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.

Between standard feeds such as @NBA and @ESPN, analysts like @jadande and @jalenrose, and the athletes themselves (everyone remembers @the_real_shaq joining Twitter), I must say the NBA is very well represented. And it’s great for fans.

Whereas in the past I read about NBA rumors in stories, now I’m reading about them in 140 character tweets by those involved. Example: free agent Chris Bosh asks his followers on Twitter what team he should go to.

Or I’m seeing a flurry of controversy that erupts over what a player supposedly did or did not tweet. Example: Paul Pierce (maybe) tweets the Celtics were going to sweep the Magic. For days after, Pierce vehemently denied he wrote this (it was immediately deleted, too).

Or people are responding to rumors via Twitter. Example: Lakers exec Jeanie Buss acknowledges rumors are circulating as to where Phil Jackson will coach next year.

Today, people are choosing to address issues on Twitter. No more need to go through the circus of calling and hosting a press conference or even answering the same questions over and over. Simply type up a couple lines and click a button. Done. These messages are low-effort and reach millions of people.

There’s no denying Twitter has had a huge impact on the NBA, and that the NBA has tremendously benefited from this social marketing channel. But is it all for the better? It certainly brings fans closer, puts athletes under even more of a microscope and gives new meaning to the term “trash talk.” I like the accessibility, the real-time updates, the wide range of information out there that Twitter aggregates for me. Twitter as a marketing tool for the dissemination of news, fan engagement, and overall brand promotion works great for the NBA. I’ve also seen it work well for some of my tech clients. Though on a different scale and with a different audience, the same rules apply. The notion is pretty transferable across all industries capitalizing on social marketing.

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

—–

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.

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

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

1. Boost Awareness of a Company or Product

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

3. Engagement with Industry Influencers and/or Potential Customers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, one of my favorite groups of people to follow on Twitter is the cast of Modern Family. A number of the show’s actors have active Twitter accounts, where the majority of their tweets are @replies to fellow cast mates.

The content is all very light-hearted – they tweet about what’s for lunch, or post photos of their travels while on the job. The key is that they tweet content the average user would post to their own friends, except these guys just happen to be well-known actors with a hit TV show. Since I follow most of the cast, their @replies to each other all show up on my Twitter feed. Reading these “personal” conversation chains on a daily basis while I catch up with the Twitterverse keeps the show on my mental radar. Essentially, it’s free advertising for the show due to the public nature of Twitter, and the direct access it gives us to anyone with an account.

Nowadays, actors can do more than appear on talk shows to promote their movies or films to reach out to their fans. By maintaining an active Twitter account, they can stay visible to their followers, and once in a while, throw in a tweet about their new movie opening this weekend, and the follower probably won’t subconsciously tag this as an overt advertisement.

For example, the actor that plays Cam on Modern Family (@ericstonestreet) tweeted the following:

To me, this is a more effective way of getting a fan to tune into a new episode than sitting through a 15-second television spot that cost ABC a chunk of their advertising budget.

This is the kind of advertising noise that I welcome into my daily media consumption. And if you find my views to be too idealistic, I understand that the actors could have “Twitter campaigning” written into their contracts and that they may be getting paid by ABC to be online ambassadors for the show. I’m also aware that celebrity accounts do not benefit Twitter financially, yet. If Twitter figures out a way to seamlessly integrate promoted tweets into our Twitter experience, much like the Modern Family cast does with their @replies and indirect episode promotion, this form of targeted advertising could be Twitter’s golden ticket to a profitable business model.

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.

In a post for TechCrunch (http://tcrn.ch/ct25pM), Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff writes that “we are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator.” If Cloud 1 is defined by chat, type, tabs, pulling information and the notebook, then Cloud 2 is all about video, touch, feeds, pushing information and the tablet.  Benioff calls this transformation “cloud + social + iPad.”

I believe that the touch and video aspects of the iPad are going to have an especially large impact on the future of marketing and advertising.  Advertisements are going to be forced to become even more interactive, finding new and better ways to engage their target audience. Consumers will be able to touch, drag and manipulate products that appear on a sidebar, or touch to play a video to see the product in action. Wired Magazine offered the industry a glimpse into the future with the video demonstration of their new iPad App (http://bit.ly/ccCLkR). The user in the preview touches a car in an advertisement, and turns it 360 degrees.  In a body wash ad, the user touches the words to have more or less information appear.  An article that highlights a product is touched to go directly to the product website.

Tablets are a new, mostly untouched avenue for marketers to reach consumers.  And the tablet format will become much more pervasive as competitors like HP, Google and Dell join the race.  The iPad is pushing brands to the brink of the next phase of marketing, and I think brands that are quick to embrace this opportunity will be seen as innovative, relevant and savvy, and those brands that are resistant to the tablet format will be seen as (literally) out of touch.

Like any high school grad that had to read 1984, NBC was quick to remove the rapidly spiraling thread.  But the Internet really is forever, and you can still see the fallout floating around as screencaps.

The New Late Night Wars dominated not just the shows in question, but the entire mediasphere, both online and offline.  That’s not surprising, nor was its extreme virality, as exemplified by Jimmy Kimmel’s January offensive.  What is amazing, however, is the difference in reaction between the online and offline audiences.

When Conan joined Twitter barely a week ago, the blogosphere went crazy.  As of this morning, with just ten tweets to his name, Conan had amassed over 500,000 followers, decimating Jay Leno, who’s been kicking around for some time now.  This along with his immense online grassroots support paints the picture that maybe NBC was in the wrong on this one.
Until you take a look at the numbers of Jay’s comeback show.  “Leno Crushes Letterman in Return,” goes the headline, and the stats don’t lie.  Despite all the hemming and hawing on the Internet, the liveblogged takedowns, and the Hulu tag commentary, NBC made the right business move.  Go figure.

What the Tonight Show debacle speaks to is a much broader cultural issue on which the schism between real world and Internet world audiences touches.  Businesses are increasingly dealing with generational differences that are not age-specific.  Understanding of technology and early adoption mean that it’s not just the message but also the medium that has to cater to different demographics.

Can you afford to burn bridges with the vocal minority?  In this case, playing to the network audience, older and more staid, with Leno’s everyman persona far outweighs the outcry from the highly active online Conan camp.  But should something happen and the scales swing the other way, it’s unlikely that NBC could save face.  By betting on a real world audience today, they may be sacrificing the online audience of tomorrow.

Regardless of industry type, this is an issue that is going to impact strategic and marketing decisions for all businesses.  And if the meteoric rise in use—and valuation—of social media institutions shows us anything, it’s that online consumer tendencies will hold more weight than real world tendencies.

The influx of corporate interest in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and engineered virality is proof that most forward-thinking companies already see where they have to go in the future.  But, as in the case of NBC, when it comes time to put their money with their mouth is, it becomes pretty clear that the main tenets of social media haven’t been fully integrated into how these companies operate.  Something both admirers and detractors will be quick to point out.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering where my allegiances lie:

ExactTarget has raised $140 million, including a $75 million boost in December of 2009.

This acquisition could be a milestone early flag that social media marketing is developing into a mature industry with companies that generate revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Even from my limited perspective in Silicon Valley, I can see huge changes to the PR and marketing industries. Although Page One started off as a public relations firm, our service offering has changed radically in the past year to adapt to the changing ways the public is consuming media. It seems like email marketing and advertising companies are in full throttle evolution mode as well.

Email Marketing Meets Social Media – ExactTarget & CoTweet from ExactTarget on Vimeo.

–

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

Do you know Hadoop? You know, the open source project named for a child’s stuffed elephant that is used to store and process large volumes of data? Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! sure do – they all use it. So, when Accel Partners funded startup Cloudera needed to make a make a splash for their commercial offering of Hadoop/MapReduce software and services, what did they do?

They turned to Page One PR and reached 1.5 million people within 24 hours of launch, pushing their website traffic up by more than 800 percent. In addition to a feature story in the print edition of the New York Times, Page One PR also secured 4,500 blog placements, including GigaOm, TechCrunch and the New York Times Bits blog. Google search keyword results on “Cloudera” jumped from 9,000 to 23,000 on launch day.

Big data had never been so cool. It was the talk of the town… and Twittersphere. The huge hype resulted from Page One PR’s integrated plan that meshed PR, marketing, and social media.

Twitter alone pushed the news to more than 250,000 people, whose viral impact is known to spread like wildfire. So when people such as Tim O’Reilly (with 100,000+ followers), Robert Scoble (90,000+ followers), James Governor (6,000 followers) from Redmonk, John Battelle (16,000 followers) and Matt Asay (2,600 followers) from CNET tweeted the news, it really took off.

Page One also used YouTube and Viddler videos to quickly give reporters an overview of the product and people prior to the launch. The first video depicted the CEO and founder explaining the technology and product vision. This video has been viewed more than 5,600 times to date. The second video demoed the product and highlighted key features. The videos were also used for viral distribution in Twitter, direct email, and blogs.

The messages and positioning statements that Page One built helped shape two traditional press releases, one focused on the company funding by Accel Partners, and the other focused on the general availability of the product. The messaging was also used to create the script for the video and served as the roadmap for video direction.

To complement the messages, the founder wrote a blog post highlighting the technical features of the product. He took a deeper dive on components of the release.

The entire process – from initial plans through last interview – was carefully crafted and organized. Developing and managing communications messages and a coordinated media effort truly proved to be the key to generating buzz.

Working in a social media-intensive field, I’m always on the hunt for applications and tools that help me do my job better. Like many of you out there, I’m on Twitter all day, everyday. At Page One, we place a heavy emphasis on social media metrics and results so I started researching and reviewing Twitter search tools. I wanted to find a few applications that would make my life easier and report better results to our clients.

I first had to think about my top Twitter priorities and the kind of things we monitor, report and deliver to our clients. For me, my work on Twitter varies quite a bit depending on the client. Daily activities include event and contest promotion on @CiscoGeeks, monitoring and answering company or product-related questions on @Jaspersoft and other tasks. What am I looking for in a Twitter search tool? I want:

•    A real-time, comprehensive stream of results;
•    A method to target the right audience;
•    Insights into trends, sentiment, tone;
•    URL-tracking;
•    Twitter analytics and metrics on specified words/terms;

What did I find? An overwhelming number of Twitter tools. Five stood out for what I needed to do. For PR or Marketing professionals, these five tools can help you pinpoint the things you search Twitter for on a daily, or even hourly, basis.

1. Monitter
At first glance this tool looks very similar to the search features on Tweetdeck. In fact, Alex Holt, the man behind Monitter, said he originally intended to “mimick Tweetdeck,” but this tool does so much more and boasts a very sleek UI. Designed to quickly and easily monitor responses to product launches, companies, campaigns, or whatever it may be, Monitter allows you to search up to three terms and it automatically refreshes with real-time results.  The real kicker, which makes the life of a PR/marketing professional SO much easier, is that you can RT content or @reply to tweets instantaneously, from any Twitter feed, without logging in and out of accounts on Twitter’s site. Life changing, right? Do you “man” a client’s Twitter feed on the day of a big product launch? With Monitter, you can address comments, questions and concerns directly through their application, saving you a lot of time and preventing that “oops did I just tweet something meant for my personal feed on a client feed?!” moment.

2. Twellow
The self-proclaimed “Twitter yellow pages,” is the easiest way to search Twitter profiles. Twellow will help you target the right audience for your client Twitter feed or social media campaign. This tool has a laundry list of features and bottom-line, this should be your “go-to” site for searching and reaching your target audience.

3. Twitter StreamGraph by Neoformix
Creator Jeff Clark was too modest when he told me “he doesn’t expect the tool itself to be a commercial success.” Twitter StreamGraphs give users beautiful images of data visualization and I see some real value for marketers. A StreamGraph shows the latest 1,000 tweets that contain a specified search term. Within the image, you can see peaks in chatter, which are segmented by different word associations. You can also scan the actual tweets that mentioned the search term plus each associated word.  What a great way to monitor sentiment and tone, track terms most commonly associated with your brand, and how this changes over time. Twitter StreamGraphs are ideal for monitoring promotion around product launches and events — and to report stellar results back to clients in one beautiful image.

4. Scoopler
Scoopler provides real-time search results for terms in Twitter as well as Delicious, Digg, Flickr and Identica. Are you scraping at the bottom of the barrel for Twitter content? This is an easy way to search content across multiple social media channels and see live results. Scoopler goes one step further; it also shows you the most popular links, videos, and/or images for your search term, so you can pick up the hottest content as it’s posted. I chatted with co-founders AJ Asver and Dilan Jayawardane about this feature and they gave a great example about seeing a video of the Hubble mission shuttle launch, pretty much as soon as it happened. Are you multitasking for clients and don’t have time for a Twitter content hunt? You’d probably enjoy their “peek” feature as well, which let’s you preview any content on Scoopler, without having to leave the page.

*I also need to give Twazzup a shout out, which is another a great tool and a close 2nd. Similar concept to Scoopler, except solely Twitter-focused.

5. Backtweets
Backtweets is a simple URL search tool. What makes this tool so great? It solves one major social media dilemma… The link to external websites and content in a tweet is usually most important, and if you’re a PR or Marketing professional, you’re probably tracking it too. What if someone doesn’t re-tweet your link and shares that tinyURL you tweeted as a bit.ly instead? Backtweets allows you to search for that original link across all URL shorteners. It’s also a great way to see who is linking to your client’s website, but not mentioning our client’s name on Twitter.

These five tools push the limits of Twitter search and I find them to be very useful. Let me know too, if you have found other great applications.

1. They want to tap into social media because they recognize it’s part of being on the cutting edge of marketing and PR.

2. They want to use social media to sell more products.

That’s when I feel compelled to start talking about the “underbelly” of the beast. Social media is more than being hip and fun and cool. It’s also more than just another set of channels for making sales. Most importantly – it’s a lot of work.

We’ve spent a lot of time at Page One PR trying to figure out ways to measure the influence of social media programs, and we’ve been pretty successful coming up with metrics and strategies for providing real value to clients who want social media as another set of tools in their marketing and communications arsenal.

If you’re thinking of exploring social media for your company, go for it! But before you do that, here are five important tips you need to know:

1. Social media requires a willingness and readiness to engage.
When it comes to social media, many companies want us to “just do it” for them. Good luck. Social media programs aren’t the same as just writing a press release or developing a media pitch. When you begin to engage with people, they want to interact with YOU – they want to see personalities at a company, not just a corporate image. This requires a level of transparency from the CEO down to engineering that can’t be forged by the PR firm. Be prepared to conduct business this way if you want to be successful with social media.

2. Your audience might not naturally pay attention.
A lot of companies know this but don’t understand the number of cycles that go into running social media programs and campaigns. They think that blogging, YouTube and Twitter are ways to push out their messages without realizing no one will care unless they promote content daily. Maintaining a day-to-day social media presence (and relevance) requires loyally following four key steps: produce content, push content through social media channels, actively monitor the channels you want to leverage and respond FAST. Rinse and repeat.

3. Social media never stops.
Social media demands a fair amount of interaction if you want to build relationships with your target audiences and get their attention. Companies often drastically underestimate the resources required to build successful social media channels. They want to generate buzz around a major announcement, but then want to “turn off” until their next bit of news. They don’t want to respond to questions or create new content until it benefits their bottom line. You can’t do that with social media. Don’t be surprised when people demand that you pay attention to them before they’ll care about you.

4. Social media requires A LOT of planning.
Building your brand with social media can be a lot of fun, but the planning process can be pretty exhausting. In fact, expect any social media program to take at least 2.5x the amount of time and resources a traditional PR approach normally would. You need to plan ahead. After you’ve identified your target audiences and the key messages you want to communicate to each audience, multiply those by the number of channels you plan to use and develop metrics to measure your success. Your content should be cross-linked and distributed in sync or according to a detailed choreography. Then, monitor and have guidelines for response.

5. Social media is everyone’s responsibility.
A mistake companies often make is taking the “it’s not my job” attitude. Executives, engineers, salesmen, product managers, business development employees will often pigeon-hole social media into the marketing and communications bucket. Even marketing directors and VPs will avoid being accountable. Social media enables your audience to ask questions, challenge your claims, offer helpful product feedback and share their opinions with their network of friends and followers. Companies that are successful with social media have resources in every department to immediately address questions and issues that come in through social media channels. If you’re starting up a social media program, share with your company what you want to accomplish and tell everyone how they can help.

Social Media in Action
We recently had an incident where an IT manager was having trouble installing a client’s product and began expressing negative frustration on Twitter about the company’s product. We alerted the VP of marketing at the client who immediately called the guy and put him in touch with a sales engineer. The customer started tweeting about how impressive the client’s customer service was and began offering incredibly positive feedback about the product on Twitter. This is one of several examples of how social media can be effective if you’ve got the right internal lines of communication open and the resources to reach out to your community.

The Takeaway
While social media can have an incredibly heavy underbelly, it provides a remarkably effective way to reach and engage with your target audiences. In addition, as we continue to see traditional print and online media outlets dry up, you’ll notice that the results from social media outreach done well can transcend what you’ve come to expect from traditional PR. Even better, beyond just “counting clips,” you can quantify social media results with metrics and your own Google Analytics. So, as you get on board with social media, remember that the amount of energy, planning and resources required to fuel a successful social media campaign can give you the return on investment you want at exactly the moment you need it. Plus, it can really be a lot of fun.

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.

There are many services to shorten URLs for posting on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and LinkedIn. A popular service, bit.ly, recently added analysis capability which makes it much more useful to assess the success of social media campaigns. The basic idea is to apply a unique URL to each specific channel, Twitter, blogs, YouTube. Although the use of unique URLs is an old technique, bit.ly makes it easy to set up unique URLs without having to ask technical staff for help. The bit.ly service, which sees about a third of the monthly visitors as the more popular TinyURL, also presents the data as a set of graphs that are easy to view. Marketers can now set up and track things on their own.

I previously used notlong.com which has a similar tracking capability and the additional advantage of creating unique URLs. For example, I used notlong.com to create and track this URL for a blog posting on social media ROI.

http://mediaroi.notlong.com

Although it is nice to have a custom URL, a feature that bit.ly lacks, the analysis capabilities of notlong are much weaker than bit.ly.

If you set up a bit.ly account, you are presented with a dashboard of all your links. In addition to total views by date, bit.ly also presents charts and tables for Referrers, Locations, retweets on Twitter, and FriendFeed usage.

This level of features is much much better than TinyURL, a service with 1.75 billion hits per month. TinyURL does have a stealth feature that hides the original URL. This is a useful feature that bit.ly lacks, for those cases where you want people to get information but you may not want them to know who hosts that site.

The is.gd service offers URLs that are one character shorter than bit.ly. However, it lacks the tracking and analysis features. The is.gd service has shortened 5.5 million URLs to date.

There are numerous other URL shortening services, including budURL, eweri, hex.io, idek.net, lin.cr, POPrl, snipurl, twurl, and urlBorg. budURL, designed by Andy Meadows, has features for marketing people at small businesses, including a useful dashboard and a clickstream of URLs. However, the level of analysis isn’t as deep as bit.ly right now. POPrl has a dashboard for tracking and a nice web page to view the most popular content that is being linked to.

bit.ly has a edge over the other services right now due to very strong analytics. It seems that they could easily turn their dashboard into revenue by placing advertisements on the side of the dashboard. I think that they should also develop more analytic features and offer a commercial service to marketing firms. There’s an opportunity for bit.ly to become the Google Analytics of URL shorteners, the preferred tool of choice in any marketer’s toolbox.

Here’s another screenshot of bit.ly analytics.

This one shows a view of retweets.

Although my old boss made his statement at the end of the dot-com bust, a recession in distant memory, it still resonates with me as I navigate the current economy.

Many firms that are slashing their PR and advertising budgets are boosting their social media spend. Our social media business continues to grow rapidly, far outpacing the growth of our traditional PR services. In fact, the funding for social media projects rarely even comes from the PR budget anymore. Money often comes from product marketing, business development, or a general marketing fund for a project. After speaking to Cisco, Google, HP, Palm, and dozens of venture-funded startups about social media, I realized that in a recession, money follows measurement.

If the CFO puts an axe in a marketer’s hand and forces some chops to the marketing budget, where’s the blade going to strike first? The most vulnerable things are either difficult to measure or are delivering weak results. If there is no life in advertising click-through metrics, a good marketer views the activity as deadwood and chops away.

Here is what I have learned in the last year about metrics and social media.

An effective social media process starts with a definition of business goals and ends with a continual assessment of metrics to support these goals. I’ve found that goals generally fall into three categories:

1. Increase web site traffic – usually to a specific section like the product page, community portal, or blog
2. Increase product downloads – this is usually a key goal if there is a free or community version of the product
3. Increase registrations – companies usually require registration to access support information, participate in a contest or survey, download white papers, access documentation, or get access to product demos.

Marketers are tracking customer behavior on their website more accurately with lead nurturing systems sold by firms such as Eloqua, LoopFuse, or Marketo. They combine these systems with web site analysis tools such as Google Analytics to make decisions on which marketing programs deliver results they care about.

When we roll out a social media campaign, we generally manage five to ten channels of information simultaneously. A typical process involves blog comment management, community blogs outreach, corporate blog promotion, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook group management, and several other message channels. The information in all the channels is cross-linked. For each channel, the metrics are tracked in real-time. For example, on the day of the launch, we look at Google Analytics and social media monitoring tools to make constant adjustments to how the resources are used.

An example of the metrics we track on Twitter include:

• direct referral traffic using Google Analytics;
• number of followers;
• number of @replies by community;
• number of #hashtag uses by community;

• number of keyword mentions by community;
• number of posts by Twitter channel manager (to show we’re working);
• number of retweets.

Using this data, we are able to fine-tune messages to resonate with the target audience.

In the eight years since our discussion, my old boss has made several hundred millions of dollars in his businesses. In the midst of the current recession, I’m just starting to believe that maybe he was right.

If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter.

I have to say, I’m still not convinced (this is my view and not necessarily shared by my colleagues at Page One PR).

While Paul Taylor, the presenter, did a great job of walking us through the benefits of SEO-izing your PR and marketing collateral and results, I’ve had experiences where that just doesn’t work.

Example 1: Optimizing a press release for SEO and PR

You can do this two ways and I’ve tried both:

1) Write a release, then look at a list of key words to insert.

2) Look at the key words, then write a press release with them in mind (try to use each 1-4 times and space them out).

The second worked better for me, but if you’re supposed to insert your URL and keywords ~3 times each for near optimal SEO, it gets rough and the news starts to sound like giberrish. If the release then needs to go through legal approval and potentially partner or customer approval, you’re in trouble.

That’s only one example, but I do think there’s more beyond just blending SEO with PR and, voilà, you’re on page one of wherever you want to be. The challenge often seems to be a classic case of having too many cooks in the kitchen. You’ve got the outside agency teams, such as the PR firm, the SEO firm, potentially the SEM consultant, and then all of the internal constituents, such as the corporate marketing/advertising team, sales, product marketing, etc. Each can have different business goals and be focused on maximizing content value for that agenda. Sheesh.

BusinessWeek ran an insightful article by B.L. Ochman recently, “Debunking Six Social Media Myths.” Though I appreciated every myth debunked, I really feel the writer’s pain with Myth #4: You can do it all in-house. It’s true – you can’t!

With regards to effective and viral social media campaigns, Ochman writes:

“It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.” Agreed.

I do believe things like SEO and PR should work together – of course it’s good to have a well-oiled machine running on all cylinders – but I don’t think it’s as easy as simply “working together.” Further, given that both PR and SEO are often outsourced strategic services, is it reasonable to expect both sides to come together without the forcing factor of the client company embarking on a holistic marcomm campaign which takes months of pre-planning and coordination? That’s hard to come by when you’re working with startups, particularly high tech startups.

I remain optimistic, however, that there are definitely lessons both PR and SEO can learn from each other. Throw social media in there, and you’ve got a party!

I’d appreciate any wisdom out there about the evolution of these siloed services and think I will continue to attend free webinars on the topic to keep me engaged in thinking about the right combo of SEO + PR.

Contests have been a fun marketing tool for decades. Take Theodora Smafield. In 1946, Theodora was the first winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off competition.

Decades before Jeff Howe at Wired or the folks at Dell got excited about crowdsourcing – Pillsbury saw the power of mobilizing a community around its product through a contest.

Pillsbury wanted to excite a generation of homemakers and chefs about its flour – so it invited people to submit their best recipes for the chance to win $50,000. Theodora won for her “No-Knead Water-Rising Twists,” which involved a unique process of wrapping her dough in a tea towel and submerging it in warm water.

At Page One, we have seen the value that contests have with our clients – especially those eager to take advantage of social media strategies.

In 2008, we managed a number of contests for our clients to help excite and grow targeted communities. A couple of examples:

• SourceForge – When SourceForge, the world’s largest repository of open source software, needed to increase their interaction with their community, they turned to Team Social Media at Page One PR. Before contacting Page One’s social media group, SourceForge’s major award of the year, their Community Choice Awards (CCA) had maxed-out participation at 38,000 people. After launching several contests including free tattoos and yes, a free sling monkey – Page One’s integrated PR, Twitter and YouTube video campaign more than tripled voting participation in the SourceForge CCA contest. More than 150,000 community members submitted ballots.

• Cisco – Shelly Milam and the team at Page One are currently managing the Cisco Developer Contest. Strategically, Cisco is promoting the concept of the network as a platform. So they are offering up big money prizes to have developers build applications based on the Cisco Application Extension Platform (AXP). Much like Pillsbury looked for creative recipes – Cisco is looking for creative software applications for their routers.

These are just two of the exciting contests we ran at Page One in 2008.

As we look around the technology space, we continue to see fun contests that others are doing. Intel is running its “What’s Inside You Campaign” and HP/Microsoft are running the “Magic Giveaway“.

We don’t know who is behind some of the projects we see out there (such as Tac Anderson at HP or Ken Kaplan at Intel?)

But we’d be happy to meet with you and talk about the opportunities that contests and social media will bring in 2009.

SEO is basically a way to increase your rank on a search engine results page for a certain key word term. If you want your website to be at the top of Google’s list, there are a number of techniques to help you get there, like coding the term into your website, including the term on the content of your page, and having other websites link to your site (ideally using that term).

If a PR firm is supposed to be getting a client’s news out all over the Internet, getting links to a client’s website all over the Internet doesn’t seem like a big step. However, it’s surprising how few people in PR know how to improve their clients’ search engine status (folks in marketing generally seem to be ahead of the curve). Public relations firms are just now starting to “get it.” The upcoming Public Relations Society of America conference includes a few sessions on SEO tactics, but they are mostly aimed at beginners.

Over the past six months, we have seen a real desire from our clients to partner more on increasing their web traffic, search standings, and lead generation. With access to Google Analytics information to gain a deeper understanding of how press coverage drives traffic to their sites, we can talk with clients about the keywords and search terms that they want associated with their website.

For me, the most exciting part of integrating SEO and PR practices is the impact that clients can see as their inbound links and web traffic rise. It is cool to know that a link-rich story that ran a month ago is still sending readers to the client’s site, or that a certain publication was one of the top sites sending the client traffic.

For example, the links in a June interview in Dr. Dobb’s Journal with Jason van Zyl, founder and CTO of Sonatype and creator of Maven, sent readers to the Sonatype website as recently as last week. Folks who came to the site from that story tended to stay longer, and the percentage of those who were visiting the site for the first time was higher than average. In contrast, links on the popular developer website DZone tended to send people over to the Sonatype site more regularly, but most were people who had already been there. Sure this is interesting, but why is it useful?

From a PR perspective, you get a whole new understanding of the publications. Even though they have a very technical audience, Dr. Dobb’s Journal is a better place for high-level stories that preach the gospel of Sonatype’s Java development infrastructure. Even though they have a large readership, DZone is a better placement for stories that appeal to those familiar with Sonatype and Maven. Looking at search engine and web traffic flow can help PR firms better target story placements to advance the business interests of the client.

The big question is: why don’t we see more integration of SEO and PR?

What do you think?

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.