Here at Page One, our social media techniques are constantly evolving. The context of social media marketing as a practice is ever-changing due to both the transformation of the platforms themselves and the abilities of third party applications in terms of monitoring and measurement. However, with all the discussion about evolution we can lose sight of the basics, especially when it comes to Twitter strategy. Last week in a “Twitter 101” presentation I discussed the principles of an effective Twitter strategy and wanted to share them with the Page One blogosphere.

Step 1: Identify the overall goal of your Twitter campaign. Similar to traditional PR, the messages you push out via Twitter should have an agenda (or potentially a variety of agendas). Goals for a Twitter handle can be one or a combination of the following:

1. Boost Awareness of a Company or Product

2. Broadcast and/or Promotion Channel: Positive news and information surrounding a brand, cause, or company launch.

3. Engagement with Industry Influencers and/or Potential Customers

4. Reputation Management: Proactive and Reactive Customer Service Channel.

5. Notoriety – Twitter can deem you an expert in a given field.

These may seem like common sense to an active user or even a Twitter novice, but often times the ultimate goal can be overlooked.  It’s important to take a step back and specify your goal(s) first as this is the foundation of a campaign.

Step 2: Identify the key components of your strategy. Whether it’s traditional or digital media, knowing what elements drive your marketing messages is imperative. The following are building blocks for an effective Twitter strategy:

1. Audience – Identify what type of customer/influencer is active in social media. For example, in the high-tech space we often ask ourselves: how technical is this audience? Are they developers, engineers, or is this audience connected to the product/service in terms of buying power for a company/organization? (These questions differ depending on the social media space.)

2. Messaging – The messages you push out are relative to #1: what type of information is the audience you specified interested in? Here at Page One, we construct Twitter messaging matrixes to review with clients before we even draft our first Tweet.

3. Content Production & Editorial Calendar – It’s important to note ahead of time appropriate corporate assets such as whitepapers and case studies that may be useful for promotion. Schedule this content by creating a monthly editorial calendar. Also, if you’re running a blog, it’s useful to outline a blog pipeline to promote via Twitter. This way the messaging has fluidity in terms of themes and timing.

4. Interaction/Engagement – As you build up your feed begin to target community influencers. Twitter is all about participation and recognition: a simple ReTweet or #FollowFriday can catch their attention.

In conclusion, once you’ve addressed your main goal for Twitter and outlined the key components driving this goal, you’ve successfully developed a Twitter strategy. Hopefully these tips have been useful for Twitter experts and newbies alike, and feel free to contact me on Twitter @haleyhebert or comment below if you have other ideas or questions. In part 2 of this series I’ll be covering how to gain followers on Twitter and how to find other desirable handles to follow, so stay tuned.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

What do you think?

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?