At first glance, from a company’s perspective, the premise might seem simple enough; the goal is to attract as many followers as possible in order to get your product in front of as many faces as possible. This has led to numerous blog posts advising the novice starter on the best ways to increase follower count, some have even suggested adding your Twitter handle onto your email signature (Tip No. 9 here) and reprinting your business cards to reflect your Twitter persona.

Sounds like a valid enough argument right?… WRONG!

If your goal is to become the next Britney Spears of Twitter (at last count, 5.5 Million followers and No. 1 on Twitter Counter’s 1000 most popular) then by all means, spam away. For companies interested in increasing their influence and thought leadership, however, a very different approach is needed. Our clients at Page One are technology companies catering to specific communities of highly knowledgeable influencers, analysts, media, and all around tech-savvy folk. These clients use Twitter to disseminate a very particular kind of information and really couldn’t care less about Britney’s latest run-ins with the law (personally, however, I’m excited to catch her on Glee!). What’s more, there are only a handful of people with knowledge of something as obtuse as MySQL databases, preach it to people outside that community and your message will end up falling on deaf and uninterested ears.

Having a large number of followers also prevents you from catching the important nuggets of information that Twitter intended you to have. When you reach a couple thousand followers, their updates on your Twitter home page become a barrage that is nearly impossible to make sense of.

Most people confuse popularity with influence but these are two very different concepts in the Twittersphere. The difference between these two is at the forefront of a recently published study by the director of HP Lab’s Social Computing Lab, Dr. Bernardo A. Huberman.

Influence, as it turns out, is the ability to overcome people’s passivity enough to make them engage with you. In simple words, it means being relevant enough on Twitter for people to reply and retweet your tweets. This type of engagement requires a community of people that care about the same things enough to dialogue and hash out conversations (pun intended). To achieve this is no easy task, it requires paying constant attention to your Twitter account, setting up synergistic relationships by mutually following people in your community and Tweeting relevant and up-to-the-minute information that your community cares about.

According to Klout.com, a website that can tell you how influential one is in the Twittersphere, out of 5,560,927 total followers and 416,924 people Britney is following, there are 0 mutual followings. Imagine her standing in a room with her back turned to 5.5 Million people while she grooves to her own music through noise-cancelling head-phones. That’s what’s going on.

Popularity means nothing, at least for those interested in thought leadership and influence, if you can’t interact with your community. We at Page One PR understand that and encourage our clients to critically examine their social media campaigns. It’s not about looking up at the stars in silent admiration, it’s more about looking sideways and saying hi to the colleague standing right next to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While some advertising agencies have begun experimenting with social media in their ad campaigns (e.g. Trident’s full-page ad showcasing Twitter messages from its customers or the Old Spice YouTube videos created by the ad agency, Wieden + Kennedy, with the help of social media consultants), social media firms seem a bit more cautious incorporating advertising into their marketing campaigns. This may be due to the distrust people generally feel toward advertising, which makes its introduction into a community-oriented social media channel rather tricky.

However, advertising can work especially well in social media due to the high engagement level of social media users. Page One PR has run Facebook ads, Twitter ads, and even placed ads on message boards and newsletters for our clients. The ads we ran can be divided into two objectives: to increase the reach or engagement level of a channel and to increase direct sales and downloads of a product or service.

What worked and what didn’t?

Message boards and newsletters tend to cater to audiences that are not being targeted by traditional forms of PR and marketing. By locating message boards and newsletters that are relevant to a client’s market, we can identify a niche audience that is very likely to be interested in a product or company. Though we may be reaching a smaller audience, it is one that is pre-vetted and predisposed to listen to our client’s message. The target audience is narrow but deep.

In contrast, running ads on Twitter-specific networks garners a very wide audience, but it is one that is primarily interested in Twitter. Even though an ad may be seen by a great number of people and can lead to a huge spike in followers, the viewers are rarely “quality” leads. As a further detraction, we have noticed that a significant number of followers generated from Twitter network ads drop off after a short period of time. The target audience here is wide and shallow.

We’ve generated better results from Facebook ads, though the outcome depends largely on the goal of the campaign and the “call to action.” We’ve found that ad campaigns that keep fans within Facebook’s platform lead to better returns. In one instance, we created and ran an ad to drive new fans to a Facebook Page. The number of fans grew by 44% with a gain of nearly 1,000 in one month and a conversion rate (percentage of people who became fans after clicking on the ad) of 30.3%. In contrast to Twitter network ads, fans generated from these campaigns did not drop off.

However, the results have been negligible for ads that require a user to leave Facebook’s site. We created a Facebook ad to increase attendance to an event. Though a high number of viewers who clicked on the ad ended up purchasing tickets to the event, the total number of clicks on the ad remained relatively low. This could indicate the keyword triggers and other ad filters were too well targeted to appeal to a large enough audience. A second Facebook ad offered a white-paper download from a client’s website, again taking the audience away from Facebook’s site and again leading to unspectacular results.

The last is also an example of what happens when ads are not integrated with an interesting marketing campaign. For instance, we ran an ad in which viewers were asked to share their funniest customer requests regarding a specific product. Perhaps not surprisingly, the results far outshone those from the ad that offered a whitepaper download. At a very basic level, the call to action should be more than just “buy now” or “click here.”

What’s on the horizon?

Social media at its best consists of both give and take – users generate and promote valuable content, while building relationships and engaging with communities. In contrast, consumers of traditional media and search engines are accustomed to a one-way street of communication. Because social media users tend to be more engaged, it signals a greater likelihood that they will interact with an ad, especially one which develops their relationship with a community further.

We’ve found the conversion rates from social media ads have been high, especially relative to more traditional forms of online advertising. In future, we plan to run more ads targeted at driving community interaction, specifically ones that keep an audience on Facebook’s site. We will also begin incorporating LinkedIn ads in our marketing campaigns and continue tweaking our campaigns on Twitter-specific advertising networks to generate better results. While care must be taken to ensure results are not offset by the cost of the ads, we have witnessed enough promise to continue using advertising in our campaigns where appropriate and we see this trend continuing for social media marketing as well.

Today, Twitter still remains one of our more popular social media services, but our measurements have shifted to measuring engagement with top influencers.  We now look to capture Twitter metrics like influential @replies or retweets, traffic or clicks to marketing collateral like white papers, videos or specific pages on the client’s website, downloads of free trials or products and positive comments about our clients.  In order to increase these metrics we make sure our follower base is made up of influencers and then run a series of campaigns or activities that are designed to encourage interaction with these followers.

Below I outline three techniques we have been using recently to help increase engagement on the VMware vCloud and SAP Crystal Reports Twitter feeds we are managing:

1. Twitter Polls. For both feeds we have recently run a series of Twitter polls aimed at increasing engagement with our followers.  You can use a free service like TwtPoll to easily set up the poll and then promote it on your Twitter feed to collect responses from your following.  Usually your followers will take the poll and also help you promote by retweeting it to their followers or @replying their responses.  Not only do these polls help you interact with your followers, but you can also select questions that provide valuable research data.  For example, on @crystalreports we polled our following to see which Crystal Reports products they would like to try out.  Based on the results of this poll we now have a better idea of the type of products we should give away on the feed when we run a product giveaway contest in the future.

2. Twitter Contests. Another great technique, although a little more work to pull off than a Twitter Poll, is to execute a Twitter-specific contest on the feed.  There are many different types of Twitter contests and frankly I could write an entire blog post about this topic alone, but in general the best Twitter contests are ones that are easy and fun to participate in.  The whole goal is to run an activity on the feed that entices your followers and gets them involved in some type of game or giveaway, ultimately achieving some pre-identified marketing goal.  Most Twitter contests are designed to require the Twitter user to retweet a specific phrase that includes a unique hashtag or bit.ly link or requires the Twitter user to follow the feed and then be direct messaged an instruction or prize code.  For VMware we wanted to collect use cases so designed a Twitter contest that asked vCloud users to submit their use cases on a contest microsite, follow @vcloud and then tweet the phrase: “Hey, @vCloud I just submitted to @Bluelock’s developer contest to win an iPad! http://bit.ly/dsXfI1 #cloudmonkeys” to be entered to win a prize.  Contests like this help promote the feed and specific marketing content, but also provide a means to interact with the following.

3. Twitter Q&As. This is a relatively new technique we are trying out, but the preliminary results look interesting.  For SAP Crystal Reports we have identified a long list of business intelligence and Crystal Reports influencers, some of which have rather large social networks.  In order to tap into those networks we have selected a few of the top influencers and will be facilitating Q&As with them on our Twitter feed.  We are currently running our debut Q&A with a prominent author of a top rated book on Crystal Reports and are asking the community to submit questions via Twitter or Facebook to be responded to by the author.  We are hoping to execute a series of these influencer Q&As with members of Crystal User Groups and other technical communities in the future.  A series like this can provide our Twitter following with access to Crystal Reports “superusers”, which will serve as a valuable resource and make our Twitter feed a go-to site for Crystal users.

These are just a couple of the ideas we have been using recently on the feeds we manage.  Since social media is in a constant state of evolution, I’m sure we will be using different techniques in the near future.  What’s important to keep in mind though is that a good Twitter feed will provide both valuable content and engage with it’s following, either through conversation or techniques like those outlined above.  Let us know what techniques you are using to stimulate engagement on your Twitter feeds!

1) Mind the platform:

2) Be Clear and Honest:

3) Take Full Responsibility:

4) Be Proper:

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

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

After announcing the upcoming revisions in October, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released their guide for advertisers for the first time since 1980 in December with some notable revisions. With fines up to $11,000 per penalty, companies and endorsers engaged in social media campaigns have to be a lot more careful.

The FTC is cracking down on social media endorsements. From celebrities to tech bloggers, if the relationship, or “material connection,” between the endorser and companies using social media is not obvious to consumers, the endorser must disclose this information. The FTC has the consumers’ best interests in mind, but places the responsibility on advertisers to know what consumers take away from their ads and promotions.

Although the guidelines state that the connection between the company using social media and the endorser must be disclosed, they do not say specifically how or where it must be disclosed. The FTC does hold the endorser responsible for disclosure, but both the endorser and the company can be liable: “The Commission believes that the endorser is the party primarily responsible for disclosing material connections with the advertiser.  However, advertisers who sponsor these endorsers (either by providing free products – directly or through a middleman – or otherwise) in order to generate positive word of mouth and spur sales should establish procedures to advise endorsers that they should make the necessary disclosures and to monitor the conduct of those endorsers”(“Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising”, Federal Trade Commission, 39).

How will these new guidelines affect social media marketing? Andy Sernotivz of AdvertisingAge says the FTC’s new guidelines work to social media marketing’s advantage: “Now we have the clarity to properly invest in social media, without having to guess about legal risks,” and Dallas Lawrence of Mashable and Bulletproof Blog suggests that “there isn’t much companies should be doing now that they shouldn’t have been doing before these rules went into effect.” Here at PageOne, we excel in our social media marketing campaigns, all while complying with the new FTC guidelines.

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Craig Oda and Paulina Singhapok ( Twitter @sf_paulina)

That budget battle forced by the recession arrived at about the same time as more and more brands began to take social media seriously in their marketing. Many companies were frankly desperate to try anything that might work. And to their delight they found that the investments required in social media tended to start small. So they jumped in feet first.

Okay, now who decides what the plan will be?

Who’s in charge of that social media spending and strategy and execution?

Surprise! It turns out no one. The PR people tended to raise their hands first but many flailed since social media was so much different than the strict message control practiced by most brands’ public relations departments. The creative services agencies took the most of this opportunity. They understood a good idea and could create compelling content. Many had digital groups that could also do the digital plumbing required to publish that content on the Web. PR firms usually had to outsource this activity. Unfortunately a lot of ad agencies still only understand how to broadcast one way. They missed the engagement part of the equation required in successful social media campaigns.

Filling much of this gap in the meantime are some smart specialist firms that consult on social media marketing. Their principals pontificate on panels at prestigious conferences. They’re all over Twitter. We see some of them in our work with global brands such as Cisco and SAP. They’re smart. But most seem weak on the execution side of social media marketing. They have good ideas but they fall down trying to put them into practice. This phenomenon has been good for our business at Page One.

Tim Dyson, CEO of Next15, the UK-based holding company for some PR firms that we respect, pointed out recently in his blog that ad agencies were winning social media awards. Ad agencies are playing on the turf of PR agencies and winning. He observed that PR agencies can play that same game. At Page One, we’re already taking budget from the ad side.

Most of our big social media clients discover and hire us through individual business units. These groups have a business problem they want to solve. They have good budgets, too. They’re considering social media in the mix with other marketing spends, including advertising, webinars, lead generation, online micro-sites, games and more. The PR/communications teams within these companies know that we’re helping these business units, and we coordinate with them, but they’re not driving the strategy. And they don’t control the budget. It’s money that comes from marketing (usually from the ad spend), not whatever shrinking fraction has been allocated this fiscal year to PR/communications.

I think that there is an opportunity for PR to take charge of social media, but at the same time learn how to play well with the ad side of the house. PR can move faster and respond more quickly than the advertising people. We’re two-way communicators who just need to let go of our control issues. At the same time, ad people are great on content.

We’re in the middle of a pretty exciting social media campaign right now with one of the world’s largest software companies. We’re working closely with the client’s branding agency and the budget is split two-thirds, one-third between us. We’re driving the overall strategy and communications and owning the direct relationships with influencers. They own presentation of content. It’s going great right now. We’ll see when the results come in. I think it may prove to be an interesting model for future campaigns.

Advertising on Facebook

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

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

Advertising on LinkedIn

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

A few things to keep in mind:

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

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

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

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

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

1988 – Jarkko Oikarinen creates Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

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

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

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

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

2003 – LinkedIn goes live

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

2004 – Flickr is created

2004 – Digg launches

2005 – YouTube is founded

2006 – Twitter is founded

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

2010 – Google launches its social networking platform Buzz

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

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

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

Phase Two of the Twitter advertising model rolled out this month – Promoted Trends.  Once dominated by every Justin Beiber reiteration imaginable, the trending topics list will now incorporate topics sponsored by a company that will also be marked as “promoted.” Disney/Pixar was the first to try this new phase, by promoting “Toy Story 3” as a trend in advance of its June 18^th opening.

Last week, a clever campaign from Coca Cola demonstrated the potential of the Promoted Tweets model when executed well. The beverage brand capitalized on the World Cup fervor and “bought” the hashtag #WC2010, which was listed as a Promoted Trend on Wednesday, June 23 – the day of the U.S. vs. Algerian match and possibly the best (and most Tweeted) game in U.S. soccer history.  When Twitter users clicked on the #WC2010 Promoted Trend, a Promoted Tweet from Coca Cola with a soccer-related message and a link to their website appeared at the top of the search results. From this one-two Twitter punch, Coca Cola reported an impressive 86 million impressions and a 6% click-thru rate in 24 hours (via @mashable).

Twitter is very vocal about the fact that the evolution of this advertising model will be a slow one – heck, it took them two years to get to the Promoted Tweets idea.  But I can already see two places for improvement:

- Incorporating Promoted Tweets into broad searches: I could only find the Virgin America Promoted Tweet when searching for the phrase “Virgin America.”  I think Promoted Tweets would be of more value to companies if their Promoted Tweets were featured on broader searches – in this case, words like “Vacation,” “Airplane,” or “Travel.”

- Reaching TweetDeck users: In its current state, the Promoted Tweets model seems to skip over those Twitter users who use an external client, like TweetDeck or Twhirl, and don’t see trending topics (promoted or otherwise) on their interface. In searches for “Virgin America” on both clients, the Promoted Tweet from Virgin America did not appear.

At the Conversational Media Summit on June 8, Twitter COO Dick Costolo reported that Twitter now has 190 million users tweeting 65 million times a day. Clearly, Twitter is an untapped advertising goldmine.  However, I think that the Twitter advertising model has a way to go before more companies, especially those that are small-to-medium sized, see the benefit. With the flexibility of millions of advertising dollars, corporations like Disney, Starbucks and Virgin America are the perfect guinea pigs.

MONITORING – Without it, we wouldn’t know what strategy to develop for a social media campaign and we wouldn’t be able to make a campaign dynamic and actionable.

To build a social media campaign strategy, we need to first conduct an audit just as we would for a more traditional PR campaign. The social media audit consists of four major monitoring-and-analysis components. The first three, which we break down in our September ’09 issue, monitor and analyze where a company (and its product) stands in comparison to its competitors, its market and its current social media efforts. The fourth component monitors and analyzes influencers who are most relevant to a campaign, a process we describe in our March ’10 issue.

But monitoring doesn’t end with the audit process and development of campaign strategy. Once the campaign has been launched, we continue to perform ongoing monitoring in order to identify specific actions and opportunities to proactively engage with target audiences (customers, potential customers and influencers). Ongoing monitoring differs from monitoring during the audit phase in that it leads to specific actionable recommendations that feed back into the creation of strategic content.

MEASUREMENT – Did the campaign accomplish its intended goals? Was it worth the time and resources? Measurement allows us to evaluate the success and value of a social media campaign.

The first question requires a method to identify and report the results of a campaign. To begin, it is necessary to set specific actionable goals for a campaign and to then determine metrics that have a direct correlation to the goals. Those metrics should be used to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. The goals for a Twitter campaign typically involve increasing awareness (of a company, event or product), so metrics that determine the number of impressions and the level of interaction (or interest) produced by a campaign serve as a good indicator of whether goals have been reached. Our June ’09 issue details the metrics that we generally use when measuring the results of a Twitter campaign. However, these are just starter metrics and we should always make sure the goals are really appropriate for a campaign. For example, reaching the largest number of people may be less important than reaching specific people.

The second question of whether a campaign was worth the time and resources addresses the issue of ROI and is unfortunately a much harder nut to crack. Though we would be the first to recognize there’s no simple solution, we offer one way to tackle the issue of measuring social media ROI (especially in comparison to other marketing programs) in our July ’09 issue. We hope to offer more on this topic as we get more hard data from our campaigns for clients.

MANAGEMENT – You’ve completed your audit, developed your strategy, and even determined the metrics for measurement. Now begins the work of producing and communicating content as part of your campaign, a process that can be overwhelming and time-consuming. How do you optimize limited time and resources?

Our debut issue from May ’09 outlines steps to increase the results of a product launch by incorporating social media channels like blogging, Twitter, and video. But how do you manage those channels individually?

For example, many companies struggle to find a process that allows them to publish and promote posts regularly for a corporate blog. In our February ’10 issue, we introduce one method, which follows a publishing model practiced by media companies and which addresses the three main obstacles of corporate blogging: 1) getting busy people to consistently contribute content; 2) identifying relevant topics; and 3) generating enough blog views to justify the cost of time and effort.

With Twitter, the challenge lies in managing the flood of content that is pushed out to the Twitterverse. How do you know what requires a response? Is there a way to minimize the amount of time spent searching for and writing mini-posts to publish? We have found that some tools can ease the process and we provide a guideline to using such tools effectively in our issue from January ’10.

Integrating video into a product launch is especially effective due to video’s visual impact and YouTube’s viral potential. Video can tell the story of a company or a product in a way that cannot be accomplished by the written word (e.g. press release) alone. Unfortunately, producing a video is a foreign process to most companies. Budgets rarely allow for the employment of professional production studios, so how do you make a video that looks professional, yet doesn’t cost tens of thousands? We struggled with the issue ourselves and share some tips we learned in our November ’09 issue.

Want to hear more about our experiences with new social media technologies and the lessons we learn while carrying out campaigns for clients? Sign up for our newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Amazon. Yikes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growth in three social media channels managed by Page One:

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

Influencer Identification and Outreach

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

Live Social Media Coverage

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

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

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.

I tend to sit on the New Media side of the house and would argue that since so many traditional journalists now have blogs too, and would still claim legal protection for anything posted on their newspaper column or blog, then bloggers who are covering the news should also get the same type of protection.  Regardless of which side you land though it’s undeniable that there are shifts going on in the communications industry.  I’m beginning to question if the debate stops with just “journalist vs. blogger” though.

A blog published on Read Write Web yesterday covering the HP/Palm news is based entirely on Twitter content.  The article is basically a cut and paste of “the smartest tweets” from industry thought leaders about the acquisition.  After doing some internet trolling, it seems to me that this is one of the first articles to rely solely on Twitter content.  In fact, I myself hardly ever scan my Google Reader anymore and tend to just rely on my Twitter feed to get my daily news.  So if journalists first became bloggers and then bloggers became tweeters does this now mean that Twitter users get legal protection too?  What implications are there exactly for the Joe Schmoe who decides to use his Twitter feeds as a “reporting” mechanism and happens to tweet about a confidential product?  Does he get legal protection too?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flying back from a sales call to one of the world’s largest technology vendors, I realized how much our business had changed while our business model had not. We were trying to run our exploding social media practice using pricing models from our legacy public relations business.

I suspect this problem is a challenge for other agencies new to social media. It’s also a struggle for clients used to agency pricing practices that are really just time and materials. Like a lawyer, I’m running a business that sells services by the hour. But the new product I offer is more like advertising agency creative. What’s the cost of a great idea?

Public relations agencies doing substantial social media work need to shift to value pricing (tied to client business objectives and clear metrics) while customers need to understand better where the value is in what they are buying. A surprising amount of the social media value a customer ‘buys’ is a great idea and a smart strategy (developed up front), not the tactics and execution after the contract is signed and delivered through hourly charges on the backend.

Before my team flew in to meet with this client (yes, we got the gig), we probably invested more than 100 hours of senior executive time developing a strategy. It was a lot of effort. But when we submitted the statement of work, there was no line in the contract’s pricing schedule for “big idea” and “strategy.” The pricing in the contract focused on people and time and hourly rates. As a small agency, we don’t have the luxury of using our own paper in contract negotiations. I don’t think there’s any way we will recover our up-front time investment in this three-month project. In this case the client actually threw in some extra money in recognition of the situation.

I struggle with how to manage pricing value right.

I’ve been surprised at the lack of conversation around pricing value in social media. Most of the heated conversations and debate are around ROI and measurement. I think we’ve largely figured out those problems and the social media experts who claim otherwise are disingenuous.

Every social media program that we run is tied to metrics that map back to the client’s business objectives (we blog here frequently on the topic). We measure the needles that social media can move and that the client agrees will also impact their business objectives. We’ve run now more than 100 social media programs to get to this point. So I don’t think the ROI measurement discussion matters anymore. You just do it. And everyone will be doing it right soon enough.

We ran a social campaign (it’s still on-going actually) for a client in the fall of 2009 around the global launch of the products that drive most of the company’s revenues and profits (a $200+ billion firm). We had to coordinate and lead on social media activities across eight different business units. The top objective was to drive traffic to a specific web site landing page. The client invested millions of dollars in other marketing channels as well. Our budget was a single digit percentage of the client’s overall outside marketing spend. But our programs drove one-third of the traffic to the target page. How should I have priced that campaign? Talk about value – and apples-to-apples ROI comparison to other marketing spends!

I’ll confess that in our early days of social media programs we landed some projects with some very big clients where we didn’t deliver the value I wanted. At the time we were so focused on tactics and execution (all this social media stuff was new!) that we failed to focus sufficiently on the strategy at the onset. We also didn’t listen well to what the client really wanted. As a result, we probably over-charged. We also lost that division of the company as a client.

Part of the pricing and value problem also lies with the client. In social media, so much of this work is so new that most clients frankly don’t know what they want anyways. They don’t know what they can get or what is possible. I think our job today is to help clients understand what is possible with social media in the context of their marketing objectives and price that value fairly. And for us, strategy is where we deliver the most value in the campaigns we run. But I still don’t know how to price it right.

If anyone has a good answer to my value dilemma, please comment below, reply back or DM me on Twitter at @p1lonn or email me directly at lonn@pageonepr.com.

Public relations and law enforcement professionals have seen tremendous benefits in using social networking in terms of boosting a company’s image and crime fighting. On the other hand, the sport and health industries have struggled with maintaining peace in online interaction.

Public relations often uses social networking to expand news coverage of a company, connect with other professionals and keep up-to-date with trends and national news. Law enforcement officials are also taking advantage of the real-time search capabilities to enhance tactics, disseminate public information, and prevent criminal activity. Mashable recently posted six ways social media is used to fight crime.

However, using the Internet and engaging in social networking is controversial in other industries. The health industry is seeing a large growth in “e-patients” or those who use email and online communities for inquiries about medical issues. Psychologists in particular are sensitive about crossing boundaries and view communicating online as informal and less business-like than making a phone call. Additionally, social media exchanges with patients, carry potential liability in a variety of areas, including confidentiality, timeliness of response, and clarity of meaning.

Social media has also been the cause of concern for sports. Last week, White Sox general manager Ken Williams described his frustrations with social media when manager Ozzie Guillen’s son, Oney made brash statements on Twitter. Oney was forced to resign from his position with the video department because his tweets were inappropriate for a team employee.

The response to social media in sports has gotten so extreme that the NFL has banned Tweeting during games. This harsh reality stemmed from Bengal’s receiver, Chad Ochocino posting updates to Twitter during regular season games. For a first offense, players are now fined up to $25,000. We all know Ochocino doesn’t need any more fines, especially after his last stunt.

Like most things in life, social media, should be regulated. The amount of regulation is under debate for industries where the increase in use of online tools has led to greater privacy challenges. Professionals should try to find a happy medium where they are able to cater to those who prefer online interaction but at the same time don’t cross any important boundaries. In the sports industry, sites such as Twitter are pertinent in reaching out to fans in discussing changes with players and the game in general but should not interrupt the flow or bash other players. Fans from all walks of life appreciate updates about their team and should not be denied this information.

As long as it’s done in a respectful and thoughtful manner, there’s no reason why social media can’t be a part of every profession. What do you think about social media and the professional world? How much of it should be regulated?

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

Honda Crosstour Facebook Page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

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

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

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

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

Penny and Percy (as they are known in the office) will be traveling with the Page Wonders on our various social media adventures. You can follow them every step of the way on our Facebook Page. Photos will be added regularly to The Adventures of Penny and Percy photo album, and they’ll also soon be checking-in from Foursquare.

Currently, Percy is away on an important social media business trip to Vancouver. Want to know how he’s doing? Become our fan on Facebook to receive updates!

PR Pro: And you’ll honor the embargo?

Journalist: Yes, I’ll honor the embargo.  In fact, I’ll make you a better offer.

PR Pro: Oh.

Journalist: I will honor the embargo for the rest of my working life.  As I have no intention of writing about your new revolutionary software as a service for social media companies that will change the way social media marketing is done forever.  So, yes, I’ll honor the f**king embargo.

This video struck a nerve because the embargo conversation takes place all the time between PR pros and the media, especially in science and technology.  But are embargoes really necessary?

Back in the old days, news cycles moved more slowly, and journalists were happy to honor embargoes.  The advantage of the embargo is that it allows journalists time to research the topic, conduct interviews, and write up the story before it breaks.   Ideally, at the precise moment the embargo lifts, stories from multiple journalists go live at the same time.  The client gets lots of clips, and multiple journalists get to “break” the story.  Nobody wants to publish their article second and give the impression that another outlet scooped them.  In addition, sites like Google News prioritize the first article published, rewarding them with increased traffic.

In these dark days of media layoffs and publications disappearing altogether, journalists are under more pressure than ever to be the first to break a story.  The 24-hour news cycle never stops, and stories and rumors can spread across Twitter and Facebook almost instantly.  The media landscape has changed dramatically, with traditional news sources being eclipsed by blog-oriented news sites like the Huffington Post, ReadWriteWeb, and Mashable—sites that tend to post many short stories throughout the day, but don’t take the time for interviews or in-depth research.  Even at traditional outlets, with fewer writers to carry the workload, reporters often don’t have time to jump on the phone for a briefing.  They want to be emailed with just the facts, ma’am, along with a quote or two that they can quickly package up into a story and send out the door.
Taking a jab at bloggers’ tendency to slap together basic posts (in lieu of more-substantive journalism), someone in PR posted a video response to the famous “Embargoes” video:

Blogger:  We are in the business of breaking news here.  Our readers demand it.

PR Pro:  Do your readers also demand quality in your posts?

Blogger:  That is less important.

PR Pro:  So, short of an exclusive, you would rather I just send you the information the morning of the announcement and let you scramble with the rest of the world in a race to see who can crank out the quickest, shoddiest, slapped-together blog post with no context, background, or in-depth information?

Blogger:  Yes.  I will fill in the blanks later, or not.

In the worst-case scenario, a reporter will agree to the embargo and then break it, which rewards the embargo-breaker with increased web traffic and, thereby, more revenue.  On the flip side, the broken embargo throws the PR person into frantic crisis-management mode, and angers the other journalists who were honoring the embargo.  For the client, a broken embargo can affect the amount of media coverage the announcement gets–usually for the worse.

These days, some bloggers and journalists are refusing to honor embargoes altogether.  A prime example is TechCrunch, which acknowledges the benefits of embargoes but complains that too many embargoes today are broken, putting reporters who play by the rules at a disadvantage.

So, what’s a PR pro to do?  It’s part of our job to make the reporter’s job easier, and increasingly that means avoiding embargoes and providing content via email instead of telephone interviews.  My approach is to avoid embargoes as much as possible, using them only occasionally for my client’s most important announcements, particularly where there is a lot of dense subject matter for reporters to slog through.

What do YOU think about embargoes?  Please participate in our poll, or leave a comment below.

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the techniques we used included:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

1. Driven.  The social media world is at the height of “start-up mode” right now, which means although there is some process coming together it’s still pretty much crazy and chaotic.  I hate to be so dramatic, but really only the strong and scrappy will survive.
2. Ability to go with the flow.  In the morning you’re running Cisco’s Twitter feed, in the afternoon you’re developing a video script for VMware, tomorrow you’re coming up with a Facebook campaign for SAP…who knows what tomorrow evening holds in store.   The ability to go with the flow and take on any challenge with a positive attitude will get you far.
3. Brilliant.  No, not just your average smart cookie, we’re talking brilliant.  You have to be able to take those smarts one step further though – it’s the ability to translate brilliance into innovative, cutting edge campaign ideas that will help the team in the long run.
4. Organized.  At the end of the day, it’s all about metrics and ROI and if you can’t keep an organized excel sheet or Google Doc, you will get left behind (and probably frustrate your manager and the client).
5. Ability to deal with uncomfortable situations.  The Twitter feed got suspended.  The client smiled and nodded when you said quality is more important than quantity, but they still want 10,000 Twitter followers by tomorrow morning.  It’s the night before the big pitch and your managers are still arguing over what angle to take.  You get the point.  Being able to trouble shoot, not give up and frankly have the “I need to fight to live another day” attitude helps.

Social media is by no means a perfect science, making hiring for a social media position even more tricky, but have faith hiring managers!  I’ve tested these criteria over the past year and have found some extraordinary and very talented team members.

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

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

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

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

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

–

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

During the half-day summit, representatives from companies such as Facebook, Altimeter Group, and Technorati gave presos that illustrated great examples of marketing and creative advertising campaigns that implemented social media tactics to yield significant metrics and results. But I recognized a trend in the case studies: they were all campaigns focused around consumer products.

Much of the consumer strategy discussed could not be directly applied to B2B companies. In fact, when an audience member asked the Building Brands panel if they could offer any successful examples of B2B social media campaigns, no one could give an answer. After a few moments of shifty silence, the best the panel could do was, “We’ll get back to you on that.”

Perhaps I should have jumped up from my seat and rattled off our clients to that audience member, but instead I will provide an answer in the form of this blog post. Page One specializes in social media strategy for B2B companies. So if anyone from the Building Brands event is still waiting for a response, take a look at the following case study videos to see the social media work we’ve done for B2B companies such as Cisco:

For two more Cisco examples, head over to Page One’s Case Study page to access videos about the IT Innovations Forum and the ISR Product Launch: Cisco Case Studies.

From my vantage point, there are two areas that have seen the biggest disruption from Buzz.  The first is our own personal identity.  And I’m not talking about the privacy issues.  Yes, these are big privacy concerns, and Google doesn’t deserve a pass, but they’ve already started to take steps to rectify the privacy situation.  The deeper sociological implication that the privacy issue strikes at, though, is how we treat different segments of our online personality.  Until now, email was always the most private.  It existed in a separate realm than social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.  The email address was the most direct, most serious, and most intimate way of interacting with someone online.  Google’s integration of your contacts into chat and reader applications made sense because these communities were very private.

Buzz immediately broke down these walls; not just with privacy snafus, but by attempting to aggregate your online identity in a place that was linked to your email.  Literally.  Content from sites like Google Reader, Picasa, Flickr, Twitter, and Gchat can now appear in one aggregated stream.  Which forces people to look at their email not just as an address, but as a full-on social network profile.  In fact, when people rushed to change their privacy settings, it was the first time a lot of people really understood that such a thing as “Google Account settings” existed.  It’s a somewhat understated and nonmaterial difference, but it is a tidal shift in our personal conceptions of our email and contacts.

This dovetails with the issues created from the second major area of disruption, the disruption of share communities.  This happens on two levels.  The first is that of the major social networks, which were already suffering from concerns as far as differentiation.  Buzz now offers yet another avenue for real-time information updates, which should create a period of confusion for communities as they try to figure out where in the online social landscape this newcomer fits.

Which causes issues for the second level of share communities, which are our personal networks that we have built up over time.  A flood of new, undifferentiated information threatens share community ecosystems by creating burnout or backlash not just against technology but individuals, as well.

In the end, though, these theoretical concerns might be overwhelmed by the potential for Buzz’s content generation.  And this isn’t just conjecture: by the end of week one, Google pulled in over nine million posts and comments. At best, Buzz will find acceptance and a niche in terms of sharing and aggregation that will become a vital part of people’s Internet tendencies.  At worst, it’ll be seen as a misstep, but will probably continue humming along despite the disappointment.

Or at the bizarre, maybe Brazil will find a use for it.

We are looking for a brilliant, enthusiastic and highly motivated individual who wants an opportunity to impact companies’ business decisions with social media. The ideal candidate would be able to manage social media accounts (large and small), keep the accounts and grow them over time.

Job Requirements:

* 3-5 years experience in marketing, public relations, advertising or related communications field;
* Account management experience and strong track record of retaining accounts with outstanding results;
* Ability to successfully manage large tech accounts such as Cisco, SAP and VMware as well as smaller start-ups;
* Experience designing and implementing social media campaigns and a proficient understanding of social media techniques and strategy;
* Exceptional organization, writing and verbal communication skills;
* Ability to contribute individually, and lead, manage or participate in cross-functional teams;
* Ability to grow account retainer sizes;
* Four-year university degree.

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

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 from your first day on the job.

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

The salary for this position is up to $70,000 annually, depending on experience.

If you are interested in a career as a Social Media Account Manager at Page One, email a resume and a cover letter outlining your account management and social media experience to socialmediajobs at pageonepr dot com.  Take a look at our website, the social media services we offer and our clients – please outline your experience and explain how you would be a good addition to the team.  Applicants without a cover letter will not be considered.

Learn more about us: http://www.pageonepr.com

Follow us on Twitter: @pageonepr

Become our fan on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pageonepr

Read our blog: http://www.pageonepr.com/blog/

By now, most of you have heard about the launch of Google’s real-time search, which pulls live updates from websites like Twitter and Facebook and features them alongside traditional search results.

From a social media professional’s vantage point, Google’s real-time search is a big step forward in illustrating the true impact of social media. Inclusions of live Twitter and Facebook mentions for a Google search stresses the value of having a social media presence to foster positive conversations about a brand or product. Hopefully this will convince companies who have not yet dove into the social media pool to jump in head-first off the high dive.

As real-time searches become accessible to a much wider audience, monitoring and tracking also becomes an invaluable service provided by social media professionals. Social media was once believed to be a setting for casual conversation. More and more, it’s becoming an official space for brand management and monitoring. If a person searching on Google instantly sees a negative comment about their search term, they will form an initial impression about the term before visiting its official website. It’s also noteworthy that people are more inclined to be influenced by a fellow customer than a corporate website.

Google’s real-time search is definitely a legitimizing move for the social media industry. Now it’s up to the social media professionals to develop the best strategies to leverage these new functions, and of course, be prepared for the next thing in social media.