We write a lot here about the new ground Page One PR is forging with social media, but to run a well-rounded successful PR program, which means staying on top of editorial calendar, speaking and award opportunities, still takes a lot of shoe leather and sweat – or at least a really robust tickler file.

We also write here about the free tools that we use to make our jobs a little bit easier. Here’s a new one: ITMemos from ITDatabase. (Disclosure: ITDatabase is a client)

We’ve already waxed poetic about the benefits of ITDatabase’s resources for tech companies wanting to keep in the know about what reporters are covering. With ITMemos, newsletter recipients are provided links to new speaking opportunities, given the heads up on upcoming editorial calendar opportunities and share reminders of impending award deadlines. All in one place. And by the way, these opportunities are vetted prior, so you’re not receiving crap.

ITMemos is worth taking a look. It will save you time… and it’s free.

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.

This week Page One PR celebrated the first birthday of the Social Media Team (SMT).  As I was setting up the cake and lighting the birthday candles in our San Francisco office, one of my fellow Page Wonders asked me if a year ago I would have ever thought the program would be where it is today.  My answer? No way! I was just hoping to hang on for the ride.

Craig Oda and I founded the SMT during the spring of last year. We feared Page One was lagging far behind the industry and had a lot of catch up work to do.   It turns out we were right and wrong about that assumption.  In the past year we’ve worked many long days and nights to figure out how to define and run social media for the agency.  I honestly never imagined we would have come as far as we have though.

Today we are running social media programs for some of the biggest brands in the world and helping our start-ups to become the next big names in the Valley.  We were the first agency to differentiate our services by defining social media metrics and demonstrate that you could measure social media spend and ROI.  We’ve developed a standard process (The Page One Process) that has produced outsized results for our clients.  It’s not all work – we’ve also managed to have a lot of fun along the way!

When I reflect back on the past year I’ve noticed three critical turnings points in the development of our program:

The first was Wine.com.  I was so excited to start working with Wine.com last fall!  They were the very first pure social media play we scored and – just stating the obvious – the product was wine!  We developed a three-month program aimed at increasing online wine sales.  We’d bring wine to the consumer, through Twitter, Facebook and a Wine.com blog, to boost sales.  Meet the consumer at their desired online channel.  Seems simple right?  No.  We found out quickly that it is very difficult to entice people to buy wine through Twitter.  I think the founder of Page One and I single handedly floated the total Twitter wine sales through the better part of the program.  (I still have Wine.com purchased wine at my apartment.)  That’s when we realized the importance of social media metrics.  Metrics quickly became the defining characteristic of our program and the trait that differentiates us from other PR agencies.  Social media is not about the tools you use, it’s about the strategy and campaign you create around those tools. We discovered the value of measuring specific metrics to justify social media ROI.  If you can’t measure it, it’s not worth doing.

The next critical turning point came with Appcelerator, a start-up creating software for developers.  Up to this point we had learned that social media was much more than the tools, but Appcelerator’s launch of Titanium showed us that social media cannot be a stand-alone campaign. It must fit into a larger marketing campaign if it’s going to be sustainable.  For Appcelerator, we really started to integrate social media and PR very closely.  I took the traditional PR skills I had learned in my first year at the agency and combined them with the social media lessons I had learned on Wine.com and previous social media campaigns to produce a new hybrid product launch.   The results we got for Appcelerator’s first launch (an alpha launch, mind you) were crazy!   Imagine a 3,500% increase in website traffic and more than 10,000 product downloads within the first few hours of the announcement.  Craig and I were even in shock.  During the weeks leading into the announcement I had an inkling that we were doing something big, but on launch day last December I realized that by combining social media with traditional PR we had created a service that we could actually sell.

I will be eternally grateful for the clients we worked with in the very beginning and for the programs they allowed us to run – there is definitely something to be said for client trust.  The opportunities to experiment and take a risk are really what allowed us to learn the most valuable skills along the way.

The third critical turning point came with our next big break, Cisco.  I still remember when I got the Facebook message from my old manager from my intern days at EMC, asking if we could talk about Page One’s social media services.  If Cisco had heard about us this was big!  We initially started working with them to support and promote their AXP Developer Contest.  Now let’s just be honest – the client calls were incredibly confusing. There were so many people on every call! There were product-marketing people, PR people, social media people and roles I never knew existed. I quickly realized that the mere task of trying to figure out whom everyone was, what group they belonged to and what that group’s motives were was going to be challenging.  However, Cisco is a very well oiled marketing machine.  We learned during the AXP social media campaign that social media does not cleanly fit into PR or marketing, either as a program or budget item – it sits somewhere in between (I’ll blog about this more in a week or so).  In today’s social media industry, no one group owns responsibility (or budget).  Because of this everyone in a company is a stakeholder and has to actively participate for the campaign to be a success.

While these three campaigns – and dozens of others over the past year – have allowed me to define social media and its role for our agency, the main lesson I have learned is to never compromise.  We have never settled for average results or average campaigns for our clients.  With each passing month and year, we’re steadily improving our social media services. We’d like to share what we are learning with you too.  I hope you’ll sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube to stay up to date on the next year’s discoveries!

While I’m not a fan of reading blogs about PR best practices from PR professionals, I wanted to give a shout out to three good friends from the old world of traditional PR that you don’t want to overlook in the mad rush to embrace all things social media.

So, my credentials. I’ve promoted everything from Kinkos and McDonald’s to hot high-tech startups and even the BodPod on Good Morning America. PR for me is all about results. Whatever it takes to get results as long as you don’t burn bridges – that’s how I see it. Be smart, be useful, show restraint, add value.

Specifically, there are three things from the old media world of PR that I think every practitioner still needs to understand and do better.

1) Contributed articles – typically, these are pieces written by a vendor for a publication that provides a series of criteria for acceptance (vendor neutrality is usually #1 requirement). While there are reputable publications that accept contributed articles (eWeek and Network World come to mind), there is an order of magnitude greater number of online publications that are suspect. In other words, their filter for excellence is porous at best. Now, I’m not talking about professional trade journals published quarterly by associations with peer review. I’m talking about contributed ‘cons.’ If you’re counting client clips at the end of the month, you know what I’m talking about – begins with an S and ends with ‘con.’ Don’t con your clients. Takeaway – go big or go home. A clip in a publication no one has ever heard of is a waste of your time and your client’s retainer.

2) Product reviews – tread carefully as bad reviews live forever on Google searches. First, do NOT submit your product for a review if you can’t find the time to make sure to prepare a reviewer’s guide. Assuming you have at least a basic reviewer’s guide, there are many types of reviews with varying degrees of depth you can consider. There are competitive bake-off reviews. There are reviews written from demos alone (if even that). There are reviews by established labs (unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer every day) under the supervision of eWeek, InfoWorld, Informationweek or CRN, for example. But, even some of these pubs “outsource” their reviews to freelancers. Some advice – avoid bake-off reviews whenever your product is more expensive. I’ve seen a number of examples where cost influenced the reviewer over functionality. It’s not too surprising since they have to crank out a lot of reviews and can’t spend too much time on each product. If you do get a standalone review with a reputable source – I’ve always felt Cameron Sturdevandt stood out here – drop everything and be available for them. Send a competent body to help with configuration who can answer all questions on the spot (even if you have to put them on a plane). Answer email and phone questions within an hour. Make it as easy on the reviewer as possible. Lastly, don’t try to get reviews if your product is not ready – you can’t fool all of the people any of the time.

3) Company mention – this is where your company, along with a string of other companies, is mentioned in an article. I see these types of mentions as mush. Tapioca pudding. Cream of Wheat. Sure, you want to make sure you’re included in the discussion – it is bad if you’re not included – but it will hardly move the results meter. Frankly, I think it’s mostly unscrupulous PR firms who rely on these drive-by mentions to pad their monthly client reports.

Here’s a bigger idea to chew on – people sell PR short by thinking of media opportunities as a 1:1 ratio. That is, client briefs reporter – reporter writes story – it goes live – it is listed under client news section. Instead, focus on using media opportunities and successes and discussion to breed other media opportunities and successes and discussion.

There’s a reason Twitter is exploding and newspapers are going out of business.