You see a lot of talk on this blog about how companies are successfully (and sometimes unsuccessfully) leveraging social media to build their brand and engage in proactive outreach with the public. Often overlooked, though, is the fact that individuals have also been extremely successful in building their brand and identity through Twitter–and I’m not talking about the bevy of self-proclaimed “social media gurus” that have sprung up like weeds over the past few years, either. I’m talking about the most attention-starved, desperate-to-engage subset of society there is: celebrities, of course! What else but Twitter could have brought the spotlight (and a combined 3.5 million followers) back to the likes of MC Hammer, R.L. Stine (of Goosebumps fame) and Fred Durst?

While Twitter has been an effective medium for has-been celebrities to return to relevance (OK, I feel compelled to take R.L. Stine out of this group–his is actually one of my favorite Twitter handles out there, and who didn’t love Goosebumps?), it’s been even more effective for high-profile celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Lady Gaga aiming to build on their respective identities through “informal” engagement with fans.

Any discussion on the most popular and influential celebrities on Twitter inevitably brings you to one of the biggest (both literally and figuratively) names out there: Shaquille O’Neal, AKA THE_REAL_SHAQ.

One of the first celebrities to embrace Twitter, Shaq has built up a a strong following of over 3 million users; for perspective, the aggregate number of users following all other NBA players combined is 20 million. Early on, Shaq was known to Tweet his location just before game-time, offering free tickets to the first fan that could find him. He has also used Twitter to protect his reputation and dispute the notion that he is an aging star incapable of contributing on the court anymore. He engaged in a feud with outspoken ESPN commentator Jim Rome last month, when Rome claimed that it had been a mistake for the Boston Celtics to sign O’Neal to a multi-year contract earlier this summer. In previous eras (say, three years ago), Rome could have made his pithy comments about Shaq being over the hill and that would have been that, but mediums like Twitter and Facebook have allowed individuals to increase their voice and reach. Thus ensued a mini-feud between Shaq and Rome via Twitter that concluded with Shaq playfully challenging Rome to a charity boxing match at ESPN headquarters. Rome backed off his comments, and Shaq, ever the showman, emerged unscathed.

Boston Globe blogger Eric Wilbur wrote a great post exploring the impact Shaq’s arrival would have in a social media-savvy city like Boston and noted that no other celebrity has been as effective as Shaq in leveraging Twitter as a marketing vehicle, without explicitly seeming to do so. While he is known for joking around and interacting with fans in an extremely casual manner, it’s worth noting that after a summer of sporadic Tweeting, Shaq exploded onto the Twittersphere in early August, just before the season premiere of his ABC reality show “Shaq vs.” Coincidence? I think not. Also interesting was his decision around the same time to interact with other high-profile celebrities on Twitter–from Justin Bieber to Penn & Teller–and thus increase his potential reach. He may seem like he’s just goofing around on Twitter, but make no mistake: Shaq knows what he’s doing (and has the ratings to prove it).

Jim Rome may not have been totally off-base when he declared that Shaq is in the twilight of his basketball career (he’s 38, after all–though I’m still predicting the Celtics win the championship this year–call me a homer if you must). Over the hill, though? Hardly. Shaq has successfully established himself as a celebrity both on and off the basketball court, and is using Twitter to ensure that his celebrity continues long after his playing days are over.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that Page One was tapped to provide social media support for SAPPHIRE NOW, a global enterprise conference put on by SAP. The conference simultaneously took place in 3 locations: in Frankfurt, Orlando, and of course – online. The event also featured great keynote speakers such as Vice President Al Gore, Sir Richard Branson, and SAP founder Hasso Plattner. The global nature of SAPPHIRE NOW attracted lots of attention from traditional and online media outlets, but our job was to carve out a social media presence for the conference. We wanted people to feel like they were taking part in a large-scale international event, but also provide an intimate online community for them to have conversations with each other and voice opinions in order to build relationships. We set out to achieve this by establishing official Twitter and Facebook channels for the conference.

For marketing professionals, the great and sometimes most difficult thing about social media is that it never stops. Conversations don’t turn off during non-business hours. This is why it was essential to push out a steady flow of messaging on Twitter and Facebook 24 hours a day. Online monitoring was also a non-stop process that allowed us to respond rapidly to any pressing concerns that were expressed by those tweeting about the conference. As the content creator of both those channels, I made sure to follow the conference through the live streaming broadcasts around the clock so I could react in real-time to the day’s most important news and announcements. Yes, this meant waking up at 3am to tweet from my bed for the Frankfurt audience, but hey, it was all worth it!

SAPPHIRE NOW lasted for just three days, but the online buzz was strong for long after. At the end of the conference, we walked away with some impressive stats:
- #4 Twitter trending topic in the U.S.
- 10,478 mentions of the #sapphirenow hashtag
- 3,337 fans for the Facebook Page
- 21,561 Facebook Page views

If you’d like to learn more about our social media work with SAP, check out our SAPPHIRE NOW case study below.

Social media has inevitably gravitated towards interaction on Twitter making it the 11^th most visited website and attracting an estimated 8% of the worlds Internet users. With so many people on it, its really no wonder that everyone from my mom to Coca Cola have jumped onto the band-wagon and are trying to milk the millions of Twitterers for all their worth.

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

Sounds like a valid enough argument right?… WRONG!

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

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

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

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

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

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

We all know that social media offers marketing execs a great avenue to engage directly with their customers, but how do you go about doing it well without alienating your community?  We’ve been working with our clients to develop interactive marketing/social media campaigns, which allow marketers to use social media to stir up customer interaction and then funnel that activity into traditional marketing objectives, such as increases in product downloads, website traffic, etc.

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

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

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

Since Twitter came onto the social media scene in 2007, almost all social media marketers have started using it to gain an edge in marketing campaigns.  Silicon Valley companies we work with like Cisco, McAfee, and SAP all use Twitter extensively.  Twitter typically takes up about 25% to 60% of the social media campaign budget.  These companies are at the cutting-edge of B2B marketing and their commitment to Twitter is an indication of the value of Twitter in B2B marketing programs.

Unfortunately for marketers, Twitter guidelines can be confusing.  The guidelines are often vague and enforced suspension can be handled by automated algorithms.   It’s possible for accounts to get suspended during the middle of a campaign due to a misinterpretation of Twitter guidelines.

Here are five important points social media marketers needs to know about doing business and advertising on Twitter:

1) Avoid aggressive following.

- Any user can follow 2,000 people total, but this does not mean that you cannot have more than 2,000 followers. After 2,000 followers, Twitter will pay close attention to your “follower-to-following” ratio. For example, if you are following 5,000 people but only have 100 followers, Twitter will consider that “aggressive following” and will send an error message because you have reached your limit for your account.  Repeat violations or overly aggressive following may result in account suspension.

2) Avoid spamming.

- Do not post the same update multiple times on the same day.

- Do not post the same update on multiple accounts (this is not the same as a retweet, or RT, this is if the same company owns multiple accounts and posts the same tweets on each account to garner more attention.)

- When Twitter users constantly follow and un-follow many users, this is what Twitter calls “aggressive follow churn.” The only automated function Twitter allows is auto-follow, which, when enabled, simply means that your account automatically follows any user who first follows you.

- Do not “squat” a username for more than six months. After six months, Twitter can remove that username. Selling usernames is not allowed unless you have arranged a separate agreement with Twitter.

3) Remember to stay within the limits.

- In addition to aggressive following, Twitter has a few other limitations to an account on a daily or timely basis:

a. Direct messages are limited to 250 per day

b. API requests are limited to 150 per hour

c. Updates are limited to 1,000 per day (including retweets)

d. Changes to account e-mail are limited to 4 per hour

e. Followers (daily) are limited to 1,000

4) Third parties are not allowed to submit paid tweets into the Twitter API.

- Promoted Tweets are the only paid tweets allowed. Twitter says that the reason for this is that third parties do not have Twitter and twitterer’s best interests in mind, andTwitter emphasizes the preservation of “long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem,” and also want to encourage creativity and innovation.

5) Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends

Although this doesn’t impact account suspension, marketers need to know about these new tools for businesses on Twitter, weighing the costs of paying Twitter directly for promotion versus paying your staff to run campaigns.

Page Wonder Hartley blogged about the benefits of promoted tweets, as well as places where promoted tweets could use some improvement. Although it has not yet been released to all advertising companies, Twitter has given us a few pointers on how promoted tweets work.

- “Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses want to highlight to a wider group of users.” – Twitter Business Help Resources

- Promoted tweets rely heavily on resonance, a platform Twitter is developing currently to determine which tweets will become promoted by measuring a company’s interaction with its customers (“@replies, re-use of hashtags, avatar clicks, hashtag clicks, in-Tweet link clicks, views after Retweet and more”). This indicates that all tweets begin as regular tweets, and Twitter’s resonance algorithm will determine which tweets are eligible to become a promoted tweet.

- Promoted tweets will appear at the top of relevant search result pages, and a “promoted” button will indicate promoted trends.

Although this isn’t an explicit rule in Twitter’s terms of service or guidelines, it is best for businesses to try  to keep up with their followers and fellow twitterers: monitor what is being said about your company, pay attention to #hashtags and @replies, and connect with the people behind the brand you are trying to reach out to. Tweet more than just links and promotions. Twitter strongly believes in a friendly environment, and I believe social media marketing on Twitter can and should fall under that category.

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Research and writing assistance provided by Paulina Singhapok of Page One ( Twitter @sf_paulina , paulina@pageonepr.com)

We tend to write about Twitter a lot on this blog.  We’ve reviewed promoted Tweets and trends with online advertising, walked through step-by-step  case studies and example campaigns and have discussed how to set up a Twitter strategy, among many other topics.  When the agency first started running social media campaigns a few years back, Twitter was one of our most successful avenues for message distribution.  We measured our early successes through increases in Twitter followers though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in May, Page One partner Craig Oda noted that Twitter had banned “paid Tweets” and in turn rolled out its own marketing service, Promoted Tweets.  Twitter founder Biz Stone described Promoted Tweets as just the first phase of the Twitter advertising model. Simply, Promoted Tweets are company-sponsored Tweets that are listed first at the top of certain search results on Twitter.com, and are clearly marked as “Promoted.” Brands like Starbucks and Virgin America were the first to utilize the new service.  For example, when typing in “Virgin America” in the Twitter search engine, this Virgin America-sponsored Tweet is listed first:

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

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

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

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

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

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

If there’s anything we as a society put a premium on, it’s transparency. Most of us learned the whole “honesty is the best policy” lesson sometime between being caught for stealing cookies from the pantry when we were 5 and cheating on our 8th grade algebra exam. Not BP, apparently.

The oil conglomerate has been dominating the headlines for all the wrong reasons over the past month-plus, and deservedly so. They have perpetrated perhaps the greatest environmental disaster in human history, and they have been shockingly apathetic about it.

To channel Tina Fey for a moment: “Really, BP? Really?!?”

Simply put, BP has become the face of evil corporate greed; I’m not sure if Goldman Sachs has sent them a gift basket yet, but I’m sure it’s on its way in any event. The oil spill is a disaster that is affecting nearly every facet of society. There’s no getting around this story, nor should there be. You’re just as likely to read about the dire economic impact the spill is having on fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico, rare bird species whose existence is threatened by the deluge of oil attacking their habitat or the collective failure of BP and the federal government to properly regulate oil rigs. These are the facts, plain and simple.

While the spill is certainly the main story here, BP could have and should have done much more, much sooner from a PR/marketing standpoint. As it stands, the company is staring bankruptcy in the face and people are far more likely to voice their collective disgust with CEO Tony Hayward’s pathetic “I want my life back” spiel than to express any kind of confidence in BP and their ability to clean up the spill.

Perhaps the best microcosm for this phenomenon comes from comparing two Twitter handles: BP_America and BPGlobalPR. The first handle is BP’s official account and provides semi-regular updates on the company’s “progress” in stemming the spill. It’s all well and good that they’re cleaning up 5,000 gallons a day, but don’t you feel slightly misled to learn that the daily volume of oil leaking out of their well is far greater than that? BP’s lack of transparency has alienated the vast majority of the public and has tarnished their image even more than the spill itself.

Which brings us to BPGlobalPR, the Twitter phenomenon that has gained over 150,000 followers in just over a month. The handle skewers BP by satirizing their seemingly apathetic response to the spill and their continued opacity and failure to keep the public adequately informed of the ongoing cleanup effort. Unlike its prim and proper corporate counterpart, BPGlobalPR actively engages its audience and has channeled popular sentiment to build a strong online following almost overnight.

Take a look at this extremely telling graph, courtesy of TwitterCounter, that tracks each account’s followers over the past month (BPGlobalPR is orange, BP_America is blue):

The chart speaks for itself and is indicative of BP’s massive public relations failure throughout this ordeal. As of Wednesday afternoon on June 9, BPGlobalPR had literally ten times the number of followers than BP_America did. This last fact prompted this poignant Tweet from BPGlobalPR (for more on brand hijacking, see this post from my colleague Kim Terca).

BP has completely lost its voice in this crisis. They can go on about their efforts to clean up the spill until they’re blue in the face, but the fact is, nobody is listening to them anymore.

When it comes to crisis PR, especially on a scope of this magnitude, the most important thing to keep in mind with corporate communications is transparency. BP has taken the opposite route from the get-go, choosing to tell us about their “dilligent efforts” cleaning up the spill while conveniently omitting to tell us that they’re barely making a dent.

For those of you that think recent pressure has BP changing their tune, I offer this story from June 9 that details the millions (and counting) BP has spent on search engine optimization to redirect traffic looking for oil spill updates to “BP-sponsored updates”—think Stalinist propaganda here, though that may be a bit of an understatement.

BP recently hired a hotshot communications executive to take over their PR efforts, but I can’t help but wonder whether it’s too late. They’ve seemingly rewritten the book on “what not to do” in crisis communications with their response so far; it’s hard to see the public forgiving them at this point.

What’s more, they just overtook Paris Hilton on Google’s search rankings. When that happens, you’ve either got a serious problem on your hands, or you’re the next Justin Bieber. And I don’t think Tony Hayward’s got much of a voice.

A little over a year ago, we delivered the debut issue of the Social Wonders Newsletter. A look through the past year’s topics reveals three main themes – Monitoring, Measurement and Management. While we did not set out with the intention of focusing on these three areas, it quickly became apparent that they form the cornerstones of social media campaigns. Here’s why…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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As Shelly Milam mentioned in an earlier post, the annual SAP conference, SAPPHIRE NOW, was a great social media success. In addition to her points, I wanted to touch on two other strategies that Page One and SAP developed to encourage quality levels of social media activity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

At Page One, we talk a lot about the benefits of using social media to engage with your customers and community.  One of the most interesting aspects of the social web is that it’s a two-way conversation: your customers can talk back to you, whether you like what they have to say or not.

The Nestle Facebook debacle in March is a now-legendary example of how NOT to respond to criticism online.  In this case, angry consumers began posting comments on Nestle’s Facebook wall about their use of palm oil in products.  A page that was supposed to promote Nestle got hijacked by consumers and became a place to criticize the brand, instead.  That was unfortunate, but the real trouble began when Nestle began censoring and removing negative posts from their wall.  An Internet-wide backlash resulted, and Nestle was forced to apologize.  In the end, Nestle conceded to the critics and partnered with The Forest Trust to support the sustainable harvest of forests.  Lesson learned: when you engage via social media, you have to be prepared to listen to what your customers have to say, and if what they have to say it negative, don’t even think about trying to censor it.

Another interesting example is the Bros Icing Bros phenomenon that is currently sweeping the nation by storm.  What started as a frat-boy drinking game has expanded to universities, offices, and Wall Street trading floors, mostly driven by social media as people post photos and videos of “bros” and even celebrities being “iced.”

Many have speculated that this is an undercover marketing campaign devised by Smirnoff, but that seems unlikely to me.  Sure, this fad is helping them sell more product, but the catch is that Smirnoff Ice is the butt of a joke.  As brosicingbros.com says: “try and buy the most disgusting flavored ice or a 24oz ice. Pineapple, mango, and grape are top of the list for the most gut wrenching, mind numbing, throw up in your mouth, Smirnoff ice flavors.”  Somehow, I don’t see Smirnoff’s marketing team writing that.

How should Smirnoff respond to this hijacking of their brand?  On the one hand, it’s a popular phenomenon that must be helping to drive sales.  But on the other hand, the game is immature and potentially dangerous, and Smirnoff doesn’t want to be seen promoting irresponsible drinking, not to mention the possible legal liability.  If you go to Smirnoff’s website, you will find no mention of “bros” whatsoever.  Smirnoff’s official statement is that: “Icing is consumer-generated and some people think it is fun. We never want underage “icing” and we always want responsible drinking.” What Smirnoff is doing is probably the best strategy: acknowledge the fad but stay out of it as much as possible.  If they condemned the practice or tried to shut down the Bros Icing Bros website, people would probably revolt.  If Smirnoff embraced the game and tried to promote it, people would assume it was a marketing ploy all along and shun it.

Another current example is the fake BPGlobalPR Twitter feed, which posts funny, derisive comments about the Gulf oil spill, as if written by BP’s public relations team.  In only a week, the feed has grown to more than 74,000 followers (by comparison, BP’s official Twitter feed has only 7,754 followers).  To add insult to injury, BP’s official feed was just hacked this week, as well.

When you take your brand to the social media channels, you have to be prepared for criticism.  Trying to censor people’s comments is a PR disaster waiting to happen.  Instead, your best strategy is to listen, acknowledge your customers’ opinions, and consider whether to incorporate their feedback into your business practices.

I enjoy following basketball. It’s particularly exciting now that we’re in the thick of the NBA playoffs. This is the first year I’ve gotten more of my NBA news from something other than the ESPN or NBA homepages… Twitter. That’s right, the microblogging site makes it very convenient to keep up with the NBA because news is delivered directly to my feed in pretty much real-time. Stories, scores, video, etc. – it’s all there. I rarely ever have to search on a website (even more of a pain on a smartphone) to check out what’s going on.

Between standard feeds such as @NBA and @ESPN, analysts like @jadande and @jalenrose, and the athletes themselves (everyone remembers @the_real_shaq joining Twitter), I must say the NBA is very well represented. And it’s great for fans.

Whereas in the past I read about NBA rumors in stories, now I’m reading about them in 140 character tweets by those involved. Example: free agent Chris Bosh asks his followers on Twitter what team he should go to.

Or I’m seeing a flurry of controversy that erupts over what a player supposedly did or did not tweet. Example: Paul Pierce (maybe) tweets the Celtics were going to sweep the Magic. For days after, Pierce vehemently denied he wrote this (it was immediately deleted, too).

Or people are responding to rumors via Twitter. Example: Lakers exec Jeanie Buss acknowledges rumors are circulating as to where Phil Jackson will coach next year.

Today, people are choosing to address issues on Twitter. No more need to go through the circus of calling and hosting a press conference or even answering the same questions over and over. Simply type up a couple lines and click a button. Done. These messages are low-effort and reach millions of people.

There’s no denying Twitter has had a huge impact on the NBA, and that the NBA has tremendously benefited from this social marketing channel. But is it all for the better? It certainly brings fans closer, puts athletes under even more of a microscope and gives new meaning to the term “trash talk.” I like the accessibility, the real-time updates, the wide range of information out there that Twitter aggregates for me. Twitter as a marketing tool for the dissemination of news, fan engagement, and overall brand promotion works great for the NBA. I’ve also seen it work well for some of my tech clients. Though on a different scale and with a different audience, the same rules apply. The notion is pretty transferable across all industries capitalizing on social marketing.

Last week Page One finished up a social media engagement with SAP to support the SAPPHIRE NOW user conference.  This was the first year SAP put a social strategy together for the conference and Page One was tapped to manage the Twitter feed and Facebook Page.  By the last day of the event, the Facebook Page had 3,332 fans, with 194 wall posts and 115 comments, and the Twitter feed had 2,037 followers, with over 780 retweets and over 12,130 uses of the #sapphirenow hashtag.

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

Influencer Identification and Outreach

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

Live Social Media Coverage

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

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

Twitter announced yesterday that they are banning paid tweets.  If you didn’t know that many companies were using paid tweets, you need to pay closer attention to the world of social media marketing.  The online world of third-party content production is undergoing rapid evolution.  The announcement by the people at Twitter is a sign of a much larger trend in social media marketing to pay people to publish content.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter are changing their terms of use to capture more marketing dollars themselves.    Many people feel that Twitter’s announcement to ban paid Tweets was motivated by a strategy to limit competition for their Promoted Tweets service that they launched with Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America as customers.   Before scoffing at the concept of Tweeting for money, consider that the initial customers for Twitter’s Promoted Tweets services are big, global corporations with massive marketing budgets.

Six months ago, a powerful social media technique was to identify and build relationships with key influential people on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.  This technique quickly evolved into building the relationships with travel expense reimbursements, other marketing gifts, and to direct payments of money.  Although there are legal requirements for the disclosure of payment in some cases, the technique of paying people to produce content is in widespread use.

So, should you care about the Twitter announcement about banning of Paid Tweets?  Well, if you already knew about the practice of Paid Tweets and it isn’t part of your business processes, then you can pay little attention to the announcement.  However, if you have a limited understanding of how marketing techniques involving payment for content work, you need to dig in now and do some research.

I’m not recommending that companies pay for content.  The vast majority of marketing campaigns are based on traditional techniques of information organization, publication on official channels, and helping reporting to understand the information.

However, I do believe it is important to understand what other techniques are being used by competitors.  It is also extremely important to have a thorough understanding of the rules of use and the laws that affect these new types of marketing technique that involve payment.

Craig Oda, managing partner

coda@pageonepr.com

—–

Eight paragraphs into the blog post, this statement pops up:

we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.

Twitter is changing its terms of services and using legal tools to block paid tweets.

There’s been a lot of talk about the big data explosion in the Business Intelligence community lately. Organizations are generating massive amounts of data as they shift to cloud-compatible models and are increasingly employing advanced analytics models to try to make sense of their data and gain a competitive advantage over the competition. Much has been made, for example, of Wal Mart’s use of predictive analytics to better understand their customers and maximize revenue streams. Companies from a wide range of verticals, from finance to pharmaceuticals, are employing advanced models to better understand their data and identify key trends in their respective markets.

The PR industry is no exception to this rule. More and more, PR practitioners are emphasizing marketing metrics when they report results back to their clients. We at Page One have been emphasizing metrics for several years now. Since 2007, we’ve included them in our monthly reports to clients. Our dashboards map back to client goals, and how they’re performing relative to benchmark competitors. Additionally, it helps teams within the agency focus on areas that generate the highest ROI from PR efforts.

Analytics tools have evolved over the years and ease of use has improved significantly. Gone is the era where you need a Ph.D. to conduct any type of data analysis. Today’s offerings—which range from longstanding legacy products SAS and SPSS to more cutting-edge models running on advanced programming languages like R, to specialized tools like Google Analytics—allow business analysts, PR professionals, and the blogger-next-door the ability to mine through data at a far more efficient rate than before and identify key user/market trends.

As a tech PR agency, we work with a number of venture capitalist-backed startups that measure everything in marketing. If the agency doesn’t provide Chief Marketing Officer X with material metrics that demonstrate a high ROI, you can be sure that he or she will have to come up with their own data to report to the board. By mining through the data and delivering it to clients in a presentable manner that outlines key metrics, we’re able to drive the process that demonstrates ROI and make everyone’s life easier in the process.



We’ve also focused on metrics in the ever-expanding field of social media. Many organizations are still trying to define the parameters of what exactly constitutes success (or failure) in their social media marketing efforts. How do you measure the success or failure of a Twitter campaign? Does a Facebook page with 10,000 “fans” really lead to more consumers buying your product? The model we’ve developed and honed over several years has become a powerful tool for us as we’ve gone deeper into the social media space and has led to the acquisition of some of our biggest clients. All thanks to the data.

Due to the recent Gizmodo iPhone debacle, the legal implications and debate over  “journalist vs. blogger” has been getting quite a bit of talk-time.  Many on the Old Media side of the house cringe at the thought of bloggers receiving the same type of legal protections that took them many years of schooling and hours in the newsroom to achieve.  While the New Media folks claim bloggers most certainly count as journalists and reference O’Grady vs. Superior Court, the 2006 case in which Apple sued a group of bloggers for revealing a confidential unreleased product, as their proof point.

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

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

The April blog club meeting was held at R and G Lounge in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  We walked up there from our office in the Financial District.  After two Dungeness crab dishes, BBQ pork, roast duck, and walnut prawns, I can saw that this highly rated.

One of the purposes of the club is to discuss marketing trends and explore potential blog topics for the next month.

With the growth of social media marketing campaigns, the industry is seeing more and more failed campaigns.  We’re starting to discuss campaigns that we encounter in our research to educate ourselves on the risks of social media.  This knowledge helps our clients to implement campaigns with less risk.

Among the topics we discussed:

* Major department store chain launched a contest on Facebook with unclear rules.  The contest helped to boost Fans to 30,000+.  Unfortunately, the store got slammed on the Wall posts, with the vast majority of posts being negative, spawning a negative feeding frenzy;
* Someone’s friend got their Facebook campaign halted by Facebook for not abiding by the Facebook Promotion Guidelines.  Holy smokes!  Many of us did not know that the guidelines had been rewritten on Dec 22, 2009!
* We exchanged many Twitter feed stories with feeds we read about getting locked due to automatic usage triggers;
* YouTube’s use of automated music verification and audio-stripping when background music is illegally used in videos

Some club members brought up the new trend in paying famous people to Tweet.  One remember even referred to an ROI analysis that showed greater value from paying small amounts to less famous people rather than one large sum to a famous person like Ashton Kutcher.

One member spoke about the new influencer widget in Radian6 and the increasing use of influencer identification and analysis in social media campaigns.

Many of these topics should turn into blogs this month.  Check back soon for more information.

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

Here at Page One, our social media techniques are constantly evolving. The context of social media marketing as a practice is ever-changing due to both the transformation of the platforms themselves and the abilities of third party applications in terms of monitoring and measurement. However, with all the discussion about evolution we can lose sight of the basics, especially when it comes to Twitter strategy. Last week in a “Twitter 101” presentation I discussed the principles of an effective Twitter strategy and wanted to share them with the Page One blogosphere.

Step 1: Identify the overall goal of your Twitter campaign. Similar to traditional PR, the messages you push out via Twitter should have an agenda (or potentially a variety of agendas). Goals for a Twitter handle can be one or a combination of the following:

1. Boost Awareness of a Company or Product

2. Broadcast and/or Promotion Channel: Positive news and information surrounding a brand, cause, or company launch.

3. Engagement with Industry Influencers and/or Potential Customers

4. Reputation Management: Proactive and Reactive Customer Service Channel.

5. Notoriety – Twitter can deem you an expert in a given field.

These may seem like common sense to an active user or even a Twitter novice, but often times the ultimate goal can be overlooked.  It’s important to take a step back and specify your goal(s) first as this is the foundation of a campaign.

Step 2: Identify the key components of your strategy. Whether it’s traditional or digital media, knowing what elements drive your marketing messages is imperative. The following are building blocks for an effective Twitter strategy:

1. Audience – Identify what type of customer/influencer is active in social media. For example, in the high-tech space we often ask ourselves: how technical is this audience? Are they developers, engineers, or is this audience connected to the product/service in terms of buying power for a company/organization? (These questions differ depending on the social media space.)

2. Messaging – The messages you push out are relative to #1: what type of information is the audience you specified interested in? Here at Page One, we construct Twitter messaging matrixes to review with clients before we even draft our first Tweet.

3. Content Production & Editorial Calendar – It’s important to note ahead of time appropriate corporate assets such as whitepapers and case studies that may be useful for promotion. Schedule this content by creating a monthly editorial calendar. Also, if you’re running a blog, it’s useful to outline a blog pipeline to promote via Twitter. This way the messaging has fluidity in terms of themes and timing.

4. Interaction/Engagement – As you build up your feed begin to target community influencers. Twitter is all about participation and recognition: a simple ReTweet or #FollowFriday can catch their attention.

In conclusion, once you’ve addressed your main goal for Twitter and outlined the key components driving this goal, you’ve successfully developed a Twitter strategy. Hopefully these tips have been useful for Twitter experts and newbies alike, and feel free to contact me on Twitter @haleyhebert or comment below if you have other ideas or questions. In part 2 of this series I’ll be covering how to gain followers on Twitter and how to find other desirable handles to follow, so stay tuned.

Advertising on Twitter has been a hot topic for years, and with the recent release of Promoted Tweets, more self-proclaimed social media experts are firing off about this topic than ever before. It’s still up for debate how effective Promoted Tweets will be. I personally think the monetization plan has potential because Twitter’s Dick Costolo is saying that they’re focusing on user experience. This got me thinking about the non-traditional forms of advertising that already take place on Twitter – high-profile or celebrity users who use the microblogging platform to self-promote (their company, television show, clothing line, etc.) but still maintain a unique personality that delivers value to their followers.

For example, one of my favorite groups of people to follow on Twitter is the cast of Modern Family. A number of the show’s actors have active Twitter accounts, where the majority of their tweets are @replies to fellow cast mates.

The content is all very light-hearted – they tweet about what’s for lunch, or post photos of their travels while on the job. The key is that they tweet content the average user would post to their own friends, except these guys just happen to be well-known actors with a hit TV show. Since I follow most of the cast, their @replies to each other all show up on my Twitter feed. Reading these “personal” conversation chains on a daily basis while I catch up with the Twitterverse keeps the show on my mental radar. Essentially, it’s free advertising for the show due to the public nature of Twitter, and the direct access it gives us to anyone with an account.

Nowadays, actors can do more than appear on talk shows to promote their movies or films to reach out to their fans. By maintaining an active Twitter account, they can stay visible to their followers, and once in a while, throw in a tweet about their new movie opening this weekend, and the follower probably won’t subconsciously tag this as an overt advertisement.

For example, the actor that plays Cam on Modern Family (@ericstonestreet) tweeted the following:

To me, this is a more effective way of getting a fan to tune into a new episode than sitting through a 15-second television spot that cost ABC a chunk of their advertising budget.

This is the kind of advertising noise that I welcome into my daily media consumption. And if you find my views to be too idealistic, I understand that the actors could have “Twitter campaigning” written into their contracts and that they may be getting paid by ABC to be online ambassadors for the show. I’m also aware that celebrity accounts do not benefit Twitter financially, yet. If Twitter figures out a way to seamlessly integrate promoted tweets into our Twitter experience, much like the Modern Family cast does with their @replies and indirect episode promotion, this form of targeted advertising could be Twitter’s golden ticket to a profitable business model.

My conclusions about the usefulness of Twitter and Facebook for marketing are likely a product of my personal experiences as a user. I learned Facebook when I was a sophomore in college about four years ago. Facebook was about sustaining relationships with people whom I had met in person. Some of these were “friends” in the true sense of the word. Facebook also nurtured early relationships formed initially with acquaintances face-to-face and subsequently helped transform them into real world friendships. I believe this is still true today, although I admittedly do not use Facebook nearly as much as before. Facebook helps people facilitate their social lives through the sharing of personal information, as well as information about physical events. I’d argue for most people, Facebook was not, and is still generally not today, about the intellectual exchange of ideas directly through the platform.

I learned Twitter at Page One PR. Twitter’s prompt, “What are you doing?” (before Twitter changed it) never reflected well how people use Twitter. In the minds of Twitter users, I think the prompt was always closer to “what are you thinking about?” or “what are you reading that’s interesting?” or “what’s your opinion on the things that matter to you most?” On Twitter, unlike Facebook, the threshold for following or being followed is low. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never met the person before face-to-face. In many cases, you never will. But if you share a mutual interest and find mutual benefit in conversation, it makes sense to connect. Running corporate Twitter feeds on behalf of clients at Page One, it’s not all too difficult to find people who care about the same issues as my clients, since people on Twitter are more or less defined by their profile, which is a public stream of content and ideas.

These norms that inform how the typical user (I’d argue I’m typical) acts on Facebook and Twitter have consequences for marketers who are looking to leverage these tools. Because Twitter places emphasis on the exchange of ideas and has a low threshold for personal interaction, the platform is more intuitive and easier to use for marketers who want to discuss their messages with a target audience. Because Facebook is generally used as an avenue for social connections with real world acquaintances and friends and has a high threshold for personal interaction, the platform is more difficult to use successfully for marketing purposes.

There are certainly examples of companies that have had successful marketing campaigns on both Twitter and Facebook. I’m arguing that the act of marketing companies (in an engaging, interesting way that puts the “social” in social media of course) aligns better with the fundamental values of Twitter than it does with those of Facebook, and is therefore easier.

Facebook has taken specific actions to appeal to marketers. Examples include corporate Fan Pages, advertisements, more Twitter-like “Walls,” the “News Feed,” and (controversially) the reduction of privacy. It’s true that some people are beginning to treat Facebook Wall posts the way they would Tweets. However, marketers face two problems on Facebook that don’t exist in the same way on Twitter – 1) how do you discover people who would be interested in your Fan Page? 2) how do you influence people to become your fans?

Answering the first question on Twitter requires technique and strategy, but put simply, just find the people who are talking about the things you talk about. On Facebook, this often is not possible because many people choose to keep their personal conversations with groups of friends, as well as their personal information, private to outsiders.

Answering the second question is difficult if you don’t have an answer to the first. Several techniques on Facebook include advertisements and the “Suggest to Friends” button, but it’s difficult for the manager of a Page to target strangers who share specific interests. Contrast this with the free-for-all of people and information on Twitter, where barriers to strangers connecting by virtue of their shared interests and ideas are few.

My bet is that Facebook will continue to become more like an idea-sharing platform in the fundamental areas that will help the company bring in revenue from marketers. Although changes to the interface and various applications further this end, the norms by which people model their behavior on Facebook won’t change anytime soon.

Just when you thought every possible angle of the health care debate had been covered to death…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The social media campaign we just completed for the SAP Open Tennis match was especially challenging since we only had a month to get 22 million impressions for their Twitter content on a brand new feed. Starting from zero, we got 3,500 Twitter followers, a 30 percent engagement rate on the feed, and more than 500 visits from the feed to the Ticketmaster site for online purchase of tennis tickets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the techniques we used included:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

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

Companies in Silicon Valley are starting to leverage the personal Twitter feeds, Facebook profiles, and blogs of their employees for corporate promotions.  By integrating employees into social media influencer campaigns, companies are acknowledging the value of their employees as spokespeople.

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

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

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

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

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

–

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

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.