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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Two weeks ago (I know, in social media time this translates into two years), I attended the Building Brands on Social Networks event sponsored by Sprout as a part of San Francisco’s Social Media Week 2010.

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

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

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

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

“GOOD – FAST – CHEAP: Pick Two” is the mantra for producers in the film industry.   It’s applicable to most project-based endeavors and it’s an easy concept to grasp. If you have the money to spend on an experienced crew, equipment and other resources, you can complete your production quickly at the highest professional level of quality. Since almost all producers are concerned with budgets, sacrificing on expenses necessarily impacts speed, quality or both.  You only get two of the three!

The rules are different today with online video. But many production houses trying to work in social media don’t seem to understand how the rules have changed and why that’s good for customers.

Given the low cost, high quality video imaging and editing technology available today, along with more varied distribution methods that re-define production quality, now it’s possible to achieve all three elements in video productions – especially if we substitute “effective” for “good.”   Following below are some examples of where the smart social media marketer can make sacrifices to maximize the return of the three elements on any video production.

Social Media with Video Services vs. Production Company

First, we have to consider that Page One video services is not a traditional video production company – think of it as Social Media with Video Services.  We are not equipped to handle large-scale productions requiring a pool of talent, set locations, crew and motion graphics or effects.  And with online distribution, an expensive broadcast standard is not necessary. We could eventually expand into larger scale productions, but for now, let’s take a look at some examples of videos that are more modest in scale, yet remain creative and integrate well with social media to deploy your message.

Animation: Simple cut-out drawings animated by hand are popular and a low-cost way to explain complex technology ideas.
Cloud Computing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg

White Board Video: Similar to animation, using whiteboard drawings to help explain technology.
Funambol: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek93ABPxVa4

Video Tweet: A wave of short quick creative videos, linked through Facebook and Twiiter, may be good way to make an announcement.
http://12seconds.tv/

Standard Interview, Plus:
Using Titles Creatively:
Yahoo: http://tinyurl.com/kjztjc
Lilipip: http://www.lilipip.com/about/
Adding Visuals:
Cisco/Leapfrog: http://tinyurl.com/daywp7
Vinagame: http://tinyurl.com/ydo65xr

Screen Capture: Ideal for showcasing your software.
Google Wave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw

Documentary Style: These short documentaries were great PR for Intel.
China Quake: http://tinyurl.com/y9ye43c
Vietnam Classmates PC: http://tinyurl.com/yfxobk5

Music Video: A clever, fun concept well executed, doesn’t always need expensive, complex lighting or lots of production time, though a bit of preproduction went into the creation of the song.
The Real Linus Torvalds/Linux: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzqnA793unc

Collaboration, Preproduction and the Script

In previous blog posts, and in our recent newsletter announcing our video services, Craig Oda made some good points about the need to define roles and responsibilities, and the process of developing a clear script. I’d like to emphasize that collaboration among the client, account manger, and video producer is key to producing an effective, visual video that grabs a viewer’s attention. It’s the key to creating the best concepts at the lowest costs.

Hopefully, the examples above can help spark some creative ideas for your company. All of these programs offer engaging, cost-effective messaging for social media distribution. And with rigorous planning and pre-production, you can save time in both production and post-production, and achieve all three elements of the Project Triangle: Good, Fast, and Cheap.

Telling the story of the product

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

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

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

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

Video director and acting talent work together

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

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

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

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

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Creative Commons, Social Media, and Sharing

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

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

Cure for the Common Video

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

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

New staff for the Silicon Valley social media team – LiPo Ching (left) and Evan Hanlon (right)

The press release,  traditional tool of public relations professionals, is fighting  valiantly to stay relevant in a new communications world filled with Twitter, blogs, and YouTube.   Although I have many fond memories of the press releases I’ve written and  telephone pitches I’ve made, I hold no loyalty to these aging warhorses of PR.

I work in the PR world of Silicon Valley, a world filled with video.  Product and company information is moving online.  For many technology-savvy people in the Valley, the 2 minute video is more interesting than the 2 page press release.  Video will not replace the press release.  In most cases, it will increase the effectiveness of press releases and blogs.  I’m betting on video, the short product screencast video on YouTube, the vision video head shots of the CEO, and the customer testimonial video.  I’m betting that video + press release + blog + Twitter = much greater reach and visibility.

Lonn Johnston, the founder of Page One PR, and I have created a new video services group headed by LiPo Ching, an award-winning videographer from the San Jose Mercury News.  We’ve also hired Evan Hanlon, a New York brand man out of Harvard with a background in film documentaries and the independent music scene.

Evan and LiPo are organizing our video services now.  In a few months we’ll launch an expanded range of  services with lots of example videos.  I anticipate that our future video services will be fresh and exciting.  To help people understand where our video services are headed, I’ll explain how we’ve integrated video into our PR programs in the past.

Executive Vision Video – Two executives talking about the product, technology or company.  This video is traditionally used for a company or product launch.  Both major and minor product updates can benefit from this video.  The typical video is generally 2-3 minutes long.   The video should be finished two weeks prior to the launch date.  We generally put the video on a private URL at a site like Viddler and then offer the private URL to media under embargo.

Customer Testimonial Video – This is a short video of a customer talking about the value of the product.  The video can be used to augment a customer quote in a product press release.  The link can be placed into the release for people that want additional information.  It can also be offered up to reporters to help them evaluate if they want to interview the customer for a story.  If the video is not used as part of a major or minor version product launch, it should be used as part of another promotional campaign such as a direct email campaign.  This type of video will not go viral and needs to be used as a component of a larger PR or marketing campaign.

Screencasts – Videos of a software product taken using Camtasia or Screenflow.  The videos function like a short demo of the product without having to install the product to test or sit through a live demonstration.  When used as part of a product launch, the video can gain viral distribution.  It’s important to focus PR efforts on getting the video embedded in as many blogs and articles as possible.

There are many variations of these videos.  For example, the executive vision video can be adapted into a white board video that makes use of diagrams and text written on a white board.  The executive can also be speaking over stock video footage that can be cheaply licensed from video libraries.  The vision video and the screencast format can be combined, moving between people talking and shots of the product.  Animation and stop-motion video techniques can also be used to create funny or more visually appealing effects.

Although we could have worked with an outside video development firm instead of developing in-house production capability, we decided to treat video like another channel to get messages out to the target audience.  Since we write our own press releases, we decided to create our own videos.  Just as advertising firms expanded from newspapers and magazines to television, we believe that many PR firms will expand into video production.

The press release and the product video are both alive and well.  They’re not going away.

You’ve planned. Storyboarded. Worked with company spokespeople on messaging. Identified goals. Spent three hours filming and 24 hours editing. And now you have a concise video masterpiece of corporate vision. What’s next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With that in mind…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

When I first saw the shortlist for the 2008 Sabre Award silver finalists in Technology Software, I had to look twice. A&R Edelman for Adobe Systems, Access Communications for Intuit, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide for Microsoft and, what? PAGE ONE PR for a small open source start up? Could this be right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So who are we looking for?

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

Our new team member will have:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We’ve been working to build social media campaigns for our clients this year, but decided to turn the camera on ourselves this holiday season. Get ready for our 15 seconds of fame – lights, camera, action!

Rather than design and print our usual satirical holiday cards, we decided to save a few trees by dusting off our singing voices for your viewing pleasure.

We hope you’ll check out our videos and maybe even smile. And, yes, that is a penguin in the photo! Let us know how we did but, above all, please accept our warmest wishes for a merry holiday season and a happy new year. Here’s looking to 2009 from our team to yours.

Sincerely,
Your friends at Page One PR

P.S.– If you like crazy reindeer, don’t forget to check out this special feature from our Santa Barbara office. Boy, that guy can deck the halls!

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.

We took a recent Stanford University graduate, convinced her to wear a cow suit and increased web site traffic by 43% for a Silicon Valley startup in three days. Well, to be fair, we also had a fox, a demon, and penguin to help us.

At LinuxWorld in San Francisco last week, we walked around the show floor in costumes, recorded video, danced, sang, and convinced attendees to participate in choosing the Next Open Source idol. The results were hilarious and great for business. GroundWork Open Source saw a 43% increase in traffic to their corporate web site in three days. They also had 1,133 people go to the community portal on their main web site and interactively vote on their favorite idol. The videos generated 5,000 views from a targeted open source audience in one week.

The PR campaign also generated buzz in the IT media community, including this short blurb in NetworkWorld.

The project was viewed as a success, helping to increase the visibility of GroundWork Open Source in the technical community and driving relevant traffic to their web site. We also got to dress up in funny costumes in public a full two months ahead of Halloween.

In the last three months, I’ve seen a big change in the attitude that Silicon Valley startups have toward YouTube. Every few weeks, I answer questions about what companies can do with YouTube or what is required to produce, publish, and promote YouTube videos. We’ve completed several projects, including one for the Linux Foundation that was our first effort at a YouTube channel.

Based on our initial experience, we decided to experiment with lavalier microphones and boom microphones. Even for YouTube videos, the internal microphone did not allow us to get decent audio quality. We followed an interview style format and kept the videos to less than five minutes. The primary goal of the project was to help people that weren’t attending the show get a better understanding of who some of the key people in open source were. We didn’t promote the video channel aggressively.

Shelly Milam is going up to OSCON tomorrow to do a similar project for SourceForge. She’ll be using a new camera. The current plan is to stick with the internal microphone until we finish more testing with external microphones. We’re going to continue to use iMovie for editing.

We’re estimating that the total time for four movies, including production, editing, and distribution will be eight hours.