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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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.