Photo courtesy of maggiejumps via Flickr

It’s sometimes brought up as a harsh truth for public relations and marketing professionals: social media “doesn’t scale.” If you monitor blogs and social sites for mentions of your brand, the more comments you notice, the more time and effort it takes to respond to them in a timely fashion.

Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang last week told an audience at South by Southwest Interactive, “you can never hire enough community managers” to respond to mentions of your brand quickly enough. Read it all..

Photo courtesy of Jon Hanson via Flickr

 For a while now, I’ve been writing about how public relations professionals can use social metrics such as links, comments and votes on social news sites to determine which blogs and sites represent the most influential voices on a particular topic. 

It’s easy to get mired in the muck of all these numbers. So Cision Media Research Director Valerie Lopez and I will use a metaphor to illustrate how these metrics relate to each other in a free webinar on social media measurement next Tuesday, March 16 at 1 p.m. CST.   Read it all..

Last week, I presented Targeting the Media, a free Cision webinar, with Director of Media Research Valerie Lopez. The webinar examined how to reach the appropriate media and develop relationships with journalists. We received a lot of great questions, some of which we didn’t get a chance to answer during the presentation. We’ve tackled a couple of them here instead.

Read it all..

American Idol contestants provide a case study in social capital

In many of Cision’s free social media webinars, we frequently receive questions about how to get more followers on Twitter, Facebook and other top social networks. My answer usually consists of two parts:

1. Quality vs. Quantity: It’s not just a numbers game on these sites. There are lots of get-rich-quick tricks to getting a lot of followers – but if they aren’t loyal followers, they will not be inclined to take action or act as a brand ambassador. Building quality relationships with a smaller community will get you much further in the new world of building social capital.
2. Authentic Involvement. Act as a member of the community by actually having conversations with friends and fans, sharing helpful ideas, links and stories and answering and asking questions as they arise. Comment on influential bloggers’ posts in your industry, create a list of your favorite Tweeters or create something of value within your social network for friends and fans to take advantage of. These actions will build your social capital and you will watch your community grow.

These are definitely best practices, but, in reality, does a larger number of followers ever produce better results solely because of sheer size? Well, we may soon know the answer.

The behemoth machine that is American Idol has always kept a pretty tight reign on the messaging coming from its contestants. In past years, contestants were not allowed to maintain public profile pages on the top social networks – this year, Fox gave each semi-finalist a controlled MySpace, Facebook and Twitter profile, according to Reality Blurred. Read it all..

Photo courtesy of D'Arcy Norman via Flickr

 Often, people ask us what it takes to make something “go viral”. Some social media strategists will tell you that online virality, where thousands or millions of people are discussing and linking to a blog post or video at once, is too high a goal for PR and marketing professionals to attain. When the volume of conversations around a topic or event spikes into the stratosphere online, that’s an organic phenomenon that cannot be engineered, they say. 

Nonetheless, achieving mass exposure for a brand or product remains the goal of many professional communicators. The ability to position a campaign to spread by word of mouth is an important skill, and yet for most of us it seems elusive. Perhaps thinking about the role of conflict in storytelling is a good place to start.    Read it all..

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In the week since Google announced its newest social Web tool, Google Buzz, bloggers have been doing what bloggers do when a new tool arrives: expressing their excitement, exposing its flaws, debating its significance and impact on competitors, and so forth.

Using the Cision Social Media Dashboard, I analyzed about 200,000 blog posts, tweets, forum posts, videos and other social messages online discussing the launch of Google Buzz, which integrates new social features into Gmail. Below are the 10 most influential blog posts based on a formula which weighs three factors in decreasing order of importance: comment count, inbound links and votes on social bookmarking sites like Digg. (I chose to employ that specific formula but there is plenty of flexibility in the Dashboard regarding how you choose to weigh influence.) Read it all..

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Companies that go looking for reasons not to monitor and engage with social media sometimes wind up with what sound more like excuses: rigid cultures, time constraints, organizational siloes, and so forth. But one common objection that is harder to overcome is fairly specific to the healthcare and pharmaceutical space: an uncertain regulatory landscape.  

Despite a lack of direction from regulators, some firms have experimented with social marketing projects online, says Christiane Truelove, editor in chief of R&D Directions and Med Ad News, who covers what companies are doing with healthcare and pharmaceutical promotion in social media. With some tips from Truelove, I’ve been looking at these case studies and present for you 5 of the best I’ve found from the past couple of years. Read it all..

Photo courtesy of Pratheepps via Wikipedia

One of the most common questions PR professionals ask me is how to deal with criticism of their brands on the social Web. Books, blogs and conferences have been covering the topic of “social media crisis communications” for 2 to 3 years now, and the advice doesn’t seem to change much: listen, respond quickly, apologize and fix it.

As more companies have attempted social outreach online, the general level of anxiety about these swells of contempt toward brands seems to grow amongst communications professionals. Read it all..

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One of the many things The Jetsons got wrong about the future of American life when the show first aired in 1963 was that advances in technology would lead to fewer tasks for workers. (I am also still waiting for my flying car.) George Jetson’s job as a “digital index operator” requires him to push a single button for 3 hours a day, 3 days a week.

To be fair, here in the year 2010 we are only about halfway from 1963 to the setting of The Jetsons, which takes place in the year 2062. But while communications technology is making our lives more productive and, in the case of public relations professionals, broadening our reach to new audiences, at the same time it is requiring us to push more buttons than ever before. Or at least, that’s how it feels. Read it all..