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..

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 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.

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Figuring out when to pitch a story is half the battle. Magazine editors constantly remind PR professionals to be conscious not only of deadlines but of the long lead times. Although it’s February and magazine editors may wear snow boots and down jackets to work, once they sit down at their desk, they’re crafting stories about sailboats and summer.

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 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..

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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..

Mediaweek recently reported that Conde Nast is scrambling to keep pace with initiatives from other publishing companies such as Hearst, Time Inc. and Hachette by introducing ideas branching beyond the pages of a magazine. One specific idea mentioned was keeping the brand names alive of shuttered magazines such as Gourmet and Domino by branding them on products like kitchen appliances. Read it all..