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.

We all know that social media offers marketing execs a great avenue to engage directly with their customers, but how do you go about doing it well without alienating your community?  We’ve been working with our clients to develop interactive marketing/social media campaigns, which allow marketers to use social media to stir up customer interaction and then funnel that activity into traditional marketing objectives, such as increases in product downloads, website traffic, etc.

For SAP we recently launched a campaign aimed at increasing interaction within the Crystal Reports community to drive website traffic and increases in free trial downloads.   On June 28, an online personality quiz launched and within the first four weeks had over 1,000 completions and 1,615 views.  The online “Reporting Artist” quiz asks the Crystal Reports community “what type of reporting artist are you?” through a series of humorous questions and then ends with one of four different personalities based on the responses.  Free trials for the Crystal products and whitepapers are baked into the personality responses.

To continue to build upon the success of the quiz, we are launching a new campaign on August 16 called “Reportapalooza”. You can check out the site now, but be sure to come back on the August 16 when the first challenge launches!  Through social media monitoring, we identified five of the top SAP Crystal Reports experts and are having them compete in a three month long challenge, similar to Bravo’s Top Chef.  During the campaign the experts will be asked to use the SAP Crystal solutions products as well as rely upon community involvement to complete a series of five challenges.  In November, we will crown the top Crystal Expert and shower him or her with prizes and recognition.  There are also a lot of incentives and prizes worked in for the community to participate along side the experts.

The goal of Reportapalooza and the interactive micro-site is to continue to build quality interaction within the community and ultimately increase Crystal product downloads.  Page One worked with White Rhino to develop the campaign concept and creative assets.  We designed the social media strategy to ensure that we tapped into the viral nature of the community and are using the SAP Crystal solutions Twitter and Facebook channels to drive traffic to the site.  Be sure to check out Reportapalooza in the coming weeks!

With social media growing increasingly more influential, more companies are looking to promote their products through social media. Some campaigns really work, and, as Page One managing partner Craig blogged a while back, some campaigns really don’t. Last year, Ford broke into the social media realm to promote the Fiesta, a small, European-style car targeted towards “millennials.” To support the young, spontaneous feel of the Fiesta, Ford asked 100 participants to drive Fiestas around to complete themed missions and to share them on the Fiesta’s official Twitter handle, Facebook page, Flickr account and YouTube channel.

On July 26th, Ford took an even bigger leap by doing away with a traditional auto show revealing and instead used Facebook as their main platform to reveal the new 2011 Ford Explorer. At 12:01 ET, Ford placed a “reveal” tab on the official Facebook page containing a YouTube preview video and an agenda of events throughout the reveal date. After the YouTube video reveal at 7:40 AM ET, an interactive feature to explore the Ford Explorer was added to the top of the page, with “Like” buttons attached to each feature. The rest of the day’s events consisted of live chats with the fans and people of Ford (including CEO Alan Mulally.) Fans barraged the wall expressing opinions about the car and asking a lot of questions for everyone involved in the live chats. Ford also bought ads on other sites with Facebook “Like” buttons embedded into the ads to direct fans right back to the main hub of the campaign.

I’ve got to give it to Ford – I think their campaigns are working out well. Ford is utilizing social media to have an on-going conversation with their consumers while aiming to increase awareness of and interest in a product. With the Fiesta Movement, they were able to get 50,000 people interested in purchasing the car (97 percent of which do not already own a Ford) just by asking 100 millennials to drive their car and share their experiences through social media. As for the Explorer reveal, I think Ford did a great job utilizing Facebook’s features by engaging with their fans via the live chats on the day of the launch. They also have been very good at keeping up with the page after the reveal by leaving wall comments and answering the community’s questions daily. To keep people around throughout the six months before people can actually buy the vehicle (it will be available for purchase in the winter,) they are running a big sweepstakes, several giveaways, and an Explorer tour around the nation. They are chronicling this tour through photos and YouTube videos embedded into their Facebook page.

It’s clear that with a well thought-out campaign, social media can definitely make big waves and generate a lot of buzz. Even after the Fiesta recently became available for purchase (which marked the conclusion of the six-month campaign), the Facebook Page and Twitter Feed still have a good number of followers and active voices (34,166 fans and 8,806 followers, respectively). The question is: will all of this translate into impressive sales figures? I certainly hope so. At Page One, we strongly believe in the power of social media. It’s good to see we’re not the only ones that do.

Screen caps and photos from Ford Fiesta and Ford Explorer’s Facebook Pages.

Not many people, even those who are active on Facebook, are aware of the social networking site’s strict promotions guidelines. As Page Wonder Paulina Singhapok referenced in her recent blog, Facebook published a long list of legal do’s and dont’s in December that restricts the housing of promotional contests on a Facebook Page.

I first got word of Facebook’s new guidelines when I considered designing a Facebook contest for a client. After getting in contact with a Facebook employee, I learned creating a custom tab to promote a contest would cost me an ad buy of $10,000 per month.

$10,000? Facebook contests used to be free, simple, and spur-of-the-moment campaigns. Long gone are the days when any Page could ask trivia questions to their fans via wall post, and the Page would pick a random winner from the answers they received in the comments. For marketing professionals, contests and giveaways are a great way to attract new fans and encourage existing ones to interact with a brand. But now, only companies with a substantial advertising budget can use this method of increasing their fan following on Facebook.

Part of Facebook’s appeal to me is that it’s a great outlet for small businesses, new brands, and indie artists to build a loyal legion of fans. $10,000/month is out of their reach. I understand Facebook needs to make money. But once upon a time, Facebook also started out as a small start-up. They too spread virally through word-of-mouth because they found a niche market and provided a useful service. Now that they’re a big gun, I hope they don’t forget about the little guys that need them the most.

I’ve always declared myself to be (in an admittedly blissful manner) somewhat of a social media purist. For me, social media’s biggest value is that it facilitates relationships – for both the big corporation and for the local indie band. Social media is most effective when a brand is able to connect with consumers on a deeper level that is never achieved with traditional advertising or marketing campaigns. The basic framework of social media platforms allows for instant feedback, interaction, and engagement. When it comes to using contests as a strategy to quickly attract and engage fans, Facebook’s promotions guidelines give an unfair competitive advantage to large advertising budgets.

To reiterate, the new guidelines are a smart way for Facebook to make some money, and to cover their bases when it comes to liability. But I think the $10,000/month price tag is too steep, and I guess I can’t help but root for the underdog. I confess, I don’t have a solution that will make both parties happy. I’ll give it some more thought and will hopefully have some concrete conclusions in my next blog installment. But until then, there is always Twitter. Zing!

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

1) Mind the platform:

2) Be Clear and Honest:

3) Take Full Responsibility:

4) Be Proper:

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

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

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

Advertising on Facebook

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

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

Advertising on LinkedIn

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

A few things to keep in mind:

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

“What the heck is Social Media Day,” you ask?  “Sounds like some made-up holiday.”

And you would be totally right: Mashable has arbitrarily named June 30 as Social Media Day—a holiday intended to “celebrate the revolution of media becoming a social dialogue.”

In honor of the day, social media aficionados are holding Mashable Meetups around the world, in hundreds of different locations.  Revelers are also invited to use the hashtag #smday or play the traditional game “Pin the Tail on the Fail Whale.”  (Okay, so I made that last part up).

I started thinking about how social media has evolved to become the dominant trend on the Internet.  From its humble beginnings in the chat rooms of the 1990s, Social Media now encompasses a countless variety of platforms, with new services launching all the time.

So, in honor of Social Media Day, I present a brief history of the social web:

1988 – Jarkko Oikarinen creates Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

1995 – Sun creates Java, leading to the first Java chat rooms, which allowed people to participate using their Internet browser

1997 – The term “blog” is coined by Jorn Barger

2002 – Friendster launches as the first modern social network.  Although it has since been eclipsed by competitors in the U.S., Friendster is still the #1 social network in Asia.

2003 – MySpace launches.  By 2006, MySpace had become the leading social networking site in the world.

2003 – LinkedIn goes live

2004 – Facebook launches at Harvard, and then later at other colleges.  In 2005, high school networks were added, and by 2006, the service became open to anyone.  By 2009, Facebook had overtaken MySpace as the dominant social networking site.

2004 – Flickr is created

2004 – Digg launches

2005 – YouTube is founded

2006 – Twitter is founded

2009 – Foursquare’s location-based social networking service launches

2010 – Google launches its social networking platform Buzz

2011(?) – Rumors are circulating that Google is plotting a Facebook-killer, to be called “Google Me”

Although Facebook is undoubtedly the King of Social Media today, the social media space is still young, and the tide can change very quickly (just ask MySpace).

With hundreds of different social platforms competing for mindshare, our clients often ask us which ones they should be monitoring.  The answer depends on the particular client, but in general, Page One’s social media services typically focus on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and blogs.  But we’re always on the lookout for the next big thing in social media.

At Page One, we talk a lot about the benefits of using social media to engage with your customers and community.  One of the most interesting aspects of the social web is that it’s a two-way conversation: your customers can talk back to you, whether you like what they have to say or not.

The Nestle Facebook debacle in March is a now-legendary example of how NOT to respond to criticism online.  In this case, angry consumers began posting comments on Nestle’s Facebook wall about their use of palm oil in products.  A page that was supposed to promote Nestle got hijacked by consumers and became a place to criticize the brand, instead.  That was unfortunate, but the real trouble began when Nestle began censoring and removing negative posts from their wall.  An Internet-wide backlash resulted, and Nestle was forced to apologize.  In the end, Nestle conceded to the critics and partnered with The Forest Trust to support the sustainable harvest of forests.  Lesson learned: when you engage via social media, you have to be prepared to listen to what your customers have to say, and if what they have to say it negative, don’t even think about trying to censor it.

Another interesting example is the Bros Icing Bros phenomenon that is currently sweeping the nation by storm.  What started as a frat-boy drinking game has expanded to universities, offices, and Wall Street trading floors, mostly driven by social media as people post photos and videos of “bros” and even celebrities being “iced.”

Many have speculated that this is an undercover marketing campaign devised by Smirnoff, but that seems unlikely to me.  Sure, this fad is helping them sell more product, but the catch is that Smirnoff Ice is the butt of a joke.  As brosicingbros.com says: “try and buy the most disgusting flavored ice or a 24oz ice. Pineapple, mango, and grape are top of the list for the most gut wrenching, mind numbing, throw up in your mouth, Smirnoff ice flavors.”  Somehow, I don’t see Smirnoff’s marketing team writing that.

How should Smirnoff respond to this hijacking of their brand?  On the one hand, it’s a popular phenomenon that must be helping to drive sales.  But on the other hand, the game is immature and potentially dangerous, and Smirnoff doesn’t want to be seen promoting irresponsible drinking, not to mention the possible legal liability.  If you go to Smirnoff’s website, you will find no mention of “bros” whatsoever.  Smirnoff’s official statement is that: “Icing is consumer-generated and some people think it is fun. We never want underage “icing” and we always want responsible drinking.” What Smirnoff is doing is probably the best strategy: acknowledge the fad but stay out of it as much as possible.  If they condemned the practice or tried to shut down the Bros Icing Bros website, people would probably revolt.  If Smirnoff embraced the game and tried to promote it, people would assume it was a marketing ploy all along and shun it.

Another current example is the fake BPGlobalPR Twitter feed, which posts funny, derisive comments about the Gulf oil spill, as if written by BP’s public relations team.  In only a week, the feed has grown to more than 74,000 followers (by comparison, BP’s official Twitter feed has only 7,754 followers).  To add insult to injury, BP’s official feed was just hacked this week, as well.

When you take your brand to the social media channels, you have to be prepared for criticism.  Trying to censor people’s comments is a PR disaster waiting to happen.  Instead, your best strategy is to listen, acknowledge your customers’ opinions, and consider whether to incorporate their feedback into your business practices.

Twitter announced yesterday that they are banning paid tweets.  If you didn’t know that many companies were using paid tweets, you need to pay closer attention to the world of social media marketing.  The online world of third-party content production is undergoing rapid evolution.  The announcement by the people at Twitter is a sign of a much larger trend in social media marketing to pay people to publish content.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter are changing their terms of use to capture more marketing dollars themselves.    Many people feel that Twitter’s announcement to ban paid Tweets was motivated by a strategy to limit competition for their Promoted Tweets service that they launched with Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America as customers.   Before scoffing at the concept of Tweeting for money, consider that the initial customers for Twitter’s Promoted Tweets services are big, global corporations with massive marketing budgets.

Six months ago, a powerful social media technique was to identify and build relationships with key influential people on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.  This technique quickly evolved into building the relationships with travel expense reimbursements, other marketing gifts, and to direct payments of money.  Although there are legal requirements for the disclosure of payment in some cases, the technique of paying people to produce content is in widespread use.

So, should you care about the Twitter announcement about banning of Paid Tweets?  Well, if you already knew about the practice of Paid Tweets and it isn’t part of your business processes, then you can pay little attention to the announcement.  However, if you have a limited understanding of how marketing techniques involving payment for content work, you need to dig in now and do some research.

I’m not recommending that companies pay for content.  The vast majority of marketing campaigns are based on traditional techniques of information organization, publication on official channels, and helping reporting to understand the information.

However, I do believe it is important to understand what other techniques are being used by competitors.  It is also extremely important to have a thorough understanding of the rules of use and the laws that affect these new types of marketing technique that involve payment.

Craig Oda, managing partner

coda@pageonepr.com

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Eight paragraphs into the blog post, this statement pops up:

we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.

Twitter is changing its terms of services and using legal tools to block paid tweets.

There’s been a lot of talk about the big data explosion in the Business Intelligence community lately. Organizations are generating massive amounts of data as they shift to cloud-compatible models and are increasingly employing advanced analytics models to try to make sense of their data and gain a competitive advantage over the competition. Much has been made, for example, of Wal Mart’s use of predictive analytics to better understand their customers and maximize revenue streams. Companies from a wide range of verticals, from finance to pharmaceuticals, are employing advanced models to better understand their data and identify key trends in their respective markets.

The PR industry is no exception to this rule. More and more, PR practitioners are emphasizing marketing metrics when they report results back to their clients. We at Page One have been emphasizing metrics for several years now. Since 2007, we’ve included them in our monthly reports to clients. Our dashboards map back to client goals, and how they’re performing relative to benchmark competitors. Additionally, it helps teams within the agency focus on areas that generate the highest ROI from PR efforts.

Analytics tools have evolved over the years and ease of use has improved significantly. Gone is the era where you need a Ph.D. to conduct any type of data analysis. Today’s offerings—which range from longstanding legacy products SAS and SPSS to more cutting-edge models running on advanced programming languages like R, to specialized tools like Google Analytics—allow business analysts, PR professionals, and the blogger-next-door the ability to mine through data at a far more efficient rate than before and identify key user/market trends.

As a tech PR agency, we work with a number of venture capitalist-backed startups that measure everything in marketing. If the agency doesn’t provide Chief Marketing Officer X with material metrics that demonstrate a high ROI, you can be sure that he or she will have to come up with their own data to report to the board. By mining through the data and delivering it to clients in a presentable manner that outlines key metrics, we’re able to drive the process that demonstrates ROI and make everyone’s life easier in the process.



We’ve also focused on metrics in the ever-expanding field of social media. Many organizations are still trying to define the parameters of what exactly constitutes success (or failure) in their social media marketing efforts. How do you measure the success or failure of a Twitter campaign? Does a Facebook page with 10,000 “fans” really lead to more consumers buying your product? The model we’ve developed and honed over several years has become a powerful tool for us as we’ve gone deeper into the social media space and has led to the acquisition of some of our biggest clients. All thanks to the data.

The April blog club meeting was held at R and G Lounge in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  We walked up there from our office in the Financial District.  After two Dungeness crab dishes, BBQ pork, roast duck, and walnut prawns, I can saw that this highly rated.

One of the purposes of the club is to discuss marketing trends and explore potential blog topics for the next month.

With the growth of social media marketing campaigns, the industry is seeing more and more failed campaigns.  We’re starting to discuss campaigns that we encounter in our research to educate ourselves on the risks of social media.  This knowledge helps our clients to implement campaigns with less risk.

Among the topics we discussed:

* Major department store chain launched a contest on Facebook with unclear rules.  The contest helped to boost Fans to 30,000+.  Unfortunately, the store got slammed on the Wall posts, with the vast majority of posts being negative, spawning a negative feeding frenzy;
* Someone’s friend got their Facebook campaign halted by Facebook for not abiding by the Facebook Promotion Guidelines.  Holy smokes!  Many of us did not know that the guidelines had been rewritten on Dec 22, 2009!
* We exchanged many Twitter feed stories with feeds we read about getting locked due to automatic usage triggers;
* YouTube’s use of automated music verification and audio-stripping when background music is illegally used in videos

Some club members brought up the new trend in paying famous people to Tweet.  One remember even referred to an ROI analysis that showed greater value from paying small amounts to less famous people rather than one large sum to a famous person like Ashton Kutcher.

One member spoke about the new influencer widget in Radian6 and the increasing use of influencer identification and analysis in social media campaigns.

Many of these topics should turn into blogs this month.  Check back soon for more information.

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

My conclusions about the usefulness of Twitter and Facebook for marketing are likely a product of my personal experiences as a user. I learned Facebook when I was a sophomore in college about four years ago. Facebook was about sustaining relationships with people whom I had met in person. Some of these were “friends” in the true sense of the word. Facebook also nurtured early relationships formed initially with acquaintances face-to-face and subsequently helped transform them into real world friendships. I believe this is still true today, although I admittedly do not use Facebook nearly as much as before. Facebook helps people facilitate their social lives through the sharing of personal information, as well as information about physical events. I’d argue for most people, Facebook was not, and is still generally not today, about the intellectual exchange of ideas directly through the platform.

I learned Twitter at Page One PR. Twitter’s prompt, “What are you doing?” (before Twitter changed it) never reflected well how people use Twitter. In the minds of Twitter users, I think the prompt was always closer to “what are you thinking about?” or “what are you reading that’s interesting?” or “what’s your opinion on the things that matter to you most?” On Twitter, unlike Facebook, the threshold for following or being followed is low. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never met the person before face-to-face. In many cases, you never will. But if you share a mutual interest and find mutual benefit in conversation, it makes sense to connect. Running corporate Twitter feeds on behalf of clients at Page One, it’s not all too difficult to find people who care about the same issues as my clients, since people on Twitter are more or less defined by their profile, which is a public stream of content and ideas.

These norms that inform how the typical user (I’d argue I’m typical) acts on Facebook and Twitter have consequences for marketers who are looking to leverage these tools. Because Twitter places emphasis on the exchange of ideas and has a low threshold for personal interaction, the platform is more intuitive and easier to use for marketers who want to discuss their messages with a target audience. Because Facebook is generally used as an avenue for social connections with real world acquaintances and friends and has a high threshold for personal interaction, the platform is more difficult to use successfully for marketing purposes.

There are certainly examples of companies that have had successful marketing campaigns on both Twitter and Facebook. I’m arguing that the act of marketing companies (in an engaging, interesting way that puts the “social” in social media of course) aligns better with the fundamental values of Twitter than it does with those of Facebook, and is therefore easier.

Facebook has taken specific actions to appeal to marketers. Examples include corporate Fan Pages, advertisements, more Twitter-like “Walls,” the “News Feed,” and (controversially) the reduction of privacy. It’s true that some people are beginning to treat Facebook Wall posts the way they would Tweets. However, marketers face two problems on Facebook that don’t exist in the same way on Twitter – 1) how do you discover people who would be interested in your Fan Page? 2) how do you influence people to become your fans?

Answering the first question on Twitter requires technique and strategy, but put simply, just find the people who are talking about the things you talk about. On Facebook, this often is not possible because many people choose to keep their personal conversations with groups of friends, as well as their personal information, private to outsiders.

Answering the second question is difficult if you don’t have an answer to the first. Several techniques on Facebook include advertisements and the “Suggest to Friends” button, but it’s difficult for the manager of a Page to target strangers who share specific interests. Contrast this with the free-for-all of people and information on Twitter, where barriers to strangers connecting by virtue of their shared interests and ideas are few.

My bet is that Facebook will continue to become more like an idea-sharing platform in the fundamental areas that will help the company bring in revenue from marketers. Although changes to the interface and various applications further this end, the norms by which people model their behavior on Facebook won’t change anytime soon.

Just when you thought every possible angle of the health care debate had been covered to death…

The passage of comprehensive health care reform into law last week made the controversial bill a reality, but the debate rages on in the blogosphere and beyond. Regardless of where you personally stand on the issue, it’s interesting to take a step back and look at the health care debate through a social media lens.

Health care reform is perhaps the single most controversial and significant piece of legislation enacted since the advent of social media. It stands to reason, then, that there is much to be gleaned from the web.

Social Radar, a web analytics tool that tracks social media, came up with some particularly interesting data about the debate and its general trends. Web traffic was predictably highest on the days leading up to and immediately after the House passed the health care bill, but a closer look at the analytics suggests that the fiercely contentious nature of the debate (even by Capitol Hill standards) was fueled by an equally contentious debate being waged by the general public over the internet.

As the graph below indicates, the majority of conversations related to health care were happening on microblogs (read: Facebook and Twitter), followed by blogs, and finally web forums. This fact was not lost on Congress; both Democratic and Republican leadership employed Twitter and other social networking mediums at an unprecedented rate in an attempt to directly engage Americans in the health care debate.

Both sides, Democrat and Republican, are predictably claiming victory in out-maneuvering the other in the social media space. While Republicans are claiming victory based on momentum (@GOPLeader, the Twitter alias of House Minority Leader John Boehner, picked up over 2,500 followers last week alone), Democrats are touting the quality of their content, including a Facebook page that added 12,000 followers last week.

According to Social Radar’s statistics, which mines through blog data for buzzwords and key phrases, 59% of the conversations related to health care reform were positive, 36% were negative, and 6% were indifferent.

The most important lesson from this data may have nothing to do with health care at all, but rather a sign of things to come in politics. The increased emphasis politicians are placing on social media parallels that of corporations and is emblematic of a broader acceptance of the field and its long-term efficacy.

So, does this settle the health care debate once and for all?

Didn’t think so, but it definitely gives you something else to talk about…

Honda Motor Company failed in the marketing launch of its new Crosstour vehicle. People perceived the car as ugly. The perception was started on Facebook, triggered by a failed Facebook campaign that was core to the launch of the new vehicle. Honda made a critical error by releasing pictures of the new vehicle on Facebook first.

Facebook Fans got the pictures before automotive press. There was a large amount of negative comments. Reporters and bloggers went to the Facebook Fan page to look at the pictures and get the initial public reaction. Unfortunately, it was negative.

Honda Crosstour Facebook Page

The Internet is filled with speculation as to why the problem occurred. Analysis includes:

* The pictures weren’t good. The appeal of the car’s unusual shape isn’t represented accurately in the pictures that were put on Facebook;

* The demographic on Facebook didn’t match the target audience the car was designed for. The car is designed to be attractive to people that are older than the average Facebook fan;

* Honda marketing simply made a mistake in giving up control of their communications channel. They would have been better off keeping the photos secret until they launched the vehicle with a press conference and working with reporters that the PR people had relationships with.

Of course, pointing out errors after a failure is always easier than designing a successful marketing campaign.

I think that the verdict is still out on whether or not an official Facebook Fan page is a good platform to leak product photos. However, if I were hired to manage the Facebook Page to launch photos, here is what I would have done differently:

* Identify key Facebook influencers prior to the creation of the Facebook Page. Identify and prioritize influencers based on their reach on Facebook and in other social media channels;

* Use PR techniques to provide these influencers with organized information, special attention, and rapid responses to questions prior to giving them access to media like photos;

* Work out a process to let them see the car, either the physical car itself or a photo that they agree won’t be reposted;

* Use feedback from the influencer group to adjust the pictures as needed;

* Expand out the influencer group over time. By the time the photo got leaked, there would have been enough of a positive impression of the car to either weaken the negative sentiment or drown it out.

If a marketing campaign is run on Facebook, the platform becomes a marketing tool. By applying existing marketing techniques, such as those developed by PR experts, the risks of a failed Facebook campaign can be reduced.

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

This week the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston launched a PR campaign around the 20th anniversary of the largest art heist in history.  In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, two men disguised as Boston Police officers entered the museum, subdued the guards, and escaped with 13 priceless pieces, including masterworks by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, and Manet, which were cut out of their frames.  Two decades later, the crime remains unsolved, and the empty frames still hang on the museum walls as a haunting reminder.

Historically, stolen art is often recovered.  This is because famous pieces are instantly recognizable and virtually impossible to sell.  Someone happens to see the artwork, realizes it’s stolen, and alerts the authorities.  With this hope, the Gardner museum and the FBI are now offering a $5 million reward and guaranteed criminal immunity for information leading to the artwork.

The traditional PR campaign has resulted in placing hundreds of stories in publications and blogs around the world.  But surprisingly, the social media presence has been nil.  Considering that art crimes are often solved through crowdsourcing, social media seems to be an ideal platform for this type of campaign.  Followers on Facebook and Twitter could retweet about the stolen art, and their friends might retweet it, and eventually someone who knows something might see it.  A recent survey found that 75% of Americans learn about news through social networking sites and email.

The Gardner Museum actually does have a Twitter feed with 1,421 followers, but they have posted nothing about the stolen artwork.  They also have a Facebook Page with 3,516 fans, but they are not publicizing the $5 million reward there, either.  On the anniversary (March 18), I searched Twitter for the terms “Gardner” and “art” and found fewer than 5 posts per hour.

The continued disappearance of the Gardner masterpieces is a tragedy, and I hope the renewed publicity finally results in the artworks’ return.  In the meantime, social media is a critical missing piece in the campaign to raise public awareness.

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.

The social media campaign we just completed for the SAP Open Tennis match was especially challenging since we only had a month to get 22 million impressions for their Twitter content on a brand new feed. Starting from zero, we got 3,500 Twitter followers, a 30 percent engagement rate on the feed, and more than 500 visits from the feed to the Ticketmaster site for online purchase of tennis tickets.

Many of the activities involved leveraging existing tennis communities, including fans of the Australian Open which took place a few weeks prior to the SAP Open.

This is a great example of how social media can be used to acquire new customers.

In 2009, most of our experience was with social media campaigns designed for customer retention or customer engagement. For example, the @CiscoGeeks Twitter feed engages existing customers of Cisco routers and switches. Right now, we’re running fun contests for existing Cisco customers to share pictures of networking equipment with each other.

Typical social campaigns are based on self-publishing models that push out product information, discounts and prizes from central places like a Twitter feed or Facebook Fan Page. For example, we’re in the early stages of a campaign with VMware to manage content and interaction on Twitter, Facebook and the corporate blog. Since most customers of VMware’s vCloud Express product are still in beta, initial efforts have focused on publishing information to people that are either using the beta product or a related VMware product.

Some social media campaigns are similar to opt-in email marketing campaigns where the target audience is already familiar with the product.

However, new types of social media campaigns are targeting new “green field” customers. The SAP Open Tennis campaign is a good example of the new type of social media campaign designed for new customer acquisition.

Some of the techniques we used included:

* leveraging existing tennis communities and engaging with people interested in related topics like the Australian Open;

* joining discussions around famous people like Andy Roddick who won the SAP Open Tennis tournament in 2009;

* managing contests, including one with a prize of a signed Andy Roddick tennis racket;

* getting people that were going to the tennis tournament to pass the word on to their friends that weren’t going to the tournament.

The last technique is the key to success of any social media campaign designed for customer acquisition.  We’re tracking message distribution by counting the number of ReTweets and hashtag use on Twitter.  On Facebook, we’re focusing more on measuring user-generated content.

Although I think that the majority of social media campaigns in 2010 will still be focused on customer retention and engagement, I’m really excited about the opportunities to work on more customer acquisition campaigns as well. I’ve already started developing a new campaign for a secret client to acquire new customers from a competitor’s base.

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

The marketing world is turning upside down, with influencer marketing and customer marketing flip-flopping.

The most popular form of influencer marketing is public relations, an activity based on organizing information and sending the information to influential people.  Usually, these people are reporters.  In the best scenario, the reporters write for a publication that reaches millions of people.  This model of influencer marketing is changing rapidly as newspapers cut staff and the number of reporters and publications decrease.

Customer marketing is based on publishing content like newsletters or advertisements that reach potential customers directly.  The two main distribution channels for customer marketing are paid placements in newspapers and magazines and the direct mailing of advertisements through the postal mail.

In the past year, public relations has moved from purely influencer marketing to incorporate some types of customer marketing such as writing corporate blogs or running contests for customers.

Social media always incorporated both customer marketing and influencer marketing.  However, the first wave of social media activities focused on customer marketing.  The most popular marketing activities were self-publishing content on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.  Today, we’re seeing the emergence of social media influencers, people with large numbers of Twitter followers or high traffic on a personal blog.

In the last three months, we’ve been identifying, organizing, and building relationships with social media influencers, people that are not professional writers and may not even have a blog.  The new breed of influencer may only be prominent on a technical message board or be known for funny YouTube videos

Yes, social media marketing is new and many things like tools, monitoring and metrics are new.  However, the basic strategy is built on top of experience with traditional customer marketing and influencer marketing campaigns.

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

Companies in Silicon Valley are starting to leverage the personal Twitter feeds, Facebook profiles, and blogs of their employees for corporate promotions.  By integrating employees into social media influencer campaigns, companies are acknowledging the value of their employees as spokespeople.

Twitter feeds for employees are uncontrolled, filled with personal information such as pictures of pets, boyfriends, and the lives of their kids.  However, since work is a big part of their lives, the employees often include information on technology or products that they  are involved with.

Big brands contract with us to map out which employees have Twitter feeds and to rank the value of the individual employee’s Twitter feed for marketing purposes.  We then pitch the employee and try to get their cooperation in getting the word out about a marketing asset such as a YouTube video.

We use the same process with blogs.  However, very few employees have blogs that are influential.  Leveraging Facebook profiles is still in the beginning stages.  However, we’ve seen some success with getting employees to join relevant Facebook Pages as Fans and then interact with the community on Wall posts.

Message boards are another hot area to get the help of employees.  We map out the most active employees on relevant message boards and forums.  Many of the forums are off the main corporate site.

These techniques are highly effective in companies with thousands of tens of thousands of employees.  However, they can also work for smaller companies if the executive team gets behind the effort.

–

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

Over the weekend, TechCrunch broke the story that Facebook had taken a user’s vanity URL and sold it to audio-entertainment solutions company Harman International. Facebook claimed the user, Harman Bajwa, was “violating Facebook’s policies” and his username didn’t have a clear connection to his identity. However, “Harman” as Harman Bajwa’s vanity URL seems perfectly fitting, and TechCrunch saw the revocation of facebook.com/Harman as all about making a sales deal. Harman International wanted the URL because of a campaign they’re working on for the Grammys, and initially tried to bribe Harman Bajwa citing a past gift of Coke Zero for Twitter handle twitter.com/avtr during promotion of the movie Avatar.

After the story broke I was talking with a friend about it and he was hardly surprised (unlike myself). He felt that users are willfully choosing to participate in Facebook’s network by opening an account, so terms of use are ultimately according to Facebook. Since Facebook created the option of a vanity URL in the first place, they can decide to take it away at any time.

However, I disagreed with his stance, noting that lack of respect for the individuals the site and company are founded on is a huge PR misstep and flawed business practice. Facebook’s success is because of its users. The popularity of the social networking site over time is a direct result of viral growth through users and the main catalyst for ad growth and thus ad revenues.

The URL has since been given back to Harman Bajwa with an apology from Facebook, but the incident made me want to research Facebook’s official policy regarding vanity URL’s. If you go to facebook.com/username, their stance covers their backs in all respects:

I’m not sure if their policy has always been this overarching, I’d be curious to know if it was the same prior to the Harman incident (I’m guessing it wasn’t).

What’s even more interesting is when I went to create a vanity URL for one of my clients this morning, Facebook lists “several things for you to remember” upon confirmation, stating “You can’t transfer ownership of a username to another party”. Isn’t that exactly what Facebook was trying to do? Transfer ownership from Harman Bajwa to Harman International? Maybe if Facebook started abiding by the rules they set for their own users, the company wouldn’t receive as much backlash as compared to recent months.

What do you think about this incident? Yes, Facebook technically has the right to revoke these usernames per their policy, but is it ethically sound when one’s business is fueled by its users? Would love to hear your comments below.

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.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and blogs present resource problems for corporations that want to use these channels as marketing tools. Managing multiple channels that lack unification requires more time, resources and specialization than most companies can afford internally. Firms like Page One PR have benefited from this problem because we specialize in the unification and management of social media marketing programs.

At the same time, we’ve learned that proprietary corporate portals that combine video, forums, reviews and blogs can serve as an alternative to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. A corporate portal is more integrated and easier to navigate than individual social media sites. Social media channels are wide and shallow, but the corporate portal is narrow and deep. For customers who want depth of information, the corporate portal may be the better answer.

A good example of a corporate portal is the SAP Community Network (SCN)*, an online community that doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter. SCN is based on proprietary technology developed at SAP. The community consists of more than 1.7 million people, 9,000 companies, 60,000 wikis, and 3.5 million forum posts. The corporate portal offers an efficient way to get product-specific information that can be searched and managed from a central location. However, even a corporate portal that is enormously successful such as the SCN portal can’t contain all discussions. Online discussions will bleed over to other channels such as Twitter, Facebook or whatever tool may be hot at the moment.

While there are excellent examples of corporate portals — just as there are excellent examples of social media campaigns — even companies at the cutting edge of marketing are only just beginning to integrate their efforts at managing peer-generated content that originates in the ‘wild’ with content in their portal. Today there is a great opportunity for smart marketers to leverage the strengths of both the corporate portal and social media channels by integrating a corporate web site with popular tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This will mark the dawn of Social Media 2.0.

I see this next stage of social media marketing consisting of the following elements:

* There is a central hub for online communication where customers can get updates. The infrastructure for the central hub could be a simple tool like Twitter, or it could be a more complex corporate portal.

* Careful deployment of a central hub helps corporations streamline the official communications spokes linked to the hub. It’s much easier to eliminate redundant channels, clearly define goals, and manage messages. Many corporations are running too many similar corporate Twitter channels and Facebook groups that focus on the same products. Eliminate the redundancy.

* A much larger network of community-generated content is freely created around the “official” hub and spokes.

* Online conversations are monitored at all levels – hub, spokes, and community networks.

Social media, with content generated by peers, is now an important part of our daily communication, not just for technology hobbyists or businesses, but also for everyday people making decisions about how to spend their time or money. We are at the cusp of a moment of great change in how real people find and assess the value of information. I look forward to seeing how companies merge the great content and infrastructure they have on their corporate web sites with the amazing opportunities presented by vast amounts of unfiltered content produced on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

*Disclosure: SAP is a Page One social media client.

Facebook has changed a lot since I first started using it in college four years ago. New users may be shocked to learn that the “News Feed” didn’t even exist back then.  While college students may have a legitimate complaint about Facebook being usurped and transformed since the “good old days,” I can say that this popular social networking app is becoming increasingly useful for social media, PR and marketing professionals. With each update, Facebook increases the opportunities for content and conversations to go viral and to reach more users.

One of the key things for marketers to understand about Facebook is when to use Groups or Pages to organize a community. When organizations join Facebook, they have to decide between starting a Group or a Page. In basic terms, both Groups and Pages are forums for self-selected users to connect around a common interest. Pages are specifically designed for companies and organizations to reach their “fans.” Groups can be organized around virtually any topic, although there’s nothing stopping an organization from starting a Group as well.

Just a few months ago, I would have declared a toss up between Groups and Pages in terms of their relative effectiveness for marketers looking to make an impact in the social media space. While Groups are more antiquated and less customizable than Pages, Groups allow administrators to send messages to all members, which are sent as emails. Pages, on the other hand, only allow “Updates” to be sent through Facebook itself to the homepages of fans. When Page One PR ran a social media campaign for Wine.com in late 2008, we created a Page and found only limited features available that would be useful for reaching potential new fans (save paid advertisements). The Page was an important part of our campaign, but I wanted more.

Since our Wine.com campaign, Page One PR has set up both Pages and Groups for our company and for our clients. After working on several campaigns, I would now recommend that organizations choose Pages over Groups for their effectiveness in marketing campaigns.

What’s changed? In the most recent alteration of Facebook, Pages took on the appearance and functionality of a personal profile. This means that a Page comes fully equipped with a “Wall” where the administrators of the Page as well as fans can post comments, links, videos, and pictures. Fans can also comment on wall posts, “Like” posts or share them on their personal profiles or through direct messages. Most of these Page interactions will show up on users’ “News Feeds,” making the information more viral.  If fans share information from Pages on their own profiles or engage in conversations on the Wall, their friends see this information on their own News Feeds. Hence, another viral effect is born. Pages also come with traditional applications like “Events” and “Notes”.

Another benefit of Pages is the analytical capability called “Insights”. Measuring the results of social media is crucial if social media campaigns are to demonstrate value and ROI. With “Insights,” organizations can track growth of their fan base over time, unique views of the Page and specific areas such as pictures, demographics of the fans, and even how fans are engaging with the site over time. For one of our current clients, Meltwater, we’re discovering that Insights actually does yield interesting data about fan interaction with the Page. In particular, we’ve noticed the popularity of rich content such as pictures by tracking clicks and views over time.

Finally, the coup de gras that sold me on Pages over Groups was a vital feature improvement called “Suggest to Friends.” Previously, it was difficult for Page administrators and fans to get the word out to other Facebook users. Now, any administrator or fan can suggest the Page to their friend networks AND these suggestion notices are sent as emails.

With all of these new Facebook updates, Pages have become more useful for marketers and PR professionals. Groups have the same largely static characteristics as before. There is no Wall that interconnects content and people through the News Feeds, although Groups include pictures, videos, discussion boards, and events capabilities. This means it is more difficult to spread content virally. The best feature of Groups, from the perspective of marketers, is the ability to send messages that are sent as emails to members. However, this feature, along with Events, is the only way that members learn of Group activities without having to revisit the Group itself.

I’m not saying that the Facebook Page is the best social media tool for every organization, but I am finding that Facebook can play a helpful role in larger social media efforts.

What do you think about the transformation of Pages? Please feel free to comment on personal experiences or give your own take on Facebook as a marketing/PR vehicle.

So, maybe you found out the spoilers to LOST Season 3 on Facebook. Maybe you got your Grand Theft Auto 4 trade secrets from a blog. Maybe you heard John Mayer and Jennifer Aniston broke up for the 11th time on Twitter. Perhaps you didn’t know that an entire prison of convicts in the Philippines could remake the entire Thriller video until you saw it up on YouTube.

Well, whatever you heard, be it entertainment or news, these are the ways information is being delivered today. This is social media. This is Page One.

We are a Silicon Valley public relations firm that caters to the high-tech industry and we are currently looking to add consultants to our Social Media Division in the San Francisco office.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:

Page One is looking for brilliant, enthusiastic and highly motivated individuals who want an opportunity to impact real companies’ business decisions with social media.

Social media is fresh and constantly shifting, so we don’t expect you to be a social media guru. NO PREVIOUS PR or SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCE IS NECESSARY, but if you’ve got some, we won’t complain. If you understand what social media is and can see yourself leading smart PR projects and creating never-done-before campaigns for clients, you could be who we are looking for.

WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR:

Ask yourself if you like who we are. It’s as important.

We are 100% about our people: over-achievers who get the job done better than anyone else and have fun.

As a new Consultant/PageWonder, you’ll learn from the best: our Sr. PR people have reported for the Los Angles Times, managed campaigns for Microsoft, placed cover stories in Business Week, taught graduate journalism at UC Berkeley, written keynote for Bill Gates and even created the first ISP in Japan.

We’re corporate, but collaborative and laid-back. People at Page One come from all walks of life. We like that mix and we look for initiative, intelligence, humor, integrity, creativity, risk taking, fearlessness, writing skill and a track record of success.

When it comes to work/life balance, we don’t just work. We are marathoners, lacrosse players, salsa dancers, avid travelers and more, and Page One gives us the time to do what we love. Sure, you might find a Page One consultant at MacWorld stalking Steve Jobs, but 9 times out of 10, you’ll see a group of us enjoying happy hour in downtown SF.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING:

No coffee fetching. No press release copying. We don’t look for gutsy people just to take up space.

Page One’s Social Media Consultants design and produce social media content including video campaigns, blogs and social network profiles for clients. They also produce social media for Page One’s internal marketing. Every PageWonder actively engages in developing clients’ PR, marketing and brand management strategies. We specialize in company launches, product launches, media relations, messaging and positioning, analyst relations and (of course) social media.

WHAT YOU’LL BE GETTING:

Benefits? Want 20 days off? OK.

Since Page One’s culture is all about great people doing great things, we reward our employees with exceptional pay, quarterly bonuses, matching 401K and 20 days of paid time off from your first day on the job.

• 20 PTO days (even in your first year!)
• 11 paid company holidays
• Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependants
• Matching 401K
• Long- and short-term disability insurance
• Life insurance (twice your annual salary)
• Flexible spending account
• Costco delivers the snack food on the first of every month

If you are interested in a career as a Social Media Consultant at Page One, email a resume and a note telling us about yourself to Jasmine Teer at jasmine@pageonepr.com.

Visit us: http://www.pageonepr.com
Read our blog: http://www.pageonepr.com/blogs/thepagewonders/
Check out our Facebook group: Page One PR
Follow us on Twitter: @pageonepr

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.

Yes, the rumors are true! The Page One Social Media Team is looking to hire a new member to join our expanding team. I have posted a very detailed job description below. It is fairly long, but because so many social media jobs are ill-defined I thought it was best to be very descriptive about who I am looking to hire and what type of work this person will be doing.

Please send resumes to socialmediajobs [at] pageonepr.com.

Want to put your social media skills to the test in public relations, marketing, and the high-tech industry?

I lead the Page One Social Media Program at Page One PR, an international public relations firm that caters to the high-tech industry. The Page One Social Media Team has experienced rapid growth in the past year and we’re now looking to hire a full-time social media specialist to join the team in our San Francisco office. Since the new member of the team will report directly to me, I’ll start off by telling you a bit about myself.

I joined Page One PR two years ago and soon after, founded our Social Media Program. I have a strong passion for crafting innovative strategies to communicate corporate messages and have developed an even stronger passion for social media as the right tool to do this. I live and breathe social media, because I believe, 100%, that social media is the future of the PR industry and if companies do not move quickly to adapt these new techniques, they will go the way of the dodo bird, just like the printing press and now the newspaper. Many people are sitting back wondering what is going to happen to PR in the next few years. I am not one of those people. I am that person running up ahead, trying to help define the solution and pave the path. I feel strongly that there is a right way and a wrong way to do this though. It’s all about metrics and measurement and connecting social media programs to real business objectives. Without having well defined, well thought-out goals and the ability to clearly track and monitor progress and results, social media campaigns are often just a waste of time and money. I really enjoy my job because Page One has allowed me the opportunity to grow and expand a program that has the potential to radically shake things up. I have spent the past year learning, experimenting, observing other PR agencies and developing our social media program and have created a process and set of services that will differentiate Page One PR and put us at the cutting edge of social media. Our results already speak volumes on this. Now I just need to build out the team!

So who are we looking for?

Page One’s Social Media Team has developed a unique, metrics driven process focused on generating great results for our great clients. We are looking for a smart, enthusiastic, highly motivated and driven individual that is looking for the opportunity to help high-tech clients integrate social media techniques into their communications strategy. We are ideally looking for an individual who is already actively engaged in a broad range of social media activities (blogging, social networking, community development, monitoring and response, etc.), has the ability to think creatively and develop strategic solutions, and wants to jump in and get their hands dirty to create and run successful social media campaigns.

Our new team member will have:

• 2-3 years PR experience that includes PR agency or corporate experience working with technology companies;
• Experience running social media campaigns and a strong background in social media techniques and strategy;
• Creative outlook and willingness to think outside the box to find solutions;
• Outstanding writing skills and verbal communications skills;
• Willingness to experiment and ability to deal with uncertainty;
• Ability to contribute individually, and lead, manage or participate in cross-functional teams;
• A team player with the ability to create great working relationships on all levels in the company and with clients;
• Four-year university degree.

What will you be doing on the Page One Social Media Team?

This position, while a lot of fun, will also involve a lot of hard work. We are looking for someone ready to take on the challenge! By joining the Page One Social Media Team you will have the opportunity to work closely with me to help define and shape the structure of Page One’s Social Media Program, work with top-notch clients, come up with crazy campaign ideas and actually receive the support and materials to implement them.

Okay, so what are some of the activities you may be asked to do?

• Develop messaging and positioning for complex high-technology products, many of them in the B2B space;
• Respond independently to engineers, business executives and media about complex business and technology issues;
• Develop strategies to package messages that leverage media and social media trends;
• Develop strategies to enable content to be distributed online through viral word-of-mouth channels;
• Detailed analysis of metrics to track the popularity and viral distribution of specific content;
• Produce graphs and charts of media metrics;
• Independent writing of both short and long content on complex topics. Content must be engaging and able to capture enough attention that a reader will naturally pass the content on to their friend;
• Discuss plans and concepts with both mid-level and executive-level clients in meetings and in face-to-face presentations. Instill confidence in clients that you can get the job done;
• Sell concepts and plans internally and to clients to drive consensus;
• Build Twitter following on corporate channels and develop strategies for content to go viral with retweets, hashtag, and bit.ly use;
• Manage video projects for YouTube and Vimeo, including videos directed and produced by Page One and videos created by the community;
• Manage Facebook and LinkedIn campaigns, including campaign strategy creation;
• Develop and manage blog promotion strategy, including management of content from multiple people that are slow in providing content;
• Establish communication with clients even when they appear to be too busy to respond;
• Have fun and spread the awesome potential of social media throughout Page One, the entire Silicon Valley region, and the rest of the world.

Benefits. The good stuff. Want 20 days off? OK.

Since Page One’s culture is all about great people doing great things, we reward our employees with exceptional pay, matching 401K and 20 days of paid time off per year.

• 20 PTO days (even in your first year!)
• 11 paid company holidays
• Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependants
• Matching 401K
• Long- and short-term disability insurance
• Life insurance (twice your annual salary)
• Flexible spending account

The salary range for this position is up to $60,000.

If you are interested in applying to join the Page One Social Media Team, please send a resume and a note telling us about yourself to: socialmediajobs [at] pageonepr.com.

Learn more about us on: Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook.

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!

Working in PR, we are in the midst of the social media craze. Tweet that press release. Start that Facebook group about that issue, comment on that YouTube video/blog-post/profile. It makes sense. Our industry, just like many others, is trying to take advantage of the most popular thing on the internet: social media tools, online networks and other types of user generated content in Web 2.0. We were fighting over the last drumstick until just now, when Mom brought out a second whole new Thanksgiving turkey from the oven. With all of the perceived benefits of this new type of communication, I’d like to ask the pundits and experts one question:

How in the heck am I supposed to get anything done?

It is a growing trend for companies to let their employees use social media tools (read: screw around) at work as companies begin to see the advantages and uses of having a connected workforce.

Yeah, social networking sites like Facebook (and LinkedIn, which is growing on me) are a great way to network and extend business contacts, but after I poke/nudge that influential reporter, I’ll spend the next 20 minutes looking at pictures from Marie and Tom’s trip to Hawaii. Twitter, which started out as a way for me to be able to read the current climate and see what the buzz was about at all times has turned into a platform where I can share the latest funny YouTube video with every other member of the 80 million member community who is also procrastinating at work. And Wikipedia? Don’t get me started on Wikipedia… it’s an invaluable resource for someone working in the tech industry, or anyone, but at what price?

When I worked at Goldman, we had personal email and Facebook blocked (for reasons other than productivity), something that can easily be done by any company. It seemed to work pretty well (although maybe if the i-bankers were on MySpace instead of investing in risky loan markets, we’d be doing a little better…). Does the added benefit of the interconnectedness of Web 2.0, where everyone gets to create content (and learn more in the process), outweigh the costs of millions of man-hours lost in procrastination?

Let’s use math to find out. An Arbitrary Procrastination Equation (APE):

x = abs[ b + (p + d/p)/w - (w - 2p)^(d/p) - a] + 100

where…
b = amount of time it took you to read this post (assuming you read 200 words/min)
x = you have to figure that out for yourself! This is mathematics!
p = amount of time you spent following the links in this post
d/p = distraction quotient, your propensity to keep following more links off the main linked page
w = hours you are expected to work today
a = age of your boss

I invite the procrastination experts out there on the Interweb to post their APE scores here on the blog. If x is greater than 100, you are not being productive right now.

What’s your APE score?

On a sunny morning in March 2008, hundreds crowded into the Santa Clara Convention Center to hear the morning’s speeches at EclipseCon. I sat beside Eclipse marketing chief Ian Skerrett and watched him type brief dispatches in a text box at the top of a strange website.