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.

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.

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.

Feature adoption is often met with an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude. But two new pieces of technology, one big and one small, from Google and Twitter respectively got me thinking recently about what it really takes to change people’s social media habits.

Twitter’s official retweet function has been met with a lot of fanfare, but hardly the kind Twitter wanted. Until now, “retweeting” was always an unofficial function, a meme perpetuated by users who needed a system with which to quote one another. Seeing this user behavior, Twitter took steps to codify retweeting by making it an actual feature. In doing so, however, they’ve inadvertently disturbed the flexibility and editability inherent to the unofficial function. People have protested on Twitter in two ways: by voicing their hatred for the new function, and by continuing to retweet the old-fashioned way.

Old-fashioned communication is what Google is trying to evolve, as well, but on a much more grandiose scale. Google Wave has been billed as the next evolution in online communication, a highly collaborative and expandable platform that will “bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.” And as with every new Google product, there’s been a scramble to procure beta invites. But from my personal experience, excitement quickly gives way to confusion. The first line of any wave is almost always something resembling “I’m in the wave,” quickly followed by “I don’t get it.”

So are the official retweet and Google Wave failures? Hardly (if history has taught us anything…). I was recently Gchatting with a friend about Google Wave. There were a lot of questions about why it exists, what it does, and whether or not we’d ever use it…the only conversations that really seem to be going on about Wave right now. Then she forwarded me her very first Gchat from a few days after the Gchat feature was launched:

My Friend:
testing…
i just saw the green light.
and this is the first time i’ve used this moderately silly feature.

Her Friend:
yeah it doesn’t seem like a winner to me, but i tend to accept google’s ingenuity unconditionally

Almost three years and literally thousands of chats later, her friend’s words ring true with a sort of prescience. And my friend’s conclusion about Wave? “[I] may have to continue to hold judgment on Wave.”

Such patience when it comes to technology is certainly a virtue, especially given the social media public’s tendency to rapidly warm up to new shiny toys. After Facebook implemented the newsfeed, there was a tremendous backlash (as every Facebook redesign has experienced since), but Mark Zuckerberg stood his ground. Now it’s a central feature. Looking back on this event, Zuckerberg summed up social media users’ skepticism-turned-adoption quite lucidly and succinctly: “A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

That said, the only sure bet that can be made is that the final draft of Google Wave and Twitter’s official retweet will have to go through a number of revisions before people consider mass adoption. But human stubbornness works both ways. Google and Twitter will be just as determined to perfect these new features as people are reluctant to start using them. And if history’s shown us anything, it’s that time is on their side.

eCairn

eCairn specializes in the blogosphere. Their Conversation application is a tool that maps out blog communities. Users manually create a list of blogs they wish to track. A proprietary algorithm ranks these blogs by “influence,” largely by measuring how frequently the blogs cross reference other influential blogs. The tool’s functions are less about search, and more about text mining.  For our agency, identifying key blogs and conversations is important, but if the tool also worked for Twitter and other social media sources it would be much more valuable.

Overtone

Open Mic by Overtone works on a platform that operates on keywords, and does a great job of analyzing data from search terms. I especially liked their emerging trend alert function which identifies potential spikes in a keyword that could lead to future trends or issues. However, Open Mic seems designed to focus on single brand topics for companies to manage online forums or customer service surveys more than for use as a general purpose monitoring tool. It’s not well suited for agencies.

ViralHeat

We signed up for a free ViralHeat trial after Mashable described them as a sophisticated, yet affordable social media tracking tool. ViralHeat pulls data from Twitter, websites, blogs, and YouTube from search profiles we create in the tool. It can tell you specific information such as the number of total unique authors who tweeted about your search term. They also pull together a convenient summary of daily metrics activity. However, a downside of the tool was that the search capability wasn’t as user-friendly and flexible as other monitoring services. Our account was limited to 10 profile searches, and it was difficult to figure out how to compare multiple keywords in the same search. Starting at $10 per month, ViralHeat is priced aggressively. But for Page One, ViralHeat would best serve as a secondary tool that would complement a primary monitoring service with better search functions and less rigidity.

Sysomos

Sysomos offers two main products, the Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat. MAP is an in-depth tool useful for historical analysis over time. The tool is able to identify key influencers in social media communities and uses text analytics to determine tone and sentiment. One attractive feature is that MAP’s database reaches back to 2006, and the data can be effectively categorized by geographic location. It can also monitor across multiple companies.

Their second product is Heartbeat, and is targeted for real-time, day-to-day monitoring, usually for a single brand/company. This tool tracks social media mentions instantaneously, determines sentiment and key influencers, and lets users view their current competitive landscape. Heartbeat also allows multiple users to log-in to the website at one time, which facilitates the sharing of information with your colleagues. Like most other tools, the social media data only goes back 30 days, which is hopefully something that could be tweaked in the future.

Because of its flexibility, search functions, easy-to-use dashboard, and the real-time component, MAP and Heartbeat from Sysomos appear to be good choices right now for our agency (we also plan to more extensively test drive eCairn for its blog capabilities). But we understand that social media monitoring is still an evolving service, and our monitoring needs as an agency will change over time. One thing to remember about choosing a social media tracking tool is that what’s right for our agency may not be right for you.

If you have any insights or questions, please feel free to leave a response in the comments.

Happy tracking!

New Page Wonders Susan Chang and Haley Hebert

Susan Chang came into the conference room and handed me a list of 200 influential people on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. This was a list of routing and switching people. Tough assignment. Great list. Susan had been working at Page One less than a week.

Haley Hebert gave me a 19 page social media analysis report on her second day on the job. The report covered blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and forums for cloud computing infrastructure.

Their work was based on over a year of intensive social media monitoring, measurement of metrics and our experience with The Page One Process. The quick turnaround on their work shows how social media campaigns can be quickly scaled by adding new members and giving them responsibility for tasks with well-defined steps.

The foundation of each of our social media campaigns is the monitoring of activity and measurement of results. We use dozens of tools, both commercial and free tools. There is no single monitoring system that meets our needs. The combination of a replicable process, monitoring, and measurement allows a single campaign manager to divide work among a group of people and quickly scale a social media campaign, delivering rapid results at lower cost.

I feel really fortunate that Haley and Susan joined our social media team. We reviewed more than 400 applicants and chose the top two people. Haley left her position with a large communications firm in Boston to join our social media team in San Francisco. Susan had to leave a social media job with Turner Communications in Los Angeles. Silicon Valley, the area between San Francisco and San Jose, is attracting top communications talent from around the nation because it is the new center for the development of social media marketing techniques. All the web companies – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo! – and all the social media vendors are right in our area. And now, Silicon Valley is getting all the social media people.

——–

Craig Oda, managing partner and campaign launch enthusiast

Telling the story of the product

“And, action!” The director’s hand goes down. The talent speaks. The story begins. In the midst of bright lights, the whir of camera motors, and the smell of coffee, a tale of a new product is brought to life.

At Page One PR we tell stories about products. Today, Lonn Johnston, the founder of Page One, and I were using video to tell our product story. In the coming weeks, we’ll use a newsletter, web page, Twitter, and Facebook to distribute and amplify our story.

Lonn and I are about six months into a journey to extend the reach of public relations techniques using videos that are tightly integrated with social media campaigns. This was our first experience with a real studio, one that had all the gritty, hip flair of the San Francisco art scene. It was also our first attempt at making a video of our own product.

We’ve learned that techniques for product production and PR are different, joined together mainly by the story and the messages our clients want to communicate. The world of video production has traditionally been more expensive than the social media world of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. Over the last six months, we’ve learned what it takes to merge the two worlds, taking the best elements of social media viral distribution and video production to create extremely effective marketing campaigns.

Video director and acting talent work together

Here are the top two lessons we’ve learned about video production:

1) You need a script. The script should follow a production movie format that your company customizes for its own style. Both the video production people and the marketing people need to understand the cues and direction of the script. Before writing the script, we prepare marketing guidelines that identify the target audience, goal of the video, and main messages that the campaign is trying to convey. The exact dialogue does not need to be in the script. We’ve tried making videos without scripts and with loose scripts. It is more efficient, and therefore cheaper to produce a video, if you create a script for your videos and enforce standard conventions.

2) Clarify roles and responsibilities. There are many roles that must be filled to create a video: video director, producer, audio manager, lighting manager, writer, set director, art department, acting talent, and many others. In order to reduce costs, we compress multiple roles into each person on the set. This works most efficiently when the roles and responsibilities are clear to each person. Efficiency on the set translates into lower video production costs and better marketing results per dollar.

—–

Craig Oda => http://twitter.com/codawork

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

But the US market is big and geographically diverse, and linguistic and cultural barriers make it expensive and time-consuming.  What can a Japanese software startup do?

Leverage social media.

The landscape is constantly changing, but as of mid 2009, there are three main services you should be using: Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Twitter

In Japan, Twitter is known as the “mumbling blog (つぶやきブログ)” which is an unfortunate translation.  Thinking of Twitter as unimportant things you’d say under your breath is misleading.  In the US, because it is a fast, quick way to get news, hints and links — in real-time — it is quickly overtaking blogging as a preferred way to communicate with users and the media.  It grew 3712% in April 2009, and it has become a major source of news and information for millions of users.

Twitter has several major advantages for Japanese companies:

1. It’s short.  The 140 character limit helps non-native English speakers.

2. It’s lightweight.  You are not allowed to write a full blog post.  Just a thought, a link, or a quick answer.  This makes Twitter easy to continue.  Corporate blogs always end up being too much work.

3. The US media reads it.  Twitter has two important audiences: The US media and your potential users.  Even just one would be good enough.

Case Study: Japanese software company Lunascape

Lunascape, an unknown commodity in the US through the end of 2008, was developing a “triple rendering engine” web browser.  Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome have virtually unassailable market share.  However, Page One PR helped Lunascape announce their alpha version, which garnered coverage in Tier 1 technology blogs like TechCrunch, Slashdot, Wired and many others.  Traffic spiked 30,000%.  (No joke.)  We then set up the Lunascape Twitter account.  Lunascape was able to attract over 150 followers, many of whom regularly talk up Lunascape, ask support questions, and recommend Lunascape to others.  As an important bonus, Lunascape is able to ask questions directly to its main users this way as well.  Even more valuable, several important bloggers and journalists now follow Lunascape and have established very direct channels of communication with the company.  This has helped keep Lunascape web traffic elevated long after the initial “big bang” press release.

Facebook

Facebook is the way to connect into a growing audience with a mix of static corporate information and live updates.  It is the largest social networking site, growing 700% over the past year.  It has a bigger and more professional audience than MySpace.  Automatically bringing your Twitter updates to Facebook requires no extra effort to keep your Facebook page up-to-date and interesting.

YouTube

Owned by Google, YouTube is the biggest video site in the US by far.  For explaining complicated software to the media, there is nothing better than a short, clear video.  Don’t think HD and clear lighting.  No, it’s “down and dirty,” just screenshots of the most interesting functionality.  Videos like this can explain complicated software clearly and catch viewers’ attention.

Will all of these social media sites be active and popular in a year or two?  Probably not.  The landscape is changing quickly.  But why wait?  You can gain access to US media and potential customers very quickly and easily.  Social media can be an important stepping stone to making it in the US.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid or gone off the grid, there’s no denying that there are huge, new forces changing the way that we consume and transmit information and there’s a whole new set of tools whose potential we’re only just starting to understand. This is social media. This is Page One PR.

We are a Silicon Valley public relations firm that caters to the B2B industry and we are currently looking to add consultants to our Social Media Team in the San Francisco office.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:

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

Social media is constantly evolving, so we don’t expect you to be a “social media guru”.  No previous PR or social media experience is necessary, but if you’ve got some, we won’t complain. What we’re looking for are people who understand what social media is and how it can be used for the good of our clients and their customers alike.  If you can see yourself executing strategic PR projects and developing never-done-before social media campaigns, you could be who we are looking for.

WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR:

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

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

As a new Consultant/Page Wonder, you’ll learn from the best: our Sr. PR people have developed social media strategies for Cisco, reported for the Los Angles Times, managed social media campaigns for SAP, placed cover stories in BusinessWeek, taught graduate journalism at UC Berkeley and even created the first ISP in Japan.

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

When it comes to work/life balance, we don’t just work. We are marathoners, salsa dancers, music enthusiasts, avid travelers and more. Page One gives us the time to do what we love, and even incorporate those interests into the work we do.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING:

We don’t look for gutsy people just to take up space. There’s no paint-by-numbers or auto-pilot.  By-the-book at Page One means going off-script.  Social media is constantly evolving, so our processes have to constantly evolve with it.  That’s where you come in.

Page One’s Social Media Consultants help design social media strategy and execute innovative campaigns for some of the most well known technology brands in the Valley.  Daily activities could include social media monitoring and analysis, video production, blog writing, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn management, and social media strategy development for our clients. Every Page Wonder actively engages in developing clients’ PR, marketing and brand management strategies. As a PR agency we specialize in company launches, product launches, media relations, messaging and positioning, analyst relations and (of course) social media.

WHAT YOU’LL BE GETTING:

Benefits? Want 20 days off? OK.

Since Page One’s culture is all about great people doing great things, we reward our employees with exceptional pay, 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

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

At Page One PR, we’ve assisted companies like SAP and Cisco with their various monitoring campaigns. We’ve learned over time that useful “monitoring” really means in-depth analysis of a problem, using data from our own manual observations and social media keyword searches, to achieve a specific result or make a strategy recommendation to a client. While these campaigns come in all shapes and sizes – from an assessment of a client’s existing social media implementation to an analysis of a competitor’s online marketing programs – we believe that most monitoring projects can be performed according to a five-step process. Blame our public relations pedigree, but we believe a message-driven approach to monitoring will produce the best results.

Step 1: Audience Segmentation

At the beginning of the monitoring project, whether your focus is your own company or your competitors, it’s important to gain an understanding of the various audiences that the observed marketing or PR activity is attempting to reach. Ultimately, you will want to know whether or not content is positioned and delivered effectively for specific target audiences.

Step 2: Message Categories

Dividing monitoring parameters by major conversation themes and marketing messages focuses the monitoring project on organized, actionable data. You don’t need to know about every John Doe or spam bot that happened to mention your new product. You do need to turn a wild social media jungle into key findings that lead to specific strategic recommendations.

Step 3: Origination and Delivery

After discovering and building a list of key themes and messages, it is important to determine the location of those messages, who originated specific conversations, and how messages were distributed. For example, some of the questions you may ask yourself include:

– How is your company driving messages through its own social media channels?
– What social media channels contain important conversations?
– Do conversations link across multiple channels?
– How are external actors changing the focus of conversations or seeding new message themes?
– How are messages spreading virally?

Step 4: Goals

What are you or your competitors trying to achieve through marketing or PR activities? In order to determine the effectiveness of messages, it’s important to understand the purpose of those messages. At the end of the day, social media needs to achieve a business goal or it’s not worth doing.

Step 5: Effectiveness of Marketing/PR Messages

Try and answer two questions: did the messages reach the right target audience and what action did the target audience take upon exposure to the messages? These questions will help you determine if your campaign or a competitor’s was effective. If key influencers are commenting on blogs, “retweeting” messages, and making content go viral across multiple social media channels, you need to have a deep understanding of this process and how conversations are framed in specific contexts. Understanding effectiveness in this sense requires the kind of careful analysis that an automated tool simply cannot perform by itself.

The Page One social media team now starts every social media campaign with some form of monitoring to ensure our developed strategy and plan is based upon detailed research and analysis. Although this process seems simple enough, monitoring is by no means an easy task. Especially on complex projects, it’s important to have a team that carefully deliberates on analysis and strategy and remains vigilant in linking the findings to the ultimate goal of the project.

What do you think of this process? Have you used a different approach successfully for in-depth analysis of social media campaigns and monitoring results? I’ll even invite the plethora of tool-makers in the space to share their thoughts. Although if you say your tool is a cure-all for PR and marketing professionals, expect a robust debate!

The Page One video service has really started to ramp up, and one of the things that we’re learning is how often people forget that video is an audiovisual medium. We get so wrapped up in planning for the video shoots themselves that we often forget to give ourselves enough time or energy to find the right soundtrack to accompany the visual elements. Given the complications of licensing from major music labels, we have a need for an easy, but still stimulating, solution when it comes to browsing song libraries and deciding upon music.

There’s no shortage of stories about resistance from the Music Industry™ to change. Since Metallica and the RIAA successfully killed Napster in 2001, there’s effectively been a war on the new age of readily available digital music. And with the rise of streaming video technology, sites like YouTube have become the latest battleground. Videos using copyrighted material are being systematically muted or removed. We’ve even noticed this with some of our earlier video work. Most recently, ASCAP won a licensing suit against Google to the tune of $1.6 million, and has started sending collection letters to website owners for embedding YouTube videos without properly licensed songs.

The problem with taking aim at your customers is that you end up shooting yourself in the foot. Especially when what you’re fighting against are the big forces of the modern Web: collaboration, interactivity, and social media. Backlash against giants such as Warner Music is becoming much more visible as users continue to fight for their right to usable, remixable content.

These responses are intended to protect copyright holders and official videos. But the term “music video” no longer applies to MTV-quality productions. Video art collages, karaoke jams, re-enactments, interpretive dance routines, and home videos by the artists themselves give the listener-viewer access to the songs they’re looking for with a feast of visual accompaniment.

The real take away here is that it is in the copyright holder’s best interest to allow greater use of their content. Something the major music industry stakeholders are refusing to acknowledge.

Creative Commons, Social Media, and Sharing

So what’s to be done? Enter Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation bringing the rules of copyright into the 21^st century. How? By providing new types of licenses “to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.” This model provides more robust possibilities for licensing to create new opportunity for creative work. It also gives independent artists the ability to use the power of social media to create new modes of distribution. Now songs can be released directly to the public through Twitter, MySpace pages, blogs, and artist websites. All you have to do is find it.

There are some new online tools to simplify this search process. Aggregators like Hype Machine’s Twitter Music Chart are now emerging to unify the independent music mediasphere and assist in the search for the Next Big Thing™. The Free Music Archive, directed by legendary freeform radio station WFMU, goes a step further. Their highly interactive, highly legal audio library offers free music downloads through openly licensed content “inspired by Creative Commons and the open source software movement.”

Cure for the Common Video

By working with these tools, we’ve found that the end result is an increasingly accessible independent music industry with a wealth of possibility for collaboration. We can now engage directly with independent artists and labels to find new music to soundtrack our videos. It increases production values for us, provides bands with promotion, and gives both parties access to a larger audience. Which means more opportunities for cross-promotional outreach and interaction through social media channels.

It’s a win for everyone involved: our clients, the bands we like, and the new concept of digital media rights in a social media world. Be on the lookout for interesting new sounds paired up with interesting new corporate videos in the future. Look out for a short stop-motion project we’ll be doing in the coming weeks to really show our video service’s potential, using the music of Lucky Dragons or Cornelius, or maybe both. Stay tuned.

Ralph Hibbs – A smiling face in the search engine marketing space

Surprise! The success of a video often depends on the promotional campaign that a superstar PR team creates around it even more than the original content. However, part of a strong promotional campaign is identifying, with your client, the goals of the video and then finding the right site on which to host a video to help achieve those goals. Where you host the video matters. Sometimes a lot.

There are a variety of hosting sites on the Web nowadays, but YouTube, Viddler and Vimeo have emerged as three of the best. More a bit later on why they make my top three list. (Readers, feel free to disagree with me or suggest others in the comments.)

First, all three offer similar basic services and offerings (public and private viewing options, statistics about how the video is faring on the site, etc.) and most agree that choosing one comes down to what you hope to achieve with your video.

Every company has different specific hopes for a video, but there are a few broad goals that we PR folks always aim for:

- Reach a wide audience. Even if the video is targeted at a specific group of people you still want access to the highest contingent of that group.

- Present that audience with a quality viewing experience (i.e. smooth playing, clear visuals and sound, etc.). No one wants to watch a choppy video.

- Have an easy back-end experience. Hard-working, time-crunched PR reps don’t want to deal with a lengthy, complex or buggy upload process.

With that in mind…

Until recently, I used to hear people say “If you want to tell the world, use YouTube. If you want to show the world, use Vimeo.” Early on, YouTube was known for an extremely large and active user community but also for shortcomings in video quality. Fuzzy images, choppy sound and other performance snags were common.

Vimeo differentiated itself with higher quality viewer experience by becoming the first site to enable HD video sharing. However, uploading videos to the site – a slow process – made reaping the benefits inefficient.

Viddler, when it launched, was knocking socks off – and being praised favorably over YouTube — with its clean UI, ease of use, speedy uploading and easy browsing. But it lacked (and still does) the enormous community of YouTube.

Over the past few years, and especially as more and more hosting sites cropped up, it seemed that compromise was the name of the game. You could have a wide audience, a quality viewing experience or a smooth back-end process, but not all three.

However, YouTube changed all that – and in my opinion justified its position as the number one video hosting site — by enabling HD video sharing last year. Add to this jump in quality the fine-tuning they have done on the uploading side and the unparalleled user base, and YouTube became my one-stop shop for meeting almost all client PR goals.

The important thing to remember, though, is that the success of a video depends on the time and energy taken to put it together, and the traction of a video depends more on the PR campaign than on where the video is housed. You can’t go wrong with any of the three sites discussed above, but having access to YouTube’s vast potential audience – and recognizable brand name — at your fingertips is nothing but an asset.

I’m curious, though. What do you all think? Anyone have great (or terrible) experiences with these sites you care to share?

From a public relations perspective, the value of social media is greater than any one ROI metric can capture. Digital communities are providing avenues for scaling the kinds of close customer relationships that weren’t possible just a decade ago. But especially in today’s economy, we need to reach for more defined metrics in discussions with marketers who prefer to speak in terms of ROI.

There’s another field that has made this shift with a great deal of success, moving from more abstract impression estimates to more concrete action-based metrics: advertising. Internet advertisers understand the power of the click. With the advent of Google Adwords and other search ad networks, the Cost per Click (CPC) metric has become a common method for determining the success of campaigns in influencing target audiences to take specific desired actions.

At Page One, we have started the process of converting Twitter and YouTube ROI into CPC metrics. My colleague Craig Oda wrote on his personal blog about this topic recently. A major goal of social media promotional campaigns is to drive traffic to content pages where potential customers can gain rich information about the company. The content pages may include corporate websites, registration pages, blogs, and videos. To give marketers a comparison to advertising activities, we can use the cost of Twitter and YouTube campaigns along with the number of clicks on unique URLs or video views to determine social media CPC. While I’m not saying social media campaigns should replace advertising, the comparison will be highly useful to marketers attempting to justify spending a portion of limited budgets on social media.

Let’s first compare advertising to Twitter CPC. Our client base is largely business to business high tech software companies. Although CPC in search ads for this sector can vary widely depending on the competitiveness of the bidding process for keywords, the $1 – $2 range is typical. In the month of May, one of our clients, an open source software company, averaged about $1.50 CPC for Google Adwords. For a fair comparison with Twitter ROI, it is important to include the entire cost that companies incur for ad campaigns – this includes the initial set up and testing of messages, keyword selection, and management over time. Many service firms charge about 15% of the advertising spend for basic management costs. This number can increase depending on the level of testing and analytics. Companies with small ad spends often pay up to 30-40% due to minimum fee policies. Including management fees, a $1.50 CPC could easily increase to $1.72 – $2.10.

Since Twitter is a free tool, the cost of a Twitter campaign is solely comprised of the people-hours that go into activities such as determining strategy and voice, updating the feed, engaging with followers, monitoring the Twittersphere, and reporting results to clients. We include all these services within the cost for the CPC, because even Twitter activities not related to unique URL linking can grow the feed and contribute positively to click rates. To make a fair comparison to the content of advertisements when calculating Twitter CPC, we only include clicks on unique URLs that point to the client’s corporate website, blog or other content that gives a prominent impression of the client in a positive light (e.g. a feature story on an external news website).

We are in the process of collecting data across several accounts, and an initial measurement based on the Twitter feed of the Linux Foundation, the non-profit Linux consortium, yields a $0.12 CPC. The Linux Foundation Twitter feed is highly popular and has been in existence since July 2008. We’d expect that younger feeds for less well known companies would yield more costly CPC rates. Rudimentary and partial data from June for the Twitter feed of Appcelerator, an open source application development platform, shows an approximate $1.00 CPC. The Appcelerator feed is another popular, high quality feed.

Now, let’s compare advertising to YouTube video CPC. Page One offers professional video production services. In the past, projects have included short client vision videos and comical videos at technical conferences. We host these videos on YouTube and other platforms, and track the number of times that people view each video. This process is similar to tracking clicks on a search network advertisement or interactive ad, but the content in YouTube videos is arguably richer than that of internet ads. The cost of a video campaign includes messaging strategy, scripting, professional videographer production costs, direction and promotion. In some cases, the cost of promotion may be difficult to determine when the campaign blends with more traditional PR services, resulting in overlapping costs. For instance, media relations activities may result in an article that links to the video. Since this increases the number of views, these activities should at least be considered in the CPC metric. We’ve seen that campaigns are most successful when PR is integrated with social media activities, creating a multiplier effect.

Our initial measurement of video CPC across several accounts shows an approximate $0.32 CPC for strongly developed campaigns. A vision video for Appcelerator yielded $0.14. A vision video for Cloudera, a high-end data storage and processing system, yielded $0.32. Both of these videos were associated with major product launches, so we’d expect relatively high view counts. Conversational videos at a developer conference yielded $0.50. A big difference between CPC for video campaigns and CPC for ad campaigns is that the former tends to decrease over time while the latter tends to remain relatively flat assuming that market conditions remain steady. Whereas the cost of a video is incurred at the beginning of the project, the cost of an ad campaign increases with time. To be sure, clicks for ads also increase over time but in proportion with the ad spend. On the other hand, if a YouTube video goes viral, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. You continue to get clicks without additional cost.

Since Craig’s initial blog post on this topic, we’ve collected more data and can now update our CPC comparison chart. We’ll continue to refine these metrics going forward, especially as we gain more Twitter data from our client accounts. We’d appreciate your comments and thoughts on social media ROI.

In recent recruiting cycles, Page One got overwhelming positive responses to an open position at the firm when we ran a 7-week recruitment campaign FOR FREE.  Here are our top five tips on how to find the best of the best on a budget of zero.

1. Start with the usual suspects.

Candidates have been given the secrets to pass the social media recruitment test. Since recruiters tend to check an applicant’s personal blog, Facebook profile, Twitter feed, LinkedIn recommendations, Flickr portfolio, SlideShare presentations or even YouTube resume, establish the same transparency for your company with these tools. Creating your firm’s online character attracts the best pool of applicants and indicates to potentials how they stack up to your ideals, culture and caliber.

To keep costs down, companies should start by posting their own creative job description on a company site or blog and then use email, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to pass around the URL. Nine times out of 10, the best candidates are already in your employees’ networks.

2. Avoid CraigsList, Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs and other major database sites for one of two reasons.

If you’re looking to fill a professional position these sites do not filter resumes enough to make the search worth the time. “Employers” on these sites are often temp or placement agencies or even spammers — not actual employers — and good applicants know this.  As a real employer, know that talent is available in excess, but your ideal applicants generally try to target their job search by looking at sites catered to their specific industry and skill set. They’re not spending much time on the large database sites.

Second, the cost of posting jobs on these sites can grow very quickly based on the number of people you’re looking to hire. If you’re a small firm, there’s no reason to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to recruit a few people. If you’re a large organization, your own infrastructure is more suitable for recruiting internally on your own site. Google does this especially well.

3. Recognize that paying for recruitment services is almost always a poor decision.

In recruitment, your fixed costs of recruiter salary is a given, so your end goal should be to eliminate all other variable costs like job posting fees. Again, big sites are not the way to go.

CareerBuilder starts at $419 to post for one month for one job position. A bevy of emails and socially networked messages might not get you as many responses in volume, but rest assured candidates who do respond will on average be more qualified, know more about your specific company and industry, and will possess more genuine interest in being an asset to your firm. In this game Quality: 1, Quantity: 0.

The exception to this rule is niche recruitment. From healthcare to tech, smaller job sites are generally cheaper and viewed by a more industry-savvy audience, so bets are if you’re going open the purse strings, smaller sites are a smarter move in your recruitment strategy. Mashable, for instance, offers a gamut of social media positions. For recruiters using Mashable, the $50 price tag is justified by the hours your HR manager won’t have to spend combing through unqualified candidates who‘ve been spamming their resumes around.

4. Use Smart Tools

Doostang is a smart tool.

Back in 2005, Doostang was created by Mareza Larizadeh as an online career advancement website that connects elite professionals with top jobs. The platform is designed like a social network, which makes leveraging connections easier, but the biggest pull for recruiters is that Doostang is free. We’re talking no fees to post jobs. And since Doostang was started with affiliations to Stanford, Harvard and MIT, many of the applicants on the site come from top-notch university networks.

Just this week, Larizadeh told me their level of “executive recruitment pushes the company out ahead of its competitors.” By my calculations, it’s a winner when it comes to keeping recruitment expenses to a minimum.

5. Use Tools with an Edge

SnapTalent is a tool with an edge.

SnapTalent is a recruitment platform that uses social media to profile and match employers to potential hires.  I give them five stars for creating an interface that comprehensively (and easily) profiles companies all for the low price of $0. Jamie Quint, SnapTalent COO, spoke to me about the company’s vision: “We let companies build rich media recruitment pages that tell the full story of their company in a way the ‘connected’ generation understands.”

With the SnapTalent interface, posting information about your company, your employees, your corporate blog and your YouTube video of the office Christmas party happens all in one place. This approach gives candidates the best sense of who your company is and who might fit in with you. Since its start in late 2007, SnapTalent has adopted a tiered pricing plan (like LinkedIn) that’s based on the number of successful contacts it makes for you, but even if you don’t purchase resumes, you still get all the same exposure for a price that can’t be beat.

If you have some great tips and tools to suggest that worked in your hiring, send me a note or comment below!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:

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

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

WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR:

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING:

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

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

WHAT YOU’LL BE GETTING:

Benefits? Want 20 days off? OK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, the concept of social media as some aggrandizing power play we PR agencies have to master for our clients is still, to me, a question to be answered. How much can really be gained by power-tweeting our clients and answering, “What are you doing right now?” every 42 minutes? I wanted to explore this idea to see what social media has (or hasn’t) done.

I set up a survey for my Page One colleagues and found there are some conclusive benefits to stacking a client’s (Tweet)deck with social media. The Survey Monkey results revealed these social media channels yield the best results for clients:

39.9% – BLOGS
33.3% – TWITTER
11.1% – SCREENCASTS
5.6% – VIDEO
5.6% – CONTESTS
5.6% – OTHER
0.0% – FACEBOOK
0.0% – LINKEDIN

My hypothesis is that social media works when it can entertain as well as inform. It engages in a way that traditional media can’t. Seeing a reporter’s snide comment on a news story trumps reading his rendition of a press release when it comes to dishing out opinions. Delivery of information is faster, sometimes funnier, less formal and a lot more in your face.

Twitter, for example, allows people to find their inner prophet. Having actual followers, yes, that’s right… followers… guarantees an audience who will validate your every thought (or so you hope). As humans, let alone PR agents, how are we not supposed to find the advantages in that?

When asked to rank the purpose of social media on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most important), my Page One colleagues listed:

9.0 – WEB TRAFFIC
8.5 – GROW COMMUNITY SIZE AND ENGAGEMENT
7.0 – PRODUCT DOWNLOADS
6.4 – MEASURABLE PR
5.5 – REACH NEW TARGET AUDIENCE
5.4 – LEAD GENERATION

So here’s the bottom line. Social media is useful in PR. But it’s not going to completely usurp traditional media. Segmenting social media from its traditional counterpart is as huge a mistake as asking Madoff for investment tips. At this agency, the most successful social media campaigns have intertwined social media and traditional media, because again, what is a video sitting on YouTube without a TechCrunch mention to drive traffic to it?

The future of (good) PR is finding the mix of both. I remain a skeptic about some of the grandiose claims of social media, but I need to better understand how we measure the nominal versus real benefits of social media.

With Google Analytics and a host of monitoring tools, we are getting better at locking in numbers to measure social media. I still don’t think that anyone in social media has gotten close to calibrating those measurements in terms of possibility and percent of market reached. As an economics major, I look (and more easily trust) numbers that reflect not just reach, but penetration. Sure, we can throw parties when we can tell clients we’ve gotten them 1,000 more unique visitors to their site in a day, or even that we’ve managed to increase their web traffic by 313 percent, but I like to look at the macro results. I want to know what the pool of potential targets was. Was it 5,000 or 250,000? And if we reached 1,000, how well is social media helping us penetrate the audiences we’re actually targeting?

I’ll probably be a skeptic supporter of social media until it’s matured far enough to the point where this can be easily measured and assessed. As a CEO or CMO, this is the kind of question I would ask, and though social media is growing quickly, it can’t answer these questions yet. But, it will, and probably soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So who are we looking for?

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

Our new team member will have:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what’s he talking about?

The most important aspect of media these days — no matter what community you’re trying to reach — is participating in a conversation. That’s why “social media” has become the Next Big Thing.

Nothing is one-way anymore and if you’re not having a two-way conversation you’re being left behind.

My two favorite social media tools for dipping into the online conversation are blogs and a Twitter feed. Twitter is great for rapid-fire, real-time exchanges, while blogs provide the opportunity for more thought out commentary, with room for all the blog bling: charts, links, graphs and photos.

Good PR is all about noticing openings in the conversation and finding a place for your client at the right table so they can join in. All these new social media tools are just more ways to grok the seating chart.

So why did this CEO compare our work to tequila? Well in addition to being a good-time guy he’s also smart. And when he piped up with a particularly timely blog post about the growing influence of Facebook online, we made sure the right people saw it and incorporated it into their conversation on the topic.

In one day, his blog saw a 600 percent traffic increase. He’s pulling his chair up to the table.

The work we do behind the scenes doesn’t go in a shot glass. It’s the relentless targeting of the right influencers in the right way, using all the tools at our disposal: A tweet, a note, a link. A few more.

But if the metaphor works for you, what we do is tequila in action. Just enough to get a good vibe going, never so much that you regret it in the morning.

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

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

http://mediaroi.notlong.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s another screenshot of bit.ly analytics.

This one shows a view of retweets.

1. Is your audience on Twitter?
The average Twitterer is a tech-savvy, urban, 31-year-old male with a college or graduate degree. However, this demographic is broadening as Twitter’s reach continues to expand into mainstream Internet users. Try searching Twitter for your company’s name, your competitors, and keywords from your industry to see what the online conversation is all about. Your customers may already be talking about you, and you’re being left out of the conversation. Alternatively, what if you find few or no relevant tweets? It may be a great opportunity for you to take the lead in your industry and initiate the conversation.

2. What do you want to get out of Twitter?
Twitter is constantly evolving, and there’s no “correct” way to use your Twitter stream. Some companies use it for customer service, some use it to publicize their press releases and media clips, some tweet to drive sales and announce special deals, some monitor what customers are saying and use it for market research, some share links to interesting news, and some companies do all of the above. In our experience, Page One clients using Twitter are most interested in driving web traffic and in interacting with their online developer communities—two objectives where a Twitter campaign can be highly successful.

3. Who will tweet for your company?
Writing an engaging Twitter feed takes time, and you’ll need to designate one or more people to tweet regularly (ideally, at least once a day). In addition to the time spent writing, you should spend time reading your followers’ tweets and responding to the most pertinent ones. This process can easily consume half an hour or more each day. Although some companies run their Twitter streams in-house, many of our clients are turning to Page One’s social media services to manage the process for them. These clients have been overwhelmingly pleased with our track record for developing successful Twitter campaigns and measuring our results. Here are just a few of our clients on Twitter: @linuxfoundation, @CiscoGeeks, @funambol, @sourceforge, and @appcelerator. (Naturally, @pageonepr is also on Twitter).

Once you’ve decided to dive into Twitter, where do you start? Stay tuned: we’ll share some Twitter best practices in an upcoming blog.

Working all the time with developers for many of our clients, I figured it would be cool to see how Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine stack up in the blogosphere – what key terms are people associating with them and what similarities or differences are there. A little compare and contrast exercise. I set parameters for the last month.

This is what EC2 looks like:

Not a surprise that most terms are developer focused. What about App Engine, where does it stand?

Clearly, there’s considerable overlap. This is to be expected since they offer similar services.

What’s more revealing are the differences. First, “cloud” is much more prominently associated with EC2 than App Engine. The “cloud” in EC2 dwarfs the “cloud” in App Engine. Second, EC2’s cloud reflects a larger enterprise base. “Business,” “company,” and “customers,” to name a few key terms, are all highlighted in the EC2 cloud, while similar terms are either not present or tiny and irrelevant in the App Engine cloud. Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine are closely related, arguably competitive platforms, with key differences that stand out.

This analysis only covers 30 days and is a crude instrument. But it paints an interesting ‘word’ picture. In the blogosphere, people are much more likely to associate Amazon’s EC2 with business and Google’s App Engine with developers.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example of the metrics we track on Twitter include:

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

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

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

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

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