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.

When I first saw the shortlist for the 2008 Sabre Award silver finalists in Technology Software, I had to look twice. A&R Edelman for Adobe Systems, Access Communications for Intuit, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide for Microsoft and, what? PAGE ONE PR for a small open source start up? Could this be right?

Upon second look, I saw it was true! According to the Sabre Awards, Page One is standing among some global giants, and we are neck and neck. But although we’d like to take credit for coming up with the creative idea behind it all, I also have to admit we couldn’t have done it without social media.

Our nomination comes for a campaign that we cooked up last summer at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo called “Who’s the Next Open Source Idol?” We created a contest to determine which of four popular open source mascots Linux junkies love most and threw in Tux the Penguin, Beastie the BSD Devil, “Foxie” the FireFox and the GNU (also know as Bessie). Even better, we asked people to sing or dance on behalf of their vote.

After stirring up some trouble at the show, FireFox fans rallied and ousted Tux. In the meantime, our client saw a 43% increase in traffic to their corporate website in three days and 1,133 people visited their community portal to vote. We also generated buzz in the IT media community, and people are still talking about it.

The Sabre Awards recognize public relations firms that focus on delivering out-sized results and improving a client’s bottom line through out-of-the-box campaigns. For “Open Source Idol,” we tapped a variety of social media channels to generate buzz, which ended up being incredibly cost-effective to leverage. In fact, one reason social media is so effective is that it puts everyone on a level playing field. Through a mix of social media and traditional PR tactics, we were able to reach the Linux and open source enthusiasts we needed to participate and were able to engage with them directly.

So, I guess the big takeaway is it no longer matters how big your marketing or PR budget is – even a small technology startup can stand out against giants. It just takes some guts, smarts and social media.

One of the most common goals we hear from prospects is, “We want to be the next JBoss.” The inevitable follow up question is, “How did you do it?”

I like to say “with a lot of blood, toils, tears and sweat,” but that would border on sentimentality. The truth is, JBoss in 2003 had a lot going for it already: good, free technology (or, in more famous words, “It’s free and it doesn’t suck”); a growing community; and a firebrand of a chief executive in Marc Fleury.

What PR provided was discipline, consistency, and a soapbox. The rest was history.

You could argue that open source developers were the original online social networkers. With that in mind, there were three things that JBoss did right that went against conventional PR wisdom at the time, but are more applicable than ever today, especially given the rise of social media usage.

First, JBoss always put the community first. Under the open source mantra of “release early, release often,” JBoss developers didn’t wait for sign off from PR to release code, announce it on community mailing lists, and blog about it. This was initially a major headache for PR, as I often took calls from reporters asking me why I hadn’t told them about such and such a release. And, as JBoss expanded the number of projects over which it had direct stewardship, this disconnect only exacerbated.

The PR team initially tried to control this, but communities don’t work this way. Traditional PR often focuses on controlling the flow of information when it should focus on the content itself, regardless of whether it is delivered through press releases, interviews, blog posts, podcasts, or presentations. Once we accepted that, we used the the blogs (remember, this was 2003!) as another way to get information out that supported messages of innovation, community, and participation.

Second, JBoss did not fear controversy. We never attempted to “censor” Fleury; his strong opinions, enthusiasm, and colorful choice of words gave him an authentic voice that no amount of PR prepping/media training could ever create. But those strong opinions–not just from him but from other JBossians–sometimes rubbed others the wrong way, inviting controversy after controversy. While each episode was challenging to go through, JBoss always came out of it smarter than before.

It’s always a good idea to take the high road, but there are times when it really pays to be scrappy. If you’re the David in a hot market with lots of Goliath players, you can’t always turn the other cheek. Those willing to put up a good fight have a fighting chance.

Lastly, JBoss was incredibly metrics-driven. The company bootstrapped itself for almost four years before taking on venture financing. PR, as Fleury liked to tell it, was JBoss’ biggest investment. To track this investment, we established detailed reporting that looked at every article, every positive and negative word, and every key message we wanted to get across. This was done on a quarterly basis, and when things didn’t track, we adjusted the program.

Fast forward that five years to 2009 and you will see that metrics is more important than ever. We’re in the midst of a recession, so measuring spending vs. results is essential. Though PR is still more art than science, there are sophisticated tools now to make reporting that much easier and that much more valuable to the company.

If you’re doing PR today, you know it’s a changing business. JBoss’ success was a product of its time, though it offers some lessons that stand true today. You have many more tools with which to build community around your offerings and measure adoption and visibility. You may not be the next JBoss; but you could very well create your own category and become the benchmark for startups to come.

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!

Plat’Home, in discussions with Page One, realized that they needed more specific differentiation in the U.S. market and re-positioned the product value proposition around the microservers’ hidden strengths – low power consumption and extreme temperature resistance. In our rollout strategy at Page One, we also offered review units to reporters. You have to see these things to believe them. Out of the box, the high quality Japanese engineering and small size – a fully functional server that fits in the palm of your hand – has a big impact.

Plat’Home has the advantage of having market-tested products. While they appear to be a startup here, the products they sell in the U.S. market are in their fifth generation, with many large satisfied Japanese customers such as KDDI (telecom), HitachiSoft (software), Yomiuri (news), and Shimizu (construction).

Page One, in media outreach and Web-based guerilla marketing, focused on “tiny, green and extreme toughness,” to re-launch Plat’Home products in the U.S.. Clips piled up quickly, with coverage in CNET, Wired, The Register, Slashdot (with 188 comments), E-Commerce Times, and many other important IT trade publications.

U.S. web site traffic, the main barometer of success and where all sales leads originate, jumped 20-fold and then 70-fold and finally 90-fold. It was like an online firehose. In-coming sales leads tracked a similar trajectory, overloading Plat’Home’s ability to respond, initially (they subsequently added “Buy Now” buttons on most of their Web pages). That’s a nice problem to have!

The U.S. market is large and noisy for foreign companies entering for the first time. Adjusting to the landscape of U.S. media can also be daunting. But Plat’Home now has increased interest in the U.S. market, both in the media and with customers. They still have work ahead of them but they have built a good foundation for long-term success by focusing their messages and playing to their strengths.

Plat’Home-At-A-Glance
Daily U.S. web site traffic before Page One PR: life support, almost flat line. Minimal inbound sales queries (see trend lines in graph below).

March 31, 2008, first press release with Page One PR (clips in CNET, others):

• Web traffic up 2,000%;
• In-bound sales queries up 500% over historic traffic level.

April 21, 2008, second press release with Page One PR (clips in Wired and Slashdot, others):

• Web traffic up 7,000%;
• In-bound sales queries up 1,000% over historic traffic level.

April 28, 2008, follow-up Page One pitching on second news release sparks second round of media coverage (clips in The Register, others):

• Web traffic up 9,000%;
• In-bound sales queries up 1,300% over historic traffic level.



(percentage increases in plathome.com website traffic)

When the organizers of the main community conference for the Python programming language contacted Page One to do PR for them, their goals were modest — just stir up some interest… oh, and turn it into the JavaOne of Python. Yikes!

Fortunately, Google (and YouTube), Microsoft, Canonical, and many, many other big brands backed PyCon. Page One loves working with developers so we accepted a small project to give back to the open source community and to gain experience with the Python community. Due to the small size of the project, PyCon organizers were only expecting a few press clippings here and there. A couple clips = success. Not hard, right?

Right away I realized that PyCon had almost zero name recognition. “What is PyCon?” or “Who do you represent?” reporters and bloggers kept asking me. Pitching the conference as a standalone event proved quite challenging. So I moved on to coupling it with other Python news (oh, by the way Guido Van Rossum is leading a session on that topic at PyCon next month!). In my opinion, that was the most fun part of the whole experience – looking for story pitches where I could legitimately insert a PyCon angle. And it worked. One story in particular was completely focused on a separate issue altogether, yet the PyCon people dominated the copy.

So what effect did Page One actually have on PyCon? Statistically, we blew away the coverage of any previous PyCon with 25 press clippings (versus a half dozen clips for the 2007 event). But it’s not the multiple podcasts, radio interviews, features in publications such as Dr. Dobb’s Journal, InfoWorld, and Internet News, or the 77 percent increase in attendance that really stands out. More important were the intangible effects – we got the word out there. People stopped asking me what was a PyCon? And that was the real aim of our work for PyCon – to maintain the grassroots, community feel while putting PyCon on the map and stimulating interest in Python in general. I’m sure attendance and press interest will increase next year… maybe not entirely because of Page One, but we definitely got the ball rolling. Have you heard of PyCon?

We took a recent Stanford University graduate, convinced her to wear a cow suit and increased web site traffic by 43% for a Silicon Valley startup in three days. Well, to be fair, we also had a fox, a demon, and penguin to help us.

At LinuxWorld in San Francisco last week, we walked around the show floor in costumes, recorded video, danced, sang, and convinced attendees to participate in choosing the Next Open Source idol. The results were hilarious and great for business. GroundWork Open Source saw a 43% increase in traffic to their corporate web site in three days. They also had 1,133 people go to the community portal on their main web site and interactively vote on their favorite idol. The videos generated 5,000 views from a targeted open source audience in one week.

The PR campaign also generated buzz in the IT media community, including this short blurb in NetworkWorld.

The project was viewed as a success, helping to increase the visibility of GroundWork Open Source in the technical community and driving relevant traffic to their web site. We also got to dress up in funny costumes in public a full two months ahead of Halloween.

Page One PR has used social media tools in our client campaigns since we started the agency in late 2002.

We developed our expertise at companies in the early days of open source and Linux. In open source, the winners are projects and companies that can foster communities of developers the fastest. The more developers you attract to your code, the more valuable your code becomes and that in turn attracts more users to projects. If you’re a company, the more of those users who convert into customers, the more successful your business.

That experience informs how we look at “social media” PR at Page One.

It’s very challenging to attract a lot of different people around an idea. The idea by definition has to be big. And authentic. For us, it was originally open source and the promise to participate in something that would change forever how software was made.

Google came to us in mid-2008 for help on a project. Their big idea was that software would be created in the cloud and run on clients in the browser. No one owns the cloud but Google has great tools for making software in the cloud. They wanted developers to know more about those great tools. Their business interest was to attract more Web developers to their Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I think by all measures it was a huge success. Registrations were so high that Google had to shut down the lines at Moscone to start the keynote address on time. We had onsite blogging from TechCruch, podcasts by Mashable, and twitter feeds from all of the main events. Pre-event coverage was up almost 600 percent from the year before and first day coverage jumped more than 300 percent. CNET alone ran 10 stories.

Many of our agency peers in the PR industry run around all bug-eyed like old Roman statues obsessed with Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Seesmic, Plurk, LinkedIn or whatever might be the latest tool. But successful social media is not about the tools. It’s about the big idea, and then it’s about how you use all of the tools you can to foster participation in the big idea and, if you’re a company, to advance a business interest that you can measure.