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.

“When will NBC learn: the Internet is not Jay Leno’s friend.”

So ends the Gawker piece on the latest guerrilla skirmish between Team Conan and Team Leno.  Basically, a moderator on the NBC forums created a thread for people to post things they want Jay Leno to see.  Which was more or less a siren call for Conan O’Brien’s veritable Internet army to give it to Jay on the chin.  Conan propaganda, photoshops, and just straight-up vulgarity appeared by the page.

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:

The other day, the Israeli army canceled a planned operation because a soldier posted a status update with details on the mission. He was relieved of duty, court-martialed, and sentenced to 10 days in prison. And now the military is cracking down on soldiers’ use of social networking sites.

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.

Twitter announced a new feature today called Contributors.   The new feature will allow multiple people to post Tweets on behalf of a company.  Although corporate Twitter feeds like Bing are already using this with a caret plus initials (^CO), official support from Twitter will change the perception of a Twitter feed as a source of corporate communication.

There is an ongoing debate among social media professionals about whether a corporate Twitter feed needs a single voice, a single persona, ideally managed by a single person.  In my opinion, the new contributors feature ends the debate.  When the contributors feature comes out of beta, corporate Twitter feeds will move to having multiple people post information, similar to how a corporate blog has multiple posters, each with their own voice.  Just as with blogs, there will be a need for individuals to have their own personal Twitter feed.

The Twitter contributors feature will be supported by the Twitter API, which will enable a wide range of commercial Twitter tools to offer even more management features for multiple people that are managing a single Twitter feed.

—–

Craig Oda   http://twitter.com/codawork

http://socialmediasurfer.com

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

“Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent,” said Bertrand Russell. And while his words are typically poured over by philosophers as opposed to the Technorati, his idea can be applied to pretty much every part of human history. We are an inherently skeptical population, it seems. Especially when it comes to technology.

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.

Selling into the US market has always been the ultimate challenge for Japanese software companies.  Make it here and you’re for real.  It’s the only legitimate way to claim success.  Succeeding only in Japan — ask Just Systems and their long-forgotten Ichitaro word processor — is not enough.

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.

The “micronews” approach to PR can significantly boost results for clients outside of traditional media pitching, especially when it comes to driving web traffic. This strategy can really help clients during dry spells of hard news.

What is the “micronews” approach to PR? It’s a simple three-step process: content creation, channel communication, measurement.

1) Content Creation

Thanks to blogs, everyone has the potential to be a media outlet. However, it takes more than having a blog to make a significant impact on traffic. You need interesting, consistent content that a targeted group of readers would likely pass on to others. News needs to be viral. Within this “micronews” approach,” blogs should not be long – around 400 words. The key is to be interesting. I suggest setting up periodic recorded interviews (10-15 minutes) with the client’s internal thought leaders to surface points of interest. The likelihood is they have interesting content nuggets and they don’t realize it. The PR practitioner should have an ear for what could lead to an active online discussion. Love them or hate them, lists almost always work well (example: “6 Steps To Refactoring Rails”).  Insights on hi-level trends can be interesting (example: “To ESB or not to ESB”). Controversy is always good for stirring up interest (example: “3 Reasons Why Encryption is Overrated”).

Two more quick points to consider on content creation. First, be consistent – shoot for one blog per week minimum. Second, plan ahead. Create an internal editorial calendar; share it via Google docs or a wiki. Solicit suggestions. Be disciplined and stick to the schedule.

2) Channel Communication

When the blog goes live, create a simple abstract (catchy headline and brief synopsis) that you can circulate via social media sites such as LinkedIn, Google Groups and DZone. Create and use a bit.ly address (URL shortener) that links back to the blog in your promotion (after free registration, one can monitor bit.lys).

Here’s an example:

“Headline: 6 Steps To Refactoring Rails

Text: Since December, Rails has undergone a fairly significant internal refactoring in a number of areas. Here’s the process for diving into a new area of the codebase and emerging some time later with a much improved area that does basically the same thing — Yehuda Katz blogs about a 6 step approach to refactoring Rails. http://bit.ly/116BST”

I’ve found that LinkedIn Groups are a great way to spread the word about interesting blog posts. Warning – provide useful information. If you spam or overtly pimp your products or services, you will quickly lose any credibility among the groups and may even be banned by the moderator and host. LinkedIn allows an individual to be involved in up to 50 groups at one time. These groups can have thousands of members (for example, the Information Security Community has more than 39,000 members). Treat the community right by providing truly useful, interesting information and it can be beneficial to one’s thought leadership position and prove an excellent driver of web traffic. Google Groups is another great forum to spread micronews.

Twitter is another communication channel to spread micronews – though you are limited to 140 characters. Thus, it’s all about the headline. If possible, make the “tweet” short enough so it can be re-tweeted easily without going over 140 characters. Again, the headline needs to be interesting enough to the audience you are targeting so that they click on the bit.ly link and/or pass it on to their friends, colleagues and go viral.

Client example: “5 Common Questions About Hadoop – http://bit.ly/ehZ15”

3) Measurement

One albatross that has hung around the neck of PR for some is that PR results can’t be measured well or easily. The micronews approach IS measurable. For example, bit.ly can be a great tool for capturing reach (how many people clicked to your content). But your best friend is Google Analytics. At the very least, it will show you whether a particular post or campaign or outreach was successful or not. For a well-executed micronews approach, it provides proof of success. Below is an example of a client’s Google Analytics graph (specific metrics are blocked out) along with notes explaining traffic spikes …

➢    June 1-2 spike: “Before You Jump Into Cloud Storage, Answer These 5 Questions…” blog post (6/1/09 issue)
➢    June 10-11 spike: “3 Reasons Why Encryption is Overrated” blog post (6/10/09 issue)
➢    June 23-26 spike: “Response Part 1: Future Processing Power” blog post (6/23/09 issue) and “Response Part 2: Complexities of Key Management” blog post (6/24/09 issue)

The Caveat – Content Still Matters (a lot)

Though the micronews approach provides straightforward marching orders to creating, distributing, and measuring content, it all really falls apart if the content is bad. Remember, create content that would be so interesting to the audience you are targeting that they would pass it on to their colleagues and friends. Take off your rose colored glasses.  Marketing brochure speak about how great your product or services will not only fail – it could very well hurt your brand.

Social media embodies Silicon Valley values. Social media communities are collaborating in innovative ways to create entirely new approaches to business and communication problems. It’s no wonder then that many Silicon Valley companies have embraced social media as a platform to engage with users and customers. But Silicon Valley also values pragmatism and ROI. Many PR professionals and social media marketers shudder at the thought of fielding this question in a new business pitch: “Social media sounds like something we should be doing, but how does it measure up to other marketing activities that I use to support critical business goals?” At Page One PR, headquartered in Silicon Valley, we understand that this question should not only be expected, it should be welcomed.

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.

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.

First, Twitter erupted on the social media scene.  Then came the flurry of application developers, in a very iPhone-esque way, extending and piggybacking on top of the Twitter platform.  Now there are Twitter applications for pretty much everything.

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.

Here are seven golden rules to keep in mind as you prepare to tweet your next tech event:

1) Establish a hashtag, and start using it before the event in all Twitter communications. Without doing this, you may find yourself in a “hashtag war” where your company suggests one but users use another. This is not a disaster. But it can be sloppy. One reason users will pick a different hashtag: yours is too long. Because hashtags will be appended to all related tweets, they should be short, to take up as little room as possible. Consider changing #mycompanyevent to #mce. You lose a little in obvious branding but gain a lot in Twitter usefulness. Searching for this hashtag at any point gives readers a quick summary of all tweets related to your event.

2) You’ll tweet a little bit about your event leading up to the day, and then you’ll turn on the fire hose of tweets as the event unfolds, in real-time. If you’re worried about how the big change in the number of tweets coming from your account will be received, don’t be. In general, in Twitter, more information is welcomed, not criticized. By all means, in the days leading up to the event, give your followers some warnings: “Event coming up, we’re trying something different, live-tweeting it.”

3) Make sure your tweets are short enough to be easily retweeted. 140 characters MINUS “RT @yourcompany” means that others reading your tweets can retweet them without any editing. At a live event, this is a major advantage.

4) Not all issues are technology related. Don’t forget politics. Live tweeting panels, even though it’s a public forum, requires taking into account participants’ opinions as well, and can be a bit tricky. If you have someone running the Twitter feed who can take political considerations into account real-time, you’ll be better off. Too sharp of comments and there are potential participant issues. Too bland and your Twitter feed is useless. Most likely, other Twitter feeds will fill in with sharper criticism.

5) In one case, Page One PR’s client was very open source centric, so giving a nod to Identi.ca, built on open source software, was important. All tweets were initiated through Identi.ca. You can easily configure Identi.ca to automatically post to Twitter. All tweets are then signed “half a minute ago from Identica,” marking you as an open source supporter. (As you should be!)

6) Timing is of the essence. With other people enthusiastically tweeting, five minutes late looks really late. Preparing informative tweets ahead of time helps. In a separate document, if you know, for instance, 3-4 panels that the company will be tweeting about, line up 3-4 tweets that announce “XYZ panel with John and Jane Doe, just getting started…” Interspersing prepared tweets with live ones will help significantly with your real-time workload. Bonus rule for the expert Tweeters to consider:

7) How to work with panels. Soliciting questions for a panel may feel like a good idea — real democracy! — but there are several important things to consider. Are you confident you can get enough questions live? If not, soliciting questions ahead of time is smart. How do you transmit them up to the podium? IMing them is possible, but whoever is receiving them needs to both scan and summarize real-time. They can not be actively participating in the panel. Summarizing and reporting the answers? Not possible with one person running the Twitter feed. Ideally, you need two people to properly handle: one who is monitoring the Twitter feed, one who is listening to the panel and summarizing and condensing answers into tweets. (Not easy!) Tweeting back answers? Again, not possible with one person.

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.

So, maybe you found out the spoilers to LOST Season 3 on Facebook. Maybe you got your Grand Theft Auto 4 trade secrets from a blog. Maybe you heard John Mayer and Jennifer Aniston broke up for the 11th time on Twitter. Perhaps you didn’t know that an entire prison of convicts in the Philippines could remake the entire Thriller video until you saw it up on YouTube.

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

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.

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.

I had a CEO compare Page One’s work to a tequila shot the other day. I took it as a compliment.

“I really feel like we’ve turned a corner,” he told me as he drove through the streets of San Francisco, clutching his blackberry. “I like being part of the conversation. And Page One, you guys were the lubricant. You were the shots of tequila.”

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.

Twitter is everywhere these days, with 11% of online Americans now tweeting (up from 6% in May 2008). The “Twitterverse” is increasingly filled with corporate accounts, including popular examples @zappos, @JetBlue, and @ComcastCares. Before you jump in with a “me too” Twitter account, here are three points you should consider:

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.

Eight years ago, my old boss, CEO of a largish software company told me, “Craig if you can’t measure it online, it doesn’t exist.” At the time, I was a hotshot marketer, managing PR and advertising. I thought he was wrong, a bit full of himself, and seeing the world through too narrow of a keyhole. He was an engineer with a PhD in computer science that just didn’t get what marketing was about.

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.

In September, I wrote a post on Page One’s search for a social media monitoring service. After exploring several commercial solutions, we decided on Radian6 because the functions of the tool and pricing scheme best fit our needs. Since that time, Page One has continued to engage in innovative social media campaigns. Monitoring social media such as blogs, forums, Twitter, and rich media has been a key component in many of these campaigns.

When discussing social media monitoring, many people talk in broad terms about the need for companies to listen and engage in this space. New media channels are becoming more important than ever. In late January Advertising Age reported on a study by the CMO Council which found that many CMOs do not feel they’re effectively tracking social media.

But how does social media monitoring work in practice? Can a tool like Radian6 work magic for companies looking to make headway in this new frontier?

My answer, although it may not be satisfying to some, is that the value of the tool depends on the goals you set and the metrics you’re trying to track. No one tool is sufficient for a successful campaign.

In fact, while the best features of Radian6 are its analytical graphing components, during day-to-day operations I’ll often find myself going elsewhere to monitor social media in real time. For instance, in a lightweight blog campaign, a combination of Google Blog searches may be adequate (and in some cases, even more useful than Radian6 searches, since Google has Page Rank and relevance functionality). For Twitter, hybrid desktop applications like TweetDeck and simple, yet intuitive monitoring interfaces like TweetGrid can do the trick. For determining influencers, I’ve found it essential to complement Radian6 with Google or Technorati searches.

Tools like Radian6 certainly do have strengths that you can’t get for free elsewhere. Radian6 provides the ability to process and analyze information to determine key trends and drill down on contextual information. For example, using the Topic Trends widget, you can not only track trends in social media mentions of keywords through a period of time, but you can also zero in on a particular point of interest and perform additional analysis.

Sure, Radian6 can aggregate diverse information sources into one interface, but its display features are not necessarily optimal for all activities. More importantly, the metrics it tracks are not necessarily the ones that are most useful or relevant to every social media campaign.

This is the big point – Radian6 is a good monitoring tool, but it doesn’t have all the answers (nor do the creators of Radian6 pretend that it does). When engaging in a social media campaign, it’s essential that you drive the metrics and not depend on a tool to do it for you. Fundamentally, Radian6 tracks the number of key word mentions in social media, but you may be interested in different kinds of values or metrics – for instance, how your campaign efforts have affected website traffic, or in the PR world, how successful you’ve been in securing placements in top identified publications or blogs.

Buying a tool like Radian6 is a step in the right direction but success in social media requires smart planning and identifying metrics that are appropriate to the unique circumstances of the individual campaign. There’s no silver bullet in this world, which may explain why it’s so exciting and challenging at the same time.

We’ve been helping our clients build and maintain their corporate Twitter accounts for so long that we pretty much just forgot about building one for ourselves. Well no longer! I would like to formally introduce you to the new Page One PR Twitter account. Here we will discuss the worlds of social media, public relations (of course), maybe some client news and probably a whole lot about the happenings at our office. And let me tell you, if that doesn’t entice you, this blooper video surely will.

Enjoy! and be sure to join us on Twitter for more fun.

Can community and collaboration surface the same innovation in advertising as it does in software development? This is the question that we’ve partnered with The Linux Foundation to answer in the months ahead with the “I’m Linux” video campaign.

The campaign seeks to find the most creative user-generated videos that showcase what Linux means to those who use it, and inspire others to try it. The winner gets an all expenses paid trip to Tokyo.

We’ve seen some really unbelievable, early results due to a few important strategies we defined up front.

The name of the contest was very important. We needed to help people immediately understand the context and purpose of the campaign, so we chose “I’m Linux” as a take on the widely known “I’m a Mac; I’m a PC” advertisements. And, it’s working: the online conversations taking place are noisy ones with both criticism (“why be a copycat?”) and applause (“finally, an ad campaign for Linux!”).

Another key component of our strategy was the decision to establish a panel of judges to review the submissions and help choose the winner. While we considered leaving the voting completely up to website voters, we decided to establish a panel of 5-6 judges so that we could tap into their online followers. Each judge has their own Twitter account and their own blog, among other social media channels. This exponentially increases the reach of our message and the awareness of the campaign.

The benefits of this strategy are being proven early on. While the campaign doesn’t officially launch until January 26, 2009, it is important to solicit a variety of early entries that set the tone and build momentum for the contest. By confirming judges in December and early January, and encouraging them to start talking about the campaign, we have been able to see immediate results.

Matt Asay, Larry Augustin and Tim O’Reilly were among our earliest judges to join us in the journey to find the best Linux ad. And, when O’Reilly “tweeted” about the campaign and his role as a judge late on a Friday evening in mid-December, we started to see the Twittersphere and blogosphere light up like the phones during a Howard Stern radio broadcast.

We’ve seen more than 200 additional “tweets” since O’Reilly’s shout out. We’ve also seen 43 news articles, including a Slashdot entry with more than 400 comments and 1,200 Diggs.

Also, within this two-week period after the “leak,” The Linux Foundation’s YouTube channel jumped from one subscription to nearly 100 with over 2,500 channel views. And, two of the early “I’m Linux” contest submissions have already received a combined total of 5,354 views. Simultaneously, The Linux Foundation’s Facebook group has jumped to more than 250 members.

The most interesting thing about campaigns like this one, and the variety of new PR tactics being tested, is that there are no longer any “rules of PR.” With the “I’m Linux” contest, we didn’t have to conduct a focus group or do exhaustive planning and research in advance to understand how people would react to the campaign. We put a short description on the web and engaged community influencers to share the idea with their followers. Now, we’ll help to facilitate the conversation and adjust the campaign as we go.

Look, ma: no hands!

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.

The future of PR is being created today, on sunny sidewalks and corporate cafes in Mountain View. The Google campus is germinating the future of information access and the future of public relations. There is no PR super-genius at Google inventing a new type of PR. The innovations in public information management comes from the Google campus itself, the world’s ultimate PR water cooler.

Working in PR, we are in the midst of the social media craze. Tweet that press release. Start that Facebook group about that issue, comment on that YouTube video/blog-post/profile. It makes sense. Our industry, just like many others, is trying to take advantage of the most popular thing on the internet: social media tools, online networks and other types of user generated content in Web 2.0. We were fighting over the last drumstick until just now, when Mom brought out a second whole new Thanksgiving turkey from the oven. With all of the perceived benefits of this new type of communication, I’d like to ask the pundits and experts one question:

How in the heck am I supposed to get anything done?

It is a growing trend for companies to let their employees use social media tools (read: screw around) at work as companies begin to see the advantages and uses of having a connected workforce.

Yeah, social networking sites like Facebook (and LinkedIn, which is growing on me) are a great way to network and extend business contacts, but after I poke/nudge that influential reporter, I’ll spend the next 20 minutes looking at pictures from Marie and Tom’s trip to Hawaii. Twitter, which started out as a way for me to be able to read the current climate and see what the buzz was about at all times has turned into a platform where I can share the latest funny YouTube video with every other member of the 80 million member community who is also procrastinating at work. And Wikipedia? Don’t get me started on Wikipedia… it’s an invaluable resource for someone working in the tech industry, or anyone, but at what price?

When I worked at Goldman, we had personal email and Facebook blocked (for reasons other than productivity), something that can easily be done by any company. It seemed to work pretty well (although maybe if the i-bankers were on MySpace instead of investing in risky loan markets, we’d be doing a little better…). Does the added benefit of the interconnectedness of Web 2.0, where everyone gets to create content (and learn more in the process), outweigh the costs of millions of man-hours lost in procrastination?

Let’s use math to find out. An Arbitrary Procrastination Equation (APE):

x = abs[ b + (p + d/p)/w - (w - 2p)^(d/p) - a] + 100

where…
b = amount of time it took you to read this post (assuming you read 200 words/min)
x = you have to figure that out for yourself! This is mathematics!
p = amount of time you spent following the links in this post
d/p = distraction quotient, your propensity to keep following more links off the main linked page
w = hours you are expected to work today
a = age of your boss

I invite the procrastination experts out there on the Interweb to post their APE scores here on the blog. If x is greater than 100, you are not being productive right now.

What’s your APE score?

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.

Social media is radically transforming the PR business. But like anything in PR, one of the biggest challenges is measuring and metrics. One of my first jobs at Page One PR was figuring out the best way to help our clients measure the value of social media programs.

Tapping into social media in a meaningful way for clients is not as easy as a Google Blog, Technorati, and Twitter search. To narrow in on the right conversations, we needed an automated system for monitoring all types of social media. I recently led a project to find the best commercial social media monitoring service for our purposes, which we could use to tailor comprehensive analysis and services according to our clients’ needs.

Here’s a brief summary of what I found:
Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Visible Technologies service large clients and charge correspondingly large fees. A Visible Technologies product called Trucast uses sophisticated web crawlers to stay current with the most influential voices on the web and provides an easy platform for engaging social media communities directly through the software. One downside to TruCast – it is difficult to filter information according to different categories of social media. The lack of flexibility in that case, along with the high price tag for both of these services, told us that these are not good options for PR and marketing firms that deal with startups on a limited budget or larger companies with small-scale social media campaigns.

BuzzLogic is a more reasonable value option for startups and smaller campaigns. The interface allows you to divide tasks across workers and search results are easy to filter by influence metrics for blogs and the posts that appear as subheadings. The service includes other useful features like social mapping and recording engagements with bloggers. Downsides – they only offer yearly pricing schemes (too rigid for us) and it is difficult to narrow in on categories of social media.

The Radian6 interface is intuitive and allows you to filter results based on categories of social media, including rich media sites and microblogs (but not social networks). However, the “Influence Viewer” widget requires some manual follow-up. While the widget uses criteria such as number and length of comments and votes on social bookmarking services to determine “influence,” it doesn’t do enough to highlight the blogs that have power or authority in general on the web (as opposed to the ones that have a few comments and are on topic). Other downsides – search results track back only about 30 days prior to the query (other products allow you to get better historical data), and while the product might be affordable for primary research, buying many separate topic profiles after the seven day grace period would become cost prohibitive for many small firms.

There are a few other products I’ve checked out but haven’t mentioned here. But right now, we’re going with Radian6. Any suggestions? Something we’re missing? Feel free to comment below.

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.

A few weeks ago I got a call from a reporter who was writing a book with a section on the use of Twitter in corporate communications program. I was surprised. Up until four months ago, I thought of Twitter as a toy, a bit of time sink to chat about pets, the latest meals, and the latest reality show on TV. Before the reporter called, I had been involved in about three projects to use Twitter for corporate messaging programs. However, I had never taken a close look at how the programs were doing across our agency.

I checked up on Twitter usage across the agency and was given a big wake up call when I learned that one-third of our clients were using Twitter in corporate messaging programs. A well-known open source company that was using Twitter to promote a community choice awards contest really made me think hard about the changes I’m going to have to face with these new tools of online communication. One month into a two month promotion campaign, the number of voters had increased dramatically to 100,000. This was up from less than 40,000 total voters in the previous year. Increasing the number of voters is a primary goal of this ongoing campaign. With two weeks left in the program, we may push the total above 80,000 voters.

What changed? Why was Twitter a tool now for this company, not a toy? Although we’re still in the process of executing the campaign and haven’t finished analyzing the results, I have a few initial thoughts. Twitter is a great way to send short news updates to an existing community several times a day. In this example, Twitter wasn’t used to build a community, it helped to focus the attention of some members of an existing open source development community on a specific action. In this case, they voted on the best open source software in different categories. Twitter was used to give updates on the process for community nominations and finalist selection by the community. Since Twitter helped more people to understand the process, more people felt invested in the outcome of the awards program and decided to take the time to vote.

Getting the phone call from the reporter helped me to think through how Twitter can be used. I’ve started to use Twitter software Tweetr and twhirl on my Mac desktop and recently installed the free application Twitterific on my iPhone. For me, Twitter has finally become a tool.