone, ViralHeat and Sysomos. The most important information I can share isn’t which tool was best but rather that no one tool will meet all your specific social media needs. Each tool I reviewed performed different functions with unique strengths. If you’re doing serious social media monitoring, pick the mix of tools that best meet your needs. There’s no way – yet – to automate monitoring. You still have to do manual work to fill the gaps. A smart marketer will select multiple tools that, when used together, will provide the right level of data to develop an effective social media strategy.

eCairn

eCairn specializes in the blogosphere. Their Conversation application is a tool that maps out blog communities. Users manually create a list of blogs they wish to track. A proprietary algorithm ranks these blogs by “influence,” largely by measuring how frequently the blogs cross reference other influential blogs. The tool’s functions are less about search, and more about text mining.  For our agency, identifying key blogs and conversations is important, but if the tool also worked for Twitter and other social media sources it would be much more valuable.

Overtone

Open Mic by Overtone works on a platform that operates on keywords, and does a great job of analyzing data from search terms. I especially liked their emerging trend alert function which identifies potential spikes in a keyword that could lead to future trends or issues. However, Open Mic seems designed to focus on single brand topics for companies to manage online forums or customer service surveys more than for use as a general purpose monitoring tool. It’s not well suited for agencies.

ViralHeat

We signed up for a free ViralHeat trial after Mashable described them as a sophisticated, yet affordable social media tracking tool. ViralHeat pulls data from Twitter, websites, blogs, and YouTube from search profiles we create in the tool. It can tell you specific information such as the number of total unique authors who tweeted about your search term. They also pull together a convenient summary of daily metrics activity. However, a downside of the tool was that the search capability wasn’t as user-friendly and flexible as other monitoring services. Our account was limited to 10 profile searches, and it was difficult to figure out how to compare multiple keywords in the same search. Starting at $10 per month, ViralHeat is priced aggressively. But for Page One, ViralHeat would best serve as a secondary tool that would complement a primary monitoring service with better search functions and less rigidity.

Sysomos

Sysomos offers two main products, the Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat. MAP is an in-depth tool useful for historical analysis over time. The tool is able to identify key influencers in social media communities and uses text analytics to determine tone and sentiment. One attractive feature is that MAP’s database reaches back to 2006, and the data can be effectively categorized by geographic location. It can also monitor across multiple companies.

Their second product is Heartbeat, and is targeted for real-time, day-to-day monitoring, usually for a single brand/company. This tool tracks social media mentions instantaneously, determines sentiment and key influencers, and lets users view their current competitive landscape. Heartbeat also allows multiple users to log-in to the website at one time, which facilitates the sharing of information with your colleagues. Like most other tools, the social media data only goes back 30 days, which is hopefully something that could be tweaked in the future.

Because of its flexibility, search functions, easy-to-use dashboard, and the real-time component, MAP and Heartbeat from Sysomos appear to be good choices right now for our agency (we also plan to more extensively test drive eCairn for its blog capabilities). But we understand that social media monitoring is still an evolving service, and our monitoring needs as an agency will change over time. One thing to remember about choosing a social media tracking tool is that what’s right for our agency may not be right for you.

If you have any insights or questions, please feel free to leave a response in the comments.

Happy tracking!