I’ve mentioned on this blog before that Page One was tapped to provide social media support for SAPPHIRE NOW, a global enterprise conference put on by SAP. The conference simultaneously took place in 3 locations: in Frankfurt, Orlando, and of course – online. The event also featured great keynote speakers such as Vice President Al Gore, Sir Richard Branson, and SAP founder Hasso Plattner. The global nature of SAPPHIRE NOW attracted lots of attention from traditional and online media outlets, but our job was to carve out a social media presence for the conference. We wanted people to feel like they were taking part in a large-scale international event, but also provide an intimate online community for them to have conversations with each other and voice opinions in order to build relationships. We set out to achieve this by establishing official Twitter and Facebook channels for the conference.

For marketing professionals, the great and sometimes most difficult thing about social media is that it never stops. Conversations don’t turn off during non-business hours. This is why it was essential to push out a steady flow of messaging on Twitter and Facebook 24 hours a day. Online monitoring was also a non-stop process that allowed us to respond rapidly to any pressing concerns that were expressed by those tweeting about the conference. As the content creator of both those channels, I made sure to follow the conference through the live streaming broadcasts around the clock so I could react in real-time to the day’s most important news and announcements. Yes, this meant waking up at 3am to tweet from my bed for the Frankfurt audience, but hey, it was all worth it!

SAPPHIRE NOW lasted for just three days, but the online buzz was strong for long after. At the end of the conference, we walked away with some impressive stats:
- #4 Twitter trending topic in the U.S.
- 10,478 mentions of the #sapphirenow hashtag
- 3,337 fans for the Facebook Page
- 21,561 Facebook Page views

If you’d like to learn more about our social media work with SAP, check out our SAPPHIRE NOW case study below.

As Shelly Milam mentioned in an earlier post, the annual SAP conference, SAPPHIRE NOW, was a great social media success. In addition to her points, I wanted to touch on two other strategies that Page One and SAP developed to encourage quality levels of social media activity.

1. Use of official hashtags
The conference underwent a name change, from Sapphire 09 to SAPPHIRE NOW. To make sure social media users were clear about the re-brand, Page One made sure to use the #sapphirenow hashtag in the majority of our tweets from the @SAPPHIRENOW Twitter feed. This helped to ensure that the new name would gain visibility before the conference started. We didn’t want to risk having the Twitterverse split up mentions of the SAPPHIRE NOW conference by using more than one hashtag when they tweeted about the event.

Hashtags allow tweets to be grouped together so that they can be easily located via Twitter search. For a large conference event like SAPPHIRE NOW, the hashtags were particularly useful for three groups of people. Many conference attendees in Orlando and Frankfurt were active live-tweeters who used the #sapphire to tag their updates, especially during the keynote speeches, which were timed to be presented to both locations simultaneously. SAP also launched an innovative website that allowed people to attend the conference virtually, and many online attendees were live-tweeting while streaming the keynotes. Finally, for people who could not attend the conference physically or virtually, the #sapphirenow stream was publishing such a high volume of tweets that it provided them a play-by-play of the conference’s most important events.

The #sapphirenow hashtag collected over 12,131 mentions by the end of the conference on May 19. On May 18, during the executive keynote speeches by Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott, the hashtag was the number 4 Twitter trending topic in the U.S. This uniform use of the correct hashtag would not have happened without establishing #sapphirenow as the official hashtag weeks before the conference.

2. Designating multiple routing paths for the Twitter concierge
In addition to being the official voice of the conference, one of the functions of the @SAPPHIRENOW Twitter feed was to act as a concierge for attendees who needed assistance with anything from finding the nearest bathroom, getting more information on a certain session, or navigating through the virtual website. Many attendees asked questions via @reply or DM, and Page One and SAP worked together to designate the proper routing path for each type of question and for each location (Frankfurt, Orlando, or online). Each routing path led to the appropriate SAP employee either on-location or back at SAP headquarters. This made sure that every question asked would be answered as soon as possible via Twitter.

A Twitter feed cannot just spew out information. It needs to listen. Social media platforms are expected to meet a higher standard when it comes to customer service. Corporate accounts are expected to have a personal voice behind the brand that engages with its followers and fans. Social media users like to know that their opinions are being heard, and when the @SAPPHIRENOW feed responded to followers who had conference-related questions, they were appreciative of our help. This helps spread positive content about the Twitter feed, and it lets our followers know that they are important to us.

The development of both these strategies helped to make @SAPPHIRENOW a successful Twitter feed leading up to and during the conference. An overwhelming majority of the Twitter conversations about the conference were extremely positive and attendees were very impressed with SAPPHIRE NOW’s social media initiatives. Key takeaway: in social media, a little pre-planning can lead to a high payoff.

It was a tough gig. Could Page One create and grow a social media community for a vendor entering a new market? The vendor did not have a product to sell. Yet. Oh, and the incumbent market champion created the category several years ago and did we mention their name?

Amazon. Yikes.

This Amazon challenge raises an interesting question about timing in general for social media campaigns. Should a vendor initiate a social media campaign as part of a strategy to enter a new market without a product or service that is generally available? After all, a big component of any serious social media campaign is identifying, attracting and energizing a community conversation around shared interests. For vendors, that usually means customers.

We think the answer is yes. Especially when you are raising awareness with a targeted community of early-adopter prospects while at the same time educating the industry influencers about your strategy and upcoming offering. It also helps you attract beta customers before your GA formal launch. This kind of pre-release campaign is particularly effective with technical audiences used to doing things another way (i.e., using Amazon).

For this new client, we followed the Page One process for developing a strategy for our social media campaigns. We monitored the online conversations around the client and its competitors, identified the key topics and influencers, prioritized the communications channels, and recommended a series of targeted programs that we could measure to achieve our business goals.

Fast forward to today, and yay! we surpassed Amazon on Twitter (measured quantitatively by followers and qualitatively by engagement), caught up with them on Facebook and still have some work to do on blogs. But by any measure it was a very successful start for just six months. What did we do?

First, we quickly recognized that we couldn’t compete with Amazon around the terms associated directly with “cloud computing.” They pioneered this category and we didn’t want to start our campaigns from a deficit position. Rather, we recommended to the client that we start by building on their positions of strength. In this case, those strengths were virtualization leadership and a very large installed base of developers already familiar with their enterprise solutions. We said, “Let’s talk about how easy it is for enterprise developers to use what they already know and move some of their work to a public cloud. And back.” It was and is a cool simple story and a unique value proposition that appealed to our target audience.

Following are some of the metrics we reported back to our clients at the six-month stage in our engagement. By the time the client launches a generally available offering, the key influencers and early prospects in the market will be well informed and ready to act on the details of that forthcoming announcement.

Growth in three social media channels managed by Page One:

Last week Page One finished up a social media engagement with SAP to support the SAPPHIRE NOW user conference.  This was the first year SAP put a social strategy together for the conference and Page One was tapped to manage the Twitter feed and Facebook Page.  By the last day of the event, the Facebook Page had 3,332 fans, with 194 wall posts and 115 comments, and the Twitter feed had 2,037 followers, with over 780 retweets and over 12,130 uses of the #sapphirenow hashtag.

The team is still working on the final analysis reports, but I thought I’d share a couple of the tactics we used.  These two seemed to  work out especially well:

Influencer Identification and Outreach

SAP’s sheer size is both a blessing and a curse.  While a large ecosystem definitely helps amplify social messages there are an overwhelming number of groups within SAP and they all tend to have different goals and objectives.  One of our first tasks was to identify all the potential external and internal influencers and organize a master list.  We then developed a strategy for outreach to help amplify our reach.  Using a combination of automated social media monitoring tactics and good old fashion direct phone calls and in-person meetings, Page One was able to pull together a list of external influencers (analysts, media, bloggers, SAP Mentors, SAP Alum, and customers) and identify their social media locations.  We then went to work identifying the internal influencers (employees, partners attending the conference, marketing teams, speakers) and organized their various messages and goals for the conference.  All of this came together in a master multi-tabbed Google Doc spreadsheet that the team accessed on a daily basis to reference which assets to promote, who to reach out to, and when to push certain messages.  A master content calendar of our daily Tweets and Facebook posts was also created and regularly updated to share with SAP so the internal teams could help retweet and re-post our content.

Live Social Media Coverage

During the month’s leading into the conference we worked with SAP to develop a “week-of” Twitter and Facebook strategy to facilitate conference conversations through social media channels.  While there were many on-site programs that came together last week (a Twitter Concierge program, social media Q&As during keynotes, video content from the show floor, jumbotrons displaying tweets at the Santana concert, etc.) the real gem was the Social Ambassadors program.  In addition to the main @SAPPHIRENOW Twitter feed, we had a group of social ambassadors on the ground at both conferences that live tweeted highlights each day.  Each ambassador reported on a specific conference topic and acted as the real-time eyes and ears on what happened at Orlando and Frankfurt. They were given a dedicated Twitter feed, topic hashtag and FlipCam to help upload videos straight from the floor, as well as share their thoughts and insights on the latest news that came out of SAPPHIRE NOW.

Page One has been asked to provide social media support for quite a few conferences in the past few years, ranging all the way from Google I/O to McAfee FOCUS.  While there are still no silver bullets, each time it seems like we pick up a few more tips and tricks to make the social media experience better for the conference attendees.  What tactics have you found most useful for conference promotions?

The other day, the Israeli army canceled a planned operation because a soldier posted a status update with details on the mission. He was relieved of duty, court-martialed, and sentenced to 10 days in prison. And now the military is cracking down on soldiers’ use of social networking sites.

An entire military operation was scrapped due to a post on Facebook.

Social networking sites like Facebook are often soldiers’ primary means of staying in touch with people back home. Security vulnerabilities are no doubt a major concern, but shouldn’t soldiers be able to stay in contact with family and friends?

While the soldier clearly didn’t exercise much discretion, or confidentiality, this action raises a powerful point: social networking sites empower every single community member to post virtually anything they choose. Doesn’t matter if you’re a PR flack or general in the army, you have the same abilities on social networking sites.

This “freedom” has gotten some high profile athletes in trouble. It’s commonplace now for entire stories to be written about what a player said (er, wrote) after a game. There’s been fines handed down by the NBA based on athletes’ tweets. Both the NBA and NFL have explicitly outlawed tweeting during games. A football player at the University of Oregon was even kicked off the team recently because of what he wrote on his Facebook account. Where before it only mattered what athletes said at a game or press conference, now they must be conscious of what they say off the field as well.

Similarly, a woman in Chicago was sued last summer by her realty firm for tweeting that her apartment was moldy. “The company claims her tweet was published ‘throughout the world’ and severely damaged its good name.” Yikes. No complaints, no grievances, better watch what you’re tweeting or you might end up with a lawsuit on your hands.

Where do you draw the line? Isn’t the point of social media to have a free flowing, unfiltered conversation among any number of participants? But not when that conversation jeopardizes a business or lives… It’s a fine line. Whatever the case, social networking sites are a public forum. People are easier to access. Messages are broadcast to a wide audience – everything is on the record. And the record is rolling 24/7. It’s a whole new ballgame. Better adapt.

“Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent,” said Bertrand Russell. And while his words are typically poured over by philosophers as opposed to the Technorati, his idea can be applied to pretty much every part of human history. We are an inherently skeptical population, it seems. Especially when it comes to technology.

Feature adoption is often met with an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude. But two new pieces of technology, one big and one small, from Google and Twitter respectively got me thinking recently about what it really takes to change people’s social media habits.

Twitter’s official retweet function has been met with a lot of fanfare, but hardly the kind Twitter wanted. Until now, “retweeting” was always an unofficial function, a meme perpetuated by users who needed a system with which to quote one another. Seeing this user behavior, Twitter took steps to codify retweeting by making it an actual feature. In doing so, however, they’ve inadvertently disturbed the flexibility and editability inherent to the unofficial function. People have protested on Twitter in two ways: by voicing their hatred for the new function, and by continuing to retweet the old-fashioned way.

Old-fashioned communication is what Google is trying to evolve, as well, but on a much more grandiose scale. Google Wave has been billed as the next evolution in online communication, a highly collaborative and expandable platform that will “bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.” And as with every new Google product, there’s been a scramble to procure beta invites. But from my personal experience, excitement quickly gives way to confusion. The first line of any wave is almost always something resembling “I’m in the wave,” quickly followed by “I don’t get it.”

So are the official retweet and Google Wave failures? Hardly (if history has taught us anything…). I was recently Gchatting with a friend about Google Wave. There were a lot of questions about why it exists, what it does, and whether or not we’d ever use it…the only conversations that really seem to be going on about Wave right now. Then she forwarded me her very first Gchat from a few days after the Gchat feature was launched:

My Friend:
testing…
i just saw the green light.
and this is the first time i’ve used this moderately silly feature.

Her Friend:
yeah it doesn’t seem like a winner to me, but i tend to accept google’s ingenuity unconditionally

Almost three years and literally thousands of chats later, her friend’s words ring true with a sort of prescience. And my friend’s conclusion about Wave? “[I] may have to continue to hold judgment on Wave.”

Such patience when it comes to technology is certainly a virtue, especially given the social media public’s tendency to rapidly warm up to new shiny toys. After Facebook implemented the newsfeed, there was a tremendous backlash (as every Facebook redesign has experienced since), but Mark Zuckerberg stood his ground. Now it’s a central feature. Looking back on this event, Zuckerberg summed up social media users’ skepticism-turned-adoption quite lucidly and succinctly: “A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

That said, the only sure bet that can be made is that the final draft of Google Wave and Twitter’s official retweet will have to go through a number of revisions before people consider mass adoption. But human stubbornness works both ways. Google and Twitter will be just as determined to perfect these new features as people are reluctant to start using them. And if history’s shown us anything, it’s that time is on their side.

I had a CEO compare Page One’s work to a tequila shot the other day. I took it as a compliment.

“I really feel like we’ve turned a corner,” he told me as he drove through the streets of San Francisco, clutching his blackberry. “I like being part of the conversation. And Page One, you guys were the lubricant. You were the shots of tequila.”

So what’s he talking about?

The most important aspect of media these days — no matter what community you’re trying to reach — is participating in a conversation. That’s why “social media” has become the Next Big Thing.

Nothing is one-way anymore and if you’re not having a two-way conversation you’re being left behind.

My two favorite social media tools for dipping into the online conversation are blogs and a Twitter feed. Twitter is great for rapid-fire, real-time exchanges, while blogs provide the opportunity for more thought out commentary, with room for all the blog bling: charts, links, graphs and photos.

Good PR is all about noticing openings in the conversation and finding a place for your client at the right table so they can join in. All these new social media tools are just more ways to grok the seating chart.

So why did this CEO compare our work to tequila? Well in addition to being a good-time guy he’s also smart. And when he piped up with a particularly timely blog post about the growing influence of Facebook online, we made sure the right people saw it and incorporated it into their conversation on the topic.

In one day, his blog saw a 600 percent traffic increase. He’s pulling his chair up to the table.

The work we do behind the scenes doesn’t go in a shot glass. It’s the relentless targeting of the right influencers in the right way, using all the tools at our disposal: A tweet, a note, a link. A few more.

But if the metaphor works for you, what we do is tequila in action. Just enough to get a good vibe going, never so much that you regret it in the morning.

Can community and collaboration surface the same innovation in advertising as it does in software development? This is the question that we’ve partnered with The Linux Foundation to answer in the months ahead with the “I’m Linux” video campaign.

The campaign seeks to find the most creative user-generated videos that showcase what Linux means to those who use it, and inspire others to try it. The winner gets an all expenses paid trip to Tokyo.

We’ve seen some really unbelievable, early results due to a few important strategies we defined up front.

The name of the contest was very important. We needed to help people immediately understand the context and purpose of the campaign, so we chose “I’m Linux” as a take on the widely known “I’m a Mac; I’m a PC” advertisements. And, it’s working: the online conversations taking place are noisy ones with both criticism (“why be a copycat?”) and applause (“finally, an ad campaign for Linux!”).

Another key component of our strategy was the decision to establish a panel of judges to review the submissions and help choose the winner. While we considered leaving the voting completely up to website voters, we decided to establish a panel of 5-6 judges so that we could tap into their online followers. Each judge has their own Twitter account and their own blog, among other social media channels. This exponentially increases the reach of our message and the awareness of the campaign.

The benefits of this strategy are being proven early on. While the campaign doesn’t officially launch until January 26, 2009, it is important to solicit a variety of early entries that set the tone and build momentum for the contest. By confirming judges in December and early January, and encouraging them to start talking about the campaign, we have been able to see immediate results.

Matt Asay, Larry Augustin and Tim O’Reilly were among our earliest judges to join us in the journey to find the best Linux ad. And, when O’Reilly “tweeted” about the campaign and his role as a judge late on a Friday evening in mid-December, we started to see the Twittersphere and blogosphere light up like the phones during a Howard Stern radio broadcast.

We’ve seen more than 200 additional “tweets” since O’Reilly’s shout out. We’ve also seen 43 news articles, including a Slashdot entry with more than 400 comments and 1,200 Diggs.

Also, within this two-week period after the “leak,” The Linux Foundation’s YouTube channel jumped from one subscription to nearly 100 with over 2,500 channel views. And, two of the early “I’m Linux” contest submissions have already received a combined total of 5,354 views. Simultaneously, The Linux Foundation’s Facebook group has jumped to more than 250 members.

The most interesting thing about campaigns like this one, and the variety of new PR tactics being tested, is that there are no longer any “rules of PR.” With the “I’m Linux” contest, we didn’t have to conduct a focus group or do exhaustive planning and research in advance to understand how people would react to the campaign. We put a short description on the web and engaged community influencers to share the idea with their followers. Now, we’ll help to facilitate the conversation and adjust the campaign as we go.

Look, ma: no hands!

Beta launches rarely attract much hype. But when a company shifts strategic direction and runs onto the competitive playing field with the big guys like Adobe, Sun and Microsoft, then you want some buzz. Okay, a lot of buzz! Would a 3,500% increase in website traffic on the day of the launch be nice? That’s what we did with Appcelerator.

Appcelerator wanted to make a big market splash with their launch of Titanium, an open source Adobe AIR killer. They wanted to reach traditional media publications, but also developers and social media communities. Most PR launches only target three communications channels – media, bloggers, and analysts. Our launch of Titanium targeted seven different communications channels in parallel, relying heavily on a coordinated social media campaign.

We started out securing a strong messaging platform, which allowed us to effectively position Titanium in each different communication channel we targeted and let us build a strong base to launch our social media activities. Following the messaging, we organized an intense media list and began outreach. Page One does media and blogger outreach different than most PR firms. First, we don’t spam. We begin conversations and relationships. We quickly lined up 12 media briefings in the weeks before the launch and we were asked for embargoed launch materials by every publication in our top 20 list. We also directed, produced and promoted a sophisticated vision video featuring the CEO and CTO, and promoted a series of screencasts that gave reporters a more technical look under the hood of the platform with demonstration applications. On announcement day, we coordinated a community email and a more technical blog post for the Appcelerator blog, manned the Appcelerator Twitter feeds, and monitored the blogosphere, directing the CEO when it was necessary to comment on specific blogs.

The results speak for themselves. Not only was there a 3,500 percent increase in website traffic on the day of the launch, but the coordinated PR and social media outreach drove qualified Web site traffic to ‘money’ pages for Appcelerator: 40 percent of all traffic hit the product demos, downloads, documentation, or product FAQ. There were more than 10,000 page views to the vision video in the first week, more than 10,000 product downloads, more than 44 unique stories placed in the media and a four-fold jump in Twitter followers.

That’s buzz for a beta launch that you can bank.

Hip tomes like Groundswell (2007), The Clue Train Manifesto (1999) and even a recent webinar done by monitoring service Radian6, all point to the importance of corporate listening. It’s seen as one of the foundational components of social media strategies.

A few quotes:
• “What is listening in the Groundswell – it is learning what your customers are saying. It’s tapping into that conversation. They are talking about your company, if you can listen, the information can flow back into your company.” – Forrester research vice president Josh Bernoff and co-author of Groundswell.
• “And if a company is genuinely confused about what it is, there’s an easy way to find out: listen to what your market says you are.” Clue Train Manifesto, 1999
• “Marketers are trained to do nothing but talk. Listening is not part of the traditional marketing profession.” Paul Gillen, Paul Gillen Communications, 2008 Radian6 webinar

I actually disagree a bit with Gillen’s take. The best marketers over time have been great and unapologetic listeners.

For example, in 1991, Regis McKenna, the legendary PR and marketing consultant who helped launch brands such as Apple – wrote “a feedback loop is making advertising’s one-way communication obsolete.” Blogger and VC Brad Feld paraphrased this idea here in 2007:

Today, it’s more than listening. It’s active listening. Companies need to hear, analyze and engage in the uncontrolled conversations that are taking place about your company and your market. It’s analyzing what is being said and using that information to improve your brand.

At Page One PR we do more than listen. Sure, we use tools to monitor. We build the strategy and plan for how we respond. And we analyze the information in a way that is packaged back to various stakeholders to our clients. Product managers listen for one thing. Marketing and advertising folks listen for something else. Crisis communication folks listen for something different.

One of our clients LogLogic had marketing guru Andy Lark work there for a period of time. Lark is now at Dell – which is one of the most acclaimed big businesses in terms of how it participates in uncontrolled conversations. Its entire business infrastructure is set up around active listening. Dell community members directly impact new product functionality. They help create ads. Heck, community members even help each other with customer service.

At our agency, we see the power of listening and engaging with our client’s communities – we don’t see it as new, but we do see it as a foundational component of any company committed to success.