Social Media Surfer @ LEWIS Pulse

Running Free

2011-09-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

A boy ran barefoot through the park. He laughed. He enjoyed the feel of the ground beneath his feet, the wind in his face, the jarring throughout his body. It was fun to run.

Thirty-five years ago, the boy was me.

Unfortunately, I grew up. Until January of 2011, I was a middle-age shod runner plodding slowly through the bike paths of suburbia. Well, runner, may be too grand a term to describe me, an aging office worker in Silicon Valley who used to run about 3 miles several times a week.

Last Christmas, I received a pair of Vibram FiveFingers shoes (VFFs) from my sister, an extremely nice woman living in Hawaii. Like many people trying out minimal shoes for the first time, I put them on, ran 3 miles and had sore calves the next day. The pain was so intense that I hobbled, feeling more like an injury than a case of tender muscles. At that moment, I did something that surprised me. I made a smart choice.

Instead of changing back to my normal running shoes or easing into the VFFs by running a mile at a time, I decided to run completely barefoot.

Many minimal shoe runners suggest that the best way to prevent injury is to run barefoot, not with a shoe like a VFF, but with skin on pavement. The logic behind this is that the sole of a person's foot will become sore before the foot or leg muscles are injured. I made a commitment to press the flesh to the trail.

I've spent 9 months running barefoot, primarily on asphalt trails. I'm up to 6 miles for a typical run. It's fun. However, it wasn't easy. I never cut my feet, though it often felt like I did. There were many times that my soles hurt, especially when I stepped on small rocks. I burned the bottom of my feet on black asphalt during the mid-day sun, got blisters from running too far, and got pebbles embedded in my skin.

Initially, I had to run much slower for distances as short as a half mile. Why did I do this?

Well, like most people over forty, I was getting injuries from running in normal shoes. I now realize that I have an incorrect running form, something I never knew. Most people never learn a good running gait. If I consistently ran distances over six miles, I would get blisters on my feet, a sore knee, and lower back pain.

Running barefoot started as an experiment. I kept it up because I enjoyed the feeling of putting my bare feet on the ground. It was a liberating experience, something nostalgic, something free.

I may move back to the VFFs. My foot and leg muscles are now accustomed to the new gait. The VFFs enable me to go faster on rough terrain and to run on rocky trails of the Palo Alto Baylands. Without rubber on my feet, I am stuck on asphalt or concrete trails.

I watch my kids play at the park or the beach. Without any discussion of running barefoot, they naturally take off their shoes to run. Even when I suggest they put shoes on, they often run barefoot. The look on their faces is one of joy, of freedom, the thrill of running free.

Long Term Marketing Strategy and Facebook Problems

2011-07-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

Facebook Page management is the most popular service I sell. Along with Twitter management, it is the engine that drives our business forward.

Thus, I am often disturbed when I read articles about Facebook once again blocking tools that help with the exportation and organization of Facebook friend information.

The Facebook terms of service states:

“you will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.”

Although this policy doesn't impact current Facebook Page campaigns. It does reflect the generally philosophy of Facebook management to keep Facebook a closed system. This philosophy will create problems for marketers over the long-term and will push marketers to create communities on their own web sites, communities that are distinct from platforms such as Facebook.

While the most innovation is currently happening on mega socialization sites like Facebook, we'll see another shift back to innovation on the technologies that help companies build communities on their own web sites.

Companies like SAP and Salesforce that have technology to manage customer data have the most sophisticated approach to date of integrating online communities into their web sites. These communities were developed before the big Facebook boom. They lack many of the aggressive networking features that Facebook pioneered. However, I believe that these features would technically be easy to add.

Teaching Young Children to Program

2011-04-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

I recently tried an experiment to teach my 11 year old son to program. The experience has been wonderful. I began the project with an expectation that he might have problems understanding concepts such as variables, data types, conditionals and while loops.

Well, to my surprise, I had the concept of "children learn fast" thrown in my face again.

He's using Python and IDLE now. I originally evaluated Alice, Pharo smalltalk, Logo, Ruby, and other systems designed for teaching. Although his school in Palo Alto uses Alice, I didn't think Alice would provide the necessary experience with data structures. I have a bias against too much graphics in the basic courses. Although graphics help to get children excited about the technology, too much emphasis takes time away from the basic programming constructs.

My first Python curriculum was based on a modified version of MIT's Open Courseware and free textbooks. I started there because it came up on a Google search of courses to teach python. It was also free. Another interesting resource I found was a set of videos on computer science programming paradigms from the stanford engineering everywhere (see) group.

I moved away from the MIT Open Courseware after about 5 lessons. I actually spent money to buy Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python. Fortunately, this fine book is also available for free in PDF and HTML. I think that Al Sweigart is a generous guy for making this resource freely available.

I mixed in basic concepts of graphics and sound using pygame to keep my son's interest up. I also gave him an overview of HTML and basic concepts of web applications, using the google app engine python SDK.

Subsequent to starting off with Sweigart's book, I've purchased Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, 3rd edition by Michael Dawson and Head First Python by Paul Barry. Both of these are good books with similar learning steps.

Dawson's book makes use of the LiveWires package for the graphics in some of the chapters. This makes it a bit easier to make games than with pygame. However, I would prefer if the examples just focused on pygame since the LiveWires package is that that widely used.

Each course lasts between 15 and 60 minutes. I've found that my son's attention drifts a bit after 45 minutes. It's been a great bonding experience these past few months. However, with the bass fishing season in full action, I'm a bit worried that his interest may swing back to fishing.

Surfing in Costa Rica

2011-01-20T12:53:00.000-08:00

I just got back from several days surfing in Costa Rica. It was
really a nice trip with great waves. We surfed a beach break near
Santa Teresa.

I stayed at a surf camp with people from Canada, the US, Spain, and
Germany. Surprisingly, everyone had a Facebook account and we are
using Facebook to stay in touch. The surf camp was out of the range
of any mobile phone tower. However, everyone at the camp was using
Skype to talk to friends and family. I used Skype on my iPhone to
talk to my wife and kids. With the video feature on Skype, I was able
to use the iPhone rear camera to show my family monkeys, food,
tropical trees, and people while I was talking to them.

There was no television at the camp. However, people were downloading
movies over the Internet to watch them. Streaming videos like Netflix
didn't work due to international licensing issues. Things like bit
torrent worked.

Almost all the guests found the surf camp with Google and Trip
Advisor. The camp managers had hired an SEO firm three months prior
to our arrival and business had increased dramatically.

Interestingly, the German couple was planning to go to Witches Rock
surf camp after staying with us at Shaka Surf camp. This was the same
camp that I was considering prior to the trip. Like everyone else, I
read through the Trip Advisor reviews and considered the best
locations based on peer reviews.

LEWIS Acquires Page One

2010-10-27T17:11:00.000-07:00

I recently got back from London after meeting with the country managers of LEWIS PR, a global communications firm that acquired Page One. My business partner, Lonn Johnston, and I ran Page One for the last 8 years, originally starting off as a tech PR firm focused on open source and then putting more effort into community management and social media campaigns.

This is the second firm that I've managed or helped to manage that has been acquired. The first firm was an Internet firm in Tokyo called TWICS. It was acquired in 1998 in an all-cash deal by PSINET as part of their global expansion into Japan. I was the CEO of TWICS and major shareholder. As part of the TWICS deal, I received all the cash upfront and then moved from Tokyo to Silicon Valley to get the US office of Turbolinux started up. My friends stayed at PSINET and the company is now part of Cable and Wireless Japan.

I plan to stick around at LEWIS for several years and perhaps longer. Aside from that, the deals are surprisingly similar in many ways. The goals of the deal are the same, global expansion and accelerated entry into a market. For TWICS, that market was Asia. For LEWIS, the market they want to expand in is the US.

TWICS, the firm I ran in Tokyo was the first provider of Internet services in Asia and had a solid multi-national client roster including GM and Deutsche Bank. Page One also has a solid roster of large, global clients, including SAP and Cisco.

In both cases, the firms were fairly small with hefty profit margins.

There are some differences. At TWICS, we already had the clients in Japan and the acquirer simply wanted to make TWICS bigger to expand further into the Japanese market. At Page One, we're going to expand our services in US. However, in addition to the US market, we're hoping to take our social media services to other countries. This is because the TWICS Internet services had largely become commodities. The Page One social media services are more unique.

The opportunity to work on more complex and global campaigns with the team at LEWIS is an exciting prospect for me.

Facebook Notes Replacing Blogs?

2010-08-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

I've been comparing three corporate blogs that we manage, one for SAP, one for McAfee, and one for VMware. The blogs are technical and its been challenging to drive significant traffic to the blogs. In addition to traffic, we also report on number of interactions and links.

The comparison is especially interesting since the SAP blog is actually a set of Facebook Notes. We created the blog on the SAP Crystal Fan Page. As we would expect, the level of interaction on Facebook Notes is much, much higher than the level of interaction on blogs. What we can't track on the Page right now is how many views each post gets. According to my research, the per post analytics for Pages is only available to authenticated Pages with more than 10,000 Fans.

Since we only have 5,000 Fans for the Crystal Page right now, it seems like we may not be able to get the per post analytics for several more months.

In the meantime, the interface to create Facebook Notes is improving.

Although the ability to dramatically improve interaction is enticing, the lack of analytics and SEO optimization of Facebook Page Notes is going to hamper migration from blogs to Notes for some time. Wordpress and Blogger will remain the primary platform for short pieces of corporate news distribution in the coming months. However, I feel that the lure of interaction metrics will eventually tip the scale in favor of Facebook Notes. However, that may not occur for several years and by that time, there may be a better blogging platform with improved features to foster interaction.

Process Versus Individual Craftsmanship

2010-06-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

On my way to the airline gate at Honolulu International Airport, I stopped by the newsstand and picked up a copy of Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. This turned out to be a wonderful little book about the value of different types of work.

Crawford makes the point that many types of office work involve repeating small, discrete tasks. Often the work is boring and doesn't challenge people. For some types of office jobs, the work resembles an industrial assembly line. Despite the lack of a moving conveyor belt, many office jobs are reduced to a discrete, repetitive task such as inputting numbers into a computer or filling out forms.

Crawford's point is that many manual jobs such as motorcycle repair or installing electrical wiring involve a craftsman-like approach that allows the same worker to start and finish the job. Such jobs start with the identification and understanding of a problem and require the same person to develop the solution and execute on the solution to completion.

Modern office jobs may break up the problem analysis, solution development, and execution into different people. For many workers, this segmentation makes the execution job less fulfilling.

Although this is a trend, I also believe that a parallel trend is to give office workers greater autonomy, allowing them to contribute to more steps in the entire process.

Even though Crawford's book deals with abstract concepts of workflow, I think that it would be good reading for any person developing complex social media campaigns.

Dangers of iPhone Apps in Marketing

2010-06-23T11:48:00.000-07:00

My sister recently started using Foodspotting, a new location-based social networking platform based on food and pictures. The browser-based application looked great. Foodspotting hired Egg Haus to produce the iPhone app for service. Egg Haus is an interactive advertising agency in San Francisco that has many large clients. Unfortunately, when I went to download the iPhone application, I noticed that the Customer Ratings gave the application two out of five stars, based on 2,651 rating. Wow, this is kind of a bummer for Foodspotting.

I decided not to download the application. This is a case where the ability to have customer ratings is giving the site and business a negative image. If Foodspotting didn't have an iPhone application, they might enjoy an improved image. Not only is their web site better designed than the iPhone application, there is also no obvious way to rate the web application.

Foodspotting should engage in a big campaign to collect private feedback from a large group of online feedback prior to releasing the next version of their iPhone application. By testing their product in a public area with ratings, they are creating a public image problem for themselves.

People Leaving Facebook Over Privacy Perception Problems

2010-05-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

People are leaving Facebook due to concerns over privacy. Mashable ran a survey that showed that 30 percent of people were thinking of leaving Facebook over fears that the company might share their personal information. In total, 43 percent of the respondents indicated that they might leave Facebook due to privacy worries or confusion about the large number of changes Facebook is making to their privacy settings.

Some of of my personal friends are leaving Facebook. Yesterday, I got this message from surfergrrrl, another surfer in Silicon Valley.

Because Facebook no longer respects the privacy of my data and doesn't allow me adequate control over its use, I'm deleting my account. When Disapora comes online, I'll probably give it a go.

I'm still on Twitter, LinkedIn.com, and blogging my surf adventures

Aloha

After I asked surfergrrrl about the situation, she sent me this email:

i was irritated that facebook made changes that took some of my private information public, forcing me to opt out to reprivatize it, but the system's so complicated to control now that i'm not sure i got everything. i made changes after i read this in the NY Times.

but then I read this and found I'd missed some things.

even today, when i went in to delete my data before deleting the account, i found a few random corporate "friends" that i couldn't figure out how to remove. i was hoping fb would fix all this, but they don't seem to care. so now I'm waiting for diaspora.

Influencer Marketing Applied to Twitter

2010-04-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

Among the large global brands we work with, some social media marketing programs have evolved to resemble public relations programs.

We're dividing work on Twitter into two different buckets for 1) influencer marketing and 2) customer marketing. To directly reach the customer, Twitter management services involve building the follower base and putting product and company information on the feed.

Using Twitter for influencer marketing involves identifying people with the greatest reach to the right target audience. For example, a Twitter influencer list might consist of 20 people that have influence in a specific industry such as enterprise software for iPhones.

The influencers can be found by analyzing the online use of three groups people:

Employees at the company
Partners, resellers, trainers
Industry experts that produce many Tweets, blog posts, or forum posts.

Once the influencers are identified, there are a range of PR and social media techniques that can be used to build a strong relationship.

Influencer marketing on Twitter is an evolution of Twitter feed and content management. It's only in the last few months that we've seen significant contracts that focused specifically on influencer marketing for Twitter. I expect this portion of our business to grow significantly.

Why is Social Media Not Public Relations Today?

2010-02-09T07:58:00.000-08:00

I've got questions.

Over the past year, dozens of tech companies in Silicon Valley like Cisco, McAfee, SAP and VMware hired me as a social media consultant. I got contracts with their product marketing or global marketing groups, not their public relations department.

My first question is, "Hey, I'm a PR man working at a PR firm. Why isn't this contract with the PR department?"

Many of my Silicon Valley marketing friends asked me a very similar question, "Should the responsibility for social media be handled by PR or product marketing?"

Friends at Google, HP, and Oracle asked me this question and until today, I always said, "social media should fall under PR."

Then, my friend, a bigshot in PR at HP, challenged me. He suggested that I look at marketing services as either customer marketing or influencer marketing.

I looked through a year's worth of social media service contracts and categorized activities as either customer marketing or influencer marketing.

Excluding monitoring and strategy development, more than 70 percent of social media services bought in 2009 were for customer marketing. My work on blogs, Twitter and Facebook was primarily designed to first attract and then communicate with customers.

"Aha," I thought.

Influencer marketing, getting people from the community to create unique content for us, was only a minor part of the services sold in 2009. The activities to make information go viral are still very much in development. Since Page One focuses on B2B social media, our 2009 clients were primarily interested in publishing their marketing information on sites they controlled. This meant that we got paid to manage Facebook Fan Pages, blogs, and Twitter and filled these channels with information that was directed at the customer.

However, there appears to be big changes in 2010. Already, our clients are asking for more activities that create interaction and target influencers for content creation. Recent contracts have balanced customer marketing and influencer marketing at roughly 50 percent for each type of activity.
Perhaps by the end of 2010, we'll see influencer marketing comprise the majority of social media activities. If this happens, I expect that I'll see more contracts with the PR departments of Silicon Valley companies.

ITMemos, a New and Free Resource for Buzz Campaigns

2010-02-01T10:07:00.000-08:00

ITMemos is a new free service that provides information on technology awards, speaking opportunities and editorial opportunities. Although there are many other services out there, ITMemos is free, supported by ITDatabase, a research tool for tech industry marketing and PR professionals. Over the years, I've used a number of PR tools and services to track awards and speaking opportunities. I've found all of them lacking. ITMemos is a nice, concise listing of events and opportunities that is both useful and free. In addition to the web site, ITMemos also offers a free bulletin service that automatically sends you updates by email.

Social Media Listening Software

2010-01-20T05:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a nice summary of 26 tools used for social media listening. At Page One, we're paying for Radian6, eCairne, and Sysomos. However, I often find myself turning to Google search first. It's fast and the search box is right in my toolbar. In the last project we did for SAP Business Objects, my colleague Susan also relied on manual searches within forums and sites like Facebook. One of our clients is using Cymfony and having some problems getting it to produce the types of reports that are useful for social media.

Related to monitoring is response and interaction with the online community. Recently, I've been going back to the basic PR approach of finding a small number of highly influential people in the social media space and focusing interactions with these people.

If anyone has experience with social media listening tools, please send me your experiences or leave a comment below this post.

Facebook Privacy Settings - Four Easy Steps

2010-01-15T01:03:00.000-08:00

Facebook campaign management can be improved with effective use of privacy controls. It is important to control the flow of information to different groups of people.

Unfortunately, Facebook privacy settings are buried behind several layers of menus. The default privacy settings expose information to Friends and Friends of Friends. This often results in mildly embarrassing or marginally private information being shared with people you know only through work. To avoid this, most people limit the information they publish on Facebook, ultimately limiting the value of social networking with friends and close business associates.

Marketers that manage Facebook Groups are faced with the additional problem of posting company information to a Group Wall that is then broadcast to all their friends.

Privacy settings can restrict information access to individuals or to groups of people.

Here are the four steps:

1) In the upper right corner of your browser, look for the Settings menu. It is to the right of your name, to the left of the Search box. When you mouse-over the Settings menu, Privacy Settings will appear.

2) A new page for Privacy Settings will appear. Select Profile Information.

3) You will see a range of settings for different types of information. Click on the menu with a picture of a lock on it. The default settings are Everyone, Friends of Friends, and Only Friends. You need to select Custom.

4) A pop-up window will appear that says, "Custom Privacy," at the top of the window. In the lower box, there is an option Hide from These people. Instead of adding people individually, it is better to restrict a group of people. To group people together, you need to add them to a Friend List.

Self Publishing

2010-01-11T06:23:00.000-08:00

There are two faces of social media: 1) self publishing and 2) viral distribution. For most campaigns, the self publishing component is easier to get results for than the viral distribution component. People create free games, videos, blogs, or software, give the information or digital media away for free and hope that it goes viral. Usually, self publishing campaigns get limited results, generating a few hundred views per corporate blog entry or a few hundred views to a video. Sometimes a game, a YouTube video, or an application will go big. Sometimes, a self publishing idea really goes viral.

Publishing Linux software was a doozy of an idea that went big in the 1990s. Although some people might not see the connection between open source, social media, and self publishing, to me it is clear. There is a strong connection in philosophy and business models. The initial model for Linux businesses was a publishing model, not a software development model. The initial Linux businesses were CD ROM publishers that sold square plastic cases filled with CDs that contained software that they downloaded from the Internet.

I was thinking back to the mid 1990s when the Internet was just starting to go mainstream and open source software was a new concept. Back in those days, Bob Young was just a normal guy and didn't have the huge sums of money he would later earn as CEO of Red Hat. In 1993, Bob started a company selling software on CDs. In 1994 Bob started Linux Journal with Phil Hughes, which was a pretty crude publication in it's first incarnation. By 1995 Bob had cut a deal with Marc Ewing to sell the Red Hat Linux distribution, a a set of open source software that included Linux and was packaged in a nice, easy to use format with a nice installer for all the software. Bob and Marc created Red Hat Software, which did an IPO in 1999 and made Bob rich.

Sometime around 2002, Bob Young founded Lulu, the leader in self published books. Bob and most of the other open source people from that era never really pursued businesses like Facebook or Zynga. The strategy and technology behind viral distribution of information was developed by the next generation of technology entrepreneurs.

However, the model of self publishing, whether it is software, books, music, or video, is still being pursued by the original visionaries 15 years later.

Social Media Job Opening in San Francisco

2010-01-08T16:22:00.000-08:00

Social Media Account Manager – San Francisco

Page One PR is a Silicon Valley public relations and social media firm that caters to the B2B industry. We are currently looking to add an account manager to our Social Media Team in our San Francisco office.

We are looking for a brilliant, enthusiastic and highly motivated individual who wants an opportunity to impact companies’ business decisions with social media. The ideal candidate would be able to manage social media accounts (large and small), keep the accounts and grow them over time.

Job Requirements:

• 3-5 years experience in marketing, public relations, advertising or related communications field;
• Account management experience and strong track record of retaining accounts with outstanding results;
• Ability to successfully manage large tech accounts such as Cisco, SAP and VMware as well as smaller start-ups;
• Experience designing and implementing social media campaigns and a proficient understanding of social media techniques and strategy;
• Exceptional organization, writing and verbal communication skills;
• Ability to contribute individually, and lead, manage or participate in cross-functional teams;
• Ability to grow account retainer sizes;
• Four-year university degree.

At Page One 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, management skills and a track record of success.

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 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
• Flexible spending account

The salary for this job is up to $70,000 annually, depending on experience.

If you are interested in a career as a Social Media Account Manager at Page One, email a resume and a cover letter outlining your account management and social media experience to Shelly Milam at socialmediajobs@pageonepr.com.

Learn more about us: http://www.pageonepr.com
Follow us on Twitter: @pageonepr
Become our fan on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pageonepr
Read our blog: http://www.pageonepr.com/blog/

Getting Rid of Farmville and Games Updates from Facebook

2010-01-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

The rise of social gaming has created a problem with spam on Facebook News Feed and Notifications. The News Feed are the posts on the front of your Home page when you first log into Facebook. The Notifications appear in the lower right-hand corner of your browser.

It is easy to turn off the incoming News Feed and Notifications for specific applications like Mafia Wars and Farmville.

For the News Feed, put your mouse over the post. A button called, Hide, will appear in the upper right-hand corner of the text box. When you click on this button, it will give you the option of hiding all future news from the application on your feed.

You can also hide Notifications from these applications. If you mouse-over the Notification, you an "x" will appear to the right of the notice. You can click on this "x" to block future notifications from the application.

Another option is to use Facebook Purity, a script for your browser that will remove all messages posted by applications.

Tips to Deal with the Daily Deluge

2009-12-18T04:10:00.000-08:00

I often feel that I'm a 40-something year old guy trying to sprint after 20-something year old social media gurus in the office. The word, "overwhelmed," frequently comes out of my mouth on a daily basis. I don't feel that bad because I talk to many marketers in Silicon Valley that look even worse than me when explaining their daily deluge. Fortunately, I'm able to use technology and tricks I've learned from the young members of the tribe to keep up with the massive flow of information I face every day. I even have a bit of fun in the process. You can have fun too.

There's a simple rule to manage a large flow of information.

Find and on focus on the most important things.

Today, I'm using HootSuite to manage streams of information from these five sources:

Twitter
Twitter Lists
Facebook News
Facebook Pages
LinkedIn

Twitter and Twitter Lists are in different categorizes because the high volume of noise on a Twitter Following (who you subscribe to) stream usually makes incoming Twitter posts unmanageable. There are too many posts to read. Too many posts are not relevant to what I'm looking for.

There are two methods to deal with incoming Tweets gone wild:

keyword searches;
pools of people.

Many Twitter tools, including HootSuite, can group incoming posts into columns based on automated keyword searches such as "product name." If you focus on the results of automated keyword searches, you'll be able to spot the most important Tweets easily. To be effective, you must use automated the searches with a tool like HootSuite. The other key to successful keyword searching is to pick the right keywords. I strongly suggest that you adjust the keywords over a period of months. Every week or so, look at the search terms and edit them. It's more work initially, but it will make you more effective and efficient on a daily basis as you deal with the deluge.

Automated keyword searching needs to be supplemented with Twitter groups. These need to be created manually. Again, there is more work required up front. For this reason, most people won't set up Twitter Lists and will fall victim to the daily deluge. If you need to use Twitter for your marketing job, don't be a information flood victim. Become a savvy user of Twitter Lists, both private and public, to group people. Twitter Lists are an official Twitter feature. I have a private Twitter List for people in my company. I have another smaller list for people in my group. Another private list monitors client activities.

HootSuite manages information based on columns and tabs. There can be multiple columns within each tab. I have different tabs for different groups of information. My incoming Facebook and LinkedIn information is displayed in separate columns.

I can also write my outgoing messages from a central location and post the messages to either Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn from different accounts, including multiple accounts for the same channel. I have multiple Twitter accounts for work, surfing, and personal updates.

If people have questions, comments or tips on how to deal with the daily deluge of information, send them to me.

Looking for Who is Talking Versus What People Are Talking About

2009-12-16T04:35:00.000-08:00

Laurent Pfertzel of eCairn came over to our office earlier this week to provide us with training on the eCairn social media monitoring system. We are using the system in addition to Radian6, Sysomos, and IT Database.

eCairn focuses on finding out who is talking about a specific topic such as cloud computing. Laurent's position is that tools like Radian6 and Sysomos focus on finding out what is being said about a topic like cloud computing and helps you to find an individual post or graph trends. IT Database focuses on finding every professional writer in a given subject area. For our daily PR usage where we deal with professional writers at technology publications, IT Database is the tool of choice.

However, in order to monitor social media conversations about a topic like cloud computing, we have to use tools like eCairn, which specializes in finding hundreds of relevant bloggers. Sysomos and Radian6 are similar tools that are great for monitoring keywords across a large number of social media channels like Twitter, blogs, message boards, Facebook Pages, and YouTube textual descriptions.

eCairne is based on managing large numbers of RSS feeds. Most blogs, online news sites, and even Twitter is accessible with RSS. With eCairn, we can rapidly define a pool of relevant bloggers and then apply filters to all the conversations the selected bloggers are having.

The manual creation and refinement of pools of bloggers reduces the amount of noise that we have to manually deal with. The concept looks good and the people are friendly.

I'm interested in learning more about other social media monitoring tools. If there is a list of tools, please post it here in the comments.

Corporate Twitter Feed Management with Contributors

2009-12-14T22:33:00.000-08:00

Twitter is beta testing a contributors feature that enables multiple people to post to the same feed. I'm pretty excited about this feature called contributors since I believe it make Twitter much more valuable as a corporate tool of communication. The new contributors feature in Twitter simply adds a small link at the bottom of a Tweet that identies the original poster. It's a pretty simple feature. However, it will have big changes on how companies use Twitter. For example, this feature being used in marketing campaigns that support a physical event such as a customer conference. Social media tools like Twitter work well with events. It's easy to let a group know where the interesting people are places are. The addition of multiple contributors should make Twitter marketing campaigns even more vibrant and valuable for event promotion. Many people at a event will be able to run multiple Tweetups in parallel at different locations around the show site.

Although Twitter Contributors was just announced today. Companies have been using collaborative Twitter tools for a while. Twitter tools like HootSuite and CoTweet have used different models to have a single person manage multiple Twitter feeds or have multiple people manage a single feed. I especially like the assign feature of CoTweet which allows one Twitter feed manager to assign a Tweet to another manager.

Unfortunately, the contributors feature is still in beta. I'll have to continue my experiments with notations like ^CO to indicate who is posting to a corporate feed.

Reusing and Extending Marketing Content in Podcasts, Online Video, and the Web

2009-12-11T19:38:00.000-08:00

When I drive my Honda Fit between Palo Alto and San Francisco, I often listen to podcasts. My car has a USB adapter in it that allows me to connect my iPhone to the car stereo system and use the stereo controls to select and adjust music and podcasts. My favorite podcasts are This American Life, Planet Money, and BusinessWeek. Recently, I especially enjoyed a BusinessWeek podcast on the Best Global Brands of 2009 featuring Burt Helm, the marketing editor for BusinessWeek.

Since there's a lot of traffic on Highway 101, I often think about how the print publishing agency is changing. The interesting thing to me about BusinessWeek is that I've been consuming their podcast, not their print publication. Although I subscribe the podcast in iTunes and don't normally go to the BusinessWeek site, the podcast made me go to the site and watch the video. At this point, I have a fairly good idea about the content of the BusinessWeek cover story and feel I have stronger connection with the publication and the writer, Burt Helm. However, I have not yet read the magazine story. We subscribe to the magazine in both our San Francisco and Palo Alto offices. So, getting physical access to the magazine is very convenient. However, it seems that the podcast and video are more convenient ways for me to consume media while I'm driving or taking a short break between projects.

Although most companies are not going to have the resources of an organization like BusinessWeek to produce interesting content. The core idea of reusing information in video, podcasts, and the web is one that can be done at low cost. The reason that the BusinessWeek podcast is interesting is because it provides additional content that goes beyond what the magazine contains. This is a similar strategy for their video.

When I work on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube campaigns for my clients, I design strategies to use a platform like a Facebook Page to provide content that is not available on the web site. There is usually additional content, often produced by staff at shows, that doesn't fit on the web site. Social media channels provide a way to reuse and extend marketing content.

Social Media and Crisis Communication

2009-12-09T23:07:00.000-08:00

Communications professionals are constantly trying to control the flow of information. What to do with negative information is a particularly delicate issue. Traditional PR advice is to answer questions, talk to either one reporter or hold a press conference, and issue a statement. The traditional logic is that if the questions are unanswered, there will be more speculation and wild, potentially more damaging rumors.

Does this logic still remain sound in age of hundreds of million Twitter and Facebook users?

Perhaps not.

The Wall Street Journal gives two perspectives on how the Tiger Woods crisis should be managed.

Ray Artigue, president of PR firm Barclay Communications in Phoenix, Arizona, said, "Leaving important questions unanswered allows them to linger and create suspicions about his conduct."

Robert Bork Jr., a crisis public relations expert said, "It might do more damage if he came out and sobbed like a baby on Oprah's couch."

Craig Oda, PR Man and social media surfer, says, "there are new rules in place for crisis communication that must take into account a hundred million places for rumors to be published. It's better for Tiger to wait the storm blow over."

There is no clear right answer. However, it seems likely that a statement would stoke the rumor fires and be amplified by channels like Twitter. If it were me, I would follower Tiger's current muted strategy and then issue a another series of statements in a month.

Twitter for Local Marketing

2009-12-08T22:47:00.000-08:00

Citysearch recently added Twitter to company profiles. This is a newish use of Twitter that targets people in a specific city, like Los Angeles. Previously, attempts to draw a Twitter following for a local shop didn't work, primarily because people didn't have a computer handy if they were at a shop, hanging out at a lounge, or buying food. The primary ways to reach local audiences, a physical sign, direct physical mail, and print advertising in a local newspaper, do not reach the audience when they're able to easily subscribe to a Twitter feed. The Citysearch model is interesting because the potential customer is in front of their computer and looking for a shop in a specific area.

Citysearch already included Facebook Page information and web site URL as part of their company profiles. It'll be interesting to see if this experiment in localized Twitter marketing proves to be of value to small businesses.

Technology Pioneers From the World Economic Forum

2009-12-04T05:59:00.000-08:00

Here's a listing of 26 companies that were selected by the World Economic Forum for developing disruptive innovations. Twitter is on the list. Although the technology behind Twitter isn't that innovative, the popularity of the service does make it disruptive. I wonder how CollabNet got onto the list. The company has been around for many years and I haven't seen any major shifts in its technology. I found amiando, a physical event manager, interesting since Shelly and I were going to start using EventBrite with some of our clients. Innovid, a company making videos more interactive, is also interesting.

TweetDeck Become World's Most Popular Twitter Client (For Today)

2009-12-02T23:00:00.000-08:00

According to Twitstat, TweetDeck surpassed Twitter.com as the most popular Twitter client today. getting slightly more usage than the web. The next three clients are all mobile phone clients, an indication of the popularity of Twitter on mobile phone. I use Tweetie (#3) and Twitterrific (#4). Echofon (#5) is another popular application for the iPhone. Although versions of these clients also exist for the desktop, most people are using them on an iPhone. I suspect that many people using Seesmic (#6) are actually using twhirl, since twhirl is configured to broadcast that it is the Seesmic desktop.

Growing Use of Twitter Bots

2009-12-01T14:54:00.001-08:00

There are hundreds of tools coming on the market that automatically take some action based on keyword search. On Twitter, it is becoming increasing popular to automatically follow people based on keywords that appear in their Tweets. Although, I'm currently not using these techniques at work, I do notice that many companies are setting up automated marketing campaigns. I'm also analyzing tools like Tweetmatix, SocialOomph, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and Seesmic to see which ones are useful.

After some basic experiments, I noticed that of the last 10 Twitter followers I gained on my personal feed, the majority appear to be auto-follows from bots. Although my follower base is growing, I'm not gaining in mindshare from real people.

Here's the reason that bots used to work. When a bot follows someone on Twitter, the person the bot is following receives a message that they have a new follower. Since many people will follow a a person that follows them, this was an easy way to increase your Twitter follower count.

Unfortunately, the number of bots has reached a tipping point. We now have bots interacting with other Twitter bots, getting people out of the loop. In addition to following people based on keyword searches, many Twitter bots will automatically follow someone that follows them. This creates an automated loop with other Twitter bots. One bot will follow a feed that is run by another bot, which is set to automatically follow the Twitter feed back.

This is not a good situation for the Twitter community since it weakens the value of Twitter. However, there doesn't appear to be any way to change this in the short term.

The next time you run a Twitter campaign, it might be good to constantly prune your Twitter follower base of obvious bots.

Making Real Money with Virtual Goods

2009-12-01T09:32:00.001-08:00

I'm probably going to miss this event on virtual goods put on by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) that is happening at 7pm on Tuesday, December 8.

I'm not sure if the event will be any good, but I've been interested in the concept of selling virtual goods for some time. For about a week, I had a copy of BusinessWeek on my desk open to an article on Zynga, the games company that may make $100 million this year selling virtual goods on social networks like Facebook.

The concept of selling virtual goods online is very interesting to me. Give away a functional, fun game for free, then sell inexpensive extensions to the game to make it more enjoyable.

Write More Blogs by Using Email

2009-11-30T15:54:00.001-08:00

The biggest problem we have in running corporate blog campaigns is the time it takes to get content and prepare it for publishing.

One solution is to both distribute the task of writing blogs and make it much easier to write and publish posts. The easier it is to write blogs, the more blogs will be written. Instead of using an arduous editing process, a faster and lighter process is to use email to write and publish blog posts.

I'm writing this post using Gmail and automatically publishing to blogger. The email feature is set to off by default. It's easy to enable from the Settings, Email and Mobile tab. . Blogs written by email are generally shorter and focused on one specific topic.

Good, Bad, and Borderline Twitter Use

2009-11-24T09:20:00.001-08:00

The Twitter Rules gives more insight into acceptable Twitter use than the Twitter Terms of Use document. There's an old dilemma with any form of human communication, how to be aggressive enough without being too aggressive. If people aren't aggressive enough, their competition may gain an edge. If people are too aggressive, then they risk hurting their public image and reputation. At a minimum, everyone should avoid spam techniques on Twitter. While there may be short-term gain, the end result will be to reduce the effectiveness of both your own marketing as well as the Twitter system itself. Here's the rules on Twitter spam, techniques that should be avoided.

Spam: You may not use the Twitter service for the purpose of spamming anyone. What constitutes "spamming" will evolve as we respond to new tricks and tactics by spammers. Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be spamming are:

If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;
If you have a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following;
If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;
If a large number of people are blocking you;
The number of spam complaints that have been filed against you;
If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account
If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #
If you post multiple unrelated updates to a trending or popular topic
If you send large numbers of duplicate @replies
If you send large numbers of unsolicited @replies in an attempt to spam a service or link
If you repost other user's content without attribution.
If you have attempted to "sell" followers, particularly through tactics considered aggressive following or follower churn.
Using or promoting third-party sites that claim to get you more followers (such as follower trains, sites promising "more followers fast," or any other site that offers to automatically add followers to your account).

SocialOomph Fills Gaps in Twitter Management Workflow

2009-11-24T07:56:00.001-08:00

Twitter clients, even the popular ones like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop, all have shortcomings for Twitter campaign management. Sure, the clients are generally better than the Twitter web site or Power Twitter.
However, it's becoming a bit of a problem to manually search through different Twitter feeds for different companies and post content.

I've been experimenting with SocialOomph for Twitter campaign management. The obvious cool feature is the ability to schedule Tweets at set times in the future. However, there are a range of other features, some more useful than others. I've been using the auto-response feature to send people greetings when they follow the feed. Although this feature has been around for a while, I always thought that it was too commercial and impersonal to send people automated messages. Since one of my clients wants to implement this on their feed, I've decided to take a closer look at it, experimenting both on my feed and the Page One PR feed.

Is Social Media Product Marketing or Public Relations?

2009-11-23T19:38:00.001-08:00

We're getting more and more Silicon Valley technology clients for social media projects and retainers. In most engagements of purely social media work, we don't report into the public relations department. We usually work with the product marketing team or the project marketing team. This is a little surprising to me since we are a public relations firm.

I've thought about PR versus social media for a long time. I first believed that it was inevitable that social media would fall under public relations. Perhaps this is because I viewed that the alternative to a PR firm was an advertising firm. A PR firm, I reasoned, would have more sophisticated messaging and positioning skills. I thought that in social media, the viral distribution and tracking of messages would be the core skill. While this has turned out to be true to a large extent, it still is puzzling why social media is reporting into product management.

We can categorize social media management into these work buckets:

posting information
interaction with community
special promotions (contests, surveys, discounts, submit a photo and win a prize)
content creation (YouTube videos, blogs, special applications)

The reason that social media is reporting into product marketing is that three of the four buckets resemble product marketing responsibilities. Interacting with customers, getting feedback, running contests, creating product videos are generally the responsibility of product marketing. The first bucket, posting information and crafting the messages, is key to the entire campaign. However, it's a bucket that doesn't consume as much resources as the other three.
Social media campaigns rely on the creation of new content, material for blogs, YouTube videos, white papers, and other information. In many channels like Twitter, we point people to marketing assets. Facebook management is similar. The new content takes time and resources that is often not built into the PR budget. Thus, when people need a budget for social media, it usually seems to come from the product marketing group.

Configuring Blogger to Reduce Comment Spam

2009-11-23T16:51:00.001-08:00

The Google blog platform Blogger has a number of features that can reduce comment spam. The settings are accessible on the dashboard under Settings => Comments.

Since I want to keep the blog comments interactive, I'm still allowing Anyone to comment, including anonymous users. Today, after deleting three pieces of comment spam I enabled both word verification and comment moderation. Word verification is the little graphic that appears one pages when you try to post things. I've set comment moderation to affect only posts older than 14 days. This makes it slightly more difficult to post comments. However, I'm hoping that it is convenient enough to still allow people have interactive discussions.

TweetDeck to Integrate with LinkedIn

2009-11-23T13:44:00.001-08:00

TweetDeck today announced support for LinkedIn in addition to Facebook and MySpace. LinkedIn support is supposed to come out in v0.32. The current version for download on their website is v0.31.3. Looks like I'll have to wait a few days to download the new version of TweetDeck.

With the proliferation of social media sites, people are increasingly looking for ways to aggregate incoming and outgoing content. This will be an interesting development as it starts to impact advertising sales on the social media sites. What happens to the Facebook business model if an third-party client becomes a more popular way to access Facebook content than going to the Facebook site itself?

Brian Ellefritz Moves from Cisco to SAP

2009-11-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

Brian Ellefritz is one of those Silicon Valley guys that is quietly defining the Silicon Valley social media style. I first met him when he was the senior manager for social media marketing at Cisco Systems. There, he really dug into measurement techniques for social media. Prior to Cisco, he developed new marketing techniques at Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications. He has a lot of information on the evolution of direct email marketing and how a few of those measurement techniques might be applied to social media. Brian got to Sun via the iPlanet acquisition. Due to his early involvement with Netscape, he gained enormous experience with online marketing techniques.

Brian recently took a job as the senior director of social media marketing at SAP in their Palo Alto office. I'll be meeting with him in Palo Alto on Tuesday to see how his new job is shaking out. It gives me an excuse to try out a Palo Alto lunch place on California Avenue that I haven't been to in a while.

I'm always surprised at how often I bump into people again and again at different companies.

Tea With Gary Orenstein

2009-11-19T17:42:00.001-08:00

Met with Gary Orenstein, VP of Marketing at MaxiScale to discuss big filesystems.

Five interesting points about Gary:

Wharton MBA
Camera buff. Was holding a big, honking camera during our meeting
Likes Google Applications and services including Blogger, Google Groups, Gmail and Google Apps
Knows a lot about key-value stores, memcached, and distributed file systems
Drank orange juice when we met for drinks in San Francisco

Increase in Noise

2009-11-19T07:33:00.000-08:00

There is a huge amount of noise on social media channels. The noise is decreasing the value of tools like Twitter and blogs.

Bloggers have a choice in how comments from the public are added to the end of posts. About half of the bloggers out there allow comments to be added without approval and without delay. This keeps the conversation active. Unfortunately, there's been a sharp increase is "spam" comments, notes that are obviously promotional scams for things like financial opportunities with relatives of government officials in African countries. I spend a few minutes every day deleted bogus comments from my personal blog and the Page One PR corporate blog.

With the rise of online interaction, the noise factor has increased dramatically. The value of tools to filter noise has also increased. Twitter may be at a tipping point. With so much noise on Twitter, it either needs to change or die. Without the ability to find interesting Tweets, the entire value of Twitter decreases.

The activity of following on Twitter has now become automated for many spammers. Automated bots scan Twitter for keywords, then automatically follow people and send them messages. The value of @replies is also decreasing.

There needs to be greater attention spent on developing technologies to filter noise. It's an opportunity for some hot Silicon Valley company. Although there are dozens of tools out there to search through, monitor, and organize the noise. No tool is based on the premise that 80% of the information we receive is of low value. If a tool can help people find the top 20% most valuable information they subscribe to, the tool will be very valuable.

Increasing Speed on a Wave

2009-10-01T19:30:00.000-07:00

On a wave or in Silicon Valley, things often seem impossible. Then suddenly, everyone is doing it. Every day in Silicon Valley, there are breakthrough moments of realization when a person jumps from the impossible into the new realm of, "It can be done." This is probably the greatest strength of Silicon Valley, the willingness of people to dismiss the notion that "it simply cannot be done."

I was at the Stanford Sierra Conference Center this past weekend with my family. The center is located on Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe. It was a faculty and staff weekend. I snuck in as a guest. The average IQ was extremely high, way over my head. I mostly spoke to the PhD types about the trout. People were talking about big ideas, about startups, new technologies and the future.

I hung out with my friend's son. He's six years old and rides a skateboard. There's a basic trick in skateboarding that keeps the board going forever without putting any feet on the ground. The six year old boy was fascinated by this. To him it seemed impossible for the skateboard to keep going around a basketball court, 20 laps, 50 laps, without a shoe ever touching the ground. The trick is called the pump and it's the same motion used to accelerate a shortboard surfboard on the flat section of waves. Obviously, on a surfboard there is no option of putting a foot on the board and pushing off to gain more speed. The pump also works uphill, at least on the smaller hills.

At first, the boy thought it was impossible to keep a skateboard going for 500 yards without feet touching the ground. Then, it all seemed possible, even easy. The sun was setting for me over the lake and I was finding it difficult to see very far. The young boy was looking over the the same stretch of water and asking how to get the skateboard three feet in the air with neither hands nor feet touching the ground.

He asked, "Can I get the skateboard to fly forever?" I looked at him and found myself unable to answer.

Windows 7 and Virtualization

2009-09-15T06:44:00.001-07:00

One of my son's favorite games, Age of Empires II, Age of Kings, doesn't run reliably on Windows Vista or Windows 7. It's an game that's eight years old and is designed to work on Windows XP. I've searched the Internet for solutions. Running AOE on Vista is a known problem.

Vista and Windows 7 have a XP compatibility mode that emulates some of the characteristics of XP under Vista and Windows 7. This is supposed to let 90% of the problematic XP programs run. Unfortunately, AOE falls into the non-working 10% category.

To solve this problem, I first tried a number of software and driver solutions, including forcing the installation of DirectX 9.0c graphic libraries onto my system. Before this problem, I didn't know what DirectX was. Someone on the Internet suggested that this approach would work. It didn't.

Next I tried installing Windows XP on a separate drive. I was stumped by the problems of editing Boot Configuration Data (BCD). Yikes. Fortunately, I found something called EasyBCD. I then had Windows XP and Vista running in a dual-boot configuration.

This wasn't an elegant situation. I continued to look.

It turns out that Microsoft is releasing Virtual PC and a Windows XP virtual machine as a free download for Windows 7 Ultimate and Professional . Wow, this is going to hurt Parallels and VMware.

Although Windows 7 still comes with an XP emulation mode, the Professional and Ultimate versions also allow a full copy of Windows XP to run inside of Windows 7, in a virtual machine.

Update 9/16
Turns out that Virtual PC doesn't support DirectX. Basically, Age of Empires II won't run inside of the Virtual PC XP mode on Windows 7. I've still got AOE II working in dual-boot configuration.

It appears that VMware is working on DirectX and other 3D support. It might be possible to get AOE II to run under VMware. The VMware site makes 3D support sound unstable.

I may just have to stick with the dual-boot situation in order to get the benefits of the fancy graphics card I bought on NewEgg.

Summer is Over and Social Media Grows Up

2009-09-03T18:21:00.000-07:00

I spent some of August in Mexico. My wife and I went surfing in Cabo San Lucas. It was a lot of fun. The waves at the resort were gentle. The water was warm, so different from the typical 55F California waves in my area near Silicon Valley. The first picture is me. The second pictures shows my wife surfing in Cabo.

Immediately after I got back from Mexico, we had pretty good surf in Santa Cruz. I took the family down to the beach on both Saturday and Sunday, eating picnic lunches in beach tents.

This was a nice little break from work, which has gotten super busy. I feel like vacation is over and it's back to school and work. Major companies are now signing up for our social media services, including reporting, analysis, and execution. It's seems like social media has crossed some boundary from experimentation to a viable marketing channel that needs to be assessed in marketing campaigns.

We are once again hiring people for social media jobs. Evan Hanlon, the last person to join the Page One team, is working out great. LiPo is producing some interesting videos. Shelly Milam keeps getting more powerful. :-) She's also the person that is managing the hiring process.

Business Intelligence for Social Media - sysomos product review

2009-07-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

Social media monitoring is a hot space. Companies around the world want to know what is being said about them online and how they should react to the exploding number of online discussions. The problem is that there is too much information out there. Six months ago, the problem was actually more manageable. However, we've seen such a huge growth in social media discussions that now it's taking too long to find the right conversations manually.

Instead of paying a human being to read and categorize Twitter and blog posts, many technology vendors are developing tools that significantly reduce the time and thus the cost of social media monitoring. We're entering into a phase where tools graphical tools and automated suggestions dramatically reduce the time that humans have to spend on social media monitoring. Think of it like the Google Analytics of social media discussi

ons.

Yesterday, I met with Dr. Nick Koudas, CEO and co-founder of sysomos. This company uses the tagline, "business intelligence for social media." That is a pretty cool tagline for a pretty cool product.

Dr. Koudas comes from the University of Toronto research labs where he got his best students to form sysomos, a company that currently has under 20 employees and just launched a few months ago. I suspect that they'll grow rapidly in the next year.

The two main products are MAP (Media Analysis Platform) and Heartbeat. Two of the features that I really liked are the ability to automatically filter out spam from the social media results and the ability to judge the tone of a post based on contextual analysis. Sysomos also has the ability to automatically tag posts.

In the picture below we can see a Sysomos tag cloud that looks similar to Radian6 tag clouds. Pricing for Sysomos is comparable to the pricing for Radian6.

We're going to be taking a closer look at Sysomos. A summary of features that caught my attention during the demo:

historical data going back three or more years;
automated tone analysis that looks fairly accurate so far;
automated tagging;
automated spam filtering;
demographic data by age, gender, location, and possibly occupation in the future;
improved ability to find discussion "hot spots"

Start Monitoring Before Building a Social Media Plan

2009-07-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

I've recently started work on social media projects for SAP focused on their Community Network (SCN). This is a brand new account for us. Yay! The project came to us soon after we started another social media project for Cisco focused on their router and switch lines. The projects for SAP and Cisco have strong similarities. I thought that this was an amazing coincidence. Both projects focus on monitoring, analysis and social media plan development.

Perhaps this is more than a coincidence? Over the past month, I've been figuring out why large technology companies are paying an outside marketing vendor to monitor and analyze their social media buzz. If we can sell the service to Cisco and SAP, other Silicon Valley companies might find the service valuable. The businessman in me is always looking for a marketing dollar. I thought I better first figure out how to describe what our monitoring service is before I try to sell it.

I've thought about the main goal of monitoring social media channels like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Most people want to be able to build a plan that contains the right activities in the right areas and implement the plan at the lowest cost. People are constantly wondering about the effectiveness of Twitter, YouTube, and blogging. Many people simply start experimenting with Twitter and videos and then see what works. This technique is effective in the early stages.

However, there are a number of problems with the technique of seeing what sticks to the wall. Social media discussions often spin out of control. For most companies, social media programs don't deliver results due to lack of focused resources. Most marketing managers can't justify the budget for focused resources until they know what's out there.

This is where monitoring comes in. I believe that the marketing executives at Cisco and SAP decided that they wanted to see what is out there in the social media space before deciding on activities and allocating budget. The reason they chose to work with us instead of doing the monitoring internally is probably because we have experience looking at hundreds of social media campaigns. That experience brings different perspectives to the discussions.

So what are the secrets to monitor social media and get money for it? Well, I don't have a simple answer. However, I'll try to document what we're doing.

There are three basic types of social media monitoring:

Competitive landscape - find out what your competition is doing online and evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. If you discover there is a problem, quantify the scope of the problem, provide examples of the problem, then assess whether to ignore or address the problem. If you address the problem, figure out the resources, costs and timeline of activities.
Internal social media assessment - Most companies have employees that are actively Tweeting, blogging, and are active on LinkedIn and Twitter. The effectiveness of the marketing messages that these employees are communicating and the viral distribution of the messages are usually not tracked. If employees or partners are representing your company and products, their activities need to be organized and managed. Most companies don't establish a message framework or guidelines for their staff to work inside of. Without management, it's difficult to align personal goals for a Twitter feed with company goals. Lack of management can also lead to negative discussions getting out of control. The internal assessment creates a snapshot of where the conversations are taking place, categorizes the conversations into marketing message buckets, and compares them to the overall marketing message goals.
Market analysis - Social media monitoring can also provide an overview of ongoing discussions of a specific market category, such as energy-efficient routers. The monitoring can catch discussions that a company would benefit from being in, but is not in. This is often a great way to find out what the opportunity could be to increase marketing reach with social media programs. This is also useful to figure out what channels and information are most relevant to your target audience.

Starting with these three types of monitoring, we've learned from others and developed our own techniques to quickly get consensus on social media plans. Some of the more interesting lessons are shown below.

Keywords take time to define - The monitoring techniques we use rely on keywords to identify groups of conversations about different trends and markets. The really surprising thing we've learned is that keywords take a long time to define. Instead of developing keywords in an hour, it is better to thinking about defining a first pass in a week and then adjusting the keywords over the course of a month or longer. The keyword groups are also heavily layered. We're applying smart Stanford University-powered brains to this problem and we're still learning that the keywords are very difficult to define. To help define keywords, we've had to develop a process that involves daily monitoring and regular meetings with relevant stakeholders. The results of the keywords are also skewed in the short-term due to product announcements and other events.
Monitoring is manual - We've looked at dozens of social media monitoring tools and continue to look for the best ones. At this stage, monitoring for strategy purposes is highly manual. Once the plan is launched, the monitoring can be automated to a large extent. The reason that monitoring is manual is that we need to summarize what is being said, the tone and the content, not just the number of times a keyword has appeared in Twitter or forums.
Trends fluctuate - As I mentioned earlier, the number of social media discussions can vary a great deal over time. The discussion trends are often connected to media trends. Events like a company announcement or product update can skew the results either positively or negatively. This is an important consideration when setting goals for social media plans. For example, if the conversations are unusually high during the monitoring phase, but die off after the start of the project, the number of "clicks" to links published on social media channels will be lower than expected.

Although I come from the school of try everything, throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, I'm starting to learn that this approach often doesn't scale. For faster social media results or to have a bigger impact, planning is needed. A marketer's approach to planning, picking the right activities and level of resource commitment, should be based on data and analysis, not gut instinct.

Social Media Cost Per Click Analysis

2009-06-01T20:50:00.000-07:00

Is social media becoming the most effective way to sell products at the lowest marketing costs? Or, is it just the latest Web 2.0 hype darling? As a marketing professional, I constantly try to answer these questions while I assess the cost of social media campaigns compared to advertising campaigns, traditional PR campaigns, and direct email campaigns.

All marketing campaign comparisons are flawed. Social media campaigns and advertising campaigns address different problems and often have different goals. However, I believe that a Cost Per Click analysis is good enough to be useful for most marketers, most of the time.

Over the next few months, I'll be explaining the Cost Per Click (CPC) of social media campaigns so that they can be compared to the CPC of advertising and email campaigns. My goal is to provide marketing managers with CPC examples for social media campaigns that help them decide how to use their marketing budget most effectively.

My initial estimates for business to business enterprise technology products are shown below. The data was crunched by my colleague, David Robbins, a hotshot graduate from Stanford University and a wizard with social media monitoring tools and metrics. We expect these numbers to drop dramatically.

Activity	Description	CPC
Video	Professionally produced YouTube video focusing on product or company, approximately 3 minutes	$0.30
Twitter	Message development and creation of Tweets, including community interaction.	$2.00

Twitter ROI
Although Twitter at first appears to be more costly than YouTube campaigns, I think that the data needs to be analyzed further. Our initial data relied on referral traffic from Google Analytics. Future campaigns are going to incorporate data from URL shortening and reporting services like bit.ly.

I also suspect that the audience on Twitter may be more likely to buy a product than a person that simply views a video. I'm hoping to verify this theory with more data from lead nurturing systems.

The higher cost of Twitter CPC is due to the ongoing cost of managing a Twitter feed. A typical channel needs daily updates and high interaction in order to drive the traffic back to the product site. We estimate that a Twitter feed needs 45 minutes of work a day to be most effective. This includes monitoring, response, analysis, reporting, and putting out standard informational tweets.

Twitter campaigns have many goals in addition to increasing traffic. For example, there is an increased awareness of the product and the company that is not reflected in the number of clicks to links. Twitter can also be an effective way to collect comments and feedback from customers, serving as an interactive platform to develop stronger relationships between buyer and seller. We track tone, sentiment, and analyze online interactions in addition to tracking ROI.

Although I appreciate the incredible value of social media campaigns that go far beyond CPC measurements, I am focusing on CPC as a ROI metric because it is an universal metric that can be applied to all online marketing campaigns. When I tell my friends in marketing that a typical Twitter campaign for a B2B technology company will deliver self-qualified website traffic at $2 per click, it makes it easier for them to compare the value of Twitter to other marketing campaigns that they have. I always strive to make things easier for marketing people.

I also believe that a $2 per click cost compares favorably to other traditional marketing campaigns. The cost of establishing a Twitter feed itself is zero. The only cost is the labor required to manage the feed.

For Google AdWords, you need to pay for the cost of each click on the AdWord and then factor in the cost of managing the AdWord campaign. For an email campaign, the cost of the list needs to be factored in. Even if the list is manually created, not bought, there is a labor cost associated with the list creation and management. Social media campaigns need to be compared to the total cost of a marketing campaign, including creative production, campaign management and the cost of placement.

YouTube Video ROI

YouTube video campaigns have a much lower cost per click, so low that the CPC alone compares favorably with the CPC for interactive advertising. In addition, the content of a YouTube video is often higher-value than an interactive advertisement. Clicking on a YouTube video in a social media campaign displays dense information on the product or company. The viewers of the YouTube video are a prime marketing audience. These people are actively seeking additional product information. The only downside is that compared to Twitter, the viewers of a YouTube video may not have a strong relationship with the company. Twitter is more interactive than YouTube and therefore Twitter followers will have a stronger relationship with the company.

The costs include of a YouTube video campaign include these components:

Message and positioning develop for the product or company
Script creation
Onsite video direction
Professional lighting, sound, and video creation by award-winning videographer
Editing of video
Distribution of video and channel management
Promotion of video on different social media channels

We analyzed the results from three different YouTube campaigns.

Video Type	Type of Product	CPC
Vision video with two company founders	Web application development toolkit	$0.14
Vision video with two company founders	High-end data storage and processing system	$0.35
Candid videos at technical conference	Web application framework	$0.50

Looking for Advertising ROI
Obviously, advertising is a big industry that is going to be around for a very long time. An integrated marketing campaign is going to combine advertising, PR, social media, and direct email programs to yield the best results. I'm looking for additional information on advertising campaign costs. If you have this information, please send me email at coda@pageonepr.com.

Future of Social Media ROI
If you have questions about how we're calculating the ROI of social media campaigns, feel free to write a comment on this blog post. We've only just started the process of calculating ROI and should become much more sophisticated in the next two months.

We've been cooperating with Brian Ellefritz, an awesome social media marketing manager at Cisco, and Jennifer Bocca, another manager at Cisco that works with Brian. They both have a strong background in lead generation ROI measurement. I feel that they'll have a lot to contribute to the discussion.

I'm also talking to Ralph Hibbs at Red Apple Marketing about SEO and PPC lead generation costs. We partner with Red Apple Marketing on a number of accounts and feel that marketers benefit from an understanding about how programs can be used together.

The primary cost of social media campaigns is labor. We have tens of thousands of time entries in our billing data, each tagged with a type of social media and PR work. The entries are usually in 15 minute increments. Based on this database and our experience analyzing the results of social media campaigns at dozens of companies, we're starting to form a view of how much time different types of social media take and what the results will be.

Since we know the time, we know the costs. The costs and the results are all that is needed to measure the ROI of any marketing campaign.

Additional Information

Some of the example Twitter feeds used in analysis

Linux Foundation - non-profit high-tech consortium
Cisco - CiscoGeeks feed focused on a highly technical audience for major Silicon Valley B2B tech company
Appcelerator - Silicon Valley startup focused on web application development tools

YouTube video examples

Business Versus Personal Twitter Use

2009-05-22T16:48:00.000-07:00

For many people, the more they use Twitter, the less value it becomes. The information flow on Twitter quickly becomes unmanageable as the number of people they follow shoots past 20.

Twitter is the most popular and valuable social media tool I use. However, it's also a tool with a wide range of problems. I'll briefly describe some of the problems I've encountered and explain the steps I'm taking to solve these problems by changing the way I use Twitter.

1) People mix business promotion and personal information on the same feed. This is similar to meeting a business associate at a BBQ on the weekend and having them constantly talk about business. Or, it could be similar to a business associate constantly talking about their personal life during a business meeting at the office. In the face to face world, people have developed social etiquette and don't mix business and friendly discussions in the same way that they do on Twitter. You might have an interest in their personal lives and if they're meeting up for drinks after work, but you may not be interested in the details of their work. Or, you might be interested in what they have to say about business, but not be interested in what they fed their dog in the morning.

2) People use Twitter both as a publishing platform and as a discussion platform. Twitter can function as a short publishing platform for updates or it can function as a quick discussion platform around a specific topic. However, it breaks down when people don't understand the difference in use and try to use a single feed for both purposes. A Twitter feed will be overrun if you subscribe to a few Twitter newsfeeds. By receiving Twitter newsfeeds, a person severely limits the usefulness of Twitter to function as a platform for community building.

3) People are using Twitter as an automated marketing platform with bots. There are a growing number of Twitter bots that will automatically subscribe to a feed based on keywords in a public feed. This creates a large number of followers for a given feed and further hampers the development of Twitter as a gathering of people having interesting discussions. In addition to automatically following people, some of the bots will also send messages to people, either with @replies or direct messages.

I'm experimenting with a number of Twitter techniques to help solve these problems. For the past few months I've been using TweetDeck groups and search screens to identify Tweets that were most relevant to me. This technique no longer works. I was forced to make a radical change.

My current strategy is to create a number of different accounts and create a persona around each account. I'm also using a private account for one persona to prevent the feed from being picked up by bots and people outside of the private group.

My four accounts are:

@codawork for social media, open source, technology and other work-related information;
@codapageone for private information for staff at Page One PR;
@codasurf for information related to the sport of surfing;
@craigoda for personal information about my life and the interesting lives of my friends and associates.

I've also switched to twhirl as my main Twitter client because of its ability to support multiple Twitter accounts.

I've been using the new system for about two weeks and am enjoying Twitter much more than I was before.

Future of Twitter Making Money - Latest Clues from CEO

2009-05-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting video of Twitter co-founder and CEO, Biz Stone, talking about the future of Twitter.

There's no real clear answers in the video. However, I did like how he described Twitter use as a hybrid of "marketing and customer service" for many businesses.

He's dodging the really juicy questions about commercial offerings. However, he did indicate that they do have a product manager that is researching the best way to commercialize Twitter and will announce something by the end of the year. He speculates on "lightweight analytics for business."

As someone that uses Twitter as part of my work, I'll be eagerly looking forward to this news.

Social Media Newsletter Tracking

2009-05-14T11:03:00.000-07:00

More than 1,000 people read the Page One PR social media newsletter in the past few days. This is far more than the 50 I thought would actually read the first issue. The difference in results is largely due to viral distribution, something we've been tracking with the MailChimp newsletter platform.

It's exciting to see the analytics, feel the love and study which links in the newsletter were the most interesting to our readers. Almost 40% of the clicks were to get additional information about the product launch campaigns. This surprised me since I thought that the case studies would be the most popular link.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the newsletter was forwarded to hundreds of people. It's encouraging that people see value in information on how to roll out product launch campaigns with social media and traditional marketing techniques.

Although I feel that the first newsletter hit the mark and we had viral distribution, I'm still not sure what makes good content. Although the newsletter was based on a blog that I posted on this site, it was Lonn Johnston who suggested that we use the blog post for the content. Oddly enough, I wouldn't have suggested this content for the newsletter myself. He saw something in the blog post that he found interesting and then worked with the team to hammer out the final text.

So, I have to rely on the wisdom of the crowds to find interesting content. If people have ideas for the next newsletter, please send them to me or write comments on this blog.

We're considering providing more information on social media metrics or reports.

Page One Social Media Services

2009-05-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

Page One PR is about to launch a new web site. We've tried to make the information more useful to marketers by providing case study examples of our social media work, describe the Page One Process that we use to implement campaigns, and show metrics that we track.

There's easier access to the Page One Blog, Twitter feed, YouTube channel, and Facebook Group so that people can stay connected with Page One.

What the new site lacks is information on what our services cost. PR firms don't discuss pricing until they've developed a custom proposal for a client. Page One operates the same way.

I'm not sure this is necessary. Pricing among different social media firms of the same quality are going to be roughly the same. Law firms, business consulting firms and accounting firms operate the same way. Each service firm will claim that their services are better than the competition. I would like to be more transparent with our services and let companies decide for themselves if they want to work with us.

Next week we're sending out a newsletter that describes an example product launch in Silicon Valley. The newsletter indicates that the product launch takes 200 hours to complete. From this information, people can make guesses on the cost of the services. At $200 per hour, the cost would be $40,000. If we've already been working with a client for a number of months under retainer, we will be more efficient. The costs will be considerably lower, closer to $20,000. In many cases, most of the product launch costs for retained clients is covered under the existing retainer.

The typical monthly retainer is between $10,000 and $20,000 per month. This covers an integrated mix of social media and PR services. If the company only requires social media services, the retainer may be lower.

We often suggest that companies do their PR and social media internally instead of hiring an outside vendor. The staff in the company know their own product the best and are the best advocates. However, in many cases it is cheaper, easier and faster to hire an outside vendor for social media and PR. It may be difficult to find people with social media campaign management experience. Or, companies may have a requirement to gain visibility rapidly instead of waiting for their staff to gain expertise.

Ultimately, it is going to come down to a decision about the lowest cost way to sell the most product. Personally, I believe that hiring an experienced PR and social media firm is a good use of money. A good social media firm will function as part of your executive team.

Creating Good Social Media Content

2009-05-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

Good content is the key to a successful social media campaign.

Good content is not created by wizards, it is built brick by brick by real marketing people with simple tools of measurement and positioning.

I spent the weekend surfing at Cowells beach with my nine year old son. Cowells is one of the easiest beaches to surf at and is usually packed with people learning to surf. As I watched my successfully catch wave after wave that adults next to him were missing, I thought about the importance of positioning. The position of a surfer before catching a wave is the key to a good ride. Once the surfer gets up on the wave, the ride is maintained with a series of small adjustments based on constant feedback from the board and the wave.

Creating good social media content is like riding a wave, the key to success is to set up the right positioning prior to the campaign and then to constantly measure and adjust the content during the campaign.

I view social media professionals more as craftsmen than as artists. Describing good content creation as an art makes it seem unattainable by the average marketer. This is not true. Just as everyone can learn to surf if they understand a few basic concepts, everyone can produce good social media content.

Although there are high-priced positioning and branding firms that will charge a fortune to develop positioning, most companies don't need this. There are only two questions that you need to answer for a social media campaign:

Who is the target audience?
What will interest them?

Once you've answered the basic questions and you've inserted your main product marketing messages into the content, you've got to measure the popularity of the content.

This is the step where people fail. Many people simply don't measure the popularity of their content. It might be painful to see low views to a blog or a YouTube video. Or, it might be bothersome to log into Google Analytics and take the time to understand the data. For whatever reason, people are resistant to reviewing the popularity of content and trying new ideas on a regular basis.

Surfing a wave has again led me to understand another key to social media. The magic secret of good content is simply a willingness to adjust and learn.

Using Social Media with Product Launch Campaigns

2009-04-17T09:55:00.001-07:00

According to the Page One blog companies are getting 1,000 to 4,000 percent jumps in their corporate web site traffic after implementing social media campaigns. Our new web site will make equally bold claims, showcasing work that we did for Google, Cisco, and Sourceforge that illustrate big gains of over 100% for key metrics such as registrations, media coverage or show attendance.

How much of this is hype and how much of it is real? I wrote much of the content for the site. I'll give you the inside scoop.

The numbers are actual, not exaggerated. However, after reading through our blog posts, I realized that readers may come away with the misunderstanding that social media was the only driving force behind the results.

This is not true. Social media is a component of an integrated marketing strategy. It is almost a magnifying glass that brings good content into clearer focus for a wider audience.

However, without good content, social media is an empty pipe.

The most common marketing campaign in Silicon Valley is the product launch campaign. I don't think people have a choice of choosing between a traditional marketing and PR launch or a social media launch. People have to do both. I know, at first it seems more costly. However, in the harsh reality of today's economy, it's not. The reality is that companies are scaling back on advertising, direct marketing and public relations. They're not giving up on these proven techniques. They're streamlining the process. Let's face it, if there are less publications now days, there's going to be less work to manage the advertising campaign.

When I do a social media launch of a product, it's actually an integrated public relations and social media launch. The elements must work together. I've worked on a number of integrated social media and PR campaigns in the last few months - Cloudera, Appcelerator, Zend. All the campaigns generated between 10x and 30x increases in web site traffic. That's 1,000 to 3,000 percent increases!

Here's a simplified step by step process of how it works.

Message Grid - develop high level message buckets for each target audience.

Press Release - write a traditional press release and put it to the wire on the launch day. It doesn't make a big difference what wire service you use or what format the press release is in. Doing a social media press release instead of a standard format press release will not have a big impact on your campaign results. Adding SEO techniques to a single press release will also not alter the organic or PPC search results that much. After experimenting with different formats, I've settled back to the traditional press release. Focus on the basics, writing a press release that is accurate, easy to understand and contains your main message points. Keep in mind that the value of any press release is now diminished. There are other channels that you must use in parallel to get the messages out.

Media List - Create a traditional media list that includes print, online, and bloggers. After experimenting with Cision and many other services, we've started to use Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs again. In my opinion, the days of automating a mailing list of contacts is over. Spreadsheets are a pretty basic and easy tool to use effectively. Ultimately, I don't think it matters too much what you use to manage your media list.

Vision Video - produce a 3 minute video of the top two executives that explain the product. Script out the video ahead of time using the message matrix to cover all the major buckets. You must provide direction for the video. The content of the video will have a big impact on the number of views for the video. Here are two examples that I worked on, one for Appcelerator and one for Cloudera.

Product Video - produce multiple videos of the product. The length of the video can vary between 15 seconds and 5 minutes. The basic product video in Silicon Valley is a 5 minute screencast made with Telestream ScreenFlow on the Mac or Camtasia on Windows. The voice of the engineer that built the product is usually used for audio.

Promote Videos - there are a number of techniques that we use to distribute and promote the videos. We've been continually developing different promotion techniques. Two general rules are to launch all content on the day of the launch and to cross-promote all the content in different channels. Obviously, there's a lot more strategy behind content promotion.

Corporate Blog - produce two different blog posts for the corporate blog, one with technical details and vision of the product. The other blog post, usually by the CEO or head of the business unit for the product, talks about the business benefits of the product to customer. Include links from the blog posts to all the different content - videos, Twitter feed, product demos. Save blog posts for the day of launch.

Twitter Management - Build up the Twitter following on the day of the launch. It is important that you define the voice of your Twitter feed in your internal planning document. The Twitter feed should have the personality of a single persona or person. Push out valuable content that other people will want to retweet. Remember, if you're not getting any retweets, then what you have to say on Twitter is not interesting. Sorry, but these are the harsh realities of social media. I'm not suggesting that every Tweet should be retweeted by someone. However, if you don't get any retweets at all in a day, then you need to change your strategy.

Direct Email - Time direct email campaigns with the press release and include all relevant links to social media content and channels. Use the direct email to drive followers to Twitter and viewers to the blog. If the email list is of your existing community of customers, then provide special information or special privileges such as access to special videos before the general public.

Other Progams - Depending on the company, you could may implement strategies for Facebook, LinkedIn, IRC, and message forums. The work required to update a Facebook page is usually minimal. We generally don't use Facebook applications in our campaigns, primarily due to the cost and complexity of producing a Facebook application. Since we're primarily a PR firm, it's easier for us to produce text and videos.

The key to getting results in a social media campaign is that all the different components must be used together, linking to each other, and using a common set of messages.

I do agree with many of my colleagues that social media is a little over-hyped now days. Sure, I know that it is definitely the future and gets great results today. However, it is not the silver bullet that will cure all problems. Traditional media channels are still very much alive and must be managed effectively. However, if that is all you are doing, it is definitely not enough.

If the work to manage all the channels seems daunting, take a step back and focus on streamlining the process for traditional channels. Social media is not something that can be ignored. I can guarantee you that your competition is either implementing a social media strategy today or is planning to launch one tomorrow.

Social Media Sabre Award

2009-04-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

My colleague Jenna Boller recently wrote about a social media campaign she ran for our client. The campaign is a finalist in the SABRE awards software category. The campaign was called Who's the Next Open Source Idol? and involved videos of open source mascots dancing and encouraging the public to dance on video. We're competing for the award against A&R Edelman for Adobe, Access Communications for Intuit, and Waggener Edstrom for Microsoft.

We ran the campaign in August of 2008 at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. This was one of the first social media campaigns we did at Page One. It's also one of the few campaigns where we tried to focus on humor to get the content to go viral.

Humorous videos are generally high-risk. They often take a lot more time than planned and can fall flat. In order to deliver more value to our clients, Page One has started to focus on more conservative video concepts such as vision videos and screen casts. These are lower risk and easier to produce within a fixed budget.

I was pleased that SABRE award made me remember that sometimes people take big risks with campaigns and produce great results.

This campaign was also unique because the video was produced by a social media team that wasn't on the account. This social media team was created just for the project by combining people from different accounts. Since this campaign, we've moved to a process where the account team is also responsible for social media.

The process to generate the idea for the campaign was also unique. For this campaign, multiple people developed ideas for the campaign. We had a meeting where different ideas were brought up by different people. We selected the best idea. We've now moved closer to a formulaic approach to content creation based on a handful of templates.

The notice that we're a finalist for the SABRE award caused me to reflect back on the old campaign and the management process for the campaign.

I feel that we've made the social media campaign process more efficient in the last few months and the campaigns are easier to manage from a business perspective. However, I think that we should take another look at our campaign development process and question whether or not we're creating an environment to foster maximum creativity and enthusiasm from everyone.

In particular, I would like to try to form temporary teams of people from different accounts to come up with different ideas for a campaign. Instead of developing the ideas during the meeting, each person would come to the meeting and briefly present their idea. We could then decide on the best idea, either as a group or a combination of group and manager.

Help Wanted - Social Media

2009-03-20T07:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-04T17:41:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-01T15:03:00.001-08:00

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

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business marketing web

Follow Social Media Money

2009-02-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

It's surprising to me that budgets for social media campaigns don't come from PR departments. In order to understand the business of social media, I hustled to get some meetings and was fortunate enough to have discussions with marketing managers at Palm, McAfee, Cisco, Ricoh, HP, Visa, and dozens of other companies.

Budgets are coming from product marketing, special project promotion funds, business development, online marketing, and public relations.

In my two decades as a high-tech business manager, I've found that tracking down the source of a flow of money is very efficient at cutting through the noise and learning how business systems really operate. If the money for social media projects isn't coming exclusively from public relations, it means that social media isn't equivalent to public relations.

OK, so what is social media?

Unfortunately, I don't have a concise answer. No one does right now. The definition I've developed is that social media is a process to engage an audience and measure the results of the audience engagement. The quality of social media services is judged by how well the audience is engaged, the level of viral buzz around the engagement, and how effectively the results are measured.

I believe that it is this element of audience engagement that creates demand for social media across different business areas, from community management to product marketing and partner relations.

For many years, businesses have tried to get closer to their customers and partners. Any social media program must collect statistics on audience participation and activities.

Reaching out and talking to customers is nothing new. Using customers as product advocates is fundamental to traditional old-times marketing. The only difference with social media is that the tools for both distribution and measurement are different. After the initial wave of hype over the new tools wanes, I'm placing my money on new-school social media campaigns that have integrated with strong old-school marketing strategies.

Process of a Social Media Campaign

2009-01-26T11:24:00.000-08:00

Based on feedback from Adrian Havill and other people reading this blog, I've revised the steps for our social media campaigns to include audience engagement. This is something that I've been trying to describe as viral distribution or creation of content by the audience.

I think that Audience Engagement covers both steps.

I've also changed our brochure to indicate that our social media campaigns are integrated with marketing campaigns that contain traditional PR and search engine marketing (SEM) elements. In the past, we've also managed the traditional PR elements of ours campaigns and worked with an outside SEM firm if the client needed a discrete SEM program.

I've been spending more time thinking about the need to formalize our process for social media campaigns. At some level, this is what differentiates a service firm from a group of individual consultants. Unless we establish an unique process, we will be stuck creating custom engagements for every company we work with. The knowledge transfer from one client to another will be difficult to manage. It will also be difficult for potential new clients to assess the quality of the services we offer compared to other firms that offer similar marketing services.

Our strategy up to this point has been to refer to results. Since we generally get good results, this has been enough to create a fast-growing multi-million dollar consulting business. This generally works when the new client is in the same space as our past clients. However, this approach has limitations when we try to grow into new markets.

I've decided to look at history to predict the future of marketing. Our office in Palo Alto are very close to the old Regis McKenna offices. Lonn and I jog past the complex a few times a week. Regis McKenna established a process for high-tech public relations. His techniques are a little old. The Regis Touch was published in 1986, the same year that the new crop of social media professionals graduating from college were born. The book is out of print. However, used copies are still easily obtainable. The thing that impressed me with the old Regis McKenna consulting service was their view of PR as a process. From my understanding, the core of the process was the establishment of messaging and positioning in the marketplace. Regis is still out there, talking about social.

After five years of regular jogs past the old Regis McKenna complex, I may have absorbed some of the magic through Silicon Valley osmosis. I'm hoping that the Social Media Surfer can apply the magic to our new services.

The Definition of Social Media Services

2009-01-23T17:18:00.000-08:00

I spent the bulk of the day writing the text for a brochure that describes Page One's social media services. I enjoyed the process because it forced me to organize my thoughts about what social media is. In the first version of our web site for social media, I defined social media campaigns more by the tools we used to implement the campaign than by the promotion process and strategy.

Six months ago, I focused on three types of activity, 1) content creation; 2) content promotion; and 3) channel monitoring and management. We applied these activities to different channels, primarily YouTube, Twitter, and Blogs. These were the channels that were the closest to the traditional media we were accustomed to pitching and dealing with. The main skills we had to learn were content creation and promotion.

The new social media brochure may focus on a set of seven services:

Social media footprint;
Share of voice;
Audience identification;
Message and channel selection;
Channel management;
Content management;
Social media monitoring and analysis.

I've also created a path for successful social media campaign management that consists of seven steps that are done in sequence:

Define business goal (example: increase downloads);
Identify audience (example: software developers);
Lock down messages (this is the critical step that the campaign hinges on);
Select channels based on most effective use of resources (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube);
Create content or get others to create it for you;
Promote and distribute content using viral techniques whenever possible;
Monitor and measure against goals;
Achieve goal (50% increase in product downloads).

On Monday, I'll be meeting with Lonn, Shelly, and Janet to discuss the content of the brochure mockup. I'm sure that we'll change the content extensively before we send it to a graphic designer.

Over the next week, I'm also going to try and write some new text for our web site. We're in the process of moving our main corporate site to WordPress so that we can edit the content ourselves without have to turn to our excellent, but busy, web developers.

Customers as Spokespeople

2009-01-16T18:00:00.000-08:00

After six months of social media experiments, we've gained some real wins with companies like wine.com and Cisco in addition to groups like SourceForge and the Linux Foundation.

My ultimate goal remains elusive. Although we've managed to produce content and distribute the content through new channels such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, we've had limited success in getting our clients' customers to produce content and distribute it for us.

We've had clear success with creating and promoting YouTube videos and growing a following on Twitter. We've also really shined in measurement and getting people to take some action such as downloading a product, voting, or registering into a community.

Since the traditional role of PR has been to provide information to people with existing distribution networks like a newspaper or magazine, it is quite a change to develop content for our clients. Although we're improving the services we can offer, I feel that we need to go further.

About six months ago, I designed the Social Media Magic Quadrant for our internal company presentation.

The two main variables are:

Where the content comes from;
What the audience does with the content.

In my view, pure social media occurs when the audience creates content and distributes it. Without audience participation, I don't view it as social media. I believe that getting the audience to create and distribute content is a valuable technique that we'll have to master.

Much of our early learning was on the use of new tools like Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook. Our next hurdle was to create appropriate content and promote the content. Our future challenge over the next year will be to develop new techniques that encourage the audience to produce content.

Y-Quad Fish Surfboard and Winter Frost

2009-01-06T12:44:00.000-08:00

Woke up on Sunday morning for the first NorCal session of the year. Surfing in beautiful Northern California has its own special appeal. The thermometer says 28 degrees F, my lawn is white with frost and my windshield is covered with ice.

Driving over Highway 17, my nine year old son stares at the frost-covered hills on both sides of the road and says two words, "looks grim." Well, it could be worse. At least we plan to go in after the sun comes up. Maybe the air will be in the high 40s by the time we hit the water. Yea, maybe.

We get down to the normally hideously crowded Cowells beach in Santa Cruz and see a bunch of nice, easy rolling waves coming in. Conditions look great. Something is strange. There's only one other person out there and the guy is on a stand up paddle surfboard.

My son takes out his brand new four-fin fish surfboard. It glistens in the sun. We charge in. He's getting into waves by himself and carving up and down the face.

The tide starts to drop, the waves die down, the sun heats up the air, and the crowd thickens. We head in for a fantastic lunch on Santa Cruz Wharf with a panoramic view of the surf lineup all the way from Steamer Lane to Cowells. It's another beautiful morning in NorCal paradise, just takes a certain perspective to see it.

Seven Energy Centers of Social Media

2008-12-17T08:01:00.000-08:00

Shelly Milam wrote a great blog posting on the launch of a beta product for Appcelerator that generated a 3,500% increase in web site traffic, a 400% increase in Twitter followers, and 10,000 downloads in the first few days.

The results are so astounding that we've spoken about the techniques with other marketers and my peers in the PR industry. The response is almost always, "Wow, that is phenomenal." Then, the questions usually come as to how it's possible to get such a huge increase in web site traffic. For many people, an explanation of the techniques don't add up to end result. Of course, these people are doing the math wrong.

No, of course they can add. They underestimate the more subtle effect of reaching a tipping point and having information go viral. There's a point where other people start to generate and pass on information to their friends. To reach this goal is elusive. Many people feel that the path to the tipping point is murky and nebulous, hidden from the eyes of the average marketer in the Valley.

To make thing easier to understand, I've developed seven centers of social media energy resting on a foundation message platform. The message platform must be solid or the energy centers will fall and crumble.

Here's a quick and easy roadmap that will show you how to get to the tipping point.

Foundation - The messages must leverage existing buzz. In the case of Appcelerator, we leveraged existing buzz around RIA development. We focused in on Adobe Air because it was getting the most press. In particular, we focused on a message that Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch was talking about in October. He said in a video that there will be 100 million users of Adobe Air by the end of 2008.

1) Media - The first energy center is traditional media. This includes developer publications, influential bloggers, IT trades, business press, investor publications, and other publications that can be reached through traditional PR techniques including direct email outreach, phone, IM and press releases.

2) Analysts - The second energy center is formed around industry analysts. We briefed a number of industry analysts prior to the launch in order to get their opinion before we brought the information to the media.

3) Community Generated Content - The third source of energy is from engaging with the larger community, generally bloggers that produce information. The key is to engage with the blogger community, not to pitch individual bloggers. Most PR people will approach bloggers in the same way that they approach traditional media. This is effective to some degree, but a wasted opportunity in many ways. The best way to engage with a large number of bloggers is to become part of the community, to have insights, and opinions that are shared with other bloggers in comments, on your own blogs and in direct communications. Some bloggers work like reporters and want to be treated as reporters. These people can be grouped with traditional media and approached in the same way that you approach traditional reporters. However, most bloggers are enthusiasts, not reporters. These techniques are being extended to Twitter and YouTube content creators. Similar techniques are used to encourage people to speak at shows.

4) Vision - The fourth center is the channel you create to show the vision of the product. A quick way to showcase the people and explain the vision is to create a vision video. Companies should create a video that highlights the two key people behind the product. The video should ideally be 2-3 minutes long. Other channels for the vision might be a comic book, a graphic, or a podcast. Or, a combination of the techniques.

5) Technology Highlights - The fifth center is the channel used to showcase the technology and superior features of the product. Appcelerator used a series of screencasts. The videos are easy to make. People in the company can generally do this themselves with tools like Camtasia or Jing. If the company staff create the video themselves, it is important that the process and messages be managed by a central person that is overseeing the entire launch message strategy. Usually this is a marketing person.

6) Existing Online Community - The sixth center holds the power for viral ignition. They are a catalyst that must be treated with care. The existing online community of users is the most likely group to pass the new product information along to their friends or peers. Appcelerator used a combination of blogs, Twitter, and direct email to a mailing list to make the community feel that they were getting more information, earlier.

7) Personal Outreach - The seventh center is within the founders of the company. The executives know the company and product the best. Their potential customers want to buy products from people, not from a distant brand. Especially when a company is small, the executives must make themselves known as people. Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator and Nolan Wright, CTO, personally sent email and commented on blogs. They went above and beyond the typical commitment level of an executive to make themselves available for briefings. During the launch, Page One analyzed blog, Twitter, and comment messages and made recommendations to the Appcelerator executives on where to focus their attention. However, in the end, it was their commitment that drove success and inspired everyone else to be successful.

Top Five Tips for Effective Twitter Use

2008-12-01T16:23:00.000-08:00

1) Dump the web interface

Use a desktop client. The most popular clients are twirl, Tweetr, and TweetDeck. These are all cross-platform desktop clients that run on Adobe Air. The twirl application currently supports multiple Twitter accounts, a feature that is useful if you're managing different campaigns for multiple companies. According to the developer, TweetDeck should have this feature soon. I use TweetDeck on the Mac. On the iPhone, I use Twitterific.

2) Set up groups

If you start following more than two dozen people, Twitter can quickly become a confusing waste of time. You either stop paying attention to the Tweets that are good or waste too much time in non-productive Twitter voyeurism. This is a screenshot of how my TweetDeck looks with All Tweets and a Group for Tweets from people I work with. Obviously, there are much less Tweets from the people I work with and the Tweets are more relevant. Groups allow me to focus on a subset of the people that I follow.

3) Automatically Monitor Topics
TweetDeck can automatically monitor topics written by people that you don't follow. Topics can be concepts such as "social media" or a person's name and display all Tweets on the subject. You can either monitor a Global Search or a Local Search of people you follow. The Global Search allows you to reach people that share a common interest that you have no prior relationship with. In order to unlock the potential of automatically monitoring a topic, you need to learn how to use the Reply feature in Twitter.

4) Learn to Use Replies
The key thing about Replies is that the person doesn't have to be following you. There are two ways to message people. The first most obvious way is to use a direct message. If someone is following you, it is easy to send them a direct message. Usually, this triggers an email or text alert. The second and potentially more powerful way to message people is to Reply to the Tweet with @name. The problem with a Reply is that the receiver may not be monitoring Replies. That's okay. Although some people don't look at replies, enough people do monitor Replies to enable you find and engage in conversations with people.

On TweetDeck, you can Reply by simply pressing the reply button. When you reply to a Tweet it goes into the person's Reply inbox. An active Twitter user will usually reply. You also need to monitor your own Replies. TweetDeck puts these in their own column.

5) Follow Frugally
Even with Groups and Local Searches, your Twitter inbox is sure to get stuffed. I prefer to follow a small number of people. If you're working on a Twitter campaign, you might want to follow a large number of people or use TwitterBots (I've used both of these techniques and can provide information if people are interested). However for personal use, I like to follow a smaller number of people to keep the volume of information manageable. Effectively using Global Searches and Replies can take the place of having to follow a lot of people.

In our Twitter campaigns, we've started to count the number of replies as an important metric. I believe that this metric may become even more important than the number of followers for viral campaigns. By focusing on cultivating Replies instead of Followers, you'll develop a Twitter experience with much richer information.

Integrating Video Into Product Launches

2008-11-25T11:39:00.000-08:00

I've been spending a lot of time with Jeff Haynie and Nolan Wright at Appcelerator working on the launch of their new product. We're trying a new media strategy that involves two traditional press releases, two YouTube videos, a technical blog post, Twitter feed and other social media promotion techniques.

We've hired one of the videographers from the San Jose Mercury News to take the technical vision video, help with the editing and put the video into a format that we can use on YouTube. I've worked with the same videographer with other clients and am happy with his work.

We're still experimenting with the different types of promotional videos across the agency. The most common categories for our clients are:

Product demonstration, usually as a screencast, but sometimes as a video of a screen;
Technical vision of product;
Customer testimonials;
Community focused discussion;
Video of an event such as a conference, trade show, or party.

We're also learning about the direction of the videos. The easiest way to take videos is to script it out. However, the video may come out stilted and impersonal. Right now, we' experimenting with these techniques:

Writing out lines on large pieces of paper and holding the paper behind the camera;
Assigning one person behind the camera to be the interviewer and then edit the sound of the interviewer out;
Having multiple people in the company discuss a topic interactively.

Our goal for the launch is to have many channels of information become available in parallel. People will be able to dig deeply into a topic and see what the product looks like without having to download and install the product or talk to an executive. By reducing the barrier to entry to get more information, we hope to put the product information in the hands of more people. This initial group of people will hopefully pass the information on to their friends.

How Google's Product Launch Generated 450,000 Blogs

2008-11-04T18:12:00.000-08:00

I just wrote an analysis on the Page One PR corporate blog of how the launch of Google Chrome resulted in 450,000 blog postings within 60 days of the Beta. The intense online activity resulted in Google Chrome appearing near the top of both Google and MSN search engines for people looking for a browser, ahead of Safari and Internet Explorer. Suprisingly, on MSN, Google Chrome is even ahead of Firefox.

Google Chrome also appears as the top result for "browser" on YouTube.

The techniques and tools that Google uses are all common in our social media practice. Google simply uses the tools effectively. I believe that they benefit from water cooler chats and informal discussions with the people that work on the Blogger, YouTube, Google Analytics, and Google search products. However, the techniques are in the open for all to see and use.

Can PR Directly Increase Sales Lead Generation?

2008-10-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons that I love being involved in PR right now is that the industry is changing so rapidly. PR can be the most powerful generator of sales leads if executives use PR effectively.

At the core of effective PR is a good understanding of the exciting changes in how people are consuming media. The printing press is dying, some people say quickly. Other people like Marc Andreessen say not fast enough. The model of a publisher as an omnipotent organization as portrayed in Citizen Kane is no longer valid in today's world of zero-cost, instant distribution. Sales leads will only come if executives understand how customers are finding their products. Embrace the change and thrive.

People are moving to online search engines to find products. They are using aggregation tools like Google News, specialized blog sites like Technorati, or social networks like Facebook to get the latest news and information. True, people still read the New York Times and their local newspaper. However, they may not read it everyday. People skim through dozens of media sources when they have time. This change in reading habits is great for the consumer since it gives them a wide range of perspectives. It's also great for companies that have a good understanding of how readers now find and distribute information.

My colleague Nadja Blagojevic recently wrote a blog posting on Public Relations Optimized for SEO. She also helped to organize a meeting with a Silicon Valley search engine marketing (SEM) firm that we're partnering with on several accounts. Coming from an entrepreneurial background, I find the process of closed loop marketing, lead generation and lead nurturing fascinating.

Many companies feel the economy is about to slow down and are taking a hard look at their marketing budgets. It's an excellent opportunity to assess what will generate sales leads over the next two years. Hopefully, the economic downturn will work as a forcing function to help executives build leaner and more efficient businesses.

Over the last five years, I've continually tried to integrate PR into the business processes of the Silicon Valley companies I've worked with. In my heart, I'm an entrepreneur and enjoy talking to other entrepreneurs about making new products and making money. In the last year, we've really seen companies open up their business processes to us.

Here are just some of the changes I'm seeing:

Google Analytics - The majority of our clients use Google Analytics. Many of them give us login access to directly view reports. We can now assess the effectiveness of PR campaigns in driving traffic to their web site and also see if there is a trend to increase traffic to product information sections or the contact section.

Google AdWords - As part of our messaging and positioning work, we now ask clients what keywords they are buying for Google AdWords. Most clients buy AdWords and know which words are directing traffic to their site. Using other tools, they can also drill down and see which keywords result in high quality sales leads. As part of their integrated marketing plan, PR often helps to push these keywords out to the public.

Web Site Interaction - In many integrated marketing campaigns, our clients are trying to achieve a higher level of interaction. They're trying to get a registered download of a whitepaper or free version of a product, registration in a online technical community, anonymous voting, or online button clicks.

Intentional Information Leaks - Some companies are starting to release information to the online community first and then issue a press release. Although the technique is still new and being developed, some technology executives are putting incomplete information out on blogs or Twitter before official announcements. Due to the speed requirements of online blogging, there are usually no delays with fact-checking or interviews. I've often seen a buzz cycle develop online in blogs, Twitter, and even Wikipedia in advance of a product launch and then really start to gain momentum when the full product specifications appear in a press release. Part of the reason for this strategy might be that the bloggers and people in the online community are the most passionate about the product and might be the best candidates for early product buys.

As an entrepreneur, I find all these changes exciting. It warms my heart to see companies leveraging new PR techniques to generate sales leads. This is one of the reasons Lonn Johnston and I left the entrepreneurial world and started a PR firm. The PR firms we were hiring five years ago were not integrated into the process of helping companies reach business objectives. After seeing the carnage of the dot-com bust, we knew that there was a better way to do PR, going beyond hype machines and working toward supporting the achievements of business goals. It seems that other people see the same thing too.

Manresa Surfing and Camping

2008-10-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

I camped at Manresa beach south of Santa Cruz this past weekend. Manresa is a beach break, which means that there is no channel for an easy paddle out. After powering through the shore break with my son, we got to the lineup and started to gaze out at the waves. My son drifted south of me and paddled into the biggest wave of the day. He made the wave and the drop, but fell off the board on the bottom turn when the lip of the wave crashed into foam at his feet. The wave tumbled him toward shore for about 10 yards and released its hold on him just in time for him to get to his board as the next wave in the set crashed down, pushing him under the water again and shooting his surfboard straight up into the air. My wife tried to take a picture of him riding the wave, but only got a shot of the board in the air. It looks grim.

He eventually made it back out and started catching more waves.

With the crash of the stock market last week and forecasts of doom and gloom from Sequoia Capital, I thought that catching, riding, and sometimes wiping out on a wave might be a good analogy to the life of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Catching a wave can be divided into several components:

Getting to the lineup. Surfable waves are formed a little bit further from shore than the shorebreak. To get to the lineup, the surfer must pass the shorebreak and whitewash. This can be so difficult that sometimes we can't get to the place where the waves are forming. Sometimes, we have to paddle back in without getting a session in. The technology entrepreneur must be in the right place at the right time. It may be hard to get there.

Selecting the wave. What non-surfers don't realize is that riding the wave is not that difficult. Once you're up, it is like skateboarding or snowboarding. The big problem with surfing is selecting the wave that will form at the right location for you. Kids, dogs, and people with no experience can usually get up on the board, ride, and turn it if the conditions are mild and someone selects the wave for them. If you try to catch the wave too early, it will pass under you and not develop enough force to push the board forward. If you catch the wave too late, you might fall off the board.

Getting going. There are moments in life that are critical. The pop-up or time when a person stands up and gets going is critical. Those first few seconds when a person transitions from lying down to standing up is a crucial moment that sets up the entire ride of the wave. Make the pop-up and the rest of the ride is relatively easy, still challenging, but easier. In startup businesses, the first year of a company is the toughest. To really get the revenue going and to start a sustainable business is the crucial moment. The rest is so much easier.

Kicking out. At the end of the ride, it's important to kick out or at least get off the board before getting pushed toward shore back into the shore break. Riding the wave too long might result in a pounding near the shore. The water is smoother and friendlier outside at the lineup.

When I was in Japan in my early twenties, I saw a technology wave and I sprinted to catch it. On a cold fall day in mid-October of 1994, I became the second person in Japan to access the public Internet. It changed my life and became a defining moment that I think about 14 years later. Japan had fallen from its economic heights of the late 1980s. The Nikkei stock index has yet to recover. Perhaps it was because I was from the US that I saw the wave so clearly. Certainly, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the Internet. By 1998, the Nikkei stock index was even lower. It didn't really matter. My ride was over. We sold the company in Tokyo to PSINet for a nice sum of money and I paddled back out for another wave, this time in Silicon Valley.

I don't believe that technology waves are dependent on a booming stock market. Ultimately, I don't agree with the Sequoia presentation. Waves will always come. Some people will always be able to see the wave and through either luck, placement, or knowledge will be able to catch them. Of the people that catch the wave, some of them will be able to ride it all the way to a glorious kick-out and paddle back out to try and catch another one.

Commercial Social Media Monitoring Services

2008-09-26T18:25:00.000-07:00

My colleague Dave Robbins posted a
Review of Commercial Social Media Monitoring Services.

If you're trying to track your social media footprint, it's worth a read. He looked at Radian6, Visible Technologies TruCast, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, and BuzzLogic. We decided to standardize on Radian6 across the firm right now. Dave is reviewing the contract and we're going to sign up for a minimal set of services for our initial test phase.

One thing that I found fascinating was how the people at Radian6 and TruCast commented on the blog. Here's a big shout out of respect to Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6 and Mike Spataro of TruCast. They both monitored the social media space, found the blog that mentioned their products and commented on the blog posting. What a great sign that they use their own product to help them reach their business goals. Social Media monitoring at work!

I look forward to talking to our clients about Social Media monitoring services.

Force Unleashed For Forty-Somethings

2008-09-24T17:29:00.000-07:00

Since the video game Star Wars: The Force Unleased was released on September 16, 1.5 million copies have been sold. MetaCritic gives the Wii version of the game a score of 69, not a particularly high score. Users give it a higher score of 7.8, a fairly big difference between critic and user. There's also a big difference in the MetaCritic reviews, ranging from 82 in Official Nintendo Magazine UK to 42 in 1UP.

As a reader of MetaCritic, I place more credibility in the user review. I feel the same way when evaluating cars or phones. For me, the wisdom of the crowds is more credible than the wisdom of the professional or semi-professional product reviewer. I also think that the average user is using evaluation criteria that is more similar to my own criteria. Professional critics, whether they evaluate food, video games or enterprise software, are sometimes jaded by looking at hundreds of products, each one similar to the others.

I bought Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for my son to play on the Wii. Since I don't really enjoy video games, I was surprised at how much fun the new game was. There's an exhilarting feel of raw power, the power to lift up people with a wave of your hand or destroy large machines with a flick of your wrist. In the Wii version of the game the right hand holds the Wii Remote and controls the light saber. There's a visceral thrill in moving your right hand around and seeing a bright red energy blade cut through air, buildings, and machines.

Equally fun is the Wii Nunchuck in the left hand. Moving your left hand forward unleashes the Force. There's other funky button combinations which I may never master. However, for a quick thrill, waving my hands around and moving boulders is highly satisfying. Most of the professional reviews got stuck on the simplicity of the plot or the problems with graphics and game physics. Many of the users used their gut. Sure, the game has problems. However, the bottom line is that it is fun to play.

Perhaps like me, many people are looking at the reviews from the community and realizing that the Wisdom of the Crowds is more accurate than the professional reviewer.

YouTube Viewer Demographics and Trends

2008-09-18T08:07:00.000-07:00

YouTube offers a free tool called Insight for trend and demographic analysis. The really cool feature is the ability to see viewing trends based on age and gender. This is a feature that Google Analytics doesn't have and is often requested by mark eting people. The age and gender information is pulled from the YouTube profiles of the viewers.

This yields some tasty data for marketing geeks like me. While I keep my YouTube channel up only for experiments, I still find it mega-cool when I see that the largest viewer group are males 35-44 and that the second largest group are females, ages 55-64. Since my videos are all family videos of kids, I suspect that women between the ages of 55 and 64 find it cute to watch a little kid surf.

YouTube Insight is a free tool that is included with all YouTube accounts. The tool was announced in March of 2008. The key demographic information for gender and age was only added in May of 2008. Since the tool is relatively new, not many organizations are using it yet.

Set up is easy. Simply go to Account and select more.... The YouTube Insight page can be accessed from the Performance and Data Tools area.

Money and Social Media

2008-09-15T17:27:00.000-07:00

Before a surfing session at Capitola Beach, I noticed that the free parking stalls were being converted to paying stalls at the end of summer on September 22. This isn't that much of a hardship for me since Capitola only charges $0.25 per 30 minutes at the all-day lot that I park at. However, since money is always important, it's still a factor I consider when I park for the entire day at the beach.

I've been thinking about money and social media today because Shelly Milam analyzed the actual costs to clients of social media pilot services that Page One PR working on with our clients.

The winner is Twitter. Well, it is the winner so far for best use of social media dollars. An average three month Twitter engagement cost $3,000 and yields a fairly substantial increase in quantifiable metrics such as number of registered voters for an online promtion campaign, number of contest submissions, and increase in web traffic. Of course, Twitter is not the answer to everything. It is cheap because it can be set up rapidly. In the Twitter campaigns we engaged in, we already had the messages and position created. We also had guidelines for rapid response. Without the message guidelines, the costs might have been considerably higher.

Giving advice on blog content and setup is cheap. A small investment of $1,000 might yield great results for companies with writers in-house that can produce content and just need guidance at the beginning on the best strategies for corporate blogs. Tools such as Blogger are free and have enough features to support a corporate blog campaign.

Video campaigns can have great results, but the costs of video production and editing are costly unless you have an in-house videographer. Video production and promotion for videos that require actors cost between $15,000 and $22,000 for four videos. Each video takes two hours or more of filming plus four or more hours of editing. Depending on the number of actors involved per video, the cost can increase quickly.

Simple videos based on an interview style cost between $3,000 and $4,000 for six videos. This assumes that the videographer asks the questions to multiple people at a meeting, conference or trade show. These types of interviews have generated less traffic than videos with actors.

There are hundreds of different ways to spend a marketing budget on social media. With only a limited amount of information about the costs and ROI of social media campaigns across the industry, people are having a tough time making decisions on how to allocate dollars and time. Social media also changes very rapidly. While Twitter may offer good bang for the marketing dollar today, tomorrow it might be Viddler or Tumblr or something new.

Stay tuned for future episodes of the Social Media Surfer as I track down the best use of a marketing buck.

Nielsen Rating of Social Media

2008-09-12T06:30:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate to have lunch with Jon Zilber, the director of online communications and pr services for Palm. In addition to guiding Palm's social media strategy, Jon is in charge of the Palm blog. The Palm cafeteria served up a good steak and Jon dished out social media advice based on his experience with a large corporation.

Jon knew a lot, probably more than any social media guy I have met that is working for a large corporation. Jon spoke about the need for metrics, monitoring, and data to help people decide where to allocate resources. Based on Jon's insight, I decided assign a team of people to research new monitoring services for Page One PR.

The team is currently assigned to research these services:

Ranking of top social media sites based on popularity and demographics, similar to what Nielsen offers people for old-school media;
Monitoring of client buzz across the social media space and rapid response to comments based on messaging and response guidelines;
Wall Street Analyst type of "buy or sell" rating of different social media sites.

Radian6 seems to be the most popular social media monitoring service out there now. We have a meeting with them at 1pm today.

David Robbins, a new member to the social media team at Page One PR, is also collecting information from Visible Technlogies, BuzzLogic, and a whole range of other companies.

In the last two days, I've spoken to a half-dozen companies about social media programs. All of them have a sense of urgency about implementing programs and were faced with the huge challenge of deciding where to focus resources and how to measure their return on investment. Jon was able to articulate his needs clearly and I wanted to thank him again for sharing his hard-won insights with me.

Google Beats Apple on User Interface Design

2008-09-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

After surfing for two days with my nine year old son in Capitola and strolling around the wine and art festival there, I returned to work on Monday to a bright new Google Apps system.

The most obvious difference is that we have a corporate gmail account with branding and no advertisements. The staff seems to like the Gmail interface better than Mac Mail. This is amazing to me since a desktop application from Apple is viewed as clunkier and less hip than a web-based application from Google.

Not too long ago, Apple was the king of the GUI. Google was a search engine. Is Google now browser-focused desktop apps company? Google Apps is not just Gmail, though this is main application people in my company are focused on now. Google Apps also comes with a shared calendar, presentation software, spreadsheet, and word processor. I dought that anyone in my company is going to say that Google Docs spreadsheet is better than Microsoft Excel. However, I've already heard them say that there are better collaborative features. Well, this is a beginning, a toe-hold in the cliff. How important is collaboration in your organization? In the PR business, it is very important. Maybe people will start using Google Docs on their own?

Well, Microsoft Office rules supreme for today and Google Docs isn't going to shut it out of the office. However, tomorrow is a new story with things like Google Chrome and Google Gears making Gmail and Google Docs even closer to the functionality of a desktop application.

Google Chrome Marketing Launch Analysis

2008-09-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

Jan., 2000 - News on browsers died eight years ago at the start of the new millennium. AOL bought Netscape, everyone was using IE. Mozilla, then Firefox, tried to make a comeback, but it was clunky, slow and bloated for a long time. Browser news became boring.

Sept 3, 2008 - One day after Google announced a beta version of an open source browser, there are 6,000 news stories and 50,000 blog postings on "Google Chrome." It is also the top trending topic on Twitter. They've clearly reached their target audience and created excitement over a browser with a big vision, but limited feature differentiation from Mozilla Firefox and IE. Their marketing team rocked. How did they sell the vision?

Comic Book
Google produced a sophisticated comic book that explained the problem and vision in simple terms. The comic was drawn by Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics. The comic appears to have been distributed to reporters both in online and physical formats prior to the beta launch of Google Chrome. Google distributed the comic under the Creative Commons license. This led to a viral distribution of the comic online even before Google released their own version online. Writers scanned the physical comic book into digital format and released their own version of it. In my opinion, the comic book was the most innovative and effective technique Google used.

Corporate Blog
Google stoked the media fires by pushing out information on their official corporate blog at 10pm on September 1, Labor Day. The post was done by Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director. The Google blog is enabled with Site Feed subscriptions and a link to their YouTube channel.

Wikipedia
Someone created a stub file for Google on Wikipedia at 4:17pm on September 1, Labor Day. Twelve hours later, before the start of the business day on Tuesday, there are 100 edits to Wikipedia and there is a fully-formed Wikipedia entry for Google Chrome.

YouTube Technical HowTO Videos
With each passing month, Google seems to master the art of pushing out complex technical information on YouTube. The Google Chrome videos are an average of 20 seconds long and are focused only on closeups of screen shots. Fantastic. Remember, it is usually easier to make things longer. They seem to be experimenting with the proper length for videos and are getting closer to the ideal. The videos on technical features are neatly organized on an uncluttered page.

YouTube Videos Technical Vision Human Story
Google also released "The story behind Google Chrome," a 4:50 minute video that featured their development team talking on different technical aspects of Google Chrome. They got everyone on-message about why a browser was developed and the three key issues it addresses: 1) Speed; 2) Stability; 3) Security.

YouTube Video Press Conference
Google held a physical press conference, videotaped the conference and put it up on YouTube.

Twitter
Google Chrome is the number one trending topic on twitter, ahead of Sarah Palin and McCain. With so many channels of information pushed out to the public, Google was able to leverage tens of thousands of bloggers and Twitter users. Before the week is over, the viral effect may reach hundreds of thousands of these community publishers using blogs and micro-blogs.

Messaging
Considering the number of communication channels used, Google's organization of the messaging was phenomenal. The browser brings web applications closer to desktop applications by improving speed, stability and security.

Note: I've updated this information on a new post on the Page One PR corporate blog. Check it out here.

Internet Visions - Profile on Nori Nishigaya

2008-09-03T07:41:00.000-07:00

Andrew "Nori" Nishigaya

Currently head of solutions architecture for AbeBooks in Victoria, BC, Canada. This company was recently acquired by Amazon.com

Former CEO of CyberTechnologies International, a pioneering ISP and web architecture firm with offices in Tokyo and Silicon Valley.

Craig: When did you get involved with online communities?

Nori: I got started with online communities when I was very young. Back in my youth I remember working all summer at some crappy job to save enough money to buy an Apple ][+ computer with a modem (300 baud!). I knew I wanted to explore this new computer thing, and I also knew that a modem was this wonderful mystic device that would allow me to connect to other places.

One day I was on a BBS called The Citadel. And in the middle of looking around, the screen went blank and I saw the words "Hey, what's up?" pop up. It took me a minute to figure out that this was a live human being on the other end, the sysop, talking to me. It was so unexpected and I was so surprised. That was the moment I became hooked.

Skip forward a year or so. I had convinced my parents to get me my own phone line (to stop those pesky connection drops when someone picked up the other phone...), and I had launched my own BBS using Wildcat (BBS software for the Apple). It soon became quite popular and I found myself at the center of a very vibrant but still very fringe community.

Craig: What was the original interest with online communities?

Nori: Back then the whole BBS scene was fringe and underground. Only a few people from each school around my hometown participated, but we formed a community of friends from around the state [of Alaska]. It was amazing that a group of people that would have never met in real life became a community of budding programmers, phone phreaks and hackers. It was the first clues to what the global internet would become in a few decades, but back then it was fighting through busy signals, auto-dialing your favorite BBS numbers hoping to get on and read messages and post. Interestingly, I became closest friends with those with whom I started out having the most intense flamewars.

Craig: What was your early vision about where online communities would head?

Nori: Back then the community seemed a lot more tight knit. We were not really global due to the barrier of long distance calls. Back then you dialed up local numbers and the communities were people that you could (and sometimes did) drive out and meet at a local Denny's or something for a face to face meeting. Today online communities are much more anonymous and less personal, though that is changing a bit with social networking sites that focus on friends and chains of friends instead of interacting with total strangers.

Many years later, I found myself in Tokyo and in the middle of the next wave - the Internet. That was a pretty exciting time being at the ground floor of the public Internet opening up in Japan. Back then it was really hard to explain to friends why I left a good job at Mitsubishi to start my own tiny company. No one knew what an ISP was, or a web page. Today, of course, everyone uses the Internet in Japan and it's an indispensable part of everyday life. But back then it was virtually unknown.

One thing that sticks out in my mind is co-founding the Tokyo Linux Users Group. My ISP was started up running on Linux. Back then it was something like kernel 0.98 patch level 12. Distributions still came out on floppy disks. Using this new operating system running a Unix-like environment was just as exciting as the Internet, and a few of us early adopters got together regularly to eat pizza, drink beer and talk about this wonderful operating system. We'd show each other tips and tricks and spend hours getting X-windows up and running. Good times. This was a community that bridged online and offline interactions and I really enjoyed participating.

Craig: How do you define an online community today?

Nori: Things continue to evolve and change, but an online community is any place in cyberspace where people with shared interests can come together to share ideas, exchange information and share.

Craig: Are you still involved in online communities?

Nori: I've gone pretty main stream. My primary community today is Facebook. I also run and maintain a forum for some friends who all met in an online massively multi player game called Everquest. We've long since stopped playing EQ, but we meet now and then on other games like WoW or Conan or Lord of the Rings Online. The forum is a place to keep in touch and let everyone know what game we're currently playing. It's amazing that the same group of people have been in touch for over 10 years just because of a game. Many of us have never even met face to face.

Craig: How do you organize the different types of online communities?

Nori: I think we're seeing that the best way to organize an online community is not to. Let the people in the community self organize and give them the tools to shape it in the ways that they find fits their needs. Like Gibson said, "The street always finds it's own use for things." Provide the tools and people will mash things up and make amazing derivative or even completely new things from it.

Learning to Blog

2008-09-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

As part of my blogging education, I've installed Google Analytics on my blogger account. I must be a marketing weenie in my core because I love this free tool. I was surprised that installing Google Analytics on Blogger wasn't a GUI-driven process. Fortunately, there's a lot of information out on the Internet on combining the services.

The Social Media Surfer started a week ago and I've received 41 Absolute Unique Visitors. Since I'm also evaluating changes to our corporate site, I compared the two sites for the same time period. Page One PR received 203 visitors with 8% of the traffic going to the Social Media services section and 21% of the traffic going to the front page.

Average time spent on Social Media Surfer is 4 minutes compared to the 2 minutes and eight seconds that the average person spent on the Page One PR site.

Social Media Sufer had 13 visits from twitter.com referrals, 10 from blogger.com, and 10 from edelman.com.

Page One PR had 92 visits from Google organic searches, 17 from blogger.com, 12 from twitter.com and 7 from the InfoWorld blog.

My initial blogging education is fascinating. After a brief look at Google Analytics, I feel that I could drive more traffic to Page One PR through a set of simple guidelines. I'll explain more on this in the future as the Social Media Surfer continues his journey through the uncharted storm systems of Web 2.0.

By the way, do you think it is a good idea for me to post statistics on Page One PR's corporate web site traffic? I'm curious to hear what people think. My thinking is that the raw numbers are available from tools like compete and alexa.

Predicting Social Media Trends

2008-09-02T08:47:00.000-07:00

For years, I've studied swell forecasts at Surfline.com. I try to predict the shape and size of the waves before driving to the beach. Each beach responds to the wind, swell angle, and tide differently. Forecasting starts with knowledge of what has happened in the past and what variables affect the waves. Prediction is still imprecise. However, by understanding how waves are created and the historical conditions of each beach, I have a far better chance of finding the beach that works for me.

I feel that predicting trends in Social Media will be much easier if I look at activities in the historical context of other Internet trends. For many people, the "Aha," moment of the Internet came in a powerful flash that opened their eyes to the potential of this great communications network. I've seen that moment in hundreds of people. The critical element for most people is that their great defining moment of Internet understanding revolved around communicating with another person. For all the hype around Cisco and now Google, the Internet is a hollow, empty pipe without people. Cloud computing, SOA and mashups be damned, the real action is about how the new wave of Internet apps is making it easier for people to exchange ideas with other people.

I spent Labor Day weekend talking to my friends that were true pioneers in the development of the Internet, people like John Savageau a man that has been pursuing a vision of global Internet exchanges for 15 years and is a leader in carrier-neutral networks.

I also spoke to Nori Nishigaya, an early ISP pioneer who is now a software architect for a major Internet site.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Social Media Surfer to learn more about the passion, dedication, and dreams that led to the development of Internet infrastructure needed to create the social media systems we enjoy today.

Power to the People in Online Communities

2008-08-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

Soon, a small group of us will celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the birth of the first public-access ISP in Asia. The ISP was the result of the Twics online community in Tokyo, Japan. In mid-September of 1993, Tim Burress connected a VAX VMS system in Tokyo to the public Internet and in doing so, brought a vibrant community of hundreds of people online to the world. Oh, and what a world it was, a freewheeling frontier of cyberspace being built by the most interesting people in the world moving at the speed of a rocket.

Although it is true that the real action was happening in the United States and that most of the Internet innovation at the time sprang out of the US networks, it is also true the the work of small organizations like Twics was critical to make the Internet a truly global network, not one that was isolated to the US and some research posts in Europe. With the ubiquity of the global Internet today, its hard to imagine that at one point, countries were very much isolated from each other with groups of people that were not able to communicate easily with people in other countries. The global spread of the Internet was a dream. It was a dream of a global community of people. The slogan of Twics, the first public-access ISP in Japan, didn't relate to networks, performance or connectivity. The slogan was, "The People are the system."

I remember talking to people like Jeff Shapard of PSINet, John Savageau of Sprint, and Nori Nishigaya of Cyber Technologies about the dream of a global online community, a place where people could freely share information. In many ways, we could say that the dream has blossomed. People are sharing information freely, across country boundaries, with little regard to race, age, gender, or experience. People in the community are judged on the power of their ideas.

The creation of information has moved from a centralized group of publishers to the thousands of people in the community. In many cases, government censorship has eroded in the course of a decade.

There seems to a grand proliferation of new tools for social networking that appear to me to be tools to foster online communities. However, I'm an old-school online community evangelist and I wonder if I'm viewing the world through a biased eye. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I still hang out on brainstorms run by Howard Rheingold and team. I still think back to the days when he was writing the book The Virtual Community. I still get excited, raise my voice, and make wild gestures with my arms when talking about the changes to society driven by the new freedom all people connected to the Internet have found of being able to express thoughts and ideas.

I still believe, as I always have for the last 15 years, that the time of the online community is now.

What do you think?

Social Media and Measurement

2008-08-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

I feel a common bond with my chiropractor. We're both in a profession with a bad rap. There's a lot of information out on the Internet about how bad chiropractors are. There's also quite a bit of negative baggage with the PR profession. One of my favorite films is Days of Wine and Roses, a movie that tells the story of Joe Clay, a San Francisco PR man with ethical struggles and a drinking problem.

Personally, I think that both my chiropractor and me are doing a great job. He documents the pains that go away and I count clips. We're using metrics to show the value of our work, something that Joe Clay in the movie wanted to do, but was never allowed to.

I think that Joe would have liked social media. It's all about metrics. This is something I didn't understand until a few months ago. Social media tools are like a dream come to reality for marketers. Unlike traditional advertisements or story placements, social media tools can provide clear metrics for media consumption. While traditional advertising and PR relies on number of placements and reach of circulation, social media tools rely on actual views.

YouTube videos have a number of metrics that can be counted. The most important metric is video views. Subscription, number of raters, rating and various responses can also be measured. Views on Blogger can be analyzed in great detail by integrating Google Analytics into the blog template. Twitter subscriptions can be counted and there is a ton of information on each invidual subscriber by going to their Twitter feed.

The tools of social media all come with great ways to measure metrics. This doesn't mean that social media is better than advertising or traditional print and online PR. It does mean that it is easier to show the value of a piece of work to skeptical people. This is something that not only Joe Clay, but also my chiropractor would appreciate.

IPOs Plummet as Venture Capitalists Cry

2008-08-26T15:44:00.000-07:00

IPOs are plummeting and the venture capital community is whining about a crisis in the capital market. There were no IPO's in Q2 of 2008, the big goose egg. There were only five IPO's in Q1 of 2008, still grim.

The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) even issued a press release to make it clear that we're in a crisis. I say, "we," because I view our type of PR business as a supporting service of venture capital ecosystem. Ultimately, a lack of IPO's has got to hurt PR companies, right?

Well yes, but we haven't felt it yet. The demand for PR services in Silicon Valley remains strong. I'm not just pounding the chest here. It appears that PR agencies in general, our esteemed competitors included, are expanding and doing well. Is this the last hurrah before the fall? Somehow, it just doesn't feel that way. I've watched technology cycles in Silicon Valley for 20 years. There are always the predictors of gloom at the end of each cycle, the bust after the boom. Somehow, people just keep working and inventing cool technologies.

To me, it's the most exciting time in Silicon Valley in the past five years. I see real applications of technology, not just the vision. There are a gazillion, real and valuable services and apps in the cloud. Every day there seems to be more.

I think that the slack in the IPOs is due to the changing taste of people for IPO investment. People want real businesses to invest in, not just vision. All that energy that went into painting grandiose visions is being put into usable products, not slideware.

A shout out to my friends in the VC community, don't cry, the party will be raging in the second half of 2009.

Social Media Business Growth

2008-08-25T13:43:00.000-07:00

Thinking of joining the wave of businesses offering social media services? It's still early days, which could be a good sign for social media surfers searching for uncrowded career spots to claim as their own. This could be the career equivalent of buy low and sell high. Time spent now developing social media skills and a personal brand might lead to big returns in the future.

A quick look at revenue numbers shows that the leading firms are in the $5 to $10M range in annual revenue, a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars that traditional PR firms can make.

Of the companies listed above, Shift Communications, FutureWorks, and Voce have the strongest focus on social media. Although the numbers are small, they are growing rapidly and are significant enough to prove that viable businesses can be built around social media.

Interested in riding the social media wave? Contact me.

Dawn Patrol in Capitola

2008-08-22T11:47:00.000-07:00

I paddled out to the surf at Capitola at dawn, still dark, before the sun peeked above the horizon. The ocean surface was glassy. There were only two guys out surfing, trading waves and engaged in the light conversation of the line-up that allowed anyone to leave the talk without having to acknowledge a goodbye. Flocks of seabird, pelicans and commorants, skimmed the surface of the water in graceful formations, The waves were good.

Ocean waves are started by storms far out to sea that create dips and peaks in the ocean surface that we can swells. The swells travel hundreds of miles before reaching shore and transforming into waves.

As a public relations man, I often think about waves of communication, trends in the public interest that ebb and flow, seemingly random like the waves breaking at Capitola, but often generated by events distant in both time and place. Each event or action by an organization creates a ripple in the stream of public communication. Like a pebble thrown into a pond, the actions of organizations expand out in concentric circles, interfering with and adding to the millions of other actions out there.

I watch waves for hours while sitting on my surfboard, waiting for the good waves that I can launch myself into. I watch them with fascination and intesity. I also watch the interaction of media events, the technologies that sometimes change the world, and above all the great people that make for fascinating stories.

In my job as a partner at a Silicon Valley PR, I've been trying to catch the new wave of Social Media. I've been paddling hard, taking videos, using Twitter, and experimenting with blogs. I've yet to get in the groove and be able to nurse the wave for all its worth.

I've started to watch the new Social Media waves and intend to catch and successfully ride my fair share. I'm hoping that you'll decide to come along for the ride.