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.

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.

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.

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:

39.9% – BLOGS
33.3% – TWITTER
11.1% – SCREENCASTS
5.6% – VIDEO
5.6% – CONTESTS
5.6% – OTHER
0.0% – FACEBOOK
0.0% – LINKEDIN

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.

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.