The line between PR and social media has been getting fainter and fainter for a good year or two. The integration of advertising and social media, on the other hand, seems to be a more nascent development, sped on by Facebook and LinkedIn advertising, as well as Promoted Tweets and Trends.

While some advertising agencies have begun experimenting with social media in their ad campaigns (e.g. Trident’s full-page ad showcasing Twitter messages from its customers or the Old Spice YouTube videos created by the ad agency, Wieden + Kennedy, with the help of social media consultants), social media firms seem a bit more cautious incorporating advertising into their marketing campaigns. This may be due to the distrust people generally feel toward advertising, which makes its introduction into a community-oriented social media channel rather tricky.

However, advertising can work especially well in social media due to the high engagement level of social media users. Page One PR has run Facebook ads, Twitter ads, and even placed ads on message boards and newsletters for our clients. The ads we ran can be divided into two objectives: to increase the reach or engagement level of a channel and to increase direct sales and downloads of a product or service.

What worked and what didn’t?

Message boards and newsletters tend to cater to audiences that are not being targeted by traditional forms of PR and marketing. By locating message boards and newsletters that are relevant to a client’s market, we can identify a niche audience that is very likely to be interested in a product or company. Though we may be reaching a smaller audience, it is one that is pre-vetted and predisposed to listen to our client’s message. The target audience is narrow but deep.

In contrast, running ads on Twitter-specific networks garners a very wide audience, but it is one that is primarily interested in Twitter. Even though an ad may be seen by a great number of people and can lead to a huge spike in followers, the viewers are rarely “quality” leads. As a further detraction, we have noticed that a significant number of followers generated from Twitter network ads drop off after a short period of time. The target audience here is wide and shallow.

We’ve generated better results from Facebook ads, though the outcome depends largely on the goal of the campaign and the “call to action.” We’ve found that ad campaigns that keep fans within Facebook’s platform lead to better returns. In one instance, we created and ran an ad to drive new fans to a Facebook Page. The number of fans grew by 44% with a gain of nearly 1,000 in one month and a conversion rate (percentage of people who became fans after clicking on the ad) of 30.3%. In contrast to Twitter network ads, fans generated from these campaigns did not drop off.

However, the results have been negligible for ads that require a user to leave Facebook’s site. We created a Facebook ad to increase attendance to an event. Though a high number of viewers who clicked on the ad ended up purchasing tickets to the event, the total number of clicks on the ad remained relatively low. This could indicate the keyword triggers and other ad filters were too well targeted to appeal to a large enough audience. A second Facebook ad offered a white-paper download from a client’s website, again taking the audience away from Facebook’s site and again leading to unspectacular results.

The last is also an example of what happens when ads are not integrated with an interesting marketing campaign. For instance, we ran an ad in which viewers were asked to share their funniest customer requests regarding a specific product. Perhaps not surprisingly, the results far outshone those from the ad that offered a whitepaper download. At a very basic level, the call to action should be more than just “buy now” or “click here.”

What’s on the horizon?

Social media at its best consists of both give and take – users generate and promote valuable content, while building relationships and engaging with communities. In contrast, consumers of traditional media and search engines are accustomed to a one-way street of communication. Because social media users tend to be more engaged, it signals a greater likelihood that they will interact with an ad, especially one which develops their relationship with a community further.

We’ve found the conversion rates from social media ads have been high, especially relative to more traditional forms of online advertising. In future, we plan to run more ads targeted at driving community interaction, specifically ones that keep an audience on Facebook’s site. We will also begin incorporating LinkedIn ads in our marketing campaigns and continue tweaking our campaigns on Twitter-specific advertising networks to generate better results. While care must be taken to ensure results are not offset by the cost of the ads, we have witnessed enough promise to continue using advertising in our campaigns where appropriate and we see this trend continuing for social media marketing as well.

Much like the FTC, Facebook’s advertising and promotions philosophy keeps the users’ experience in mind. Facebook has become a useful tool for advertising and promotion through social media marketing, especially for targeting specific audiences. This tool, however, does come with rules. Since Facebook can shut down your campaign if they find any violations, it is essential to understand their guidelines. In addition to following Facebook’s Privacy Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, here are a few important things you should know about Facebook’s advertising and promotion guidelines:

1) Mind the platform:

2) Be Clear and Honest:

3) Take Full Responsibility:

4) Be Proper:

By abiding by these general points, marketing and advertising on Facebook shouldn’t pose a problem to your company’s campaigns. Facebook just wants to ensure users still have a good user experience while advertisers are promoting their company or product to a targeted audience. You should always be cautious when handling tools – Facebook is no exception. Use it wisely, and you will get results.

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Research and writing assistance provided by Craig Oda (coda at pageonepr.com, Twitter @codawork)

With the crash of the economy in the fall of 2008, marketing services firms experienced a pitched battle for budget as clients slashed their spending through the recession. Perhaps hardest-hit were PR agencies. They had a tougher time justifying their ROI compared to service firms that were better at connecting their work product to revenue. Demand generation shops, SEO firms, ad agencies and anyone with a shingle that could make a case that they’d drive more qualified leads to sales than the other guy got a seat at the budget table. PR got pushed away and most public relations agencies saw revenues drop in 2009, and margins fall to record lows (under 14%, according to StevensGouldPincus).

That budget battle forced by the recession arrived at about the same time as more and more brands began to take social media seriously in their marketing. Many companies were frankly desperate to try anything that might work. And to their delight they found that the investments required in social media tended to start small. So they jumped in feet first.

Okay, now who decides what the plan will be?

Who’s in charge of that social media spending and strategy and execution?

Surprise! It turns out no one. The PR people tended to raise their hands first but many flailed since social media was so much different than the strict message control practiced by most brands’ public relations departments. The creative services agencies took the most of this opportunity. They understood a good idea and could create compelling content. Many had digital groups that could also do the digital plumbing required to publish that content on the Web. PR firms usually had to outsource this activity. Unfortunately a lot of ad agencies still only understand how to broadcast one way. They missed the engagement part of the equation required in successful social media campaigns.

Filling much of this gap in the meantime are some smart specialist firms that consult on social media marketing. Their principals pontificate on panels at prestigious conferences. They’re all over Twitter. We see some of them in our work with global brands such as Cisco and SAP. They’re smart. But most seem weak on the execution side of social media marketing. They have good ideas but they fall down trying to put them into practice. This phenomenon has been good for our business at Page One.

Tim Dyson, CEO of Next15, the UK-based holding company for some PR firms that we respect, pointed out recently in his blog that ad agencies were winning social media awards. Ad agencies are playing on the turf of PR agencies and winning. He observed that PR agencies can play that same game. At Page One, we’re already taking budget from the ad side.

Most of our big social media clients discover and hire us through individual business units. These groups have a business problem they want to solve. They have good budgets, too. They’re considering social media in the mix with other marketing spends, including advertising, webinars, lead generation, online micro-sites, games and more. The PR/communications teams within these companies know that we’re helping these business units, and we coordinate with them, but they’re not driving the strategy. And they don’t control the budget. It’s money that comes from marketing (usually from the ad spend), not whatever shrinking fraction has been allocated this fiscal year to PR/communications.

I think that there is an opportunity for PR to take charge of social media, but at the same time learn how to play well with the ad side of the house. PR can move faster and respond more quickly than the advertising people. We’re two-way communicators who just need to let go of our control issues. At the same time, ad people are great on content.

We’re in the middle of a pretty exciting social media campaign right now with one of the world’s largest software companies. We’re working closely with the client’s branding agency and the budget is split two-thirds, one-third between us. We’re driving the overall strategy and communications and owning the direct relationships with influencers. They own presentation of content. It’s going great right now. We’ll see when the results come in. I think it may prove to be an interesting model for future campaigns.

At Page One, we’re always looking for new ways to use social media and this includes experimenting with advertising on channels like Facebook or LinkedIn to increase our client’s follower base or engagement. For those of you who are already familiar with online advertising, I’m sure you’ve come to learn the top tips and tricks with online text ads. You can probably even recite the acronyms in your sleep – CPM, CPC, CTR… However, for those of you who are less familiar, I’ve pulled together a few tips of the trade for each channel.

Advertising on Facebook

The ads on Facebook show up on the right side of the pages with the ability to choose an image to go along with your text. You have the ability to choose the title for your ad, the image, the ad text and the destination URL. And at Facebook has publicized, you’ll be reaching out to 400M users with the added benefit of targeting in great demographic detail.

As you’re building out your ad, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Advertising on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has two types of advertising programs. Advertising Sales which includes rich display ads for campaign budgets over 250K and DirectAds, the targeted option for simple text and image based ads. In this blog post, I’ll be referring to DirectAds. Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn ads give you the ability to choose your ad image, title, description and destination URL.

A few things to keep in mind:

Before I let you run off and create your wildly successful ad campaigns, remember to not shy away from experimentation – especially when you’re advertising on social media platforms. Try out different texts and taglines for your ads or change the image to see if there is any improvement. With social media advertising, one of the great benefits is that you’re running on unchartered territory and you can change or pull your ads whenever you want to make them more effective.

Advertising on Twitter has been a hot topic for years, and with the recent release of Promoted Tweets, more self-proclaimed social media experts are firing off about this topic than ever before. It’s still up for debate how effective Promoted Tweets will be. I personally think the monetization plan has potential because Twitter’s Dick Costolo is saying that they’re focusing on user experience. This got me thinking about the non-traditional forms of advertising that already take place on Twitter – high-profile or celebrity users who use the microblogging platform to self-promote (their company, television show, clothing line, etc.) but still maintain a unique personality that delivers value to their followers.

For example, one of my favorite groups of people to follow on Twitter is the cast of Modern Family. A number of the show’s actors have active Twitter accounts, where the majority of their tweets are @replies to fellow cast mates.

The content is all very light-hearted – they tweet about what’s for lunch, or post photos of their travels while on the job. The key is that they tweet content the average user would post to their own friends, except these guys just happen to be well-known actors with a hit TV show. Since I follow most of the cast, their @replies to each other all show up on my Twitter feed. Reading these “personal” conversation chains on a daily basis while I catch up with the Twitterverse keeps the show on my mental radar. Essentially, it’s free advertising for the show due to the public nature of Twitter, and the direct access it gives us to anyone with an account.

Nowadays, actors can do more than appear on talk shows to promote their movies or films to reach out to their fans. By maintaining an active Twitter account, they can stay visible to their followers, and once in a while, throw in a tweet about their new movie opening this weekend, and the follower probably won’t subconsciously tag this as an overt advertisement.

For example, the actor that plays Cam on Modern Family (@ericstonestreet) tweeted the following:

To me, this is a more effective way of getting a fan to tune into a new episode than sitting through a 15-second television spot that cost ABC a chunk of their advertising budget.

This is the kind of advertising noise that I welcome into my daily media consumption. And if you find my views to be too idealistic, I understand that the actors could have “Twitter campaigning” written into their contracts and that they may be getting paid by ABC to be online ambassadors for the show. I’m also aware that celebrity accounts do not benefit Twitter financially, yet. If Twitter figures out a way to seamlessly integrate promoted tweets into our Twitter experience, much like the Modern Family cast does with their @replies and indirect episode promotion, this form of targeted advertising could be Twitter’s golden ticket to a profitable business model.

With more than 300,000 units sold within the first weekend, the Apple iPad is on track to be as popular as the iPhone (AT&T reported about 150,000 iPhones were activated the first weekend when released in June 2007). In less than three years, the iPhone has changed what the public expects, not only from their mobile device, but also from their favorite brands.  Now marketers are scrambling to develop apps that provide another dimension to the consumer experience. So how will the iPad evolve the brand experience?

In a post for TechCrunch (http://tcrn.ch/ct25pM), Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff writes that “we are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator.” If Cloud 1 is defined by chat, type, tabs, pulling information and the notebook, then Cloud 2 is all about video, touch, feeds, pushing information and the tablet.  Benioff calls this transformation “cloud + social + iPad.”

I believe that the touch and video aspects of the iPad are going to have an especially large impact on the future of marketing and advertising.  Advertisements are going to be forced to become even more interactive, finding new and better ways to engage their target audience. Consumers will be able to touch, drag and manipulate products that appear on a sidebar, or touch to play a video to see the product in action. Wired Magazine offered the industry a glimpse into the future with the video demonstration of their new iPad App (http://bit.ly/ccCLkR). The user in the preview touches a car in an advertisement, and turns it 360 degrees.  In a body wash ad, the user touches the words to have more or less information appear.  An article that highlights a product is touched to go directly to the product website.

Tablets are a new, mostly untouched avenue for marketers to reach consumers.  And the tablet format will become much more pervasive as competitors like HP, Google and Dell join the race.  The iPad is pushing brands to the brink of the next phase of marketing, and I think brands that are quick to embrace this opportunity will be seen as innovative, relevant and savvy, and those brands that are resistant to the tablet format will be seen as (literally) out of touch.

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.