Archive for June, 2009

Image credit: Ley Photography

Brand sponsored social media campaigns are popping up everywhere. From SeaWorld, Starbucks, and Dunkin’ Donuts, to Cadbury, A&E, and even Universal, it’s officially the hot trend to replace or supplement traditional marketing campaigns with social media.

According to Forrester Research’s  Social Technographics update 76% of all US Internet users are active on social media and 93 of them expect companies to have a socal media presence.  A presence – not pass by occassionally with a marketing campaign that begins and ends.

But some marketers pay only lip service to the new media environment. The fact that they’re conducting campaigns with a start date and an end date shows that they view online  in the same way they see other channels.

Talking about the Maybelline Lash Stiletto campaign Kristine Cavanaugh of Social Arc says: “I built amazing relationships with bloggers and I actually felt a bit sad at the end of the campaign.”  P&G did the Crest White strips campaign on Facebook and gathered 14,000 college kids as fans – and then it ended.

Huggies on the other hand have partnered with Circle of Moms to create Huggies Zone, a social media program that’s built around engaging with potential customers, not just trying to market to them.  The content on Huggies Zone will include an expert advice column, a mom-to-mom forum with relevant tips, age specific diaper information, parenting polls, and ways for parents to share their baby photos, reports Mashable.

Image Credit: Jurvetson

Never have CEOs been under so much scrutiny.  Nearly half of a company’s reputation is attributable to its CEO, says the Burson-Marstellar “Building CEO Capital” report.  And ninety-two percent of business decision makers who view a CEO favorably are also likely to maintain confidence in a company, even if its share price lags.

During difficult and demanding times, a favorable CEO reputation is an insurance policy – it buys precious extra time and acts as a hedge of confidence.

Seven out of 11 industries saw their reputation decline in 2008 and 16 of the companies with the worst marks fell even further, according to the Harris Interactive Reputation QuotientTM (RQ) survey.

“What the RQ survey has shown in recent years is that companies that pay attention to enhancing their reputation see bottom line results. The companies with a good reputation have stayed near the top of the list and those with bad reputations have gotten worse,” says Robert Fronk, Senior Vice President, Senior Consultant, Reputation Strategy at Harris Interactive.
With the explosion of social media and online news, the place people are most likely to look for information about your company, and your CEO, is on the Internet. Online reputation and personal brand management is a must for CEOs today.

These are the areas  the RQ survey focus on that influence consumer behavior

* Social Responsibility
* Emotional Appeal
* Financial Performance
* Products & Services
* Vision & Thought Leadership

How does your CEO measure up? Do you have an online brand building program in place?

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Image Credit: Cod Gabriel.

Social Media moves at a rapid pace.  Changes in behavior happen much faster than we’re accustomed to.  It’s important to stay ahead of the curve and have your finger on the social media pulse, so that you don’t make mistakes in your planning due to operating off old numbers.

Augie Ray calls out a few marketers who have made statements about social media demographics and behavior patterns  that are either just wrong, or way out of date.

And yes, just one year is way out of date when you’re talking about social media.  A prospective client asked me this week if his lack of interest in Facebook and online networking was typical of his age group.  A year ago I might have said yes.  Forrester’s social technographics scale, first published in April 2007, showed that just over half (52%) of the Internet population was inactive in social media and other studies showed that the over 55s were mainly reading content online, but not participating much  in social  networking.   That’s changed.  By October 2008 the inactive figure had shrunk to 25%.   ‘Silver surfers’, those over 55, are one of the fastest growing segments of the social media enthusiasts.

“The implications of incorrect assumptions and outdated information can be substantial to brand health. The failure to recognize the growth and changes in Social Media is resulting in a lack of urgency around this channel,” writes Ray.

Accurate, up to date information is easily available online. Sites like The Pew Internet and American Life Project, Nielsen Online, emarketer, Econsultancy, comScore and  Forrester Research all do excellent work in this area.  You can use site like Quantcast and Compete to get data.

There are also several bloggers who filter this flood of information – MasterNewMedia is one.  Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist blog is another.

My other blog The Proactive Report focuses on trends, statistics and behavior patterns online.

Successful social media programs depend on accurate research and information.  Find a source that you trust.

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At the PRSA T3 conference Greg Jarboe of  SEO-PR moderated the  panel “Boosting PR Results with SEO, SEM & RSS,” and by a show of hands about one third of the audience said they are optimizing press releases for search.  And while that might sound like a small percentage, theadoption of SEO tactics by PR folk is changing the game.

There are 2000 press releases day issued by the major wire services.  If PR folk adopt SEO at the same rate the marketers did, within a year we should see the number of optimized release move from a third to half in a year.

Take a look at the numbers Greg crunched:

When only 50 press releases per day were being optimized, or 2.5 percent of the total, innovators could kick sand in the face of virtually any competitor. When 320 press releases per day were being optimized, or 16 percent of the total, early adopters could still beat competitors five times out of six. When 1,000 press releases per day are being optimized, or 50 percent of the total, the early majority discover that the innovators and early adopters have moved on to the next tactic.

One of those tactics that’s still in the early phase of adoption is the addition of feeds to news content. (RSS)  At the Marketwire Social Media Roadmap webinar in May, only 8% said they are using feeds to boost their PR results.  Feeds make it possible to reach new audiences, spread the content to social sites, build more links and improve the search visibility of your news content.

Matt Cutts of Google shared some interesting ideas about where search is going in 2009 with Mike McDonald of WebProNews.

Watch the video interview

“Pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content,” said Cutts.  He noted that people will continue to pay attention to video and images in 2009 and that submitting a video to video sitemaps is really helpful in getting onto Google Video Search.

Creating digital news content is now part of the PR ‘hat.’ Building good content can help your company’s SEO efforts,  so share all your content with who ever is responsilbe for your SEO.

Brandweek has an excellent article today on the changing job description of a CMO.

Lynne Seid, a partner for the global marketing practices at Heidrick & Struggles, the recruiting firm and  Tom Kline, chief scientist for the marketing firm Digital Scientists,  interviewed 111 top CMOs in December about digital marketing. They say that the realization that data like searches, trackbacks and tweets add up to valuable marketing data is just hitting a lot of companies right now.

That is true for PR too.  As the online world changes the media landscape and what influences people, we find that we need new skills.  One of those skills is understanding search engine optimization and search trends, so our nrws content gets seen in the right places.

Google has a wealth of data and they make it freely available.  All you have to do is learn how to use their tools.  Why ‘fly blind’ when tapping into online data can give you  insights into what people are interested in right now.

Google Trends can tell you what search terms are popular, which are rising and which are falling out of favor.  Here is a Google Trends graph for the phrase skin care.

As you can see, the general web search figures are on a slow decline.  But skin care has become a rising news search term.  Google Insights for Search tells us that the top related search is skin care products and the top rising search term right now is exposed skin care – up 300%!  The top rising search term a month ago was organic skin care.

How can you use this data?  Write your news content around these rising search terms.  It makes sense that as summer approaches people become concerned about exposure and skin care.  However, without Google’s insights, I would not have picked exposed skin care as a phrase.  A news release about skin care products for exposed skin should do very well right  now.

Not sure how to do all this?  The PRESSfeed News Optimization Toolbar ( a free download) has detailed instructions on how to optimize news for search and it has links to all the tools, like Google Trends and Google Insights for Search, that you’ll need to develop this modern PR skill.

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Image credit: R. Rasmussen

In a Q&A interview with Paul Smalera on True/Slant Jennifer Preston, NYTimes social media editor said the conversation, the tips,  and the ability to monitor trends has all been helpful to their reporting.

Leah Betancourt, digital community manager at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minn.writes in a post for Mashable that social networking sites are some of the newest tools reporters are using in news gathering, networking and promoting their work.

Some newsrooms have created guidelines for using social media tools

Editor & Publisher reports that The Wall Street Journal has expanded its conduct guidelines to include online-related restrictions, including warnings not to “friend” confidential sources or get into Web-related arguments with critics. Others are debating whether to, and how to, control usage of sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

One of the issues that has arisen is reporters tweeting about stories before they appear in print, giving bloggers and online news sites an opportunity to jump on the story.

Looking at the list of newspapers  mentioned in the E&P article, one hting is clear: journalists are using Twitter, Facebook and other social sites to tap into conversations, find trends and sources and gather the news.

And for PR practitioners, understanding social media and becoming adept at using these online services to interact with journalists is now an essential PR skill.

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A new study from BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners shows that 75% of the women online are involved in social networking. But one figure that stood out for me was that women who used blogs were more than twice as likely to do so when they were seeking information, advice and recommendations than were women who participated in social networks.

When providing advice or contributing to a community, more women also turned to blogs than social networks.

In fact, women are so enthusiastic about reading and writing blogs, they are stealing time from other media to spend more time in the blogosphere and on social network sites.

“Bloggers represent a highly engaged and influential segment of social media users for brand marketers looking to connect to consumers online,” said Susan Wright, president of Compass Partners.

What content would be of interest to bloggers right now?

“All bloggers, like any other media out there, want to be relevant to their audience and their community,” said Eliza Camahort Page in an interview with eMarketer. ” And a lot of their audience and community not only may have less money, but they may have less time to spend being entertained by all of us bloggers because they’re worried about their job or they’re now working two jobs. So you’ll see a lot of bloggers starting to incorporate recession-oriented content into what they do.”

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While most old media is declining, NPR’s audience has grown 47 percent since 2000, according to figures from Arbitron, reports The Washington Post. More than half of NPR’s daily audience comes from its two “core” news shows, “Morning Edition” and the evening “All Things Considered.”

What’s their secret?  Mashable’s analysis of their success suggests a three pronged approach:

Local news: as newspaperw wither and die, and commercial radio abandons local news, NPR steps in.

Early use of social media: NPR”s Twitter account has over 780,000 followers, making it one of the top 25 on the social network

Making content available on many channels and devices: People do not want to be tied to a time and a place to listen to content. NPR lets listeners access their content on their own terms. One example is the new  mix your own podcast tool, which lets listeners create their own programming schedule from NPR’s audio archives.

Any business can emulate these ideas.  As Bryan Clarke of Copyblogger said on the Social Media Success Summit 09: “Every business has to  create and distribute content.  Think of yourself as a media producer first.  Put out helpful, useful content and you’ll build an audience that trusts you”

Your most important skill in social media is the ability to observe.

What do people need?  What content are they looking for to help them solve a problem?  How can your company help them?

Provide that content and you too will build a loyal audience.

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According to Pew Research audiences for most traditional news sources have steadily declined, as the number of people getting news online has surged.

Recent figures from Nielsen show that in 2008 the number of people getting news online passed those reading newspapers and it’s headed for an intersection with TV in the future.

Since the early 1990s, the proportion of Americans saying they read a newspaper on a typical day has declined by about 40%; the proportion that regularly watches nightly network news has fallen by half.

Younger audiences are  more accustomed to watching the news on the Internet than on television.

These ‘Net-Newsers’ are the youngest of the news user segments (median age: 35). They’re are affluent and well educated: More than eight-in-ten have at least attended college. Net-Newsers not only rely primarily on the internet for news, they are leading the way in using new web features and other technologies. Nearly twice as many regularly watch news clips on the internet as regularly watch nightly network news broadcasts (30% vs. 18%).

To reach this audience , CBS News announced that it has partnered with UStream, a live video Web site, to simulcast its newscasts and special reports. (via New York Times)

Ustream will feature breaking news coverage several times everyday– presidential press conferences, Congressional hearings, and online-only content and on-air programs such as the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.

This is not CBS’ first foray into social media -Katie Couric already has a YouTube channel and a Twitter feed with 28,486 followers.

Although CBSNews.com already shows many of those live streams, UStream makes the video more interactive – users can comment and chat beside the live coverage and embed the video player on other sites.

PR Lesson: More and more people get their news online.  The younger, well educated and affluent segment get their news almost exclusively online. (92%)   They are social media savvy. The use feeds (RSS) to access news.

Put all your news content online, optimize it for search and syndicate it with feeds.