Most say you should choose your battles wisely. As of late, Apple’s been pushing the limits, but does it really matter? In case you didn’t get the memo: DON’T mess with Apple. If you happen to find an iPhone prototype at your local pub, walk away. Adobe might as well wait for the world to end before they try to get their technology (which accounts for half of all the videos on the web) on Apple’s devices. Comedians aren’t safe cracking jokes and developers will soon have to sign an intense development agreement. Bottom line, Apple can pick a fight with whomever they want and we all continue to love them. Why is that?

Being the proud PR professional that I am, I can’t help but think PR has had something to do with it. Apple has always been a very secretive company; their strategy around product launches and announcements has remained consistent throughout the years. This plus their keen sense of what makes people tick has earned them both ink and respect. Product leaks are rare and pre-briefings and embargos don’t exist at Apple. This in turn, escalates the hype and keeps people guessing and wanting more. The 30-year-old computer company has been able to repeatedly set off public frenzies with its innovative products.

In order for Apple to appreciate the respect they have now, they must think about where they’ve been. Things haven’t always been so rosy and I think those humble beginnings helped get them where they are today. After Windows 95 came along, Apple kind of disappeared. Had that not happened, I’m not sure they would have made the strong return that they did. The extreme pressure they felt from Microsoft forced them to figure out a unique way to communicate with customers. They developed a variety of campaigns based on that distinct style of communication to promote the iPod some years later. I can still remember how I felt the first time I saw Apple’s iPod commercials. I strongly identified with the product, as did the rest of the world.

However, I realized that this secret way of doing things wasn’t right for every company during the two years I spent doing PR for smartphone maker, Palm. It seemed as though they were trying to emulate Apple’s secret success by not letting anyone know about their plans for CES in 2009. They withheld information about launching their webOS and Palm Pre at the event. The reason why I don’t think it went over well was because Palm, unlike Apple, had always been relatively open about its plans and future products, especially with well-known reporters and influencers. The sudden change in direction was perceived in a negative light. Reporters were angry and didn’t understand where the secrecy was coming from. Even though Palm’s goal was to try to build buzz around the launch and new operating system, it ended up severely threatening some long-term relationships with media.

On the marketing front, Palm launched a campaign for the Pre right after CES that featured a series of commercials with a strange Nordic girl. Popular tech outlets like Gizmodo and Engadget deemed the commercials as extremely “creepy” and “outright absurd.” The ads sent confusing messages and customers were left wondering how the girl related to the phone’s features. Unlike Apple’s commercials, Palm’s style of communication was perceived as odd and people had a tough time relating to their products.

Palm wasn’t successful following in Apple’s footsteps, which proves that what works for one company doesn’t always work for another. Obviously, keeping things secret when you’re doing PR for start ups wouldn’t make sense either. These companies are just beginning to get their message out and are trying to be heard. At Page One we are constantly doing everything we can to get the word out about the technology our clients are developing.

Today, Apple is the company to beat. Their commercials evoke emotion in people, making them passionate about their products. Whatever Apple does, tech reporters write about it and developers bend over backwards. It can’t all be attributed to their PR and marketing greatness but I think it deserves a shout out.

What are your thoughts on Apple’s secret PR tactics? What do you think the well-oiled machine will do next?

Fly-Fishing is an art. It’s all in the cast. In fact, your entire success depends upon how realistic the fly appears. The overall purpose is to cast the fly in a position that is most desirable to the fish – accuracy and presentation are everything. It’s helpful to think about casting as a three-step process. The first is loading, the second is the momentum of projection, and the third is the pause. This got me thinking about how fly-fishing is related to basic PR tactics.

Like a river, PR is constantly changing. Ten years ago, the primary goal was to disseminate information to reporters via fax with the hope that they would cover the news. Today, this is considered a dying tactic. PR has become much more interactive and engaging with the help of social media. Instead of sending bland, boring press releases, agencies are turning to rich media releases to share social media content. Reporters are also learning to appreciate more dynamic content from companies, such as an embedded video or demo. The truth is that social media channels are the basis of a majority of PR campaigns today and the landscape will only continue to evolve.

A fly rod needs the right amount of tension and finesse in the same way the media yearns for creative and accurate news angles. Fly-fishers need to consider weather conditions, fly choice and what time of day to cast among several other things. Knowing the whole story is essential for both fly-fishing and PR. The more a PR professional knows about current trends and what reporters are covering, the more respected and successful they will be. Fly-fishers have to be able to think outside the box and come up with creative concoctions that will attract fish. The PR professional needs to not only be aware of what is going on in the world and how best to represent a client but also which reporters to target.

Another tricky part to fly-fishing is setting the hook. Unlike traditional reel fishing, setting the hook in fly-fishing can leave newcomers discouraged. Instead of yanking hard on the line, the slightest flick of the wrist can set it in the fish’s mouth. The same issue applies in PR. Sure, you may have caught the initial interest of a reporter but how do you get them to commit and write? By doing research and presenting the information in an appealing manner, the reporter will bite. PR professionals can get lazy and overlook this crucial step but it is essential in gaining positive coverage. It takes extra effort but it’s worthwhile and produces favorable results for clients. Like the fish, the reporter can smell when something isn’t worth their time. A fish will swim right by your fly, if it’s not what they desire. A reporter won’t give you the time of day until you properly bait the news angle.

Whether it’s PR or fly-fishing, reporters or fish, there are plenty in the sea.

Happy Pitching!

This week the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston launched a PR campaign around the 20th anniversary of the largest art heist in history.  In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, two men disguised as Boston Police officers entered the museum, subdued the guards, and escaped with 13 priceless pieces, including masterworks by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, and Manet, which were cut out of their frames.  Two decades later, the crime remains unsolved, and the empty frames still hang on the museum walls as a haunting reminder.

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

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

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

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

Journalists and PR folks alike had a good laugh (at the expense of the PR industry) when a viral video about embargoes recently made the rounds on social media channels.   In the video, a PR flak calls a journalist in order to pitch her with an upcoming announcement, but first she has to agree to the embargo.  Annoyed, the reporter agrees, only to be hit with a generic, buzzword-filled pitch.  To top it off, it’s not even in her coverage area.  The journalist tells him as much, but undeterred, the PR guy stumbles on.

PR Pro: And you’ll honor the embargo?

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

PR Pro: Oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogger:  That is less important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some people feel that Twitter marketing is effective when integrated into email marketing campaigns. Today, ExactTarget, an email marketing firm, validated this perspective by acquiring CoTweet, developers of one of the most popular Twitter clients used by large enterprises to manage marketing campaigns.

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

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

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

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

–

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

The marketing world is turning upside down, with influencer marketing and customer marketing flip-flopping.

The most popular form of influencer marketing is public relations, an activity based on organizing information and sending the information to influential people.  Usually, these people are reporters.  In the best scenario, the reporters write for a publication that reaches millions of people.  This model of influencer marketing is changing rapidly as newspapers cut staff and the number of reporters and publications decrease.

Customer marketing is based on publishing content like newsletters or advertisements that reach potential customers directly.  The two main distribution channels for customer marketing are paid placements in newspapers and magazines and the direct mailing of advertisements through the postal mail.

In the past year, public relations has moved from purely influencer marketing to incorporate some types of customer marketing such as writing corporate blogs or running contests for customers.

Social media always incorporated both customer marketing and influencer marketing.  However, the first wave of social media activities focused on customer marketing.  The most popular marketing activities were self-publishing content on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.  Today, we’re seeing the emergence of social media influencers, people with large numbers of Twitter followers or high traffic on a personal blog.

In the last three months, we’ve been identifying, organizing, and building relationships with social media influencers, people that are not professional writers and may not even have a blog.  The new breed of influencer may only be prominent on a technical message board or be known for funny YouTube videos

Yes, social media marketing is new and many things like tools, monitoring and metrics are new.  However, the basic strategy is built on top of experience with traditional customer marketing and influencer marketing campaigns.

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

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

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

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

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

I’ve been to several recent client and prospect meetings where we’ve discussed strategies for incorporating social media programs into marketing and communications roadmaps. In most cases, the client or prospect has heard about social media and falls into one of two categories (or both):

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.

Apparent in blogs across the web, social media is the PR du jour. Call the notary public, because it’s that official.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, the rumors are true! The Page One Social Media Team is looking to hire a new member to join our expanding team. I have posted a very detailed job description below. It is fairly long, but because so many social media jobs are ill-defined I thought it was best to be very descriptive about who I am looking to hire and what type of work this person will be doing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In PR, you never stop worrying about results. You’re always looking for the fresh angle, the cool insight, the clever pitch that converts to clips or sucks in huge new Web traffic.

But we all face that moment when the client is too slammed to get back with what you need right away. The content well is running dry. All of your pitches seem to miss the strike zone. What’s a pro to do?

What a client never wants to hear from you is: “Well, I tried to reach you but you were unresponsive,” to excuse poor results. No one likes blame shifting, and clients are not paying you to “try to reach them.” They are paying you to get results. When you are on the hook for results, and you always are, you have to get creative.

I took a ride on the “Get Creative Express” a few weeks ago with a brand new client when I was looking for angles for pitches. I wasn’t yet well versed enough in their industry to create my own content from scratch, and I had a very busy client (who, in case they are reading this, I ADORE) who was slow to respond to my slew of (nagging and urgent) requests for information that day.

The solution? Maybe there was something that their former agency did recently that might spark an idea? I poked around the client’s media coverage in the previous months before we started to get an idea of the CEO’s voice and his views of a few key issues. I found a PR goldmine in a podcast with the CEO. Put my headphones in, cranked up the volume. Twenty minutes later, I had a page of notes about the dilemma developers face in the cloud.

Next step, I drafted a post for my client’s corporate blog based on the CEO’s comments in the podcast. When it went live, I pitched it to reporters who had recently covered the cloud and/or application development.

The result? In two weeks, I closed on five briefings and five clips (and one pending feature story) with online coverage that reached an audience of more than a million people. Yes, and a very happy client. Not bad for the first two weeks on a new account.

It’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you simply don’t know enough to generate good content (I get it – I’m a Human Biology major working in high-tech PR). Just remember that being independent and proactive when it comes to finding and evaluating pitch angles will pay big dividends. Don’t make the mistake of waiting for your clients’ responses to your questions — the content you need is out there already. Find it and start pitching.

I recently attended a free webinar, “SEO + Public Relations = Your Secret Marketing Weapon in 2009,” put on by the team at Webmarketing123.com. They made the case that SEO and PR should by joined at the hip.

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

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

Example 1: Optimizing a press release for SEO and PR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beta launches rarely attract much hype. But when a company shifts strategic direction and runs onto the competitive playing field with the big guys like Adobe, Sun and Microsoft, then you want some buzz. Okay, a lot of buzz! Would a 3,500% increase in website traffic on the day of the launch be nice? That’s what we did with Appcelerator.

Appcelerator wanted to make a big market splash with their launch of Titanium, an open source Adobe AIR killer. They wanted to reach traditional media publications, but also developers and social media communities. Most PR launches only target three communications channels – media, bloggers, and analysts. Our launch of Titanium targeted seven different communications channels in parallel, relying heavily on a coordinated social media campaign.

We started out securing a strong messaging platform, which allowed us to effectively position Titanium in each different communication channel we targeted and let us build a strong base to launch our social media activities. Following the messaging, we organized an intense media list and began outreach. Page One does media and blogger outreach different than most PR firms. First, we don’t spam. We begin conversations and relationships. We quickly lined up 12 media briefings in the weeks before the launch and we were asked for embargoed launch materials by every publication in our top 20 list. We also directed, produced and promoted a sophisticated vision video featuring the CEO and CTO, and promoted a series of screencasts that gave reporters a more technical look under the hood of the platform with demonstration applications. On announcement day, we coordinated a community email and a more technical blog post for the Appcelerator blog, manned the Appcelerator Twitter feeds, and monitored the blogosphere, directing the CEO when it was necessary to comment on specific blogs.

The results speak for themselves. Not only was there a 3,500 percent increase in website traffic on the day of the launch, but the coordinated PR and social media outreach drove qualified Web site traffic to ‘money’ pages for Appcelerator: 40 percent of all traffic hit the product demos, downloads, documentation, or product FAQ. There were more than 10,000 page views to the vision video in the first week, more than 10,000 product downloads, more than 44 unique stories placed in the media and a four-fold jump in Twitter followers.

That’s buzz for a beta launch that you can bank.

Business headlines these days are anxiety- inducing to say the least. And for anyone trying to get the attention of business reporters, it can be an exercise about as troubling as looking at your 401(k) balance.

But there’s a phenomenon in journalism known as the man-bites-dog story. And in this environment, good economic news is the odd yarn that gets attention.

Last week Page One PR helped SolarWorld tell the story of their new manufacturing facility opening just outside Portland, Ore. Here’s a German company placing a hefty bet on U.S. manufacturing and providing hundreds of those high-paying “green” jobs U.S. politicians are so fond of talking about. It was a powerful economic story and it received powerful coverage in outlets from Fortune to Greentech Media; CNN to the Associated Press.

Call it clean tech, renewable energy or the Green New Deal every recession has its recovery driver and my money is on green. As Page One client Clean Edge put it in their recent Carbon-Free Prosperity 2025 report, “We stand at a unique crossroads in history: the transition from polluting, resource-constrained, fossil-based energy systems to those built on sustainable, renewable, resource-efficient systems.”

Eventually the jobs and economic growth propelled by the clean tech sector — which continues to lead in venture capital tallies — might be less remarkable. But I would argue that the increasing noise in the sector will continue to require (ahem) good storytellers.

Tired of drafting those pesky press releases? Why not use your blog to break news?

That’s what we did with MokaFive last month for the company’s iPhone Sentinel prototype. The News: Vinod Khosla-backed desktop virtualization vendor launches plug-in for iPhone users to carry a full desktop on the iPhone.

The Challenge: Drive prototype downloads during VMworld – one of the biggest virtualization industry events of the year. With Microsoft’s own virtualization event the week prior and only seven days to prepare, we can generate buzz in the middle of this loud press circus, right?

Right! We skipped the formal press release and hit the blogosphere directly via the MokaFive corporate blog. Why? Rather than reach typical press release outlets, MokaFive wanted to target a very specific audience – cream-of-the-crop tech enthusiasts who would download and test the prototype, then offer helpful feedback on the product.

During VMworld, our news hit The New York Times, CNET, TechRepublic, jkOnTheRun, Life Hacker, Mobile Devices Today, DaniWeb, LinuxStreet and more. Many of the blogs were syndicated, too.

MokaFive’s web traffic quadrupled on the day of the announcement. Life Hacker alone referred more than 2,800 people to MokaFive’s web site. According to Radian6, there were 85 total blogs talking about MokaFive 15-29 Sept; 35 of these were posted the day of our blog announcement. There were also 50 blogs that mentioned “iPhone Sentinel” 15-29 Sept; 30 of which ran the same day as our blog announcement.

MokaFive saw an increase of 273% in visitors to their downloads page. In addition, the MokaFive Player page went from fewer than 50 visits the week before VMworld to more than 8,000 visits during the week of our blog announcement. In addition, downloads from MokaFive’s community site increased by 50%.

Key takeaways:
1) Consider strategies to build up your blog readership so your first blog-only launch is sure to reach your target audience.

2) Messaging and important talking points can easily get lost in the fast-paced start-up environment. While the exercise of writing a press release often helps distill key takeaways you want to communicate, it’s not the only tool for grooming spokespeople. Make sure you always carefully prep spokespeople – with or without a press release – or they may look sloppy in interviews.

3) Don’t expect your blog to do all the work. Consider ways to market your blog to make it visible within the communities you want to reach. Then, get your PR team to pitch like crazy. For example, our top blog hits (NYT, CNET) came from personal relationships and hardcore pitching.

4) Make sure the “news” is worthy. Although Microsoft, Sun, VMware, Citrix, HP, Dell, Red Hat and a variety of startups were making desktop virtualization product and customer announcements last month, MokaFive is the first to move virtual desktops to mobile phones.

If you’re considering using your corporate blog as a platform for breaking news, go for it! If you’re a seasoned PR pro with the right relationships in place, what’s to lose?

Lists litter the Internet and newstands anywhere you go in the world. You can credit the magazine publishing genius Clay Felker and the rise of city and service magazines 30 years ago for giving us PR peeps this great tool. Why do we love lists? Let me list the ways.

1) Lists are inherently appealing.
They organize information in a way that highlights the importance of each individual idea but ties them together under one umbrella. Plus, they are easy to follow and concise, which is ideal for the short attention span of the average reader.

2) Lists are the perfect way to establish thought leadership.
You consider your client’s knowledge base, find a sexy issue that they can discuss as an expert and build a few points (five is a good number — long enough to be substantive but short enough to hold interest) that offer the reader a unique perspective. Top 5 Cell Phone No-Nos. Which Five Things Drive Linux Users Nuts? And so on.

3) One list can pique interest in a variety of topics.
If you’ve got an interesting list that encompasses different topics examined from different angles, you automatically have a pool of story options just waiting to be tapped. Let me tell you about how we developed one client list idea into a series of stories for Inc Magazine.

One of our clients, the folks over at Untangle, are experts in small business IT. Their business revolves around the understanding that tens of millions of small businesses face the same IT challenges as global enterprises but with a fraction of the budget, manpower and expertise Knowing which IT issues are most pressing — and how best to allocate limited resources to manage these issues — are complicated questions for a small business

In a brainstorming session with Untangle’s CTO, we came up with the “Top 5 SMB IT Myths” — a benchmark by which small businesses can judge how best to invest their limited resources to effectively deal with complex technology issues.

The payoff? We pitched this list to Inc. Magazine, and the reporter wanted to take each myth and explore it in more depth in an article. Not one, not two, but three stories have run so far, with the possibility for a few more.

Just goes to show you that a well-crafted list can result in a PR goldmine.

On a sunny morning in March 2008, hundreds crowded into the Santa Clara Convention Center to hear the morning’s speeches at EclipseCon. I sat beside Eclipse marketing chief Ian Skerrett and watched him type brief dispatches in a text box at the top of a strange website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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