Help Wanted - Social Media

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We've got a job for someone to design the future of online communications. It's a full-time job in social media, a field so new that each day we don't just have to learn about social media, we have to create it. I don't just mean creating YouTube videos or blog posts. I mean the whole thing, the process by which social media campaigns are rolled out, measured, and valued.

I'm currently overwhelmed with requests for social media service proposals. In the last few days we've closed more than $75,000 in new business for social media engagements. For the last three engagements we've helped to increase website traffic by 1,000% to 4,000%. These results drive demand for our services. However, they won't be replicable forever. We're tapping into new groups of people that our clients couldn't reach before. Once companies become more familiar with the effective use of new online communication tools, I suspect that we'll see more modest results. However, right now we live in a happy land where we can see huge spikes in Google Analytics visitors and page views.

At the core of our social media business is the Page One Process. By focusing on metrics, we are able to continuously refine the messages and content we use to reach each target audience group. Metrics drive content creation and good content drives web site traffic.

To fuel the growth of our business, we need to hire people that are passionate about creating the next wave of social media services. We want to work with people who are driven to help us create the future. We are on the cutting edge of social media metrics measurement and want to work with people that share our desire to create new techniques.

Page One is a Silicon Valley company. We have offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto. Most of the young people live and work in San Francisco. Lonn and I live and work in Palo Alto. We also go up to San Francisco several times a day.

The person we're looking to hire would be dedicated to social media and report to Shelly Milam. The typical person we hire has 0-2 years work experience and comes out of Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, or Harvard. Shelly is looking for someone with 2-5 years of experience.

You can see videos of the Page Wonders here.

Although it is funny in some ways, the truth is that Shelly has been too busy handling our booming services to write a job description. She had a kind of exhausted, sad laugh as she was explaining the situation to me a few days ago.

I'm not sure what is going into the job description. My opinion is that the person needs organization skills, good writing ability, and creative ideas. I'm not sure how we're going to check for this in a resume. She'll probably get deluged with resumes and look even more exhausted.

We are faced with a huge opportunity and want people to help us face these challenges. The advertising industry, all $300 billion of it is being shaken to its foundations. Publishing companies like Copley Press are dumping newspapers like the Union-Tribune for $50 million even though it was worth a billion dollars five years ago.

If you're looking at the gloom and don't know what to do, this job is not for you. There's too much going on to let things just happen. We've got to go out there and take the chance that is presented to us right now.

Increase in Marketing ROI Measurement During a Recession

I posted a new article on slashing marketing costs on the Page One site. Today, I worked on three proposals for new social media services, had one social media new business phone discussion, and one face to face client meeting where we scrapped our traditional PR plan to go all-in with social media. Business is booming. Every day seems to bring new requests for business proposals and meetings to explain our service offering and the process we use to deliver results.

The reason business is expanding so rapidly is that companies are being forced to cut marketing costs. When people cut costs, they're forced to make a decision on what works and what doesn't work. People start to look for ways to measure the effectiveness of their marketing spend, something they probably were never forced to do effectively during the boom days of the economy. When people start to measure the results of their marketing programs, social media comes out on top. Since the entire thrust of our social media program is to increase the effectiveness of measuring results, our services really resonate with some organizations.

Venture-funded startups are requesting for proposals that are heavy on social media and light on traditional PR services. Established global clients like Cisco and Ricoh are also increasing their social media services with us. Some of our existing venture-stage clients like Appcelerator are changing their traditional PR engagements into 90% social media engagements. We've also been asked to develop social media program ideas for mid-sized publicly traded companies Sourceforge.

It's a crazy time. It's not all good. There's still a recession on. The current budgets for social media programs are still smaller than I think they should be. We're really having to work for our money.

In the midst of this, we're finalizing our social media brochure, getting our web site designed, and planning a small marketing push for our social media services.

Although we're extremely busy, I am really thankful to our existing clients and the companies that contact us to ask for information. I'm fully aware from reading the newspapers that there is a recession now and that these are tough times for most businesses.

So, thanks to all those businesses out there for piling the work on me. :-)

Page One Social Media Process

Many years ago, Cathy Cook, a friend of mine, told me that PR was a process, not a project or discrete set of activities. Since I was just starting in PR and Cathy is very smart, I believed her.

PR is a process. However, it is a process that many people have come to know and understand well. As we grew our PR business, it became difficult to different our services from the competition. Everyone described their process basically the same. Everyone claimed to have hired great people and could speak to stellar results.

We started to speak about discrete services such as speaking, analyst relations, business press media relations, technology trade media relations, and open source technology PR. In my opinion, the only things that really stands out as different are our strong relationships with the open source community and our knowledge of open source story angles we developed over the past decade.

When I started to draft our new Social Media brochure and web site content, I started to think about what Cathy Cook had said, "PR is a process." Social Media is a process, not a set of services or tasks.

Our new brochure reflects this position. Since social media is a new field, there is an opportunity to define the process, making our service offering more efficient and more effective than firms without an established process. There's a window of opportunity to establish ourselves as unique. The competition is trying a range of activities and seeing what works. For now, they are less efficient and sometimes miss the mark.

The process in this document does work. It's based on a year's worth of social media campaigns with Silicon Valley companies ranging from venture-funded startups like Appcelerator, to e-commerce sites like wine.com, to large technology companies like Cisco. Feel free to implement it at your own company. If you have questions, post them in the comments section of this blog post and I'm try to answer them.

Page One Social Media Process - Quick Overview

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