Facebook Fans got the pictures before automotive press. There was a large amount of negative comments. Reporters and bloggers went to the Facebook Fan page to look at the pictures and get the initial public reaction. Unfortunately, it was negative.
Honda Crosstour Facebook Page
The Internet is filled with speculation as to why the problem occurred. Analysis includes:
* The pictures weren’t good. The appeal of the car’s unusual shape isn’t represented accurately in the pictures that were put on Facebook;
* The demographic on Facebook didn’t match the target audience the car was designed for. The car is designed to be attractive to people that are older than the average Facebook fan;
* Honda marketing simply made a mistake in giving up control of their communications channel. They would have been better off keeping the photos secret until they launched the vehicle with a press conference and working with reporters that the PR people had relationships with.
Of course, pointing out errors after a failure is always easier than designing a successful marketing campaign.
I think that the verdict is still out on whether or not an official Facebook Fan page is a good platform to leak product photos. However, if I were hired to manage the Facebook Page to launch photos, here is what I would have done differently:
* Identify key Facebook influencers prior to the creation of the Facebook Page. Identify and prioritize influencers based on their reach on Facebook and in other social media channels;
* Use PR techniques to provide these influencers with organized information, special attention, and rapid responses to questions prior to giving them access to media like photos;
* Work out a process to let them see the car, either the physical car itself or a photo that they agree won’t be reposted;
* Use feedback from the influencer group to adjust the pictures as needed;
* Expand out the influencer group over time. By the time the photo got leaked, there would have been enough of a positive impression of the car to either weaken the negative sentiment or drown it out.
If a marketing campaign is run on Facebook, the platform becomes a marketing tool. By applying existing marketing techniques, such as those developed by PR experts, the risks of a failed Facebook campaign can be reduced.
Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast
This week the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston launched a PR campaign around the 20th anniversary of the largest art heist in history. In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, two men disguised as Boston Police officers entered the museum, subdued the guards, and escaped with 13 priceless pieces, including masterworks by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, and Manet, which were cut out of their frames. Two decades later, the crime remains unsolved, and the empty frames still hang on the museum walls as a haunting reminder.
Historically, stolen art is often recovered. This is because famous pieces are instantly recognizable and virtually impossible to sell. Someone happens to see the artwork, realizes it’s stolen, and alerts the authorities. With this hope, the Gardner museum and the FBI are now offering a $5 million reward and guaranteed criminal immunity for information leading to the artwork.
The traditional PR campaign has resulted in placing hundreds of stories in publications and blogs around the world. But surprisingly, the social media presence has been nil. Considering that art crimes are often solved through crowdsourcing, social media seems to be an ideal platform for this type of campaign. Followers on Facebook and Twitter could retweet about the stolen art, and their friends might retweet it, and eventually someone who knows something might see it. A recent survey found that 75% of Americans learn about news through social networking sites and email.
The Gardner Museum actually does have a Twitter feed with 1,421 followers, but they have posted nothing about the stolen artwork. They also have a Facebook Page with 3,516 fans, but they are not publicizing the $5 million reward there, either. On the anniversary (March 18), I searched Twitter for the terms “Gardner” and “art” and found fewer than 5 posts per hour.
The continued disappearance of the Gardner masterpieces is a tragedy, and I hope the renewed publicity finally results in the artworks’ return. In the meantime, social media is a critical missing piece in the campaign to raise public awareness.
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!
Journalists and PR folks alike had a good laugh (at the expense of the PR industry) when a viral video about embargoes recently made the rounds on social media channels. In the video, a PR flak calls a journalist in order to pitch her with an upcoming announcement, but first she has to agree to the embargo. Annoyed, the reporter agrees, only to be hit with a generic, buzzword-filled pitch. To top it off, it’s not even in her coverage area. The journalist tells him as much, but undeterred, the PR guy stumbles on.
PR Pro: And you’ll honor the embargo?
Journalist: Yes, I’ll honor the embargo. In fact, I’ll make you a better offer.
PR Pro: Oh.
Journalist: I will honor the embargo for the rest of my working life. As I have no intention of writing about your new revolutionary software as a service for social media companies that will change the way social media marketing is done forever. So, yes, I’ll honor the f**king embargo.
This video struck a nerve because the embargo conversation takes place all the time between PR pros and the media, especially in science and technology. But are embargoes really necessary?
Back in the old days, news cycles moved more slowly, and journalists were happy to honor embargoes. The advantage of the embargo is that it allows journalists time to research the topic, conduct interviews, and write up the story before it breaks. Ideally, at the precise moment the embargo lifts, stories from multiple journalists go live at the same time. The client gets lots of clips, and multiple journalists get to “break” the story. Nobody wants to publish their article second and give the impression that another outlet scooped them. In addition, sites like Google News prioritize the first article published, rewarding them with increased traffic.
In these dark days of media layoffs and publications disappearing altogether, journalists are under more pressure than ever to be the first to break a story. The 24-hour news cycle never stops, and stories and rumors can spread across Twitter and Facebook almost instantly. The media landscape has changed dramatically, with traditional news sources being eclipsed by blog-oriented news sites like the Huffington Post, ReadWriteWeb, and Mashable—sites that tend to post many short stories throughout the day, but don’t take the time for interviews or in-depth research. Even at traditional outlets, with fewer writers to carry the workload, reporters often don’t have time to jump on the phone for a briefing. They want to be emailed with just the facts, ma’am, along with a quote or two that they can quickly package up into a story and send out the door.
Taking a jab at bloggers’ tendency to slap together basic posts (in lieu of more-substantive journalism), someone in PR posted a video response to the famous “Embargoes” video:
Blogger: We are in the business of breaking news here. Our readers demand it.
PR Pro: Do your readers also demand quality in your posts?
Blogger: That is less important.
PR Pro: So, short of an exclusive, you would rather I just send you the information the morning of the announcement and let you scramble with the rest of the world in a race to see who can crank out the quickest, shoddiest, slapped-together blog post with no context, background, or in-depth information?
Blogger: Yes. I will fill in the blanks later, or not.
In the worst-case scenario, a reporter will agree to the embargo and then break it, which rewards the embargo-breaker with increased web traffic and, thereby, more revenue. On the flip side, the broken embargo throws the PR person into frantic crisis-management mode, and angers the other journalists who were honoring the embargo. For the client, a broken embargo can affect the amount of media coverage the announcement gets–usually for the worse.
These days, some bloggers and journalists are refusing to honor embargoes altogether. A prime example is TechCrunch, which acknowledges the benefits of embargoes but complains that too many embargoes today are broken, putting reporters who play by the rules at a disadvantage.
So, what’s a PR pro to do? It’s part of our job to make the reporter’s job easier, and increasingly that means avoiding embargoes and providing content via email instead of telephone interviews. My approach is to avoid embargoes as much as possible, using them only occasionally for my client’s most important announcements, particularly where there is a lot of dense subject matter for reporters to slog through.
What do YOU think about embargoes? Please participate in our poll, or leave a comment below.
“When will NBC learn: the Internet is not Jay Leno’s friend.”
So ends the Gawker piece on the latest guerrilla skirmish between Team Conan and Team Leno. Basically, a moderator on the NBC forums created a thread for people to post things they want Jay Leno to see. Which was more or less a siren call for Conan O’Brien’s veritable Internet army to give it to Jay on the chin. Conan propaganda, photoshops, and just straight-up vulgarity appeared by the page.
Like any high school grad that had to read 1984, NBC was quick to remove the rapidly spiraling thread. But the Internet really is forever, and you can still see the fallout floating aroundas screencaps.
The New Late Night Wars dominated not just the shows in question, but the entire mediasphere, both online and offline. That’s not surprising, nor was its extreme virality, as exemplified by Jimmy Kimmel’s January offensive. What is amazing, however, is the difference in reaction between the online and offline audiences.
When Conan joined Twitter barely a week ago, the blogosphere went crazy. As of this morning, with just ten tweets to his name, Conan had amassed over 500,000 followers, decimating Jay Leno, who’s been kicking around for some time now. This along with his immense online grassroots support paints the picture that maybe NBC was in the wrong on this one.
Until you take a look at the numbers of Jay’s comeback show. “Leno Crushes Letterman in Return,” goes the headline, and the stats don’t lie. Despite all the hemming and hawing on the Internet, the liveblogged takedowns, and the Hulu tag commentary, NBC made the right business move. Go figure.
What the Tonight Show debacle speaks to is a much broader cultural issue on which the schism between real world and Internet world audiences touches. Businesses are increasingly dealing with generational differences that are not age-specific. Understanding of technology and early adoption mean that it’s not just the message but also the medium that has to cater to different demographics.
Can you afford to burn bridges with the vocal minority? In this case, playing to the network audience, older and more staid, with Leno’s everyman persona far outweighs the outcry from the highly active online Conan camp. But should something happen and the scales swing the other way, it’s unlikely that NBC could save face. By betting on a real world audience today, they may be sacrificing the online audience of tomorrow.
Regardless of industry type, this is an issue that is going to impact strategic and marketing decisions for all businesses. And if the meteoric rise in use—and valuation—of social media institutions shows us anything, it’s that online consumer tendencies will hold more weight than real world tendencies.
The influx of corporate interest in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and engineered virality is proof that most forward-thinking companies already see where they have to go in the future. But, as in the case of NBC, when it comes time to put their money with their mouth is, it becomes pretty clear that the main tenets of social media haven’t been fully integrated into how these companies operate. Something both admirers and detractors will be quick to point out.
Oh, and just in case you were wondering where my allegiances lie:
The other day, the Israeli army canceled a planned operation because a soldier posted a status update with details on the mission. He was relieved of duty, court-martialed, and sentenced to 10 days in prison. And now the military is cracking down on soldiers’ use of social networking sites.
An entire military operation was scrapped due to a post on Facebook.
Social networking sites like Facebook are often soldiers’ primary means of staying in touch with people back home. Security vulnerabilities are no doubt a major concern, but shouldn’t soldiers be able to stay in contact with family and friends?
While the soldier clearly didn’t exercise much discretion, or confidentiality, this action raises a powerful point: social networking sites empower every single community member to post virtually anything they choose. Doesn’t matter if you’re a PR flack or general in the army, you have the same abilities on social networking sites.
This “freedom” has gotten some high profile athletes in trouble. It’s commonplace now for entire stories to be written about what a player said (er, wrote) after a game. There’s been fines handed down by the NBA based on athletes’ tweets. Both the NBA and NFL have explicitly outlawed tweeting during games. A football player at the University of Oregon was even kicked off the team recently because of what he wrote on his Facebook account. Where before it only mattered what athletes said at a game or press conference, now they must be conscious of what they say off the field as well.
Similarly, a woman in Chicago was sued last summer by her realty firm for tweeting that her apartment was moldy. “The company claims her tweet was published ‘throughout the world’ and severely damaged its good name.” Yikes. No complaints, no grievances, better watch what you’re tweeting or you might end up with a lawsuit on your hands.
Where do you draw the line? Isn’t the point of social media to have a free flowing, unfiltered conversation among any number of participants? But not when that conversation jeopardizes a business or lives… It’s a fine line. Whatever the case, social networking sites are a public forum. People are easier to access. Messages are broadcast to a wide audience – everything is on the record. And the record is rolling 24/7. It’s a whole new ballgame. Better adapt.
The social media campaign we just completed for the SAP Open Tennis match was especially challenging since we only had a month to get 22 million impressions for their Twitter content on a brand new feed. Starting from zero, we got 3,500 Twitter followers, a 30 percent engagement rate on the feed, and more than 500 visits from the feed to the Ticketmaster site for online purchase of tennis tickets.
Many of the activities involved leveraging existing tennis communities, including fans of the Australian Open which took place a few weeks prior to the SAP Open.
This is a great example of how social media can be used to acquire new customers.
In 2009, most of our experience was with social media campaigns designed for customer retention or customer engagement. For example, the @CiscoGeeks Twitter feed engages existing customers of Cisco routers and switches. Right now, we’re running fun contests for existing Cisco customers to share pictures of networking equipment with each other.
Typical social campaigns are based on self-publishing models that push out product information, discounts and prizes from central places like a Twitter feed or Facebook Fan Page. For example, we’re in the early stages of a campaign with VMware to manage content and interaction on Twitter, Facebook and the corporate blog. Since most customers of VMware’s vCloud Express product are still in beta, initial efforts have focused on publishing information to people that are either using the beta product or a related VMware product.
Some social media campaigns are similar to opt-in email marketing campaigns where the target audience is already familiar with the product.
However, new types of social media campaigns are targeting new “green field” customers. The SAP Open Tennis campaign is a good example of the new type of social media campaign designed for new customer acquisition.
Some of the techniques we used included:
* leveraging existing tennis communities and engaging with people interested in related topics like the Australian Open;
* joining discussions around famous people like Andy Roddick who won the SAP Open Tennis tournament in 2009;
* managing contests, including one with a prize of a signed Andy Roddick tennis racket;
* getting people that were going to the tennis tournament to pass the word on to their friends that weren’t going to the tournament.
The last technique is the key to success of any social media campaign designed for customer acquisition. We’re tracking message distribution by counting the number of ReTweets and hashtag use on Twitter. On Facebook, we’re focusing more on measuring user-generated content.
Although I think that the majority of social media campaigns in 2010 will still be focused on customer retention and engagement, I’m really excited about the opportunities to work on more customer acquisition campaigns as well. I’ve already started developing a new campaign for a secret client to acquire new customers from a competitor’s base.
Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast
Some people feel that Twitter marketing is effective when integrated into email marketing campaigns. Today, ExactTarget, an email marketing firm, validated this perspective by acquiring CoTweet, developers of one of the most popular Twitter clients used by large enterprises to manage marketing campaigns.
ExactTarget has raised $140 million, including a $75 million boost in December of 2009.
This acquisition could be a milestone early flag that social media marketing is developing into a mature industry with companies that generate revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even from my limited perspective in Silicon Valley, I can see huge changes to the PR and marketing industries. Although Page One started off as a public relations firm, our service offering has changed radically in the past year to adapt to the changing ways the public is consuming media. It seems like email marketing and advertising companies are in full throttle evolution mode as well.
For the past year and a half, Page One’s social media team has been rapidly expanding. While this translates into a lot of great new business opportunities, it also means we’ve been doing a lot of hiring. A common question I run into every time we start a new round is “what am I actually looking for?”. What does the ideal social media candidate look like? After thousands of resumes and interviews, here are the top 5 traits I look for when adding someone to my team:
Driven. The social media world is at the height of “start-up mode” right now, which means although there is some process coming together it’s still pretty much crazy and chaotic. I hate to be so dramatic, but really only the strong and scrappy will survive.
Ability to go with the flow. In the morning you’re running Cisco’s Twitter feed, in the afternoon you’re developing a video script for VMware, tomorrow you’re coming up with a Facebook campaign for SAP…who knows what tomorrow evening holds in store. The ability to go with the flow and take on any challenge with a positive attitude will get you far.
Brilliant. No, not just your average smart cookie, we’re talking brilliant. You have to be able to take those smarts one step further though – it’s the ability to translate brilliance into innovative, cutting edge campaign ideas that will help the team in the long run.
Organized. At the end of the day, it’s all about metrics and ROI and if you can’t keep an organized excel sheet or Google Doc, you will get left behind (and probably frustrate your manager and the client).
Ability to deal with uncomfortable situations. The Twitter feed got suspended. The client smiled and nodded when you said quality is more important than quantity, but they still want 10,000 Twitter followers by tomorrow morning. It’s the night before the big pitch and your managers are still arguing over what angle to take. You get the point. Being able to trouble shoot, not give up and frankly have the “I need to fight to live another day” attitude helps.
Social media is by no means a perfect science, making hiring for a social media position even more tricky, but have faith hiring managers! I’ve tested these criteria over the past year and have found some extraordinary and very talented team members.
The marketing world is turning upside down, with influencer marketing and customer marketing flip-flopping.
The most popular form of influencer marketing is public relations, an activity based on organizing information and sending the information to influential people. Usually, these people are reporters. In the best scenario, the reporters write for a publication that reaches millions of people. This model of influencer marketing is changing rapidly as newspapers cut staff and the number of reporters and publications decrease.
Customer marketing is based on publishing content like newsletters or advertisements that reach potential customers directly. The two main distribution channels for customer marketing are paid placements in newspapers and magazines and the direct mailing of advertisements through the postal mail.
In the past year, public relations has moved from purely influencer marketing to incorporate some types of customer marketing such as writing corporate blogs or running contests for customers.
Social media always incorporated both customer marketing and influencer marketing. However, the first wave of social media activities focused on customer marketing. The most popular marketing activities were self-publishing content on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. Today, we’re seeing the emergence of social media influencers, people with large numbers of Twitter followers or high traffic on a personal blog.
In the last three months, we’ve been identifying, organizing, and building relationships with social media influencers, people that are not professional writers and may not even have a blog. The new breed of influencer may only be prominent on a technical message board or be known for funny YouTube videos
Yes, social media marketing is new and many things like tools, monitoring and metrics are new. However, the basic strategy is built on top of experience with traditional customer marketing and influencer marketing campaigns.
Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast
Companies in Silicon Valley are starting to leverage the personal Twitter feeds, Facebook profiles, and blogs of their employees for corporate promotions. By integrating employees into social media influencer campaigns, companies are acknowledging the value of their employees as spokespeople.
Twitter feeds for employees are uncontrolled, filled with personal information such as pictures of pets, boyfriends, and the lives of their kids. However, since work is a big part of their lives, the employees often include information on technology or products that they are involved with.
Big brands contract with us to map out which employees have Twitter feeds and to rank the value of the individual employee’s Twitter feed for marketing purposes. We then pitch the employee and try to get their cooperation in getting the word out about a marketing asset such as a YouTube video.
We use the same process with blogs. However, very few employees have blogs that are influential. Leveraging Facebook profiles is still in the beginning stages. However, we’ve seen some success with getting employees to join relevant Facebook Pages as Fans and then interact with the community on Wall posts.
Message boards are another hot area to get the help of employees. We map out the most active employees on relevant message boards and forums. Many of the forums are off the main corporate site.
These techniques are highly effective in companies with thousands of tens of thousands of employees. However, they can also work for smaller companies if the executive team gets behind the effort.
–
Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast
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.
Say what you will about Google Buzz (and plenty of people have), one thing is clear: it’s doing what any new technology aims to do. Be disruptive. The main question that people have been grappling with since its launch is whether or not this particular brand of disruption has necessarily been good.
From my vantage point, there are two areas that have seen the biggest disruption from Buzz. The first is our own personal identity. And I’m not talking about the privacy issues. Yes, these are big privacy concerns, and Google doesn’t deserve a pass, but they’ve already started to take steps to rectify the privacy situation. The deeper sociological implication that the privacy issue strikes at, though, is how we treat different segments of our online personality. Until now, email was always the most private. It existed in a separate realm than social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. The email address was the most direct, most serious, and most intimate way of interacting with someone online. Google’s integration of your contacts into chat and reader applications made sense because these communities were very private.
Buzz immediately broke down these walls; not just with privacy snafus, but by attempting to aggregate your online identity in a place that was linked to your email. Literally. Content from sites like Google Reader, Picasa, Flickr, Twitter, and Gchat can now appear in one aggregated stream. Which forces people to look at their email not just as an address, but as a full-on social network profile. In fact, when people rushed to change their privacy settings, it was the first time a lot of people really understood that such a thing as “Google Account settings” existed. It’s a somewhat understated and nonmaterial difference, but it is a tidal shift in our personal conceptions of our email and contacts.
This dovetails with the issues created from the second major area of disruption, the disruption of share communities. This happens on two levels. The first is that of the major social networks, which were already suffering from concerns as far as differentiation. Buzz now offers yet another avenue for real-time information updates, which should create a period of confusion for communities as they try to figure out where in the online social landscape this newcomer fits.
Which causes issues for the second level of share communities, which are our personal networks that we have built up over time. A flood of new, undifferentiated information threatens share community ecosystems by creating burnout or backlash not just against technology but individuals, as well.
In the end, though, these theoretical concerns might be overwhelmed by the potential for Buzz’s content generation. And this isn’t just conjecture: by the end of week one, Google pulled in over nine million posts and comments. At best, Buzz will find acceptance and a niche in terms of sharing and aggregation that will become a vital part of people’s Internet tendencies. At worst, it’ll be seen as a misstep, but will probably continue humming along despite the disappointment.
We’re looking to add strong PR folk to our team in San Francisco. Take a look at the job description and let us know if you’re a fit!
Page One PR is a Silicon Valley public relations and social media firm that specializes in enterprise technology. At Page One we’re corporate, but collaborative and laid-back. People at Page One come from all walks of life. We like that mix and we look for initiative, intelligence, humor, integrity, creativity, risk taking, fearlessness, management skills and a track record of success.
We are looking for a creative, clever, and highly motivated individual who makes the most of every opportunity and wants to make a big splash. We want someone who can get results both independently and as part of a larger team. Every day is different, but the position will mostly include:
Job Duties:
* Develop relationships with media, bloggers, industry analysts
* Craft and place stories in the press and blogosphere
* Write both punchy blogs and traditional press releases
* Manage Twitter accounts
* Research industry events and opportunities
Job Requirements:
* 1-3 years experience in marketing, public relations, advertising or related communications field;
* At least if 1 year of high tech PR agency experience preferred;
* Successful track record of producing strong results;
* Ability to think outside of the box;
* Takes initiative;
* Ability to work both independently and cross-functionally across multiple teams and job duties;
* Grasp complex technology;
* Exceptional organization, writing and verbal communication skills;
* Four-year degree from a top university.
Since Page One’s culture is all about great people doing great things, we reward our employees with exceptional pay, matching 401K and 20 days of paid time off.
* 20 days of PTO (even in your first year)
* 12 paid company holidays
* Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents
* Matching 401K (after 6 months)
* Long- and short-term disability insurance
* Life insurance
* Flexible spending account
This position is based in the San Francisco office, which is located in the financial district. If you are interested in the position, email your resume and a cover letter to p1job at pageonepr dot com. Please include details on your experience and explain how you would be a good addition to the team.
Learn more about us: http://www.pageonepr.com. Follow us on Twitter: @pageonepr and Facebook: /pageonepr.
Over the weekend, TechCrunch broke the story that Facebook had taken a user’s vanity URL and sold it to audio-entertainment solutions company Harman International. Facebook claimed the user, Harman Bajwa, was “violating Facebook’s policies” and his username didn’t have a clear connection to his identity. However, “Harman” as Harman Bajwa’s vanity URL seems perfectly fitting, and TechCrunch saw the revocation of facebook.com/Harman as all about making a sales deal. Harman International wanted the URL because of a campaign they’re working on for the Grammys, and initially tried to bribe Harman Bajwa citing a past gift of Coke Zero for Twitter handle twitter.com/avtr during promotion of the movie Avatar.
After the story broke I was talking with a friend about it and he was hardly surprised (unlike myself). He felt that users are willfully choosing to participate in Facebook’s network by opening an account, so terms of use are ultimately according to Facebook. Since Facebook created the option of a vanity URL in the first place, they can decide to take it away at any time.
However, I disagreed with his stance, noting that lack of respect for the individuals the site and company are founded on is a huge PR misstep and flawed business practice. Facebook’s success is because of its users. The popularity of the social networking site over time is a direct result of viral growth through users and the main catalyst for ad growth and thus ad revenues.
The URL has since been given back to Harman Bajwa with an apology from Facebook, but the incident made me want to research Facebook’s official policy regarding vanity URL’s. If you go to facebook.com/username, their stance covers their backs in all respects:
I’m not sure if their policy has always been this overarching, I’d be curious to know if it was the same prior to the Harman incident (I’m guessing it wasn’t).
What’s even more interesting is when I went to create a vanity URL for one of my clients this morning, Facebook lists “several things for you to remember” upon confirmation, stating “You can’t transfer ownership of a username to another party”. Isn’t that exactly what Facebook was trying to do? Transfer ownership from Harman Bajwa to Harman International? Maybe if Facebook started abiding by the rules they set for their own users, the company wouldn’t receive as much backlash as compared to recent months.
What do you think about this incident? Yes, Facebook technically has the right to revoke these usernames per their policy, but is it ethically sound when one’s business is fueled by its users? Would love to hear your comments below.
Page One PR is a Silicon Valley public relations and social media firm that caters to the B2B industry. We are currently looking to add an account manager to our Social Media Team in our San Francisco office.
We are looking for a brilliant, enthusiastic and highly motivated individual who wants an opportunity to impact companies’ business decisions with social media. The ideal candidate would be able to manage social media accounts (large and small), keep the accounts and grow them over time.
Job Requirements:
* 3-5 years experience in marketing, public relations, advertising or related communications field;
* Account management experience and strong track record of retaining accounts with outstanding results;
* Ability to successfully manage large tech accounts such as Cisco, SAP and VMware as well as smaller start-ups;
* Experience designing and implementing social media campaigns and a proficient understanding of social media techniques and strategy;
* Exceptional organization, writing and verbal communication skills;
* Ability to contribute individually, and lead, manage or participate in cross-functional teams;
* Ability to grow account retainer sizes;
* Four-year university degree.
At Page One we’re corporate, but collaborative and laid-back. People at Page One come from all walks of life. We like that mix and we look for initiative, intelligence, humor, integrity, creativity, risk taking, fearlessness, management skills and a track record of success.
Since Page One’s culture is all about great people doing great things, we reward our employees with exceptional pay, matching 401K and 20 days of paid time off from your first day on the job.
* 20 PTO days (even in your first year)
* 11 paid company holidays
* Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependants
* Matching 401K
* Long- and short-term disability insurance
* Life insurance
* Flexible spending account
The salary for this position is up to $70,000 annually, depending on experience.
If you are interested in a career as a Social Media Account Manager at Page One, email a resume and a cover letter outlining your account management and social media experience to socialmediajobs at pageonepr dot com. Take a look at our website, the social media services we offer and our clients – please outline your experience and explain how you would be a good addition to the team. Applicants without a cover letter will not be considered.
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.
Twitter announced a new feature today called Contributors. The new feature will allow multiple people to post Tweets on behalf of a company. Although corporate Twitter feeds like Bing are already using this with a caret plus initials (^CO), official support from Twitter will change the perception of a Twitter feed as a source of corporate communication.
There is an ongoing debate among social media professionals about whether a corporate Twitter feed needs a single voice, a single persona, ideally managed by a single person. In my opinion, the new contributors feature ends the debate. When the contributors feature comes out of beta, corporate Twitter feeds will move to having multiple people post information, similar to how a corporate blog has multiple posters, each with their own voice. Just as with blogs, there will be a need for individuals to have their own personal Twitter feed.
The Twitter contributors feature will be supported by the Twitter API, which will enable a wide range of commercial Twitter tools to offer even more management features for multiple people that are managing a single Twitter feed.
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.
“Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent,” said Bertrand Russell. And while his words are typically poured over by philosophers as opposed to the Technorati, his idea can be applied to pretty much every part of human history. We are an inherently skeptical population, it seems. Especially when it comes to technology.
Feature adoption is often met with an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude. But two new pieces of technology, one big and one small, from Google and Twitter respectively got me thinking recently about what it really takes to change people’s social media habits.
Twitter’s official retweet function has been met with a lot of fanfare, but hardly the kind Twitter wanted. Until now, “retweeting” was always an unofficial function, a meme perpetuated by users who needed a system with which to quote one another. Seeing this user behavior, Twitter took steps to codify retweeting by making it an actual feature. In doing so, however, they’ve inadvertently disturbed the flexibility and editability inherent to the unofficial function. People have protested on Twitter in two ways: by voicing their hatred for the new function, and by continuing to retweet the old-fashioned way.
Old-fashioned communication is what Google is trying to evolve, as well, but on a much more grandiose scale. Google Wave has been billed as the next evolution in online communication, a highly collaborative and expandable platform that will “bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.” And as with every new Google product, there’s been a scramble to procure beta invites. But from my personal experience, excitement quickly gives way to confusion. The first line of any wave is almost always something resembling “I’m in the wave,” quickly followed by “I don’t get it.”
So are the official retweet and Google Wave failures? Hardly (if history has taught us anything…). I was recently Gchatting with a friend about Google Wave. There were a lot of questions about why it exists, what it does, and whether or not we’d ever use it…the only conversations that really seem to be going on about Wave right now. Then she forwarded me her very first Gchat from a few days after the Gchat feature was launched:
My Friend:
testing…
i just saw the green light.
and this is the first time i’ve used this moderately silly feature.
Her Friend:
yeah it doesn’t seem like a winner to me, but i tend to accept google’s ingenuity unconditionally
Almost three years and literally thousands of chats later, her friend’s words ring true with a sort of prescience. And my friend’s conclusion about Wave? “[I] may have to continue to hold judgment on Wave.”
Such patience when it comes to technology is certainly a virtue, especially given the social media public’s tendency to rapidly warm up to new shiny toys. After Facebook implemented the newsfeed, there was a tremendous backlash (as every Facebook redesign has experienced since), but Mark Zuckerberg stood his ground. Now it’s a central feature. Looking back on this event, Zuckerberg summed up social media users’ skepticism-turned-adoption quite lucidly and succinctly: “A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”
That said, the only sure bet that can be made is that the final draft of Google Wave and Twitter’s official retweet will have to go through a number of revisions before people consider mass adoption. But human stubbornness works both ways. Google and Twitter will be just as determined to perfect these new features as people are reluctant to start using them. And if history’s shown us anything, it’s that time is on their side.
We write a lot here about the new ground Page One PR is forging with social media, but to run a well-rounded successful PR program, which means staying on top of editorial calendar, speaking and award opportunities, still takes a lot of shoe leather and sweat – or at least a really robust tickler file.
We also write here about the free tools that we use to make our jobs a little bit easier. Here’s a new one: ITMemos from ITDatabase. (Disclosure: ITDatabase is a client)
We’ve already waxed poetic about the benefits of ITDatabase’s resources for tech companies wanting to keep in the know about what reporters are covering. With ITMemos, newsletter recipients are provided links to new speaking opportunities, given the heads up on upcoming editorial calendar opportunities and share reminders of impending award deadlines. All in one place. And by the way, these opportunities are vetted prior, so you’re not receiving crap.
ITMemos is worth taking a look. It will save you time… and it’s free.
“GOOD – FAST – CHEAP: Pick Two” is the mantra for producers in the film industry. It’s applicable to most project-based endeavors and it’s an easy concept to grasp. If you have the money to spend on an experienced crew, equipment and other resources, you can complete your production quickly at the highest professional level of quality. Since almost all producers are concerned with budgets, sacrificing on expenses necessarily impacts speed, quality or both. You only get two of the three!
The rules are different today with online video. But many production houses trying to work in social media don’t seem to understand how the rules have changed and why that’s good for customers.
Given the low cost, high quality video imaging and editing technology available today, along with more varied distribution methods that re-define production quality, now it’s possible to achieve all three elements in video productions – especially if we substitute “effective” for “good.” Following below are some examples of where the smart social media marketer can make sacrifices to maximize the return of the three elements on any video production.
Social Media with Video Services vs. Production Company
First, we have to consider that Page One video services is not a traditional video production company – think of it as Social Media with Video Services. We are not equipped to handle large-scale productions requiring a pool of talent, set locations, crew and motion graphics or effects. And with online distribution, an expensive broadcast standard is not necessary. We could eventually expand into larger scale productions, but for now, let’s take a look at some examples of videos that are more modest in scale, yet remain creative and integrate well with social media to deploy your message.
Animation: Simple cut-out drawings animated by hand are popular and a low-cost way to explain complex technology ideas.
Cloud Computing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg
Music Video: A clever, fun concept well executed, doesn’t always need expensive, complex lighting or lots of production time, though a bit of preproduction went into the creation of the song.
The Real Linus Torvalds/Linux: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzqnA793unc
Collaboration, Preproduction and the Script
In previous blog posts, and in our recent newsletter announcing our video services, Craig Oda made some good points about the need to define roles and responsibilities, and the process of developing a clear script. I’d like to emphasize that collaboration among the client, account manger, and video producer is key to producing an effective, visual video that grabs a viewer’s attention. It’s the key to creating the best concepts at the lowest costs.
Hopefully, the examples above can help spark some creative ideas for your company. All of these programs offer engaging, cost-effective messaging for social media distribution. And with rigorous planning and pre-production, you can save time in both production and post-production, and achieve all three elements of the Project Triangle: Good, Fast, and Cheap.
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.
Susan Chang came into the conference room and handed me a list of 200 influential people on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. This was a list of routing and switching people. Tough assignment. Great list. Susan had been working at Page One less than a week.
Haley Hebert gave me a 19 page social media analysis report on her second day on the job. The report covered blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and forums for cloud computing infrastructure.
Their work was based on over a year of intensive social media monitoring, measurement of metrics and our experience with The Page One Process. The quick turnaround on their work shows how social media campaigns can be quickly scaled by adding new members and giving them responsibility for tasks with well-defined steps.
The foundation of each of our social media campaigns is the monitoring of activity and measurement of results. We use dozens of tools, both commercial and free tools. There is no single monitoring system that meets our needs. The combination of a replicable process, monitoring, and measurement allows a single campaign manager to divide work among a group of people and quickly scale a social media campaign, delivering rapid results at lower cost.
I feel really fortunate that Haley and Susan joined our social media team. We reviewed more than 400 applicants and chose the top two people. Haley left her position with a large communications firm in Boston to join our social media team in San Francisco. Susan had to leave a social media job with Turner Communications in Los Angeles. Silicon Valley, the area between San Francisco and San Jose, is attracting top communications talent from around the nation because it is the new center for the development of social media marketing techniques. All the web companies – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo! – and all the social media vendors are right in our area. And now, Silicon Valley is getting all the social media people.
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Craig Oda, managing partner and campaign launch enthusiast
“And, action!” The director’s hand goes down. The talent speaks. The story begins. In the midst of bright lights, the whir of camera motors, and the smell of coffee, a tale of a new product is brought to life.
At Page One PR we tell stories about products. Today, Lonn Johnston, the founder of Page One, and I were using video to tell our product story. In the coming weeks, we’ll use a newsletter, web page, Twitter, and Facebook to distribute and amplify our story.
Lonn and I are about six months into a journey to extend the reach of public relations techniques using videos that are tightly integrated with social media campaigns. This was our first experience with a real studio, one that had all the gritty, hip flair of the San Francisco art scene. It was also our first attempt at making a video of our own product.
We’ve learned that techniques for product production and PR are different, joined together mainly by the story and the messages our clients want to communicate. The world of video production has traditionally been more expensive than the social media world of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. Over the last six months, we’ve learned what it takes to merge the two worlds, taking the best elements of social media viral distribution and video production to create extremely effective marketing campaigns.
Video director and acting talent work together
Here are the top two lessons we’ve learned about video production:
1) You need a script. The script should follow a production movie format that your company customizes for its own style. Both the video production people and the marketing people need to understand the cues and direction of the script. Before writing the script, we prepare marketing guidelines that identify the target audience, goal of the video, and main messages that the campaign is trying to convey. The exact dialogue does not need to be in the script. We’ve tried making videos without scripts and with loose scripts. It is more efficient, and therefore cheaper to produce a video, if you create a script for your videos and enforce standard conventions.
2) Clarify roles and responsibilities. There are many roles that must be filled to create a video: video director, producer, audio manager, lighting manager, writer, set director, art department, acting talent, and many others. In order to reduce costs, we compress multiple roles into each person on the set. This works most efficiently when the roles and responsibilities are clear to each person. Efficiency on the set translates into lower video production costs and better marketing results per dollar.
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Craig Oda => http://twitter.com/codawork
Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast
Selling into the US market has always been the ultimate challenge for Japanese software companies. Make it here and you’re for real. It’s the only legitimate way to claim success. Succeeding only in Japan — ask Just Systems and their long-forgotten Ichitaro word processor — is not enough.
But the US market is big and geographically diverse, and linguistic and cultural barriers make it expensive and time-consuming. What can a Japanese software startup do?
Leverage social media.
The landscape is constantly changing, but as of mid 2009, there are three main services you should be using: Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Twitter
In Japan, Twitter is known as the “mumbling blog (つぶやきブログ)” which is an unfortunate translation. Thinking of Twitter as unimportant things you’d say under your breath is misleading. In the US, because it is a fast, quick way to get news, hints and links — in real-time — it is quickly overtaking blogging as a preferred way to communicate with users and the media. It grew 3712% in April 2009, and it has become a major source of news and information for millions of users.
Twitter has several major advantages for Japanese companies:
1. It’s short. The 140 character limit helps non-native English speakers.
2. It’s lightweight. You are not allowed to write a full blog post. Just a thought, a link, or a quick answer. This makes Twitter easy to continue. Corporate blogs always end up being too much work.
3. The US media reads it. Twitter has two important audiences: The US media and your potential users. Even just one would be good enough.
Case Study: Japanese software company Lunascape
Lunascape, an unknown commodity in the US through the end of 2008, was developing a “triple rendering engine” web browser. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome have virtually unassailable market share. However, Page One PR helped Lunascape announce their alpha version, which garnered coverage in Tier 1 technology blogs like TechCrunch, Slashdot, Wired and many others. Traffic spiked 30,000%. (No joke.) We then set up the Lunascape Twitter account. Lunascape was able to attract over 150 followers, many of whom regularly talk up Lunascape, ask support questions, and recommend Lunascape to others. As an important bonus, Lunascape is able to ask questions directly to its main users this way as well. Even more valuable, several important bloggers and journalists now follow Lunascape and have established very direct channels of communication with the company. This has helped keep Lunascape web traffic elevated long after the initial “big bang” press release.
Facebook
Facebook is the way to connect into a growing audience with a mix of static corporate information and live updates. It is the largest social networking site, growing 700% over the past year. It has a bigger and more professional audience than MySpace. Automatically bringing your Twitter updates to Facebook requires no extra effort to keep your Facebook page up-to-date and interesting.
YouTube
Owned by Google, YouTube is the biggest video site in the US by far. For explaining complicated software to the media, there is nothing better than a short, clear video. Don’t think HD and clear lighting. No, it’s “down and dirty,” just screenshots of the most interesting functionality. Videos like this can explain complicated software clearly and catch viewers’ attention.
Will all of these social media sites be active and popular in a year or two? Probably not. The landscape is changing quickly. But why wait? You can gain access to US media and potential customers very quickly and easily. Social media can be an important stepping stone to making it in the US.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and blogs present resource problems for corporations that want to use these channels as marketing tools. Managing multiple channels that lack unification requires more time, resources and specialization than most companies can afford internally. Firms like Page One PR have benefited from this problem because we specialize in the unification and management of social media marketing programs.
At the same time, we’ve learned that proprietary corporate portals that combine video, forums, reviews and blogs can serve as an alternative to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. A corporate portal is more integrated and easier to navigate than individual social media sites. Social media channels are wide and shallow, but the corporate portal is narrow and deep. For customers who want depth of information, the corporate portal may be the better answer.
A good example of a corporate portal is the SAP Community Network (SCN)*, an online community that doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter. SCN is based on proprietary technology developed at SAP. The community consists of more than 1.7 million people, 9,000 companies, 60,000 wikis, and 3.5 million forum posts. The corporate portal offers an efficient way to get product-specific information that can be searched and managed from a central location. However, even a corporate portal that is enormously successful such as the SCN portal can’t contain all discussions. Online discussions will bleed over to other channels such as Twitter, Facebook or whatever tool may be hot at the moment.
While there are excellent examples of corporate portals — just as there are excellent examples of social media campaigns — even companies at the cutting edge of marketing are only just beginning to integrate their efforts at managing peer-generated content that originates in the ‘wild’ with content in their portal. Today there is a great opportunity for smart marketers to leverage the strengths of both the corporate portal and social media channels by integrating a corporate web site with popular tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This will mark the dawn of Social Media 2.0.
I see this next stage of social media marketing consisting of the following elements:
* There is a central hub for online communication where customers can get updates. The infrastructure for the central hub could be a simple tool like Twitter, or it could be a more complex corporate portal.
* Careful deployment of a central hub helps corporations streamline the official communications spokes linked to the hub. It’s much easier to eliminate redundant channels, clearly define goals, and manage messages. Many corporations are running too many similar corporate Twitter channels and Facebook groups that focus on the same products. Eliminate the redundancy.
* A much larger network of community-generated content is freely created around the “official” hub and spokes.
* Online conversations are monitored at all levels – hub, spokes, and community networks.
Social media, with content generated by peers, is now an important part of our daily communication, not just for technology hobbyists or businesses, but also for everyday people making decisions about how to spend their time or money. We are at the cusp of a moment of great change in how real people find and assess the value of information. I look forward to seeing how companies merge the great content and infrastructure they have on their corporate web sites with the amazing opportunities presented by vast amounts of unfiltered content produced on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
*Disclosure: SAP is a Page One social media client.
So just how big is the World Wide Web 2.0? 13 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. 900,000 blog posts are written per day, which are read by 77% of the active Internet users. Facebook has a population of over 250 million people, making it the fourth largest country in the world. There are almost 4 billion Tweets to date (that’s 560 billion characters or so…and counting). These numbers are sure to have shot up even higher by the time you get to the end of this paragraph.
Whether you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid or gone off the grid, there’s no denying that there are huge, new forces changing the way that we consume and transmit information and there’s a whole new set of tools whose potential we’re only just starting to understand. This is social media. This is Page One PR.
We are a Silicon Valley public relations firm that caters to the B2B industry and we are currently looking to add consultants to our Social Media Team in the San Francisco office.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:
Page One is looking for brilliant, enthusiastic and highly motivated individuals who want an opportunity to impact real companies’ business decisions with social media.
Social media is constantly evolving, so we don’t expect you to be a “social media guru”. No previous PR or social media experience is necessary, but if you’ve got some, we won’t complain. What we’re looking for are people who understand what social media is and how it can be used for the good of our clients and their customers alike. If you can see yourself executing strategic PR projects and developing never-done-before social media campaigns, you could be who we are looking for.
WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR:
Ask yourself if you like who we are. It’s important.
We are 100% about our people: over-achievers who get the job done better than anyone else and still have fun doing it.
As a new Consultant/Page Wonder, you’ll learn from the best: our Sr. PR people have developed social media strategies for Cisco, reported for the Los Angles Times, managed social media campaigns for SAP, placed cover stories in BusinessWeek, taught graduate journalism at UC Berkeley and even created the first ISP in Japan.
We’re corporate, but collaborative and laid-back. People at Page One come from all walks of life. We like that mix and we look for initiative, intelligence, humor, integrity, creativity, risk taking, fearlessness, writing skills and a track record of success.
When it comes to work/life balance, we don’t just work. We are marathoners, salsa dancers, music enthusiasts, avid travelers and more. Page One gives us the time to do what we love, and even incorporate those interests into the work we do.
WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING:
We don’t look for gutsy people just to take up space. There’s no paint-by-numbers or auto-pilot. By-the-book at Page One means going off-script. Social media is constantly evolving, so our processes have to constantly evolve with it. That’s where you come in.
Page One’s Social Media Consultants help design social media strategy and execute innovative campaigns for some of the most well known technology brands in the Valley. Daily activities could include social media monitoring and analysis, video production, blog writing, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn management, and social media strategy development for our clients. Every Page Wonder actively engages in developing clients’ PR, marketing and brand management strategies. As a PR agency we specialize in company launches, product launches, media relations, messaging and positioning, analyst relations and (of course) social media.
WHAT YOU’LL BE GETTING:
Benefits? Want 20 days off? OK.
Since Page One’s culture is all about great people doing great things, we reward our employees with exceptional pay, matching 401K and 20 days of paid time off from your first day on the job.
• 20 PTO days (even in your first year)
• 11 paid company holidays
• Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependants
• Matching 401K
• Long- and short-term disability insurance
• Life insurance
• Flexible spending account
If you are interested in a career as a Social Media Consultant at Page One, email a resume and a note telling us about yourself to Shelly Milam at socialmediajobs@pageonepr.com.
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!
The Page One video service has really started to ramp up, and one of the things that we’re learning is how often people forget that video is an audiovisual medium.We get so wrapped up in planning for the video shoots themselves that we often forget to give ourselves enough time or energy to find the right soundtrack to accompany the visual elements.Given the complications of licensing from major music labels, we have a need for an easy, but still stimulating, solution when it comes to browsing song libraries and deciding upon music.
There’s no shortage of stories about resistance from the Music Industry™ to change.Since Metallica and the RIAA successfully killed Napster in 2001, there’s effectively been a war on the new age of readily available digital music.And with the rise of streaming video technology, sites like YouTube have become the latest battleground.Videos using copyrighted material are being systematically muted or removed.We’ve even noticed this with some of our earlier video work.Most recently, ASCAP won a licensing suit against Google to the tune of $1.6 million, and has started sending collection letters to website owners for embedding YouTube videos without properly licensed songs.
The problem with taking aim at your customers is that you end up shooting yourself in the foot.Especially when what you’re fighting against are the big forces of the modern Web: collaboration, interactivity, and social media. Backlash against giants such as Warner Music is becoming much more visible as users continue to fight for their right to usable, remixable content.
These responses are intended to protect copyright holders and official videos.But the term “music video” no longer applies to MTV-quality productions. Video art collages, karaoke jams, re-enactments, interpretive dance routines, and home videos by the artists themselves give the listener-viewer access to the songs they’re looking for with a feast of visual accompaniment.
The real take away here is that it is in the copyright holder’s best interest to allow greater use of their content.Something the major music industry stakeholders are refusing to acknowledge.
Creative Commons, Social Media, and Sharing
So what’s to be done?Enter Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation bringing the rules of copyright into the 21st century.How?By providing new types of licenses “to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.”This model provides more robust possibilities for licensing to create new opportunity for creative work.It also gives independent artists the ability to use the power of social media to create new modes of distribution.Now songs can be released directly to the public through Twitter, MySpace pages, blogs, and artist websites.All you have to do is find it.
There are some new online tools to simplify this search process.Aggregators like Hype Machine’s Twitter Music Chart are now emerging to unify the independent music mediasphere and assist in the search for the Next Big Thing™.The Free Music Archive, directed by legendary freeform radio station WFMU, goes a step further.Their highly interactive, highly legal audio library offers free music downloads through openly licensed content “inspired by Creative Commons and the open source software movement.”
Cure for the Common Video
By working with these tools, we’ve found that the end result is an increasingly accessible independent music industry with a wealth of possibility for collaboration. We can now engage directly with independent artists and labels to find new music to soundtrack our videos.It increases production values for us, provides bands with promotion, and gives both parties access to a larger audience. Which means more opportunities for cross-promotional outreach and interaction through social media channels.
It’s a win for everyone involved: our clients, the bands we like, and the new concept of digital media rights in a social media world.Be on the lookout for interesting new sounds paired up with interesting new corporate videos in the future.Look out for a short stop-motion project we’ll be doing in the coming weeks to really show our video service’s potential, using the music of Lucky Dragons or Cornelius, or maybe both.Stay tuned.
Social media programs are increasingly being rolled out with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and PR campaigns. Social media and SEM share many similarities, including broad online reach and quantifiable metrics that can be tracked with web-based tools. To get a better understanding of what SEM experts think of social media, I sat down with Ralph Hibbs, principal at Red Apple Marketing, an online lead generation company based in San Francisco.
Ralph Hibbs – A smiling face in the search engine marketing space
Craig: What is Red Apple Marketing?
Ralph: Red Apple Marketing provides online lead generation using Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and lead nurturing services for B2B technology companies. Through closed loop lead tracking we tune our programs towards sales-ready leads, measuring our success on client revenue generated.
Craig: Page One PR and Red Apple Marketing work together to support marketing for a number of clients. Can you explain how PR and Social Media can fit together with PPC management, SEO and web site optimization to deliver better marketing AND sales results?
Ralph: There are several places where we collaborate together to help our mutual clients.
* Messaging—PR professionals know the messaging used by media influencers and SEM professionals know the messages which are used by searchers (e.g. prospects.) By bringing these two data sets together, we successfully help our clients improve and refine their messaging to attract more and more qualified sales leads.
* Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — Successful SEO requires the constant production of new web content for use in growing text links to client websites. The PR/Social media team creates ideal keyword-using content all across the web. The SEO team provides text link guidance which supports on-website SEO efforts.
* Marketing Metrics—We deploy comprehensive tracking systems on client websites and sales force automation systems which trace all web leads back to their original source—including media placements and social media sites. These systems provide nice metrics for awareness and sales leads generated by the PR and Social Media activities.
Craig: What is the main benefit of Red Apple Marketing Services?
Ralph: Steady flow of profitable, sales-ready leads
Craig: Why aren’t companies doing this with internal staff?
Ralph: Some are, but usually with limited success. When we take over an in-house SEM program we typically grow results by 3X to 5X with the same program budget. Successful SEM requires expertise, experience and focus, which is very difficult for in-house marketing personnel to obtain—given all the other projects on their plate.
Craig: Do you have any thoughts on the effectiveness of a PPC campaign compared to a banner advertising campaign?
Ralph: Generally we see PPC campaigns be the more effective for lead generation, because they capture prospects when they are actively seeking a solution. Therefore, we recommend clients start with PPC programs; then, explore banner advertising as their budgets grow. The most important requirement is a comprehensive measurement system, so they can accurately determine relative effectiveness.
Craig: What is the biggest change in lead generation that you’ve seen in the last three years?
Ralph: The growing importance of measuring lead generation effectiveness based on sales results. It is no longer enough to just get leads—they need to convert into business. All programs need to be measured so budgets can be effectively allocated based on results.
Craig: Where do you think lead generation is headed?
Ralph: To predict the future, it helps to review what’s happened in online lead generation. It started with generating impressions 10 years ago, then clicks and page views six years ago, and now leads are the focus for most companies. Forward-thinking companies are moving towards driving profitable leads, tracking specific search lead details all the way through to the sales automation systems. Looking two to three years into the future, we see the integration of search engine marketing (SEM) and nurturing as a logical next step for B2B companies. Companies with longer sales cycles will need to cost-effectively educate and inform a prospect up to the point they are ready for a sale. This level of integration will dramatically improve lead generation efficiency and enable companies to gain a higher return from their lead generation dollars.
Craig: Do you have any predictions about social media?
Ralph: We see social media becoming a more important component of a prospect’s learning and buying process, especially with younger professionals. As more and more B2B buyers use this technology, we believe the search engine companies will find ways to incorporate it more deeply just as blogging searches are more visible on Google and Bling. We already have clients who get leads from social media channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Appropriate tracking mechanisms are a critically important part of any lead source to determine if the effort is producing the bottom line results.
Ralph’s view of where SEM fits into the bigger marketing picture
The “micronews” approach to PR can significantly boost results for clients outside of traditional media pitching, especially when it comes to driving web traffic. This strategy can really help clients during dry spells of hard news.
What is the “micronews” approach to PR? It’s a simple three-step process: content creation, channel communication, measurement.
1) Content Creation
Thanks to blogs, everyone has the potential to be a media outlet. However, it takes more than having a blog to make a significant impact on traffic. You need interesting, consistent content that a targeted group of readers would likely pass on to others. News needs to be viral. Within this “micronews” approach,” blogs should not be long – around 400 words. The key is to be interesting. I suggest setting up periodic recorded interviews (10-15 minutes) with the client’s internal thought leaders to surface points of interest. The likelihood is they have interesting content nuggets and they don’t realize it. The PR practitioner should have an ear for what could lead to an active online discussion. Love them or hate them, lists almost always work well (example: “6 Steps To Refactoring Rails”). Insights on hi-level trends can be interesting (example: “To ESB or not to ESB”). Controversy is always good for stirring up interest (example: “3 Reasons Why Encryption is Overrated”).
Two more quick points to consider on content creation. First, be consistent – shoot for one blog per week minimum. Second, plan ahead. Create an internal editorial calendar; share it via Google docs or a wiki. Solicit suggestions. Be disciplined and stick to the schedule.
2) Channel Communication
When the blog goes live, create a simple abstract (catchy headline and brief synopsis) that you can circulate via social media sites such as LinkedIn, Google Groups and DZone. Create and use a bit.ly address (URL shortener) that links back to the blog in your promotion (after free registration, one can monitor bit.lys).
Here’s an example:
“Headline: 6 Steps To Refactoring Rails
Text: Since December, Rails has undergone a fairly significant internal refactoring in a number of areas. Here’s the process for diving into a new area of the codebase and emerging some time later with a much improved area that does basically the same thing — Yehuda Katz blogs about a 6 step approach to refactoring Rails. http://bit.ly/116BST”
I’ve found that LinkedIn Groups are a great way to spread the word about interesting blog posts. Warning – provide useful information. If you spam or overtly pimp your products or services, you will quickly lose any credibility among the groups and may even be banned by the moderator and host. LinkedIn allows an individual to be involved in up to 50 groups at one time. These groups can have thousands of members (for example, the Information Security Community has more than 39,000 members). Treat the community right by providing truly useful, interesting information and it can be beneficial to one’s thought leadership position and prove an excellent driver of web traffic. Google Groups is another great forum to spread micronews.
Twitter is another communication channel to spread micronews – though you are limited to 140 characters. Thus, it’s all about the headline. If possible, make the “tweet” short enough so it can be re-tweeted easily without going over 140 characters. Again, the headline needs to be interesting enough to the audience you are targeting so that they click on the bit.ly link and/or pass it on to their friends, colleagues and go viral.
One albatross that has hung around the neck of PR for some is that PR results can’t be measured well or easily. The micronews approach IS measurable. For example, bit.ly can be a great tool for capturing reach (how many people clicked to your content). But your best friend is Google Analytics. At the very least, it will show you whether a particular post or campaign or outreach was successful or not. For a well-executed micronews approach, it provides proof of success. Below is an example of a client’s Google Analytics graph (specific metrics are blocked out) along with notes explaining traffic spikes …
➢ June 1-2 spike: “Before You Jump Into Cloud Storage, Answer These 5 Questions…” blog post (6/1/09 issue)
➢ June 10-11 spike: “3 Reasons Why Encryption is Overrated” blog post (6/10/09 issue)
➢ June 23-26 spike: “Response Part 1: Future Processing Power” blog post (6/23/09 issue) and “Response Part 2: Complexities of Key Management” blog post (6/24/09 issue)
The Caveat – Content Still Matters (a lot)
Though the micronews approach provides straightforward marching orders to creating, distributing, and measuring content, it all really falls apart if the content is bad. Remember, create content that would be so interesting to the audience you are targeting that they would pass it on to their colleagues and friends. Take off your rose colored glasses. Marketing brochure speak about how great your product or services will not only fail – it could very well hurt your brand.
New staff for the Silicon Valley social media team – LiPo Ching (left) and Evan Hanlon (right)
The press release, traditional tool of public relations professionals, is fighting valiantly to stay relevant in a new communications world filled with Twitter, blogs, and YouTube. Although I have many fond memories of the press releases I’ve written and telephone pitches I’ve made, I hold no loyalty to these aging warhorses of PR.
I work in the PR world of Silicon Valley, a world filled with video. Product and company information is moving online. For many technology-savvy people in the Valley, the 2 minute video is more interesting than the 2 page press release. Video will not replace the press release. In most cases, it will increase the effectiveness of press releases and blogs. I’m betting on video, the short product screencast video on YouTube, the vision video head shots of the CEO, and the customer testimonial video. I’m betting that video + press release + blog + Twitter = much greater reach and visibility.
Lonn Johnston, the founder of Page One PR, and I have created a new video services group headed by LiPo Ching, an award-winning videographer from the San Jose Mercury News. We’ve also hired Evan Hanlon, a New York brand man out of Harvard with a background in film documentaries and the independent music scene.
Evan and LiPo are organizing our video services now. In a few months we’ll launch an expanded range of services with lots of example videos. I anticipate that our future video services will be fresh and exciting. To help people understand where our video services are headed, I’ll explain how we’ve integrated video into our PR programs in the past.
Executive Vision Video – Two executives talking about the product, technology or company. This video is traditionally used for a company or product launch. Both major and minor product updates can benefit from this video. The typical video is generally 2-3 minutes long. The video should be finished two weeks prior to the launch date. We generally put the video on a private URL at a site like Viddler and then offer the private URL to media under embargo.
Customer Testimonial Video – This is a short video of a customer talking about the value of the product. The video can be used to augment a customer quote in a product press release. The link can be placed into the release for people that want additional information. It can also be offered up to reporters to help them evaluate if they want to interview the customer for a story. If the video is not used as part of a major or minor version product launch, it should be used as part of another promotional campaign such as a direct email campaign. This type of video will not go viral and needs to be used as a component of a larger PR or marketing campaign.
Screencasts – Videos of a software product taken using Camtasia or Screenflow. The videos function like a short demo of the product without having to install the product to test or sit through a live demonstration. When used as part of a product launch, the video can gain viral distribution. It’s important to focus PR efforts on getting the video embedded in as many blogs and articles as possible.
There are many variations of these videos. For example, the executive vision video can be adapted into a white board video that makes use of diagrams and text written on a white board. The executive can also be speaking over stock video footage that can be cheaply licensed from video libraries. The vision video and the screencast format can be combined, moving between people talking and shots of the product. Animation and stop-motion video techniques can also be used to create funny or more visually appealing effects.
Although we could have worked with an outside video development firm instead of developing in-house production capability, we decided to treat video like another channel to get messages out to the target audience. Since we write our own press releases, we decided to create our own videos. Just as advertising firms expanded from newspapers and magazines to television, we believe that many PR firms will expand into video production.
The press release and the product video are both alive and well. They’re not going away.
You’ve planned.Storyboarded.Worked with company spokespeople on messaging.Identified goals.Spent three hours filming and 24 hours editing.And now you have a concise video masterpiece of corporate vision.What’s next?
Surprise!The success of a video often depends on the promotional campaign that a superstar PR team creates around it even more than the original content.However, part of a strong promotional campaign is identifying, with your client, the goals of the video and then finding the right site on which to host a video to help achieve those goals.Where you host the video matters.Sometimes a lot.
There are a variety of hosting sites on the Web nowadays, but YouTube, Viddler and Vimeo have emerged as three of the best.More a bit later on why they make my top three list.(Readers, feel free to disagree with me or suggest others in the comments.)
First, all three offer similar basic services and offerings (public and private viewing options, statistics about how the video is faring on the site, etc.) and most agree that choosing one comes down to what you hope to achieve with your video.
Every company has different specific hopes for a video, but there are a few broad goals that we PR folks always aim for:
-Reach a wide audience.Even if the video is targeted at a specific group of people you still want access to the highest contingent of that group.
-Present that audience with a quality viewing experience (i.e. smooth playing, clear visuals and sound, etc.).No one wants to watch a choppy video.
-Have an easy back-end experience.Hard-working, time-crunched PR reps don’t want to deal with a lengthy, complex or buggy upload process.
With that in mind…
Until recently, I used to hear people say “If you want to tell the world, use YouTube.If you want to show the world, use Vimeo.”Early on, YouTube was known for an extremely large and active user community but also for shortcomings in video quality.Fuzzy images, choppy sound and other performance snags were common.
Vimeo differentiated itself with higher quality viewer experience by becoming the first site to enable HD video sharing.However, uploading videos to the site – a slow process – made reaping the benefits inefficient.
Viddler, when it launched, was knocking socks off – and being praised favorably over YouTube — with its clean UI, ease of use, speedy uploading and easy browsing.But it lacked (and still does) the enormous community of YouTube.
Over the past few years, and especially as more and more hosting sites cropped up, it seemed that compromise was the name of the game.You could have a wide audience, a quality viewing experience or a smooth back-end process, but not all three.
However, YouTube changed all that – and in my opinion justified its position as the number one video hosting site — by enabling HD video sharing last year.Add to this jump in quality the fine-tuning they have done on the uploading side and the unparalleled user base, and YouTube became my one-stop shop for meeting almost all client PR goals.
The important thing to remember, though, is that the success of a video depends on the time and energy taken to put it together, and the traction of a video depends more on the PR campaign than on where the video is housed.You can’t go wrong with any of the three sites discussed above, but having access to YouTube’s vast potential audience – and recognizable brand name — at your fingertips is nothing but an asset.
I’m curious, though.What do you all think?Anyone have great (or terrible) experiences with these sites you care to share?
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.
More and more headhunters and companies are tapping social media channels to recruit jobseekers. Especially in a recession, companies know their ultimate success depends on the quality of human capital they can reel into their organization. Leveraging social media plays an increasingly key role in making sure your company finds its widest array of candidate choices.
In recent recruiting cycles, Page One got overwhelming positive responses to an open position at the firm when we ran a 7-week recruitment campaign FOR FREE. Here are our top five tips on how to find the best of the best on a budget of zero.
1. Start with the usual suspects.
Candidates have been given the secrets to pass the social media recruitment test. Since recruiters tend to check an applicant’s personal blog, Facebook profile, Twitter feed, LinkedIn recommendations, Flickr portfolio, SlideShare presentations or even YouTube resume, establish the same transparency for your company with these tools. Creating your firm’s online character attracts the best pool of applicants and indicates to potentials how they stack up to your ideals, culture and caliber.
To keep costs down, companies should start by posting their own creative job description on a company site or blog and then use email, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to pass around the URL. Nine times out of 10, the best candidates are already in your employees’ networks.
2. Avoid CraigsList, Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs and other major database sites for one of two reasons.
If you’re looking to fill a professional position these sites do not filter resumes enough to make the search worth the time. “Employers” on these sites are often temp or placement agencies or even spammers — not actual employers — and good applicants know this. As a real employer, know that talent is available in excess, but your ideal applicants generally try to target their job search by looking at sites catered to their specific industry and skill set. They’re not spending much time on the large database sites.
Second, the cost of posting jobs on these sites can grow very quickly based on the number of people you’re looking to hire. If you’re a small firm, there’s no reason to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to recruit a few people. If you’re a large organization, your own infrastructure is more suitable for recruiting internally on your own site. Google does this especially well.
3. Recognize that paying for recruitment services is almost always a poor decision.
In recruitment, your fixed costs of recruiter salary is a given, so your end goal should be to eliminate all other variable costs like job posting fees. Again, big sites are not the way to go.
CareerBuilder starts at $419 to post for one month for one job position. A bevy of emails and socially networked messages might not get you as many responses in volume, but rest assured candidates who do respond will on average be more qualified, know more about your specific company and industry, and will possess more genuine interest in being an asset to your firm. In this game Quality: 1, Quantity: 0.
The exception to this rule is niche recruitment. From healthcare to tech, smaller job sites are generally cheaper and viewed by a more industry-savvy audience, so bets are if you’re going open the purse strings, smaller sites are a smarter move in your recruitment strategy. Mashable, for instance, offers a gamut of social media positions. For recruiters using Mashable, the $50 price tag is justified by the hours your HR manager won’t have to spend combing through unqualified candidates who‘ve been spamming their resumes around.
Back in 2005, Doostang was created by Mareza Larizadeh as an online career advancement website that connects elite professionals with top jobs. The platform is designed like a social network, which makes leveraging connections easier, but the biggest pull for recruiters is that Doostang is free. We’re talking no fees to post jobs. And since Doostang was started with affiliations to Stanford, Harvard and MIT, many of the applicants on the site come from top-notch university networks.
Just this week, Larizadeh told me their level of “executive recruitment pushes the company out ahead of its competitors.” By my calculations, it’s a winner when it comes to keeping recruitment expenses to a minimum.
SnapTalent is a recruitment platform that uses social media to profile and match employers to potential hires. I give them five stars for creating an interface that comprehensively (and easily) profiles companies all for the low price of $0. Jamie Quint, SnapTalent COO, spoke to me about the company’s vision: “We let companies build rich media recruitment pages that tell the full story of their company in a way the ‘connected’ generation understands.”
With the SnapTalent interface, posting information about your company, your employees, your corporate blog and your YouTube video of the office Christmas party happens all in one place. This approach gives candidates the best sense of who your company is and who might fit in with you. Since its start in late 2007, SnapTalent has adopted a tiered pricing plan (like LinkedIn) that’s based on the number of successful contacts it makes for you, but even if you don’t purchase resumes, you still get all the same exposure for a price that can’t be beat.
If you have some great tips and tools to suggest that worked in your hiring, send me a note or comment below!
Do you know Hadoop? You know, the open source project named for a child’s stuffed elephant that is used to store and process large volumes of data? Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! sure do – they all use it. So, when Accel Partners funded startup Cloudera needed to make a make a splash for their commercial offering of Hadoop/MapReduce software and services, what did they do?
They turned to Page One PR and reached 1.5 million people within 24 hours of launch, pushing their website traffic up by more than 800 percent.In addition to a feature story in the print edition of the New York Times, Page One PR also secured 4,500 blog placements, including GigaOm, TechCrunch and the New York Times Bits blog.Google search keyword results on “Cloudera” jumped from 9,000 to 23,000 on launch day.
Big data had never been so cool. It was the talk of the town… and Twittersphere. The huge hype resulted from Page One PR’s integrated plan that meshed PR, marketing, and social media.
Twitter alone pushed the news to more than 250,000 people, whose viral impact is known to spread like wildfire. So when people such as Tim O’Reilly (with 100,000+ followers), Robert Scoble (90,000+ followers), James Governor (6,000 followers) from Redmonk, John Battelle (16,000 followers) and Matt Asay (2,600 followers) from CNET tweeted the news, it really took off.
Page One also used YouTube and Viddler videos to quickly give reporters an overview of the product and people prior to the launch. The first video depicted the CEO and founder explaining the technology and product vision. This video has been viewed more than 5,600 times to date. The second video demoed the product and highlighted key features. The videos were also used for viral distribution in Twitter, direct email, and blogs.
The messages and positioning statements that Page One built helped shape two traditional press releases, one focused on the company funding by Accel Partners, and the other focused on the general availability of the product.The messaging was also used to create the script for the video and served as the roadmap for video direction.
To complement the messages, the founder wrote a blog post highlighting the technical features of the product. He took a deeper dive on components of the release.
The entire process – from initial plans through last interview – was carefully crafted and organized. Developing and managing communications messages and a coordinated media effort truly proved to be the key to generating buzz.
A huge part of publicity is staying on top of new technologies for research, analytics and traffic measurement. You really need to have an appetite for discovering new tools, because there is a definite “first mover” advantage. One new tool that Page One has been evaluating recently — ITDatabase (www.itdatabase.com) — was actually created by a former Page One employee, Travis Van.
We’ve always been aware that media directories like Cision are missing a ton of important tech authors – and that it’s really hard to find even the ones that are in their database, because they don’t let you search against their coverage. But exactly how many tech journalists is Cision missing? I did a simple search on Cision versus ITDatabase, and the discrepancy was incredible.
Take a look at how many authors Cision retrieved for the query “virtualization” … 23.
Now ITDatabase – which focuses specifically on tech authors … >900.
Van tells us this gap between ITDatabase’s coverage and Cision is also true for ITDatabase versus Vocus. We don’t use Vocus at Page One PR, so I have no way to qualify that. It would be useful if another ITDatabase trial-taker who is also using Vocus would do a similar comparison. We’re still giving ITDatabase a thorough evaluation, but the early indications are that this is a serious media research tool for tech marketing and PR. Right now Cision is just feeling like a really expensive contact database, and nothing more. I have to wonder how Cision and Vocus are going to stay relevant to the tech industry when more people become aware of ITDatabase.
ITDatabase’s biggest challenge is probably just getting more tech industry marketing and PR people to try it. When you do your first tech keyword query on ITDatabase, it’s really eye-opening how much easier identifying the relevant journalists and tracking them can be with a well- designed research tool.
First, Twitter erupted on the social media scene. Then came the flurry of application developers, in a very iPhone-esque way, extending and piggybacking on top of the Twitter platform. Now there are Twitter applications for pretty much everything.
Working in a social media-intensive field, I’m always on the hunt for applications and tools that help me do my job better. Like many of you out there, I’m on Twitter all day, everyday. At Page One, we place a heavy emphasis on social media metrics and results so I started researching and reviewing Twitter search tools. I wanted to find a few applications that would make my life easier and report better results to our clients.
I first had to think about my top Twitter priorities and the kind of things we monitor, report and deliver to our clients. For me, my work on Twitter varies quite a bit depending on the client. Daily activities include event and contest promotion on @CiscoGeeks, monitoring and answering company or product-related questions on @Jaspersoft and other tasks. What am I looking for in a Twitter search tool? I want:
• A real-time, comprehensive stream of results;
• A method to target the right audience;
• Insights into trends, sentiment, tone;
• URL-tracking;
• Twitter analytics and metrics on specified words/terms;
What did I find? An overwhelming number of Twitter tools. Five stood out for what I needed to do. For PR or Marketing professionals, these five tools can help you pinpoint the things you search Twitter for on a daily, or even hourly, basis.
1. Monitter
At first glance this tool looks very similar to the search features on Tweetdeck. In fact, Alex Holt, the man behind Monitter, said he originally intended to “mimick Tweetdeck,” but this tool does so much more and boasts a very sleek UI. Designed to quickly and easily monitor responses to product launches, companies, campaigns, or whatever it may be, Monitter allows you to search up to three terms and it automatically refreshes with real-time results. The real kicker, which makes the life of a PR/marketing professional SO much easier, is that you can RT content or @reply to tweets instantaneously, from any Twitter feed, without logging in and out of accounts on Twitter’s site. Life changing, right? Do you “man” a client’s Twitter feed on the day of a big product launch? With Monitter, you can address comments, questions and concerns directly through their application, saving you a lot of time and preventing that “oops did I just tweet something meant for my personal feed on a client feed?!” moment.
2. Twellow
The self-proclaimed “Twitter yellow pages,” is the easiest way to search Twitter profiles. Twellow will help you target the right audience for your client Twitter feed or social media campaign. This tool has a laundry list of features and bottom-line, this should be your “go-to” site for searching and reaching your target audience.
3. Twitter StreamGraph by Neoformix
Creator Jeff Clark was too modest when he told me “he doesn’t expect the tool itself to be a commercial success.” Twitter StreamGraphs give users beautiful images of data visualization and I see some real value for marketers. A StreamGraph shows the latest 1,000 tweets that contain a specified search term. Within the image, you can see peaks in chatter, which are segmented by different word associations. You can also scan the actual tweets that mentioned the search term plus each associated word. What a great way to monitor sentiment and tone, track terms most commonly associated with your brand, and how this changes over time. Twitter StreamGraphs are ideal for monitoring promotion around product launches and events — and to report stellar results back to clients in one beautiful image.
4. Scoopler Scoopler provides real-time search results for terms in Twitter as well as Delicious, Digg, Flickr and Identica. Are you scraping at the bottom of the barrel for Twitter content? This is an easy way to search content across multiple social media channels and see live results. Scoopler goes one step further; it also shows you the most popular links, videos, and/or images for your search term, so you can pick up the hottest content as it’s posted. I chatted with co-founders AJ Asver and Dilan Jayawardane about this feature and they gave a great example about seeing a video of the Hubble mission shuttle launch, pretty much as soon as it happened. Are you multitasking for clients and don’t have time for a Twitter content hunt? You’d probably enjoy their “peek” feature as well, which let’s you preview any content on Scoopler, without having to leave the page.
*I also need to give Twazzup a shout out, which is another a great tool and a close 2nd. Similar concept to Scoopler, except solely Twitter-focused.
5. Backtweets Backtweets is a simple URL search tool. What makes this tool so great? It solves one major social media dilemma… The link to external websites and content in a tweet is usually most important, and if you’re a PR or Marketing professional, you’re probably tracking it too. What if someone doesn’t re-tweet your link and shares that tinyURL you tweeted as a bit.ly instead? Backtweets allows you to search for that original link across all URL shorteners. It’s also a great way to see who is linking to your client’s website, but not mentioning our client’s name on Twitter.
These five tools push the limits of Twitter search and I find them to be very useful. Let me know too, if you have found other great applications.
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.
This week Page One PR celebrated the first birthday of the Social Media Team (SMT). As I was setting up the cake and lighting the birthday candles in our San Francisco office, one of my fellow Page Wonders asked me if a year ago I would have ever thought the program would be where it is today. My answer? No way! I was just hoping to hang on for the ride.
Craig Oda and I founded the SMT during the spring of last year. We feared Page One was lagging far behind the industry and had a lot of catch up work to do. It turns out we were right and wrong about that assumption. In the past year we’ve worked many long days and nights to figure out how to define and run social media for the agency. I honestly never imagined we would have come as far as we have though.
Today we are running social media programs for some of the biggest brands in the world and helping our start-ups to become the next big names in the Valley. We were the first agency to differentiate our services by defining social media metrics and demonstrate that you could measure social media spend and ROI. We’ve developed a standard process (The Page One Process) that has produced outsized results for our clients. It’s not all work – we’ve also managed to have a lot of fun along the way!
When I reflect back on the past year I’ve noticed three critical turnings points in the development of our program:
The first was Wine.com. I was so excited to start working with Wine.com last fall! They were the very first pure social media play we scored and – just stating the obvious – the product was wine! We developed a three-month program aimed at increasing online wine sales. We’d bring wine to the consumer, through Twitter, Facebook and a Wine.com blog, to boost sales. Meet the consumer at their desired online channel. Seems simple right? No. We found out quickly that it is very difficult to entice people to buy wine through Twitter. I think the founder of Page One and I single handedly floated the total Twitter wine sales through the better part of the program. (I still have Wine.com purchased wine at my apartment.) That’s when we realized the importance of social media metrics. Metrics quickly became the defining characteristic of our program and the trait that differentiates us from other PR agencies. Social media is not about the tools you use, it’s about the strategy and campaign you create around those tools. We discovered the value of measuring specific metrics to justify social media ROI. If you can’t measure it, it’s not worth doing.
The next critical turning point came with Appcelerator, a start-up creating software for developers. Up to this point we had learned that social media was much more than the tools, but Appcelerator’s launch of Titanium showed us that social media cannot be a stand-alone campaign. It must fit into a larger marketing campaign if it’s going to be sustainable. For Appcelerator, we really started to integrate social media and PR very closely. I took the traditional PR skills I had learned in my first year at the agency and combined them with the social media lessons I had learned on Wine.com and previous social media campaigns to produce a new hybrid product launch. The results we got for Appcelerator’s first launch (an alpha launch, mind you) were crazy! Imagine a 3,500% increase in website traffic and more than 10,000 product downloads within the first few hours of the announcement. Craig and I were even in shock. During the weeks leading into the announcement I had an inkling that we were doing something big, but on launch day last December I realized that by combining social media with traditional PR we had created a service that we could actually sell.
I will be eternally grateful for the clients we worked with in the very beginning and for the programs they allowed us to run – there is definitely something to be said for client trust. The opportunities to experiment and take a risk are really what allowed us to learn the most valuable skills along the way.
The third critical turning point came with our next big break, Cisco. I still remember when I got the Facebook message from my old manager from my intern days at EMC, asking if we could talk about Page One’s social media services. If Cisco had heard about us this was big! We initially started working with them to support and promote their AXP Developer Contest. Now let’s just be honest – the client calls were incredibly confusing. There were so many people on every call! There were product-marketing people, PR people, social media people and roles I never knew existed. I quickly realized that the mere task of trying to figure out whom everyone was, what group they belonged to and what that group’s motives were was going to be challenging. However, Cisco is a very well oiled marketing machine. We learned during the AXP social media campaign that social media does not cleanly fit into PR or marketing, either as a program or budget item – it sits somewhere in between (I’ll blog about this more in a week or so). In today’s social media industry, no one group owns responsibility (or budget). Because of this everyone in a company is a stakeholder and has to actively participate for the campaign to be a success.
While these three campaigns – and dozens of others over the past year – have allowed me to define social media and its role for our agency, the main lesson I have learned is to never compromise. We have never settled for average results or average campaigns for our clients. With each passing month and year, we’re steadily improving our social media services. We’d like to share what we are learning with you too. I hope you’ll sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube to stay up to date on the next year’s discoveries!
Here are seven golden rules to keep in mind as you prepare to tweet your next tech event:
1) Establish a hashtag, and start using it before the event in all Twitter communications. Without doing this, you may find yourself in a “hashtag war” where your company suggests one but users use another. This is not a disaster. But it can be sloppy. One reason users will pick a different hashtag: yours is too long. Because hashtags will be appended to all related tweets, they should be short, to take up as little room as possible. Consider changing #mycompanyevent to #mce. You lose a little in obvious branding but gain a lot in Twitter usefulness. Searching for this hashtag at any point gives readers a quick summary of all tweets related to your event.
2) You’ll tweet a little bit about your event leading up to the day, and then you’ll turn on the fire hose of tweets as the event unfolds, in real-time. If you’re worried about how the big change in the number of tweets coming from your account will be received, don’t be. In general, in Twitter, more information is welcomed, not criticized. By all means, in the days leading up to the event, give your followers some warnings: “Event coming up, we’re trying something different, live-tweeting it.”
3) Make sure your tweets are short enough to be easily retweeted. 140 characters MINUS “RT @yourcompany” means that others reading your tweets can retweet them without any editing. At a live event, this is a major advantage.
4) Not all issues are technology related. Don’t forget politics. Live tweeting panels, even though it’s a public forum, requires taking into account participants’ opinions as well, and can be a bit tricky. If you have someone running the Twitter feed who can take political considerations into account real-time, you’ll be better off. Too sharp of comments and there are potential participant issues. Too bland and your Twitter feed is useless. Most likely, other Twitter feeds will fill in with sharper criticism.
5) In one case, Page One PR’s client was very open source centric, so giving a nod to Identi.ca, built on open source software, was important. All tweets were initiated through Identi.ca. You can easily configure Identi.ca to automatically post to Twitter. All tweets are then signed “half a minute ago from Identica,” marking you as an open source supporter. (As you should be!)
6) Timing is of the essence. With other people enthusiastically tweeting, five minutes late looks really late. Preparing informative tweets ahead of time helps. In a separate document, if you know, for instance, 3-4 panels that the company will be tweeting about, line up 3-4 tweets that announce “XYZ panel with John and Jane Doe, just getting started…” Interspersing prepared tweets with live ones will help significantly with your real-time workload. Bonus rule for the expert Tweeters to consider:
7) How to work with panels. Soliciting questions for a panel may feel like a good idea — real democracy! — but there are several important things to consider. Are you confident you can get enough questions live? If not, soliciting questions ahead of time is smart. How do you transmit them up to the podium? IMing them is possible, but whoever is receiving them needs to both scan and summarize real-time. They can not be actively participating in the panel. Summarizing and reporting the answers? Not possible with one person running the Twitter feed. Ideally, you need two people to properly handle: one who is monitoring the Twitter feed, one who is listening to the panel and summarizing and condensing answers into tweets. (Not easy!) Tweeting back answers? Again, not possible with one person.
I’ve been to several recent client and prospect meetings where we’ve discussed strategies for incorporating social media programs into marketing and communications roadmaps. In most cases, the client or prospect has heard about social media and falls into one of two categories (or both):
1. They want to tap into social media because they recognize it’s part of being on the cutting edge of marketing and PR.
2. They want to use social media to sell more products.
That’s when I feel compelled to start talking about the “underbelly” of the beast. Social media is more than being hip and fun and cool. It’s also more than just another set of channels for making sales. Most importantly – it’s a lot of work.
We’ve spent a lot of time at Page One PR trying to figure out ways to measure the influence of social media programs, and we’ve been pretty successful coming up with metrics and strategies for providing real value to clients who want social media as another set of tools in their marketing and communications arsenal.
If you’re thinking of exploring social media for your company, go for it! But before you do that, here are five important tips you need to know:
1. Social media requires a willingness and readiness to engage.
When it comes to social media, many companies want us to “just do it” for them. Good luck. Social media programs aren’t the same as just writing a press release or developing a media pitch. When you begin to engage with people, they want to interact with YOU – they want to see personalities at a company, not just a corporate image. This requires a level of transparency from the CEO down to engineering that can’t be forged by the PR firm. Be prepared to conduct business this way if you want to be successful with social media.
2. Your audience might not naturally pay attention.
A lot of companies know this but don’t understand the number of cycles that go into running social media programs and campaigns. They think that blogging, YouTube and Twitter are ways to push out their messages without realizing no one will care unless they promote content daily. Maintaining a day-to-day social media presence (and relevance) requires loyally following four key steps: produce content, push content through social media channels, actively monitor the channels you want to leverage and respond FAST. Rinse and repeat.
3. Social media never stops.
Social media demands a fair amount of interaction if you want to build relationships with your target audiences and get their attention. Companies often drastically underestimate the resources required to build successful social media channels. They want to generate buzz around a major announcement, but then want to “turn off” until their next bit of news. They don’t want to respond to questions or create new content until it benefits their bottom line. You can’t do that with social media. Don’t be surprised when people demand that you pay attention to them before they’ll care about you.
4. Social media requires A LOT of planning.
Building your brand with social media can be a lot of fun, but the planning process can be pretty exhausting. In fact, expect any social media program to take at least 2.5x the amount of time and resources a traditional PR approach normally would. You need to plan ahead. After you’ve identified your target audiences and the key messages you want to communicate to each audience, multiply those by the number of channels you plan to use and develop metrics to measure your success. Your content should be cross-linked and distributed in sync or according to a detailed choreography. Then, monitor and have guidelines for response.
5. Social media is everyone’s responsibility.
A mistake companies often make is taking the “it’s not my job” attitude. Executives, engineers, salesmen, product managers, business development employees will often pigeon-hole social media into the marketing and communications bucket. Even marketing directors and VPs will avoid being accountable. Social media enables your audience to ask questions, challenge your claims, offer helpful product feedback and share their opinions with their network of friends and followers. Companies that are successful with social media have resources in every department to immediately address questions and issues that come in through social media channels. If you’re starting up a social media program, share with your company what you want to accomplish and tell everyone how they can help.
Social Media in Action
We recently had an incident where an IT manager was having trouble installing a client’s product and began expressing negative frustration on Twitter about the company’s product. We alerted the VP of marketing at the client who immediately called the guy and put him in touch with a sales engineer. The customer started tweeting about how impressive the client’s customer service was and began offering incredibly positive feedback about the product on Twitter. This is one of several examples of how social media can be effective if you’ve got the right internal lines of communication open and the resources to reach out to your community.
The Takeaway
While social media can have an incredibly heavy underbelly, it provides a remarkably effective way to reach and engage with your target audiences. In addition, as we continue to see traditional print and online media outlets dry up, you’ll notice that the results from social media outreach done well can transcend what you’ve come to expect from traditional PR. Even better, beyond just “counting clips,” you can quantify social media results with metrics and your own Google Analytics. So, as you get on board with social media, remember that the amount of energy, planning and resources required to fuel a successful social media campaign can give you the return on investment you want at exactly the moment you need it. Plus, it can really be a lot of fun.
So, maybe you found out the spoilers to LOST Season 3 on Facebook. Maybe you got your Grand Theft Auto 4 trade secrets from a blog. Maybe you heard John Mayer and Jennifer Aniston broke up for the 11th time on Twitter. Perhaps you didn’t know that an entire prison of convicts in the Philippines could remake the entire Thriller video until you saw it up on YouTube.
Well, whatever you heard, be it entertainment or news, these are the ways information is being delivered today. This is social media. This is Page One.
We are a Silicon Valley public relations firm that caters to the high-tech industry and we are currently looking to add consultants to our Social Media Division in the San Francisco office.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:
Page One is looking for brilliant, enthusiastic and highly motivated individuals who want an opportunity to impact real companies’ business decisions with social media.
Social media is fresh and constantly shifting, so we don’t expect you to be a social media guru. NO PREVIOUS PR or SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCE IS NECESSARY, but if you’ve got some, we won’t complain. If you understand what social media is and can see yourself leading smart PR projects and creating never-done-before campaigns for clients, you could be who we are looking for.
WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR:
Ask yourself if you like who we are. It’s as important.
We are 100% about our people: over-achievers who get the job done better than anyone else and have fun.
As a new Consultant/PageWonder, you’ll learn from the best: our Sr. PR people have reported for the Los Angles Times, managed campaigns for Microsoft, placed cover stories in Business Week, taught graduate journalism at UC Berkeley, written keynote for Bill Gates and even created the first ISP in Japan.
We’re corporate, but collaborative and laid-back. People at Page One come from all walks of life. We like that mix and we look for initiative, intelligence, humor, integrity, creativity, risk taking, fearlessness, writing skill and a track record of success.
When it comes to work/life balance, we don’t just work. We are marathoners, lacrosse players, salsa dancers, avid travelers and more, and Page One gives us the time to do what we love. Sure, you might find a Page One consultant at MacWorld stalking Steve Jobs, but 9 times out of 10, you’ll see a group of us enjoying happy hour in downtown SF.
WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING:
No coffee fetching. No press release copying. We don’t look for gutsy people just to take up space.
Page One’s Social Media Consultants design and produce social media content including video campaigns, blogs and social network profiles for clients. They also produce social media for Page One’s internal marketing. Every PageWonder actively engages in developing clients’ PR, marketing and brand management strategies. We specialize in company launches, product launches, media relations, messaging and positioning, analyst relations and (of course) social media.
WHAT YOU’LL BE GETTING:
Benefits? Want 20 days off? OK.
Since Page One’s culture is all about great people doing great things, we reward our employees with exceptional pay, quarterly bonuses, matching 401K and 20 days of paid time off from your first day on the job.
• 20 PTO days (even in your first year!)
• 11 paid company holidays
• Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependants
• Matching 401K
• Long- and short-term disability insurance
• Life insurance (twice your annual salary)
• Flexible spending account
• Costco delivers the snack food on the first of every month
If you are interested in a career as a Social Media Consultant at Page One, email a resume and a note telling us about yourself to Jasmine Teer at jasmine@pageonepr.com.
Visit us: http://www.pageonepr.com Read our blog: http://www.pageonepr.com/blogs/thepagewonders/ Check out our Facebook group: Page One PR Follow us on Twitter: @pageonepr
Upon second look, I saw it was true! According to the Sabre Awards, Page One is standing among some global giants, and we are neck and neck. But although we’d like to take credit for coming up with the creative idea behind it all, I also have to admit we couldn’t have done it without social media.
Our nomination comes for a campaign that we cooked up last summer at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo called “Who’s the Next Open Source Idol?” We created a contest to determine which of four popular open source mascots Linux junkies love most and threw in Tux the Penguin, Beastie the BSD Devil, “Foxie” the FireFox and the GNU (also know as Bessie). Even better, we asked people to sing or dance on behalf of their vote.
After stirring up some trouble at the show, FireFox fans rallied and ousted Tux. In the meantime, our client saw a 43% increase in traffic to their corporate website in three days and 1,133 people visited their community portal to vote. We also generated buzz in the IT media community, and people are still talking about it.
The Sabre Awards recognize public relations firms that focus on delivering out-sized results and improving a client’s bottom line through out-of-the-box campaigns. For “Open Source Idol,” we tapped a variety of social media channels to generate buzz, which ended up being incredibly cost-effective to leverage. In fact, one reason social media is so effective is that it puts everyone on a level playing field. Through a mix of social media and traditional PR tactics, we were able to reach the Linux and open source enthusiasts we needed to participate and were able to engage with them directly.
So, I guess the big takeaway is it no longer matters how big your marketing or PR budget is – even a small technology startup can stand out against giants. It just takes some guts, smarts and social media.
Apparent in blogs across the web, social media is the PR du jour. Call the notary public, because it’s that official.
But, the concept of social media as some aggrandizing power play we PR agencies have to master for our clients is still, to me, a question to be answered. How much can really be gained by power-tweeting our clients and answering, “What are you doing right now?” every 42 minutes? I wanted to explore this idea to see what social media has (or hasn’t) done.
I set up a survey for my Page One colleagues and found there are some conclusive benefits to stacking a client’s (Tweet)deck with social media. The Survey Monkey results revealed these social media channels yield the best results for clients:
My hypothesis is that social media works when it can entertain as well as inform. It engages in a way that traditional media can’t. Seeing a reporter’s snide comment on a news story trumps reading his rendition of a press release when it comes to dishing out opinions. Delivery of information is faster, sometimes funnier, less formal and a lot more in your face.
Twitter, for example, allows people to find their inner prophet. Having actual followers, yes, that’s right… followers… guarantees an audience who will validate your every thought (or so you hope). As humans, let alone PR agents, how are we not supposed to find the advantages in that?
When asked to rank the purpose of social media on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most important), my Page One colleagues listed:
9.0 – WEB TRAFFIC
8.5 – GROW COMMUNITY SIZE AND ENGAGEMENT
7.0 – PRODUCT DOWNLOADS
6.4 – MEASURABLE PR
5.5 – REACH NEW TARGET AUDIENCE
5.4 – LEAD GENERATION
So here’s the bottom line. Social media is useful in PR. But it’s not going to completely usurp traditional media. Segmenting social media from its traditional counterpart is as huge a mistake as asking Madoff for investment tips. At this agency, the most successful social media campaigns have intertwined social media and traditional media, because again, what is a video sitting on YouTube without a TechCrunch mention to drive traffic to it?
The future of (good) PR is finding the mix of both. I remain a skeptic about some of the grandiose claims of social media, but I need to better understand how we measure the nominal versus real benefits of social media.
With Google Analytics and a host of monitoring tools, we are getting better at locking in numbers to measure social media. I still don’t think that anyone in social media has gotten close to calibrating those measurements in terms of possibility and percent of market reached. As an economics major, I look (and more easily trust) numbers that reflect not just reach, but penetration. Sure, we can throw parties when we can tell clients we’ve gotten them 1,000 more unique visitors to their site in a day, or even that we’ve managed to increase their web traffic by 313 percent, but I like to look at the macro results. I want to know what the pool of potential targets was. Was it 5,000 or 250,000? And if we reached 1,000, how well is social media helping us penetrate the audiences we’re actually targeting?
I’ll probably be a skeptic supporter of social media until it’s matured far enough to the point where this can be easily measured and assessed. As a CEO or CMO, this is the kind of question I would ask, and though social media is growing quickly, it can’t answer these questions yet. But, it will, and probably soon.
One of the most common goals we hear from prospects is, “We want to be the next JBoss.” The inevitable follow up question is, “How did you do it?”
I like to say “with a lot of blood, toils, tears and sweat,” but that would border on sentimentality. The truth is, JBoss in 2003 had a lot going for it already: good, free technology (or, in more famous words, “It’s free and it doesn’t suck”); a growing community; and a firebrand of a chief executive in Marc Fleury.
What PR provided was discipline, consistency, and a soapbox. The rest was history.
You could argue that open source developers were the original online social networkers. With that in mind, there were three things that JBoss did right that went against conventional PR wisdom at the time, but are more applicable than ever today, especially given the rise of social media usage.
First, JBoss always put the community first. Under the open source mantra of “release early, release often,” JBoss developers didn’t wait for sign off from PR to release code, announce it on community mailing lists, and blog about it. This was initially a major headache for PR, as I often took calls from reporters asking me why I hadn’t told them about such and such a release. And, as JBoss expanded the number of projects over which it had direct stewardship, this disconnect only exacerbated.
The PR team initially tried to control this, but communities don’t work this way. Traditional PR often focuses on controlling the flow of information when it should focus on the content itself, regardless of whether it is delivered through press releases, interviews, blog posts, podcasts, or presentations. Once we accepted that, we used the the blogs (remember, this was 2003!) as another way to get information out that supported messages of innovation, community, and participation.
Second, JBoss did not fear controversy. We never attempted to “censor” Fleury; his strong opinions, enthusiasm, and colorful choice of words gave him an authentic voice that no amount of PR prepping/media training could ever create. But those strong opinions–not just from him but from other JBossians–sometimes rubbed others the wrong way, inviting controversy after controversy. While each episode was challenging to go through, JBoss always came out of it smarter than before.
It’s always a good idea to take the high road, but there are times when it really pays to be scrappy. If you’re the David in a hot market with lots of Goliath players, you can’t always turn the other cheek. Those willing to put up a good fight have a fighting chance.
Lastly, JBoss was incredibly metrics-driven. The company bootstrapped itself for almost four years before taking on venture financing. PR, as Fleury liked to tell it, was JBoss’ biggest investment. To track this investment, we established detailed reporting that looked at every article, every positive and negative word, and every key message we wanted to get across. This was done on a quarterly basis, and when things didn’t track, we adjusted the program.
Fast forward that five years to 2009 and you will see that metrics is more important than ever. We’re in the midst of a recession, so measuring spending vs. results is essential. Though PR is still more art than science, there are sophisticated tools now to make reporting that much easier and that much more valuable to the company.
If you’re doing PR today, you know it’s a changing business. JBoss’ success was a product of its time, though it offers some lessons that stand true today. You have many more tools with which to build community around your offerings and measure adoption and visibility. You may not be the next JBoss; but you could very well create your own category and become the benchmark for startups to come.
Yes, the rumors are true! The Page One Social Media Team is looking to hire a new member to join our expanding team. I have posted a very detailed job description below. It is fairly long, but because so many social media jobs are ill-defined I thought it was best to be very descriptive about who I am looking to hire and what type of work this person will be doing.
Please send resumes to socialmediajobs [at] pageonepr.com.
Want to put your social media skills to the test in public relations, marketing, and the high-tech industry?
I lead the Page One Social Media Program at Page One PR, an international public relations firm that caters to the high-tech industry. The Page One Social Media Team has experienced rapid growth in the past year and we’re now looking to hire a full-time social media specialist to join the team in our San Francisco office. Since the new member of the team will report directly to me, I’ll start off by telling you a bit about myself.
I joined Page One PR two years ago and soon after, founded our Social Media Program. I have a strong passion for crafting innovative strategies to communicate corporate messages and have developed an even stronger passion for social media as the right tool to do this. I live and breathe social media, because I believe, 100%, that social media is the future of the PR industry and if companies do not move quickly to adapt these new techniques, they will go the way of the dodo bird, just like the printing press and now the newspaper. Many people are sitting back wondering what is going to happen to PR in the next few years. I am not one of those people. I am that person running up ahead, trying to help define the solution and pave the path. I feel strongly that there is a right way and a wrong way to do this though. It’s all about metrics and measurement and connecting social media programs to real business objectives. Without having well defined, well thought-out goals and the ability to clearly track and monitor progress and results, social media campaigns are often just a waste of time and money. I really enjoy my job because Page One has allowed me the opportunity to grow and expand a program that has the potential to radically shake things up. I have spent the past year learning, experimenting, observing other PR agencies and developing our social media program and have created a process and set of services that will differentiate Page One PR and put us at the cutting edge of social media. Our results already speak volumes on this. Now I just need to build out the team!
So who are we looking for?
Page One’s Social Media Team has developed a unique, metrics driven process focused on generating great results for our great clients. We are looking for a smart, enthusiastic, highly motivated and driven individual that is looking for the opportunity to help high-tech clients integrate social media techniques into their communications strategy. We are ideally looking for an individual who is already actively engaged in a broad range of social media activities (blogging, social networking, community development, monitoring and response, etc.), has the ability to think creatively and develop strategic solutions, and wants to jump in and get their hands dirty to create and run successful social media campaigns.
Our new team member will have:
• 2-3 years PR experience that includes PR agency or corporate experience working with technology companies;
• Experience running social media campaigns and a strong background in social media techniques and strategy;
• Creative outlook and willingness to think outside the box to find solutions;
• Outstanding writing skills and verbal communications skills;
• Willingness to experiment and ability to deal with uncertainty;
• Ability to contribute individually, and lead, manage or participate in cross-functional teams;
• A team player with the ability to create great working relationships on all levels in the company and with clients;
• Four-year university degree.
What will you be doing on the Page One Social Media Team?
This position, while a lot of fun, will also involve a lot of hard work. We are looking for someone ready to take on the challenge! By joining the Page One Social Media Team you will have the opportunity to work closely with me to help define and shape the structure of Page One’s Social Media Program, work with top-notch clients, come up with crazy campaign ideas and actually receive the support and materials to implement them.
Okay, so what are some of the activities you may be asked to do?
• Develop messaging and positioning for complex high-technology products, many of them in the B2B space;
• Respond independently to engineers, business executives and media about complex business and technology issues;
• Develop strategies to package messages that leverage media and social media trends;
• Develop strategies to enable content to be distributed online through viral word-of-mouth channels;
• Detailed analysis of metrics to track the popularity and viral distribution of specific content;
• Produce graphs and charts of media metrics;
• Independent writing of both short and long content on complex topics. Content must be engaging and able to capture enough attention that a reader will naturally pass the content on to their friend;
• Discuss plans and concepts with both mid-level and executive-level clients in meetings and in face-to-face presentations. Instill confidence in clients that you can get the job done;
• Sell concepts and plans internally and to clients to drive consensus;
• Build Twitter following on corporate channels and develop strategies for content to go viral with retweets, hashtag, and bit.ly use;
• Manage video projects for YouTube and Vimeo, including videos directed and produced by Page One and videos created by the community;
• Manage Facebook and LinkedIn campaigns, including campaign strategy creation;
• Develop and manage blog promotion strategy, including management of content from multiple people that are slow in providing content;
• Establish communication with clients even when they appear to be too busy to respond;
• Have fun and spread the awesome potential of social media throughout Page One, the entire Silicon Valley region, and the rest of the world.
Benefits. The good stuff. Want 20 days off? OK.
Since Page One’s culture is all about great people doing great things, we reward our employees with exceptional pay, matching 401K and 20 days of paid time off per year.
• 20 PTO days (even in your first year!)
• 11 paid company holidays
• Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependants
• Matching 401K
• Long- and short-term disability insurance
• Life insurance (twice your annual salary)
• Flexible spending account
The salary range for this position is up to $60,000.
If you are interested in applying to join the Page One Social Media Team, please send a resume and a note telling us about yourself to: socialmediajobs [at] pageonepr.com.
While I’m not a fan of reading blogs about PR best practices from PR professionals, I wanted to give a shout out to three good friends from the old world of traditional PR that you don’t want to overlook in the mad rush to embrace all things social media.
So, my credentials. I’ve promoted everything from Kinkos and McDonald’s to hot high-tech startups and even the BodPod on Good Morning America. PR for me is all about results. Whatever it takes to get results as long as you don’t burn bridges – that’s how I see it. Be smart, be useful, show restraint, add value.
Specifically, there are three things from the old media world of PR that I think every practitioner still needs to understand and do better.
1) Contributed articles – typically, these are pieces written by a vendor for a publication that provides a series of criteria for acceptance (vendor neutrality is usually #1 requirement). While there are reputable publications that accept contributed articles (eWeek and Network World come to mind), there is an order of magnitude greater number of online publications that are suspect. In other words, their filter for excellence is porous at best. Now, I’m not talking about professional trade journals published quarterly by associations with peer review. I’m talking about contributed ‘cons.’ If you’re counting client clips at the end of the month, you know what I’m talking about – begins with an S and ends with ‘con.’ Don’t con your clients. Takeaway – go big or go home. A clip in a publication no one has ever heard of is a waste of your time and your client’s retainer.
2) Product reviews – tread carefully as bad reviews live forever on Google searches. First, do NOT submit your product for a review if you can’t find the time to make sure to prepare a reviewer’s guide. Assuming you have at least a basic reviewer’s guide, there are many types of reviews with varying degrees of depth you can consider. There are competitive bake-off reviews. There are reviews written from demos alone (if even that). There are reviews by established labs (unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer every day) under the supervision of eWeek, InfoWorld, Informationweek or CRN, for example. But, even some of these pubs “outsource” their reviews to freelancers. Some advice – avoid bake-off reviews whenever your product is more expensive. I’ve seen a number of examples where cost influenced the reviewer over functionality. It’s not too surprising since they have to crank out a lot of reviews and can’t spend too much time on each product. If you do get a standalone review with a reputable source – I’ve always felt Cameron Sturdevandt stood out here – drop everything and be available for them. Send a competent body to help with configuration who can answer all questions on the spot (even if you have to put them on a plane). Answer email and phone questions within an hour. Make it as easy on the reviewer as possible. Lastly, don’t try to get reviews if your product is not ready – you can’t fool all of the people any of the time.
3) Company mention – this is where your company, along with a string of other companies, is mentioned in an article. I see these types of mentions as mush. Tapioca pudding. Cream of Wheat. Sure, you want to make sure you’re included in the discussion – it is bad if you’re not included – but it will hardly move the results meter. Frankly, I think it’s mostly unscrupulous PR firms who rely on these drive-by mentions to pad their monthly client reports.
Here’s a bigger idea to chew on – people sell PR short by thinking of media opportunities as a 1:1 ratio. That is, client briefs reporter – reporter writes story – it goes live – it is listed under client news section. Instead, focus on using media opportunities and successes and discussion to breed other media opportunities and successes and discussion.
There’s a reason Twitter is exploding and newspapers are going out of business.
I had a CEO compare Page One’s work to a tequila shot the other day. I took it as a compliment.
“I really feel like we’ve turned a corner,” he told me as he drove through the streets of San Francisco, clutching his blackberry. “I like being part of the conversation. And Page One, you guys were the lubricant. You were the shots of tequila.”
So what’s he talking about?
The most important aspect of media these days — no matter what community you’re trying to reach — is participating in a conversation. That’s why “social media” has become the Next Big Thing.
Nothing is one-way anymore and if you’re not having a two-way conversation you’re being left behind.
My two favorite social media tools for dipping into the online conversation are blogs and a Twitter feed. Twitter is great for rapid-fire, real-time exchanges, while blogs provide the opportunity for more thought out commentary, with room for all the blog bling: charts, links, graphs and photos.
Good PR is all about noticing openings in the conversation and finding a place for your client at the right table so they can join in. All these new social media tools are just more ways to grok the seating chart.
So why did this CEO compare our work to tequila? Well in addition to being a good-time guy he’s also smart. And when he piped up with a particularly timely blog post about the growing influence of Facebook online, we made sure the right people saw it and incorporated it into their conversation on the topic.
In one day, his blog saw a 600 percent traffic increase. He’s pulling his chair up to the table.
The work we do behind the scenes doesn’t go in a shot glass. It’s the relentless targeting of the right influencers in the right way, using all the tools at our disposal: A tweet, a note, a link. A few more.
But if the metaphor works for you, what we do is tequila in action. Just enough to get a good vibe going, never so much that you regret it in the morning.
There are many services to shorten URLs for posting on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and LinkedIn. A popular service, bit.ly, recently added analysis capability which makes it much more useful to assess the success of social media campaigns. The basic idea is to apply a unique URL to each specific channel, Twitter, blogs, YouTube. Although the use of unique URLs is an old technique, bit.ly makes it easy to set up unique URLs without having to ask technical staff for help. The bit.ly service, which sees about a third of the monthly visitors as the more popular TinyURL, also presents the data as a set of graphs that are easy to view. Marketers can now set up and track things on their own.
I previously used notlong.com which has a similar tracking capability and the additional advantage of creating unique URLs. For example, I used notlong.com to create and track this URL for a blog posting on social media ROI.
Although it is nice to have a custom URL, a feature that bit.ly lacks, the analysis capabilities of notlong are much weaker than bit.ly.
If you set up a bit.ly account, you are presented with a dashboard of all your links. In addition to total views by date, bit.ly also presents charts and tables for Referrers, Locations, retweets on Twitter, and FriendFeed usage.
This level of features is much much better than TinyURL, a service with 1.75 billion hits per month. TinyURL does have a stealth feature that hides the original URL. This is a useful feature that bit.ly lacks, for those cases where you want people to get information but you may not want them to know who hosts that site.
The is.gd service offers URLs that are one character shorter than bit.ly. However, it lacks the tracking and analysis features. The is.gd service has shortened 5.5 million URLs to date.
There are numerous other URL shortening services, including budURL, eweri, hex.io, idek.net, lin.cr, POPrl, snipurl, twurl, and urlBorg. budURL, designed by Andy Meadows, has features for marketing people at small businesses, including a useful dashboard and a clickstream of URLs. However, the level of analysis isn’t as deep as bit.ly right now. POPrl has a dashboard for tracking and a nice web page to view the most popular content that is being linked to.
bit.ly has a edge over the other services right now due to very strong analytics. It seems that they could easily turn their dashboard into revenue by placing advertisements on the side of the dashboard. I think that they should also develop more analytic features and offer a commercial service to marketing firms. There’s an opportunity for bit.ly to become the Google Analytics of URL shorteners, the preferred tool of choice in any marketer’s toolbox.
Twitter is everywhere these days, with 11% of online Americans now tweeting (up from 6% in May 2008). The “Twitterverse” is increasingly filled with corporate accounts, including popular examples @zappos, @JetBlue, and @ComcastCares. Before you jump in with a “me too” Twitter account, here are three points you should consider:
1. Is your audience on Twitter?
The average Twitterer is a tech-savvy, urban, 31-year-old male with a college or graduate degree. However, this demographic is broadening as Twitter’s reach continues to expand into mainstream Internet users. Try searching Twitter for your company’s name, your competitors, and keywords from your industry to see what the online conversation is all about. Your customers may already be talking about you, and you’re being left out of the conversation. Alternatively, what if you find few or no relevant tweets? It may be a great opportunity for you to take the lead in your industry and initiate the conversation.
2. What do you want to get out of Twitter?
Twitter is constantly evolving, and there’s no “correct” way to use your Twitter stream. Some companies use it for customer service, some use it to publicize their press releases and media clips, some tweet to drive sales and announce special deals, some monitor what customers are saying and use it for market research, some share links to interesting news, and some companies do all of the above. In our experience, Page One clients using Twitter are most interested in driving web traffic and in interacting with their online developer communities—two objectives where a Twitter campaign can be highly successful.
3. Who will tweet for your company?
Writing an engaging Twitter feed takes time, and you’ll need to designate one or more people to tweet regularly (ideally, at least once a day). In addition to the time spent writing, you should spend time reading your followers’ tweets and responding to the most pertinent ones. This process can easily consume half an hour or more each day. Although some companies run their Twitter streams in-house, many of our clients are turning to Page One’s social media services to manage the process for them. These clients have been overwhelmingly pleased with our track record for developing successful Twitter campaigns and measuring our results. Here are just a few of our clients on Twitter: @linuxfoundation, @CiscoGeeks, @funambol, @sourceforge, and @appcelerator. (Naturally, @pageonepr is also on Twitter).
Once you’ve decided to dive into Twitter, where do you start? Stay tuned: we’ll share some Twitter best practices in an upcoming blog.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve dived headfirst into the innovative world of social media metrics. A tool that’s quite interesting is Radian6’s “conversation cloud,” which transforms statistics into a graphic. It aggregates the most common words associated with your search term and displays the results in the form of a word cloud. The larger the word, the more often it appears in search results on the term you wanted to measure. Simple.
Working all the time with developers for many of our clients, I figured it would be cool to see how Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine stack up in the blogosphere – what key terms are people associating with them and what similarities or differences are there. A little compare and contrast exercise. I set parameters for the last month.
This is what EC2 looks like:
Not a surprise that most terms are developer focused. What about App Engine, where does it stand?
Clearly, there’s considerable overlap. This is to be expected since they offer similar services.
What’s more revealing are the differences. First, “cloud” is much more prominently associated with EC2 than App Engine. The “cloud” in EC2 dwarfs the “cloud” in App Engine. Second, EC2’s cloud reflects a larger enterprise base. “Business,” “company,” and “customers,” to name a few key terms, are all highlighted in the EC2 cloud, while similar terms are either not present or tiny and irrelevant in the App Engine cloud. Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine are closely related, arguably competitive platforms, with key differences that stand out.
This analysis only covers 30 days and is a crude instrument. But it paints an interesting ‘word’ picture. In the blogosphere, people are much more likely to associate Amazon’s EC2 with business and Google’s App Engine with developers.
In PR, you never stop worrying about results. You’re always looking for the fresh angle, the cool insight, the clever pitch that converts to clips or sucks in huge new Web traffic.
But we all face that moment when the client is too slammed to get back with what you need right away. The content well is running dry. All of your pitches seem to miss the strike zone. What’s a pro to do?
What a client never wants to hear from you is: “Well, I tried to reach you but you were unresponsive,” to excuse poor results. No one likes blame shifting, and clients are not paying you to “try to reach them.” They are paying you to get results. When you are on the hook for results, and you always are, you have to get creative.
I took a ride on the “Get Creative Express” a few weeks ago with a brand new client when I was looking for angles for pitches. I wasn’t yet well versed enough in their industry to create my own content from scratch, and I had a very busy client (who, in case they are reading this, I ADORE) who was slow to respond to my slew of (nagging and urgent) requests for information that day.
The solution? Maybe there was something that their former agency did recently that might spark an idea? I poked around the client’s media coverage in the previous months before we started to get an idea of the CEO’s voice and his views of a few key issues. I found a PR goldmine in a podcast with the CEO. Put my headphones in, cranked up the volume. Twenty minutes later, I had a page of notes about the dilemma developers face in the cloud.
Next step, I drafted a post for my client’s corporate blog based on the CEO’s comments in the podcast. When it went live, I pitched it to reporters who had recently covered the cloud and/or application development.
The result? In two weeks, I closed on five briefings and five clips (and one pending feature story) with online coverage that reached an audience of more than a million people. Yes, and a very happy client. Not bad for the first two weeks on a new account.
It’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you simply don’t know enough to generate good content (I get it – I’m a Human Biology major working in high-tech PR). Just remember that being independent and proactive when it comes to finding and evaluating pitch angles will pay big dividends. Don’t make the mistake of waiting for your clients’ responses to your questions — the content you need is out there already. Find it and start pitching.
Eight years ago, my old boss, CEO of a largish software company told me, “Craig if you can’t measure it online, it doesn’t exist.” At the time, I was a hotshot marketer, managing PR and advertising. I thought he was wrong, a bit full of himself, and seeing the world through too narrow of a keyhole. He was an engineer with a PhD in computer science that just didn’t get what marketing was about.
Although my old boss made his statement at the end of the dot-com bust, a recession in distant memory, it still resonates with me as I navigate the current economy.
Many firms that are slashing their PR and advertising budgets are boosting their social media spend. Our social media business continues to grow rapidly, far outpacing the growth of our traditional PR services. In fact, the funding for social media projects rarely even comes from the PR budget anymore. Money often comes from product marketing, business development, or a general marketing fund for a project. After speaking to Cisco, Google, HP, Palm, and dozens of venture-funded startups about social media, I realized that in a recession, money follows measurement.
If the CFO puts an axe in a marketer’s hand and forces some chops to the marketing budget, where’s the blade going to strike first? The most vulnerable things are either difficult to measure or are delivering weak results. If there is no life in advertising click-through metrics, a good marketer views the activity as deadwood and chops away.
Here is what I have learned in the last year about metrics and social media.
An effective social media process starts with a definition of business goals and ends with a continual assessment of metrics to support these goals. I’ve found that goals generally fall into three categories:
1. Increase web site traffic – usually to a specific section like the product page, community portal, or blog
2. Increase product downloads – this is usually a key goal if there is a free or community version of the product
3. Increase registrations – companies usually require registration to access support information, participate in a contest or survey, download white papers, access documentation, or get access to product demos.
Marketers are tracking customer behavior on their website more accurately with lead nurturing systems sold by firms such as Eloqua, LoopFuse, or Marketo. They combine these systems with web site analysis tools such as Google Analytics to make decisions on which marketing programs deliver results they care about.
When we roll out a social media campaign, we generally manage five to ten channels of information simultaneously. A typical process involves blog comment management, community blogs outreach, corporate blog promotion, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook group management, and several other message channels. The information in all the channels is cross-linked. For each channel, the metrics are tracked in real-time. For example, on the day of the launch, we look at Google Analytics and social media monitoring tools to make constant adjustments to how the resources are used.
An example of the metrics we track on Twitter include:
direct referral traffic using Google Analytics;
number of followers;
number of @replies by community;
number of #hashtag uses by community;
number of keyword mentions by community;
number of posts by Twitter channel manager (to show we’re working);
number of retweets.
Using this data, we are able to fine-tune messages to resonate with the target audience.
In the eight years since our discussion, my old boss has made several hundred millions of dollars in his businesses. In the midst of the current recession, I’m just starting to believe that maybe he was right.
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.
I recently attended a free webinar, “SEO + Public Relations = Your Secret Marketing Weapon in 2009,” put on by the team at Webmarketing123.com. They made the case that SEO and PR should by joined at the hip.
I have to say, I’m still not convinced (this is my view and not necessarily shared by my colleagues at Page One PR).
While Paul Taylor, the presenter, did a great job of walking us through the benefits of SEO-izing your PR and marketing collateral and results, I’ve had experiences where that just doesn’t work.
Example 1: Optimizing a press release for SEO and PR
You can do this two ways and I’ve tried both:
1) Write a release, then look at a list of key words to insert.
2) Look at the key words, then write a press release with them in mind (try to use each 1-4 times and space them out).
The second worked better for me, but if you’re supposed to insert your URL and keywords ~3 times each for near optimal SEO, it gets rough and the news starts to sound like giberrish. If the release then needs to go through legal approval and potentially partner or customer approval, you’re in trouble.
That’s only one example, but I do think there’s more beyond just blending SEO with PR and, voilà, you’re on page one of wherever you want to be. The challenge often seems to be a classic case of having too many cooks in the kitchen. You’ve got the outside agency teams, such as the PR firm, the SEO firm, potentially the SEM consultant, and then all of the internal constituents, such as the corporate marketing/advertising team, sales, product marketing, etc. Each can have different business goals and be focused on maximizing content value for that agenda. Sheesh.
BusinessWeek ran an insightful article by B.L. Ochman recently, “Debunking Six Social Media Myths.” Though I appreciated every myth debunked, I really feel the writer’s pain with Myth #4: You can do it all in-house. It’s true – you can’t!
With regards to effective and viral social media campaigns, Ochman writes:
“It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.” Agreed.
I do believe things like SEO and PR should work together – of course it’s good to have a well-oiled machine running on all cylinders – but I don’t think it’s as easy as simply “working together.” Further, given that both PR and SEO are often outsourced strategic services, is it reasonable to expect both sides to come together without the forcing factor of the client company embarking on a holistic marcomm campaign which takes months of pre-planning and coordination? That’s hard to come by when you’re working with startups, particularly high tech startups.
I remain optimistic, however, that there are definitely lessons both PR and SEO can learn from each other. Throw social media in there, and you’ve got a party!
I’d appreciate any wisdom out there about the evolution of these siloed services and think I will continue to attend free webinars on the topic to keep me engaged in thinking about the right combo of SEO + PR.
Late last year the Open Source Think Tank was held in Paris, France. One of the themes was the difference between selling open source software in Europe vs the US. As Matt Aslett points out in a post around this, Europe is in no way a single market. The same can be said for PR. Each country has its own culture, its own publications and in many cases its own languages. For a PR campaign to be effective in Europe, each country should be treated individually. This means press releases should be translated into the local language. With editorial teams having less and less time to write articles and needing to cover a wide range of topics, providing local language material makes it easier for them to do their job. News will very rarely get picked up otherwise, unless of course Microsoft is announcing that Windows is going open source! It is better to get a good translator to provide the local version, rather than one of the newswires, as the latter do tend to be too literal. Talking of wire services, another misconception is that wire services work in Europe. Unfortunately this is not the case. It is the personal 1-to-1 contact that works the best.
What is classed as news? Unfortunately French journalists will not be interested in a new US customer, or for that matter a UK customer. They want well-known French companies using your technology. Similarly the Germans won’t be interested in a new office in the UK. Each geography is interested in local news or news that is pertinent to their geography.
It is preferable to have a local spokesperson for the company. Otherwise journalists will cover what is in the release without seeking further information or will go to a local partner for the story, and that local partner is not necessarily going to express the messages you want to convey.
Cultural differences are many. One that springs to mind is vacation. In the US, you rarely take more than a week off at a time and only have 10-15 days per year. It is often met with disbelief, but there is very little point announcing important news in France, or indeed many of the Southern European countries in July and August. The French tend to take the majority of their annual vacation between 14th July (Bastille Day) and 15th August. It is certainly not unheard of for them to take 3 weeks off during this time. While you may get clips (you will be one of the few companies to send in a press release during this time), who will be around to read them? One of the other French specificities is that if a holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday, they will also take the ‘pont’ the bridge between the holiday and the weekend. In May, the 1st, the 8th and the 31st are holidays, making May another tough month to get useful coverage in. While the French do take alot of vacation during these times, the month of September, ‘la rentree’, is an extremely busy period with many announcements.
This post only scratches the surface of the minefield that is PR in Europe. If there is one key message to retain, it is that you cannot treat Europe as a single market and a local agency/PR resource is necessary to understand the specificities of each individual country.
We’ve been helping our clients build and maintain their corporate Twitter accounts for so long that we pretty much just forgot about building one for ourselves. Well no longer! I would like to formally introduce you to the new Page One PR Twitter account. Here we will discuss the worlds of social media, public relations (of course), maybe some client news and probably a whole lot about the happenings at our office. And let me tell you, if that doesn’t entice you, this blooper video surely will.
Enjoy! and be sure to join us on Twitter for more fun.
Can community and collaboration surface the same innovation in advertising as it does in software development? This is the question that we’ve partnered with The Linux Foundation to answer in the months ahead with the “I’m Linux” video campaign.
The campaign seeks to find the most creative user-generated videos that showcase what Linux means to those who use it, and inspire others to try it. The winner gets an all expenses paid trip to Tokyo.
We’ve seen some really unbelievable, early results due to a few important strategies we defined up front.
The name of the contest was very important. We needed to help people immediately understand the context and purpose of the campaign, so we chose “I’m Linux” as a take on the widely known “I’m a Mac; I’m a PC” advertisements. And, it’s working: the online conversations taking place are noisy ones with both criticism (“why be a copycat?”) and applause (“finally, an ad campaign for Linux!”).
Another key component of our strategy was the decision to establish a panel of judges to review the submissions and help choose the winner. While we considered leaving the voting completely up to website voters, we decided to establish a panel of 5-6 judges so that we could tap into their online followers. Each judge has their own Twitter account and their own blog, among other social media channels. This exponentially increases the reach of our message and the awareness of the campaign.
The benefits of this strategy are being proven early on. While the campaign doesn’t officially launch until January 26, 2009, it is important to solicit a variety of early entries that set the tone and build momentum for the contest. By confirming judges in December and early January, and encouraging them to start talking about the campaign, we have been able to see immediate results.
Matt Asay, Larry Augustin and Tim O’Reilly were among our earliest judges to join us in the journey to find the best Linux ad. And, when O’Reilly “tweeted” about the campaign and his role as a judge late on a Friday evening in mid-December, we started to see the Twittersphere and blogosphere light up like the phones during a Howard Stern radio broadcast.
We’ve seen more than 200 additional “tweets” since O’Reilly’s shout out. We’ve also seen 43 news articles, including a Slashdot entry with more than 400 comments and 1,200 Diggs.
The most interesting thing about campaigns like this one, and the variety of new PR tactics being tested, is that there are no longer any “rules of PR.” With the “I’m Linux” contest, we didn’t have to conduct a focus group or do exhaustive planning and research in advance to understand how people would react to the campaign. We put a short description on the web and engaged community influencers to share the idea with their followers. Now, we’ll help to facilitate the conversation and adjust the campaign as we go.
Beta launches rarely attract much hype. But when a company shifts strategic direction and runs onto the competitive playing field with the big guys like Adobe, Sun and Microsoft, then you want some buzz. Okay, a lot of buzz! Would a 3,500% increase in website traffic on the day of the launch be nice? That’s what we did with Appcelerator.
Appcelerator wanted to make a big market splash with their launch of Titanium, an open source Adobe AIR killer. They wanted to reach traditional media publications, but also developers and social media communities. Most PR launches only target three communications channels – media, bloggers, and analysts. Our launch of Titanium targeted seven different communications channels in parallel, relying heavily on a coordinated social media campaign.
We started out securing a strong messaging platform, which allowed us to effectively position Titanium in each different communication channel we targeted and let us build a strong base to launch our social media activities. Following the messaging, we organized an intense media list and began outreach. Page One does media and blogger outreach different than most PR firms. First, we don’t spam. We begin conversations and relationships. We quickly lined up 12 media briefings in the weeks before the launch and we were asked for embargoed launch materials by every publication in our top 20 list. We also directed, produced and promoted a sophisticated vision video featuring the CEO and CTO, and promoted a series of screencasts that gave reporters a more technical look under the hood of the platform with demonstration applications. On announcement day, we coordinated a community email and a more technical blog post for the Appcelerator blog, manned the Appcelerator Twitter feeds, and monitored the blogosphere, directing the CEO when it was necessary to comment on specific blogs.
The results speak for themselves. Not only was there a 3,500 percent increase in website traffic on the day of the launch, but the coordinated PR and social media outreach drove qualified Web site traffic to ‘money’ pages for Appcelerator: 40 percent of all traffic hit the product demos, downloads, documentation, or product FAQ. There were more than 10,000 page views to the vision video in the first week, more than 10,000 product downloads, more than 44 unique stories placed in the media and a four-fold jump in Twitter followers.
Contests have been a fun marketing tool for decades. Take Theodora Smafield. In 1946, Theodora was the first winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off competition.
Decades before Jeff Howe at Wired or the folks at Dell got excited about crowdsourcing – Pillsbury saw the power of mobilizing a community around its product through a contest.
Pillsbury wanted to excite a generation of homemakers and chefs about its flour – so it invited people to submit their best recipes for the chance to win $50,000. Theodora won for her “No-Knead Water-Rising Twists,” which involved a unique process of wrapping her dough in a tea towel and submerging it in warm water.
At Page One, we have seen the value that contests have with our clients – especially those eager to take advantage of social media strategies.
In 2008, we managed a number of contests for our clients to help excite and grow targeted communities. A couple of examples:
SourceForge – When SourceForge, the world’s largest repository of open source software, needed to increase their interaction with their community, they turned to Team Social Media at Page One PR. Before contacting Page One’s social media group, SourceForge’s major award of the year, their Community Choice Awards (CCA) had maxed-out participation at 38,000 people. After launching several contests including free tattoos and yes, a free sling monkey – Page One’s integrated PR, Twitter and YouTube video campaign more than tripled voting participation in the SourceForge CCA contest. More than 150,000 community members submitted ballots.
Cisco – Shelly Milam and the team at Page One are currently managing the Cisco Developer Contest. Strategically, Cisco is promoting the concept of the network as a platform. So they are offering up big money prizes to have developers build applications based on the Cisco Application Extension Platform (AXP). Much like Pillsbury looked for creative recipes – Cisco is looking for creative software applications for their routers.
These are just two of the exciting contests we ran at Page One in 2008.
As we look around the technology space, we continue to see fun contests that others are doing. Intel is running its “What’s Inside You Campaign” and HP/Microsoft are running the “Magic Giveaway“.
We don’t know who is behind some of the projects we see out there (such as Tac Anderson at HP or Ken Kaplan at Intel?)
But we’d be happy to meet with you and talk about the opportunities that contests and social media will bring in 2009.
We’ve been working to build social media campaigns for our clients this year, but decided to turn the camera on ourselves this holiday season. Get ready for our 15 seconds of fame – lights, camera, action!
Rather than design and print our usual satirical holiday cards, we decided to save a few trees by dusting off our singing voices for your viewing pleasure.
We hope you’ll check out our videos and maybe even smile. And, yes, that is a penguin in the photo! Let us know how we did but, above all, please accept our warmest wishes for a merry holiday season and a happy new year. Here’s looking to 2009 from our team to yours.
Sincerely,
Your friends at Page One PR
P.S.– If you like crazy reindeer, don’t forget to check out this special feature from our Santa Barbara office. Boy, that guy can deck the halls!
The future of PR is being created today, on sunny sidewalks and corporate cafes in Mountain View. The Google campus is germinating the future of information access and the future of public relations. There is no PR super-genius at Google inventing a new type of PR. The innovations in public information management comes from the Google campus itself, the world’s ultimate PR water cooler.
Type the word “browser” into Google or MSN search. Chrome pops up in the top three results, ahead of Apple Safari, Internet Explorer, and Flock. Google News results for “browser,” show Chrome in the top two rankings due to a Beta 3 announcement — well ahead of Firefox. Since when is a Beta 3 considered news? Is this 1994 and I’m reading about Netscape? On a YouTube search for “web browser” Chrome is the top search result and the Android (Google phone) browser is the second result. How is this level of visibility possible for a beta, feature-incomplete version of a browser that doesn’t work with Mac OS X or Linux?
Google PR hits on all media channels in parallel – blogs, video, forums and traditional media outreach. Having worked with Google on PR for their main developer conference, my impression is that they don’t have a large PR army of staff or consultants. They are efficient. Google doesn’t need to pay for an army of marketing professionals because their internal staff and the online community help them get the message out.
To understand the distributed nature of Google’s PR efforts, look at the Google Chrome launch.
Messaging
Google locked down three message points and pushed them out through all channels. The browser brings web applications closer to desktop applications by improving speed, stability, and security.
Bloggers Create Three Media Hype Waves
On Labor Day at 10pm, Sundar Pichai, the VP of product management and Linus Upson, engineering director, launched Google Chrome on Blogger on the Official Google Blog. This was ahead of the official Google press conference and press release. By Tuesday, the next working day for press, the web was already buzzing with Google Chrome news. There were already thousands of blog posts, a Wikipedia entry with hundred edits, and active chatter on Twitter before most professional reporters could get the official information. This resulted in a triple wave of coverage, first by the online community based on the blog and rumors, second by the mainstream press, then third by the online community again once they gained access to the official information and product. By the end of the day there were 50,000 blog posts and 6,000 news stories on Google Chrome. Today, 2 months later, there are 450,000 blog posts.
The first media wave was heighten
ed by Google’s clever use of Scott McCloud, a well-known professional comic artist, to produce a Comic Book on Google Chrome. The comic book was physically mailed to reporters and bloggers, arriving in Europe one day ahead of the launch. Although Google claims that this was in error, the result was that starting in Europe, bloggers scanned the comic book and distributed it online ahead of the official launch.
Google Chrome Media Center – an online press site with links to the official press release, B-roll (broadcast) and YouTube videos, logos, and screenshots.
Google organizes key message points and uses free online services to amplify their messages. Everyone can freely use Google Groups, Blogger, YouTube, and search analysis tools like Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools. The secrets of visibility hide in the open. Now, it’s up to the rest of us to open our eyes.
Business headlines these days are anxiety- inducing to say the least. And for anyone trying to get the attention of business reporters, it can be an exercise about as troubling as looking at your 401(k) balance.
But there’s a phenomenon in journalism known as the man-bites-dog story. And in this environment, good economic news is the odd yarn that gets attention.
Last week Page One PR helped SolarWorld tell the story of their new manufacturing facility opening just outside Portland, Ore. Here’s a German company placing a hefty bet on U.S. manufacturing and providing hundreds of those high-paying “green” jobs U.S. politicians are so fond of talking about. It was a powerful economic story and it received powerful coverage in outlets from Fortune to Greentech Media; CNN to the Associated Press.
Call it clean tech, renewable energy or the Green New Deal every recession has its recovery driver and my money is on green. As Page One client Clean Edge put it in their recent Carbon-Free Prosperity 2025 report, “We stand at a unique crossroads in history: the transition from polluting, resource-constrained, fossil-based energy systems to those built on sustainable, renewable, resource-efficient systems.”
Eventually the jobs and economic growth propelled by the clean tech sector — which continues to lead in venture capital tallies — might be less remarkable. But I would argue that the increasing noise in the sector will continue to require (ahem) good storytellers.
As a PR firm, we are always looking for ways to promote our clients, either through traditional PR activities like press releases or new social media campaigns. A few months ago I began investigating ways to give our clients more bang for their buck by checking out search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to see if our PR activities could help us boost SEO results.
SEO is basically a way to increase your rank on a search engine results page for a certain key word term. If you want your website to be at the top of Google’s list, there are a number of techniques to help you get there, like coding the term into your website, including the term on the content of your page, and having other websites link to your site (ideally using that term).
If a PR firm is supposed to be getting a client’s news out all over the Internet, getting links to a client’s website all over the Internet doesn’t seem like a big step. However, it’s surprising how few people in PR know how to improve their clients’ search engine status (folks in marketing generally seem to be ahead of the curve). Public relations firms are just now starting to “get it.” The upcoming Public Relations Society of America conference includes a few sessions on SEO tactics, but they are mostly aimed at beginners.
Over the past six months, we have seen a real desire from our clients to partner more on increasing their web traffic, search standings, and lead generation. With access to Google Analytics information to gain a deeper understanding of how press coverage drives traffic to their sites, we can talk with clients about the keywords and search terms that they want associated with their website.
For me, the most exciting part of integrating SEO and PR practices is the impact that clients can see as their inbound links and web traffic rise. It is cool to know that a link-rich story that ran a month ago is still sending readers to the client’s site, or that a certain publication was one of the top sites sending the client traffic.
For example, the links in a June interview in Dr. Dobb’s Journal with Jason van Zyl, founder and CTO of Sonatype and creator of Maven, sent readers to the Sonatype website as recently as last week. Folks who came to the site from that story tended to stay longer, and the percentage of those who were visiting the site for the first time was higher than average. In contrast, links on the popular developer website DZone tended to send people over to the Sonatype site more regularly, but most were people who had already been there. Sure this is interesting, but why is it useful?
From a PR perspective, you get a whole new understanding of the publications. Even though they have a very technical audience, Dr. Dobb’s Journal is a better place for high-level stories that preach the gospel of Sonatype’s Java development infrastructure. Even though they have a large readership, DZone is a better placement for stories that appeal to those familiar with Sonatype and Maven. Looking at search engine and web traffic flow can help PR firms better target story placements to advance the business interests of the client.
The big question is: why don’t we see more integration of SEO and PR?
Tired of drafting those pesky press releases? Why not use your blog to break news?
That’s what we did with MokaFive last month for the company’s iPhone Sentinel prototype. The News: Vinod Khosla-backed desktop virtualization vendor launches plug-in for iPhone users to carry a full desktop on the iPhone.
The Challenge: Drive prototype downloads during VMworld – one of the biggest virtualization industry events of the year. With Microsoft’s own virtualization event the week prior and only seven days to prepare, we can generate buzz in the middle of this loud press circus, right?
Right! We skipped the formal press release and hit the blogosphere directly via the MokaFive corporate blog. Why? Rather than reach typical press release outlets, MokaFive wanted to target a very specific audience – cream-of-the-crop tech enthusiasts who would download and test the prototype, then offer helpful feedback on the product.
During VMworld, our news hit The New York Times, CNET, TechRepublic, jkOnTheRun, Life Hacker, Mobile Devices Today, DaniWeb, LinuxStreet and more. Many of the blogs were syndicated, too.
MokaFive’s web traffic quadrupled on the day of the announcement. Life Hacker alone referred more than 2,800 people to MokaFive’s web site. According to Radian6, there were 85 total blogs talking about MokaFive 15-29 Sept; 35 of these were posted the day of our blog announcement. There were also 50 blogs that mentioned “iPhone Sentinel” 15-29 Sept; 30 of which ran the same day as our blog announcement.
MokaFive saw an increase of 273% in visitors to their downloads page. In addition, the MokaFive Player page went from fewer than 50 visits the week before VMworld to more than 8,000 visits during the week of our blog announcement. In addition, downloads from MokaFive’s community site increased by 50%.
Key takeaways:
1) Consider strategies to build up your blog readership so your first blog-only launch is sure to reach your target audience.
2) Messaging and important talking points can easily get lost in the fast-paced start-up environment. While the exercise of writing a press release often helps distill key takeaways you want to communicate, it’s not the only tool for grooming spokespeople. Make sure you always carefully prep spokespeople – with or without a press release – or they may look sloppy in interviews.
3) Don’t expect your blog to do all the work. Consider ways to market your blog to make it visible within the communities you want to reach. Then, get your PR team to pitch like crazy. For example, our top blog hits (NYT, CNET) came from personal relationships and hardcore pitching.
4) Make sure the “news” is worthy. Although Microsoft, Sun, VMware, Citrix, HP, Dell, Red Hat and a variety of startups were making desktop virtualization product and customer announcements last month, MokaFive is the first to move virtual desktops to mobile phones.
If you’re considering using your corporate blog as a platform for breaking news, go for it! If you’re a seasoned PR pro with the right relationships in place, what’s to lose?
Working in PR, we are in the midst of the social media craze. Tweet that press release. Start that Facebook group about that issue, comment on that YouTube video/blog-post/profile. It makes sense. Our industry, just like many others, is trying to take advantage of the most popular thing on the internet: social media tools, online networks and other types of user generated content in Web 2.0. We were fighting over the last drumstick until just now, when Mom brought out a second whole new Thanksgiving turkey from the oven. With all of the perceived benefits of this new type of communication, I’d like to ask the pundits and experts one question:
How in the heck am I supposed to get anything done?
It is a growing trend for companies to let their employees use social media tools (read: screw around) at work as companies begin to see the advantages and uses of having a connected workforce.
Yeah, social networking sites like Facebook (and LinkedIn, which is growing on me) are a great way to network and extend business contacts, but after I poke/nudge that influential reporter, I’ll spend the next 20 minutes looking at pictures from Marie and Tom’s trip to Hawaii. Twitter, which started out as a way for me to be able to read the current climate and see what the buzz was about at all times has turned into a platform where I can share the latest funny YouTube video with every other member of the 80 million member community who is also procrastinating at work. And Wikipedia? Don’t get me started on Wikipedia… it’s an invaluable resource for someone working in the tech industry, or anyone, but at what price?
When I worked at Goldman, we had personal email and Facebook blocked (for reasons other than productivity), something that can easily be done by any company. It seemed to work pretty well (although maybe if the i-bankers were on MySpace instead of investing in risky loan markets, we’d be doing a little better…). Does the added benefit of the interconnectedness of Web 2.0, where everyone gets to create content (and learn more in the process), outweigh the costs of millions of man-hours lost in procrastination?
Let’s use math to find out. An Arbitrary Procrastination Equation (APE):
x = abs[ b + (p + d/p)/w - (w - 2p)^(d/p) - a] + 100
where…
b = amount of time it took you to read this post (assuming you read 200 words/min)
x = you have to figure that out for yourself! This is mathematics!
p = amount of time you spent following the links in this post
d/p = distraction quotient, your propensity to keep following more links off the main linked page
w = hours you are expected to work today
a = age of your boss
I invite the procrastination experts out there on the Interweb to post their APE scores here on the blog. If x is greater than 100, you are not being productive right now.
Lists litter the Internet and newstands anywhere you go in the world. You can credit the magazine publishing genius Clay Felker and the rise of city and service magazines 30 years ago for giving us PR peeps this great tool. Why do we love lists? Let me list the ways.
1) Lists are inherently appealing.
They organize information in a way that highlights the importance of each individual idea but ties them together under one umbrella. Plus, they are easy to follow and concise, which is ideal for the short attention span of the average reader.
2) Lists are the perfect way to establish thought leadership.
You consider your client’s knowledge base, find a sexy issue that they can discuss as an expert and build a few points (five is a good number — long enough to be substantive but short enough to hold interest) that offer the reader a unique perspective. Top 5 Cell Phone No-Nos. Which Five Things Drive Linux Users Nuts? And so on.
3) One list can pique interest in a variety of topics.
If you’ve got an interesting list that encompasses different topics examined from different angles, you automatically have a pool of story options just waiting to be tapped. Let me tell you about how we developed one client list idea into a series of stories for Inc Magazine.
One of our clients, the folks over at Untangle, are experts in small business IT. Their business revolves around the understanding that tens of millions of small businesses face the same IT challenges as global enterprises but with a fraction of the budget, manpower and expertise Knowing which IT issues are most pressing — and how best to allocate limited resources to manage these issues — are complicated questions for a small business
In a brainstorming session with Untangle’s CTO, we came up with the “Top 5 SMB IT Myths” — a benchmark by which small businesses can judge how best to invest their limited resources to effectively deal with complex technology issues.
The payoff? We pitched this list to Inc. Magazine, and the reporter wanted to take each myth and explore it in more depth in an article. Not one, not two, but three stories have run so far, with the possibility for a few more.
Just goes to show you that a well-crafted list can result in a PR goldmine.
On a sunny morning in March 2008, hundreds crowded into the Santa Clara Convention Center to hear the morning’s speeches at EclipseCon. I sat beside Eclipse marketing chief Ian Skerrett and watched him type brief dispatches in a text box at the top of a strange website.
Twitter?
Back then, I thought “tweet” was just a line in the Jackson 5’s “Rockin’ Robin.”
On a more recent morning, another client, CEO Jonathan Lindo of Replay Solutions, is asking about the role of Twitter and other social media in PR. “Do you have an hour to talk about this?” I asked.
How did a guy who spent 15 years at dead-tree newspapers, then most of the next 11 as a PR guy who believed the three most important things in this business are clips, clips, and clips, start to grasp the power of social media?
When I first heard some early-adopting clients and colleagues talk about Twitter or their latest Facebook friend, my reaction was: These are toys; real men and women get clips. But as I started actively using the sites myself, their power and potential for business became evident. At the same time, the traditional media are dramatically shrinking. So, clearly, “communications” is widening and moving in new, unexpected directions.
On a personal level, I’ve sensed this is a moment that people of a certain age in every generation face, during a major industrial or cultural shift. You can rue or resist change, or you can get excited about being part of it.
I have used Twitter and Facebook to say something interesting (one hopes) about a client; strengthen relationships with reporters and analysts; stay better connected to agency colleagues. I work with one client, Appcelerator, who essentially told us: “We know you can help get us media coverage. We also need your help building a community of developers through social media.”
I’ve learned that perspective is important. People tend to fall in love with the latest “bright shiny object” — and social media are very bright and shiny. But social media remain just one element of a smart communications strategy. I don’t imagine a day when strong quality and quantity of clips will stop being important. I agree with those who feel social-media-for-social- media-sake is silly. As with any communications strategy, measurement tied to business objectives is needed to assess success or failure.
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.
Plat’Home, a Linux pioneer in Japan, turned to Page One PR to expand into the US market in late 2007. Plat’Home sells a line of small “microservers” not much bigger than a smartphone but with enough power to handle a wide range of IT applications. A publicly-traded company and an established brand in Japan, Plat’Home was essentially unknown in the U.S. With a conservative budget for overseas operations, they needed to rely on online sales and low-touch, Web-based marketing (including PR). Their initial marketing efforts focused on product flexibility and a wide range of possible uses because, hey, that’s what their Japan customers had wanted!
Plat’Home, in discussions with Page One, realized that they needed more specific differentiation in the U.S. market and re-positioned the product value proposition around the microservers’ hidden strengths – low power consumption and extreme temperature resistance. In our rollout strategy at Page One, we also offered review units to reporters. You have to see these things to believe them. Out of the box, the high quality Japanese engineering and small size – a fully functional server that fits in the palm of your hand – has a big impact.
Plat’Home has the advantage of having market-tested products. While they appear to be a startup here, the products they sell in the U.S. market are in their fifth generation, with many large satisfied Japanese customers such as KDDI (telecom), HitachiSoft (software), Yomiuri (news), and Shimizu (construction).
Page One, in media outreach and Web-based guerilla marketing, focused on “tiny, green and extreme toughness,” to re-launch Plat’Home products in the U.S.. Clips piled up quickly, with coverage in CNET, Wired, The Register, Slashdot (with 188 comments), E-Commerce Times, and many other important IT trade publications.
U.S. web site traffic, the main barometer of success and where all sales leads originate, jumped 20-fold and then 70-fold and finally 90-fold. It was like an online firehose. In-coming sales leads tracked a similar trajectory, overloading Plat’Home’s ability to respond, initially (they subsequently added “Buy Now” buttons on most of their Web pages). That’s a nice problem to have!
The U.S. market is large and noisy for foreign companies entering for the first time. Adjusting to the landscape of U.S. media can also be daunting. But Plat’Home now has increased interest in the U.S. market, both in the media and with customers. They still have work ahead of them but they have built a good foundation for long-term success by focusing their messages and playing to their strengths.
Plat’Home-At-A-Glance
Daily U.S. web site traffic before Page One PR: life support, almost flat line. Minimal inbound sales queries (see trend lines in graph below).
March 31, 2008, first press release with Page One PR (clips in CNET, others):
Web traffic up 2,000%;
In-bound sales queries up 500% over historic traffic level.
April 21, 2008, second press release with Page One PR (clips in Wired and Slashdot, others):
Web traffic up 7,000%;
In-bound sales queries up 1,000% over historic traffic level.
April 28, 2008, follow-up Page One pitching on second news release sparks second round of media coverage (clips in The Register, others):
Web traffic up 9,000%;
In-bound sales queries up 1,300% over historic traffic level.

(percentage increases in plathome.com website traffic)
Hollywood may have Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and whoever the latest “American Idol” winner was. It can have them. In Silicon Valley, we have our own celebrities. Sure, teenage girls probably don’t have posters of Larry Ellison hanging in their rooms, and certainly no paparazzo has thus far snapped photos of Jonathan Schwartz in his skivvies. But damnit if these stalwarts of software aren’t deserving of that kind of attention.
At Page One, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with one of these Silicon Valley icons. Bill Coleman founded BEA Systems (the B stands for Bill) and is the current CEO of Cassatt, a company that he began in order to rethink the way data centers are operated. In lieu of poorly conceived reality shows, however, the leaders of our valley contribute to society by offering thought leadership articles on the industry they are most closely aligned with. For Bill, this means green technology and cloud computing. For me, this meant working with Bill to craft his message as clearly and with as much impact as possible, while also making sure it was an interesting read. After all, some people don’t readily see the utter sexiness of data center management. Yes, yes, I know, I’m not one of those people either.
Collaborating with Bill has been a delightful experience, and it’s exciting to see the articles come out in print or online. After some brainstorming, it’s always fun to see what the final piece looks like. Where else have you heard Columbus and Magellan compared to data center energy efficiency, or learned about the strange coincidence between fantasy football and data center power usage? Putting a message together is easy when there are a lot of interesting things to say. Fortunately, Bill’s innovative years on the floor of the Valley make my job that much easier.
So keep living The Simple Life, Paris. We’ve got business to take care of up here.
When the organizers of the main community conference for the Python programming language contacted Page One to do PR for them, their goals were modest — just stir up some interest… oh, and turn it into the JavaOne of Python. Yikes!
Fortunately, Google (and YouTube), Microsoft, Canonical, and many, many other big brands backed PyCon. Page One loves working with developers so we accepted a small project to give back to the open source community and to gain experience with the Python community. Due to the small size of the project, PyCon organizers were only expecting a few press clippings here and there. A couple clips = success. Not hard, right?
Right away I realized that PyCon had almost zero name recognition. “What is PyCon?” or “Who do you represent?” reporters and bloggers kept asking me. Pitching the conference as a standalone event proved quite challenging. So I moved on to coupling it with other Python news (oh, by the way Guido Van Rossum is leading a session on that topic at PyCon next month!). In my opinion, that was the most fun part of the whole experience – looking for story pitches where I could legitimately insert a PyCon angle. And it worked. One story in particular was completely focused on a separate issue altogether, yet the PyCon people dominated the copy.
So what effect did Page One actually have on PyCon? Statistically, we blew away the coverage of any previous PyCon with 25 press clippings (versus a half dozen clips for the 2007 event). But it’s not the multiple podcasts, radio interviews, features in publications such as Dr. Dobb’s Journal, InfoWorld, and Internet News, or the 77 percent increase in attendance that really stands out. More important were the intangible effects – we got the word out there. People stopped asking me what was a PyCon? And that was the real aim of our work for PyCon – to maintain the grassroots, community feel while putting PyCon on the map and stimulating interest in Python in general. I’m sure attendance and press interest will increase next year… maybe not entirely because of Page One, but we definitely got the ball rolling. Have you heard of PyCon?
Hip tomes like Groundswell (2007), The Clue Train Manifesto (1999) and even a recent webinar done by monitoring service Radian6, all point to the importance of corporate listening. It’s seen as one of the foundational components of social media strategies.
A few quotes:
• “What is listening in the Groundswell – it is learning what your customers are saying. It’s tapping into that conversation. They are talking about your company, if you can listen, the information can flow back into your company.” – Forrester research vice president Josh Bernoff and co-author of Groundswell.
• “And if a company is genuinely confused about what it is, there’s an easy way to find out: listen to what your market says you are.” Clue Train Manifesto, 1999
• “Marketers are trained to do nothing but talk. Listening is not part of the traditional marketing profession.” Paul Gillen, Paul Gillen Communications, 2008 Radian6 webinar
I actually disagree a bit with Gillen’s take. The best marketers over time have been great and unapologetic listeners.
For example, in 1991, Regis McKenna, the legendary PR and marketing consultant who helped launch brands such as Apple – wrote “a feedback loop is making advertising’s one-way communication obsolete.” Blogger and VC Brad Feld paraphrased this idea here in 2007:
Today, it’s more than listening. It’s active listening. Companies need to hear, analyze and engage in the uncontrolled conversations that are taking place about your company and your market. It’s analyzing what is being said and using that information to improve your brand.
At Page One PR we do more than listen. Sure, we use tools to monitor. We build the strategy and plan for how we respond. And we analyze the information in a way that is packaged back to various stakeholders to our clients. Product managers listen for one thing. Marketing and advertising folks listen for something else. Crisis communication folks listen for something different.
One of our clients LogLogic had marketing guru Andy Lark work there for a period of time. Lark is now at Dell – which is one of the most acclaimed big businesses in terms of how it participates in uncontrolled conversations. Its entire business infrastructure is set up around active listening. Dell community members directly impact new product functionality. They help create ads. Heck, community members even help each other with customer service.
At our agency, we see the power of listening and engaging with our client’s communities – we don’t see it as new, but we do see it as a foundational component of any company committed to success.
We took a recent Stanford University graduate, convinced her to wear a cow suit and increased web site traffic by 43% for a Silicon Valley startup in three days. Well, to be fair, we also had a fox, a demon, and penguin to help us.
At LinuxWorld in San Francisco last week, we walked around the show floor in costumes, recorded video, danced, sang, and convinced attendees to participate in choosing the Next Open Source idol. The results were hilarious and great for business. GroundWork Open Source saw a 43% increase in traffic to their corporate web site in three days. They also had 1,133 people go to the community portal on their main web site and interactively vote on their favorite idol. The videos generated 5,000 views from a targeted open source audience in one week.
The project was viewed as a success, helping to increase the visibility of GroundWork Open Source in the technical community and driving relevant traffic to their web site. We also got to dress up in funny costumes in public a full two months ahead of Halloween.
In the last three months, I’ve seen a big change in the attitude that Silicon Valley startups have toward YouTube. Every few weeks, I answer questions about what companies can do with YouTube or what is required to produce, publish, and promote YouTube videos. We’ve completed several projects, including one for the Linux Foundation that was our first effort at a YouTube channel.
Based on our initial experience, we decided to experiment with lavalier microphones and boom microphones. Even for YouTube videos, the internal microphone did not allow us to get decent audio quality. We followed an interview style format and kept the videos to less than five minutes. The primary goal of the project was to help people that weren’t attending the show get a better understanding of who some of the key people in open source were. We didn’t promote the video channel aggressively.
Shelly Milam is going up to OSCON tomorrow to do a similar project for SourceForge. She’ll be using a new camera. The current plan is to stick with the internal microphone until we finish more testing with external microphones. We’re going to continue to use iMovie for editing.
We’re estimating that the total time for four movies, including production, editing, and distribution will be eight hours.
Page One PR has used social media tools in our client campaigns since we started the agency in late 2002.
We developed our expertise at companies in the early days of open source and Linux. In open source, the winners are projects and companies that can foster communities of developers the fastest. The more developers you attract to your code, the more valuable your code becomes and that in turn attracts more users to projects. If you’re a company, the more of those users who convert into customers, the more successful your business.
That experience informs how we look at “social media” PR at Page One.
It’s very challenging to attract a lot of different people around an idea. The idea by definition has to be big. And authentic. For us, it was originally open source and the promise to participate in something that would change forever how software was made.
Google came to us in mid-2008 for help on a project. Their big idea was that software would be created in the cloud and run on clients in the browser. No one owns the cloud but Google has great tools for making software in the cloud. They wanted developers to know more about those great tools. Their business interest was to attract more Web developers to their Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I think by all measures it was a huge success. Registrations were so high that Google had to shut down the lines at Moscone to start the keynote address on time. We had onsite blogging from TechCruch, podcasts by Mashable, and twitter feeds from all of the main events. Pre-event coverage was up almost 600 percent from the year before and first day coverage jumped more than 300 percent. CNET alone ran 10 stories.
Many of our agency peers in the PR industry run around all bug-eyed like old Roman statues obsessed with Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Seesmic, Plurk, LinkedIn or whatever might be the latest tool. But successful social media is not about the tools. It’s about the big idea, and then it’s about how you use all of the tools you can to foster participation in the big idea and, if you’re a company, to advance a business interest that you can measure.
A few weeks ago I got a call from a reporter who was writing a book with a section on the use of Twitter in corporate communications program. I was surprised. Up until four months ago, I thought of Twitter as a toy, a bit of time sink to chat about pets, the latest meals, and the latest reality show on TV. Before the reporter called, I had been involved in about three projects to use Twitter for corporate messaging programs. However, I had never taken a close look at how the programs were doing across our agency.
I checked up on Twitter usage across the agency and was given a big wake up call when I learned that one-third of our clients were using Twitter in corporate messaging programs. A well-known open source company that was using Twitter to promote a community choice awards contest really made me think hard about the changes I’m going to have to face with these new tools of online communication. One month into a two month promotion campaign, the number of voters had increased dramatically to 100,000. This was up from less than 40,000 total voters in the previous year. Increasing the number of voters is a primary goal of this ongoing campaign. With two weeks left in the program, we may push the total above 80,000 voters.
What changed? Why was Twitter a tool now for this company, not a toy? Although we’re still in the process of executing the campaign and haven’t finished analyzing the results, I have a few initial thoughts. Twitter is a great way to send short news updates to an existing community several times a day. In this example, Twitter wasn’t used to build a community, it helped to focus the attention of some members of an existing open source development community on a specific action. In this case, they voted on the best open source software in different categories. Twitter was used to give updates on the process for community nominations and finalist selection by the community. Since Twitter helped more people to understand the process, more people felt invested in the outcome of the awards program and decided to take the time to vote.
Getting the phone call from the reporter helped me to think through how Twitter can be used. I’ve started to use Twitter software Tweetr and twhirl on my Mac desktop and recently installed the free application Twitterific on my iPhone. For me, Twitter has finally become a tool.
and escaped with 
and alerts the authorities. With this hope, the Gardner museum and the FBI are now offering a 
but they have posted nothing about the stolen artwork. They also have a 
PR Pro: And you’ll honor the embargo? 
Case Study: Japanese software company Lunascape 
We then set up the 
