Now the internet has changed the face of PR and how these professionals are operating. Twitter can disperse news in real -time and the companies who used PR to promote positive relationships or  images for a brand – now have the opportunity to engage directly with their customer and can create relationships that allow those customers to promote those relationships with their friends and family with the speed, breadth and transparency that traditional PR methods just cannot reach.

Interestingly I have had some great meetings with some very skilled PR people in the last few weeks as we here at SHARE – look at our various projects – and the mix of offline and online marcomm tools needed to make a marketing campaign powerful and profitable. There are still many viable uses for PR as well as the integration of social media as a PR tool. Mashable.com has posted an article today by Erica Swallow – who in this post spoke to several PR professionals who provided their take – on the future of long standing PR tools, such as the press release, the evolution of social platforms, building relationships and current limitations with solutions for the challenges that arise leveraging social media.

With the advent of Twitter and sites like HARO  for which I subscribe – where you can help a reporter out by answering to a post, as a source for an article of interest. “Rather than having PR reps make the first moves all the time, now members of the media can put out requests for pitches from particular types of experts.” For me the most powerful statement to that – is that the author Erica Swallow used HARO to write this article and received 200 quality responses. I personally get several HARO feeds daily and am always looking for someone who might be interested in my expertise as part of an article they may be writing.

At the end of the day PR and social media is about the human factor of building and engaging in relationships. Social media has changed that relationship – as it is no longer a one way dialog – but rather one that can be shared “a bonus for both the company and the customer”. Melding the two together can be a powerful duo!

Best Nicole

Public relations specialists were some of the first people to embrace the power of social media, and as a result they are often the ones leading the way in the social space, whether they are consulting with clients from an agency point of view or strategizing on an in-house PR team.

In the past decade, the Internet has had a huge impact on how PR professionals function. As of late, social media is changing the face of PR, as well. We interviewed 14 PR pros on the future of public relations and how they see social media changing the industry. We collected their thoughts on how social media will affect the future of the press release, the evolution of social platforms, current limitations and solutions for those impediments, connecting with other PR pros, cost savings, and building relationships.

The Future of the Press Release

During the past few years, we’ve witnessed a shift towards what some are calling the “social media release.” Services like PitchEngine, PressLift, PRX Builder, and MindTouch are bringing the press release into the new millennium with embedded multimedia and easy distribution through various channels, including social media and e-mail. We asked our PR experts about the future of the traditional long form press release, and we received quite a bit of feedback that showed that while it is here to stay, it will continue to be influenced by the brevity and accessibility of social media.

Amanda Miller Littlejohn, founder of Mopwater Social Public Relations, commented on the importance of the social media release and how it enables readers to share and interact with it:

“While I don’t believe the press release is dead, it has been transformed, to become this living, breathing thing. If a release doesn’t have a social element — that is, a way for viewers to comment or share to their social networks — it doesn’t have legs.”

The format of the press release isn’t the only factor in its evolution. In an e-mail interview, Vice President of BLASTmedia, Lindsay Groepper, discussed how distribution of the press release will continue to be key to its future:

“When I first began my career in PR more than decade ago, we would e-mail or fax (gasp!) the full press release text to the press. What we see now is new methods of distributing the info, driven by social media. Rather than e-mailing a press release, PR people are sending journalists to custom landing pages created just for that specific announcement, contacting them via Twitter with a BUDurl link to the release, or even directing them to a YouTube video with a message from the CEO making the announcement.”

PR professionals are now experimenting with these new distribution channels. Likewise, many are finding that the form of the press release isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for every channel. Vistaprint’s Public Relations Manager Jeff Esposito believes that the press release will continue to evolve into multiple iterations for various audiences, channels, and situations:

“Over the next five years, I think we’ll see three types of press releases that will assist different audiences. The first is in a video format where there will be a short description followed by a link to a video giving information on the news from a company source, hitting on the five W’s and also offering sound-bites that can be used for stories or added to a news story. The second iteration will be a further evolution of the social press release that is being used today, except more brief and more focused. The final is similar to what we see now with company boiler plates, stock quotes and additional information.”

In the end, the press release’s future may simply depend on media consumption trends, according to David McCulloch, director of public relations at Cisco Systems:

“In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a marked shift in [the press release's] format to reflect the accelerating societal shift from mass consumption of media (“push” media) to personalized consumption or “pull” media. That’s a shift that has led Cisco to spend less time telling reporters and bloggers what it is we expect them to write, and more time helping them understand how what Cisco is doing might fit with their interests.

“…[I]t’s pretty clear where the press release will go next: It’s going to get shorter; link to more sources; be focused on simplification and explanation; and it’ll come in many more flavors. Practically speaking (assuming the SEC keeps pace with media evolutions), that means the press release of the future will deliver its content in text, video, SMS, microblog and podcast form, to any choice of device, whenever the reader decides, and preferably it will be pre-corroborated and openly rated by multiple trusted sources.”

Kelly McAlearney, an account supervisor at Edelman Digital, agrees that based on natural progression, the press release will continue to get shorter, for concision’s sake:

“Engagement with journalists and consumers has evolved considerably over the past five years, to shorter formats. Often, we find that our most effective pitches are our most succinct. And interactions have naturally become more concise as many brands are in constant, direct contact with consumer audiences and media via online channels.”

Lou Hoffman, CEO of The Hoffman Agency, brought an interesting perspective to this conversation. He said that the backlinks generated by press releases are reason enough to continue syndicating them, even if the contained information is of little use to the audience. He speculates that if search engines were able to point out and devalue republished news releases and their included backlinks, companies would find better ways of dispersing news:

“I don’t think the news release will die in the foreseeable future, say the next five years. Even if the syndication of this content has little impact on the target stakeholders, they’ll still be generating backlinks, which by themselves deliver a decent ROI.

“Looking beyond five years, I could see the algorithms of search engines becoming smart enough to discern whether a backlink comes from syndicated content, which in turn causes it to greatly reduce the value of the backlink. In other words, even if a news release is syndicated on the Wall Street Journal, with all the “authority” that comes with the site, the search engine figures out that it’s nothing more than a republished news release, so scores the backlink super low. If this happened, we would see the volume of news releases significantly decline.”

The Evolution of Social Platforms

The social media platforms with the most value must be used by a client’s target audience and be a meaningful place for brands to connect with consumers and journalists. Our PR experts said that mass social platforms, like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, will continue to be important on some level, but niche, industry-specific networks will be of greater value in the future.

“The most important platforms for PR pros in the future will be the ones most targeted for their clients,” said Cara Stewart, founder and principal at Remarx Media. “Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are ‘fun;’ getting nitty-gritty into community sites that are industry-specific is less ‘fun,’ because PR pros have to really understand clients’ technologies, business models, services and more. Really, it’s more about PR pros becoming better PR pros and understanding their clients’ businesses, as well as what their clients do … Social media is not a one-size-fits-all solution.”

Social media platforms will continue to evolve, but “A PR person’s job remains the same,” said Heather Whaling, founder and president of Geben Communication. “It’s critical that we’re innovative and staying on top of the latest and greatest; however, we also need to avoid ’shiny object syndrome’ and instead make recommendations based on the client’s business needs.”

Once the industry settles in to a standard for finding the right platforms for each of its clients, the next step is measuring success. Miller Littlejohn pointed out that the PR industry is moving from placing importance on broadcasting to highly valuing monitoring and measurement:

“Right now, the most important tools are the broadcasting tools … But in five years, the most important tools will be the monitoring and measurement tools — the tools that can tell you what happened to your message once it got out there. [T]he tools that can demonstrate (and quickly demonstrate) return on engagement will be winners.

“Free measurement dashboards will also be winners. Right now, there are a few ways to measure mentions of your brands for free, but they are extremely limited in how much and what you can measure at one time. You can pay thousands of dollars per month for a nice platform to measure your brand on the social web, but most smaller brands and small businesses can’t afford that. I think if someone develops a more sophisticated social media and PR measurement and monitoring dashboard and offers it for free, that will be a rock star tool.”

There is also a growing demand for social platforms that make it easier for journalists and PR reps to contact one another. Help a Reporter Out (HARO), PRNewswire’s ProfNet, NewsBasis, and Media Kitty are all enabling the communication lines to run in both directions. Rather than having PR reps make the first moves all the time, now members of the media can put out requests for pitches from particular types of experts. In fact, I used HARO to write this article and received nearly 200 quality responses.

Current Limitations & Solutions

While PR pros are experiencing lots of successes with social media as is it today, our experts pointed out quite a few limitations with the current offering of social platforms that will need to be worked out for continued adoption, understanding and success across the industry.

• Broadcasting vs. Listening: Our experts pointed out that a vast majority of the PR people out there are using social media as a broadcasting tool for sending out press releases and recent client news. The next gen PR pros will use social media as a listening and communicating tool. Scott Bauman, vice president of Greenough Communications, elaborates:
  

  “In the future, I think we’ll see more … real-time interaction that demonstrates the brand is actually listening. This begins to build trust, which is highly valuable and highly perishable. This means continued growth in listening platforms (such as Radian6), but less for reporting (just showing share of voice, for example) … In the end, the real change is a more fluid, immediate, and nimble PR/communications practitioner, instead of one who simply follows a PR plan and rigidly adheres to it.”

• Finding the Right Audience: Many of our experts agreed that while the mass social platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, are useful, the niche, industry-specific communities provide just as much, and sometimes more, value for clients. The current issue, though, is that finding these communities is quite tough and involves a lot of scattered research across the web. In the future, directories with the ability to search for target demographics across a broad range of social networks would make the process of finding the best platforms with the right audiences much easier.
• Imperfect Data: With measurement becoming one of the most important features of social networks for marketers and PR pros, data is the key to enlightenment. “Social media provides a lot of information, but it’s also imperfect data,” said Chuck Tanowitz, founder and principal at PR and social media firm Fresh Ground. “So the trick is knowing what to accept and what to dismiss.”Tanowitz gave the example of the mayor of his home city of Newton, Massachusetts. Mayor Setti Warren has just over 700 followers on Twitter, which wouldn’t put him into the “influencer” category on most social measurement tools. However, in real life, he’s quite influential. Tanowitz notes, “It doesn’t tell you much. Yet, when he got elected [as mayor], he received a call from President Obama, so he obviously has the ear of some influential people. You can’t learn that from Twitter.” For now at least, social measurement data should be taken with a grain of salt.
• Social Stream Aggregation: Nicole VanScoten, a public relations specialist at Pyxl, believes that the future of PR is all about a one-stop social dashboard for easy social media management. She says, “Right now, we’re forced to pay attention to a whole host of different networks. I think we’ll continue to see more aggregation here … People will continue to develop programs that save us time.”Tools like Hootsuite, TweetDeck, CoTweet, Postling, Vitrue, SocialTALK and more, aim to make it easier for businesses posting and monitoring across platforms. While there isn’t one perfect management tool quite yet, over the next five years, it’s probable that one or two clear leaders will emerge.
• Client Buy-In: Lastly, PR pros are still finding it difficult to obtain client buy-in for investment in social media. Currently, a large part of a PR pro’s job involving social media is educating clients of its use and benefits. The solution here is data. As success measurements continue to improve, the case for social media will become much clearer.
  

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  Connecting with Other PR Pros

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  As more and more independent PR professionals launch their own consultancies, the independent PR community at large is becoming an important place for individuals to get advice. Social media is driving those relationships.

  LuAnn Glowacz, an independent PR strategist and founder of PR firm WordCove PR notes, “My most valuable business connections are other independent PR and related professionals in Austin, who I connect with daily on Twitter and Facebook. We refer each other, give advice to each other, co-work and socialize together. It’s like having co-workers and employees while keeping the paycheck all to myself.”

  Glowacs also connects with other PR pros every Wednesday at the #SoloPR Twitter chat, moderated by her colleague and PR/social media consultant, Kellye Crane. Crane also runs a blog and LinkedIn group for Solo PR. Glowacs commented on Solo PR: “In my opinion, it’s the top social media resource for indie PR pros. [It consists of] very high-caliber PR pros from around the country helping and learning from each other.”

  Twitter chats seem to be popular among contemporary PR pros. Stewart and her team at Remarx attend the #B2Bchat on Twitter every Thursday to keep up with social media trends and share their own knowledge of the space. And Whaling co-moderates the popular #pr20chat, a weekly exploration of social media’s influence on public relations.

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  Saving Money and Putting It to Good Use

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  Social media has the ability to save companies lots of money through enhancing traditional and online campaigns. INgage Networks‘ Corporate Communications Manager Kathy Saenz explained how her company saved $270K in expenses via social media. They had previously paid $250K annually for an external PR agency, and $20K in events budgeting for venue, traveling and promotions expenses. They saved all of that money by bringing their PR in-house and focusing on social media. Instead of running large events at expensive venues, they now run webinars. Of their latest webinar, Saenz said, “It was a targeted B2B audience we wanted to reach; [we] broke record attendance numbers. We didn’t have to pay for anything as a result. Great exposure and big money saved.”

  For PR professionals, social media also saves time and money by yielding higher response rates to pitches. VanScoten explained:

  “It’s amazing to me that I get a MUCH higher response rate when pitching reporters via Twitter than e-mail. I would actually go as far as to say that every time I’ve pitched a reporter via Twitter, I have gotten some sort of response (often resulting in a story for my client). Via e-mail, I have maybe a 50% response rate. The phone call response rate would be my lowest.”

  As these success stories become more publicized and the PR industry begins to see the cost savings behind social media, it’s inevitable that the stragglers will jump on the bandwagon.

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  The Human Factor

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  No matter which tools PR pros use to connect with media members, the most important factor is the human factor. Public relations and social media are both about creating and fostering relationships. Our PR experts agreed and emphasized the fact that personal relationships will continue to propel the bond between social media and PR.

  Dave Delaney, social media coordinator at Griffin Technology explained, “Today, not only can we send a press release to a valuable group of media contacts, but we can now take that message wider using social media. Whether our communication is a press release, blog post, or a tweet, the important thing is remaining relevant and engaging our friends, fans and followers.”

  Emphasizing relationships, Hoffman also discussed his agency’s use of social media:

  “We’re definitely using social media to connect with journalists and customers, but this outreach involves a news release maybe 20% of the time tops. The other 80% of the time we’re talking with journalists, bloggers and other influencers about issues and macro topics. In short, we devote most of our outreach to helping our clients serve as industry and business sources, as opposed to promoting their products.”

  McAlearney reiterated the importance of building relationships with influencers. “Regardless of how an announcement is shared -– via wire, blog post, tweet, or otherwise –- the critical step has historically been, and will remain, the human element. By directly reaching out to key media and influencers with whom we maintain relationships, we’re able to ensure their timely awareness of the news.”

  Groepper backed up that point in saying that “Despite the changing landscape of press release distribution, the most effective communication for a PR person still remains unchanged: Building relationships with the most influential press in your space. Having key relationships is what helps drive the type of media the client is seeking, and no press release can accomplish that in its place.”

  “In truth we’re talking about the same positive PR practices that good PR people have been doing for decades,” Tanowitz concluded, “They read and understand their target audience, then help craft stories that speak to and with that audience.”

Some of the ways we at Share demonstrate our social media savvy include: Writing on our blog most weeks (five days a week), yes we use Twitter and Facebook, and yes we have been able to build successful social media campaigns that integrate both offline, online and in-store marketing initiatives. We read other blogs and participate and comment. We are using  our experience by being out there everyday—to help us find the way that will best get you the results that you need because we created a strategy. Maybe it doesn’t involve Facebook and Twitter…maybe it is a viral video or an email campaign that is integrated into a microsite that includes a poll and comments on a blog. We are going to assess what you are doing on the front end but we are also going to look at the online commerce strategy you have planned and our experience from a search engine marketing/optimization perspective to leverage a way to find you success.

Tim Burrows, the author of the blog Mumbrella, from Australia, writes a most clever and clear account of what can happen when an agency with no social media experience creates a social media campaign: How Saachi & Sacchi’s Toyota social media disaster unfolded.

Yes. You need to get into the game of social media and when you have success, it will be because you partnered with someone who has social media savvy. If not, and you just decide to get into the game yourself, understand how it works by being there. As the article states “It is not the social media that becomes the reason for success it is the lack of social media savvy”

How social media savvy do you plan to be?

Best Nicole

PS. The attached article is some what long but worth every bit of time to read!

Toyota’s now disastrous foray into social media offers a demonstration of what skills an agency needs to play in that space.  

It’s now obvious that PR expertise is not an optional extra that ad agencies having a bit of a dabble in social media can do without. Although advertising has always had the potential to be controversial, for social media that possibility grows exponentially and that risk needs to be controlled.

And as Saatchi & Saatchi has demonstrated, it now goes without saying that you actually need to understand social media before you start. You can’t start learning on the client’s time.

For Toyota, I still think that running a live social media pitch with the five competing campaigns was a good thing. Even without this week’s events, it will have learned a lot. And by doing it in the public arena, the entire marketing industry got to learn too.

Where it went wrong was in giving too much leeway to an agency with little apparent social media experience and seemingly too little risk control to accompany that.

As an aside, it was interesting to note that another agency on the shortlist was Oddfellows, a long term partner of Toyota. A traditionally based agency, Oddfellows didn’t have the hubris to claim to be able to understand social media on its own. It partnered with social media agency The Population.

Saatchi & Saatchi apparently decided it could fly solo. Rather like many media planners think they’d make a good creative, I wonder if Saatchis thought social media was easier than it was.

It began to go wrong for Saatchis very early in the process. For starters, a film competition is such a tired idea. There was no twist. The brief was simply: make a film featuring a Yaris, and win a relatively small amount of money.

The accompanying Facebook page felt that it was being moderated by somebody who had just discovered the internet, and was catching up on the last few years’ memes. It posted links to the likes of the OK Go treadmill music video, the Johnnie Walker Robert Carlyle ad and “Guy catches glasses with face”. All great virals, but also familiar to anyone who’d spent much time online in the last year like the target audience. It didn’t position the Facebook group as somewhere to go to catch the latest and hottest.

No wonder then that as rival agencies’ Yaris campaigns began to get up stream, the Clever Film Comp got stuck on the grid. Facing the embarrassing prospect of no entries, the agency abandoned the idea of genuine user generated content, and with it what many would consider social media authenticity.

It forwarded this email to production house contacts:

From: Rob

Subject: Clever Comp

Hey creative people

I’ve got something that you’ll (or your housemates, brothers, sisters, artistic friends etc will) be interested in.

It’s a film comp in aide of promoting Toyota Yaris.

“A film comp? I don’t have the time!” you may say, but listen up. So far, NO ONE has entered and it has been open for more than 10 days and closes 1st December. Voting is done on hits and comments so if you’re in first you have a huge advantage. And you don’t have to make an ad, just put a Yaris in somewhere a la the ‘number 8′ or ’spring’ in Tropfest or something

First prize is $7,000. $3,000 for second and $1,000 for 3rd. At this stage, you could enter a picture of your cat playing in his kitty litter and win 7 grand.

Details are in the attachments. If you win, I’d love an all carbon fibre road bicycle for Christmas.

Cheers y’all.

-Rob

As a result, this skewed the entries. If you promote the competition as an ad agency to your production house contacts then what you’re going to get back are slick would-be commercials, rather than short films. This was, as we now know, to prove important.

It certainly suggests that by this point the agency’s aim was to avoid the embarrassment of having very few entries for its contest, rather than to run an authentic, engaging competition.

When The Brand Shop’s Peter Bray wrote a guest posting for us on the contest, he placed the campaign in fifth place. He asked:

“Perhaps the account management and build was put together by interns? The Twitter followers are embarrassingly low, as are the number of Facebook followers. It seems a scattergun approach was used to build participation. Twitter appeared to be used for little purpose, as did Facebook, so why these platforms were even implemented has to be called into question. A social media campaign doesn’t have to use either Twitter or Facebook; there is no need to try and be everywhere. So combining the fact that the budget seems to be overly stretched, together with the dated mechanic and low level of participation means this campaign comes in fifth. Saatchi & Saatchi are definitely capable of better.”

As it happens, Saatchis haven’t returned calls on this issue throughout the process and certainly not since the crisis erupted (I believe PR practitioners would have their own views on the wisdom of that approach), so I don’t know for certain what the seniority of those involved actually was.

Even at this point, although it was becoming embarrassing for Saatchis within social media circles, it wasn’t the end of the world for the brand. Toyota had probably more than learned $15,000 worth of lessons about Saatchi & Saatchi’s social media savvy, which justified the budget.

But then came the key, bad decision. The ten most viewed and commented upon entries went in front of a jury. We don’t know who was on it, except it included mainly Saatchi & Saatchi staff, at least one Toyota representative, and they were “from the demographic”.

I suspect they weren’t given any kind of specific brief about Toyota brand values (or indeed reminded of the terms and conditions of the contest, which implied that non squeaky clean films wouldn’t be accepted). I wonder if there was even anyone senior in the room.

They selected the controversial ad we now know all about. And on December 6, just before 10pm, they posted the name of their winner to Facebook, and the timebomb began to tick.

It took nearly seven days to explode.

On Sunday afternoon I was in the office, clearing the decks for what I expected to be a busy week for other reasons. We’d written several times about the social media pitch, and I idly wondered if they’d announced their winner yet.

So I followed the link. I could not believe what I was seeing.

Wearing my journo hat, it was instantly obvious that by picking it as their winner, Toyota had endorsed the content. The comments on Facebook and on YouTube probably amounted to a couple of dozen at that point, but they all made the same point – it was sexist and offensive. And because it was made by a production house, it looked like a well made ad, not user generated content.

I started to write the story. And I called Toyota’s social media marketing boss Todd Connolly at home. When I put it to him that people were reacting against it, he was relaxed. He talked about how well made it was – which is true.

A marketer rather than a PR man, he saw it as user generated content. We had a cheerful chat even after I flagged up that I thought this was going to be a big deal. I suggested he looked at the comments, which he hadn’t seen and I suspect nobody else had been monitoring either – certainly there were no moderator responses.

I don’t think he realised that journalists and the public would not see it simply as user generated content once Toyota had selected it as its winner. Why would he? That relies on having the advice of a PR practitioner, who as far as I can see hadn’t been involved in that process.

I posted the story. A few minutes later, the first blogger to link to the story, Philip O’Neill, memorably referred to it as “abuser generated content”. It was a phrase which was to go global.

Within an hour or two the penny began to drop at Toyota. The video was taken down.

However, even at that stage I don’t think that those behind it actually understood that it was causing genuine offence to the public.

One of the comments that evening read:

“One minute Mumbrella and Burrowes are praising advertisers and particularly Toyota, who seem at least to have had a crack in the social media space, then Burrowes is shit-canning them in the next breath. Christ! Get a life! Try creating something for once rather than leeching off others’ ability and criticizing them. It must have been a very slow day in the Burrowes household. There are worse things on the net than this. Maybe Tim needs a good pounding.”

It’s funny how often the subject of unwelcome coverage story complains about how it must be a slow news day.

Although the video had been taken down, as they always do, copies began to pop up on YouTube.

At about the same time on Monday The Punch carried a robust opinion piece from David Penberthy and theage.com.au wrote a lengthy news story. (Interesting to note the differences in approach – Penbo was generous in his link back to Mumbrella. The Age story was based on our material apart from a new Toyota comment at the end, but behaved as if it was breaking the news. Last time that I wrote about Fairfax being bad link citizens, there were lots of cross denials. Interesting to see little has changed.

The story spread to other Aussie news sites. Then by Monday night the British news titles were covering it. Yesterday the Aussie papers and US media get in on the act. And this morning, it’s getting coverage on some of the large global ad blogs.

StreamGraph of Twitter propogation. Hat-tip: @ianlyons

A big part of the problem is that if the public don’t read the story properly, it looks like a real ad.

By midweek, I began to feel a bit for the Toyota press office, which is more used to setting up journo test drives than crisis PR. During conversations, it became clear that they still had not been properly briefed by the marketing team and didn’t really understand what had happened.

Spokesman Mike Breen described the competition to The Age: “I’ve talked to the guy who looks after the social media side of things, and from my understanding the competition was run by Saatchi & Saatchi. It asked for individual production houses to pitch for what you would put together for a commercial for Yaris, and so one of these agency production houses produced this film that was then put up on a website.”

In later conversations with Mumbrella it became clear that the PR team was under the impression that the ad had only won a stage of the competition, and there were four other film making challenges still going. My impression is that Toyota (whose comms team have attempted to be nothing but helpful during this entire affair, by the way) has yet to nail down their message.

Going back to the cause of this, a big part of the issue is a cultural one. This could have happened to many ad agencies other than Saatchis. Culturally, very few are genuinely active and involved in social media. There are also few ad agencies who really understand PR. It’s hard to understand how social media really works unless you do it. There are only a handful of ad agency people who also have a genuine social media profile.

If they want a piece of the social media action that will have to change. They will need to start learning about it for themselves rather than using their clients as guinea pigs, or they will need to find partners who do.

In the end, it wasn’t social media that created this disaster for the brand – it was the lack of social media savvy.

Tim Burrowes

Best Nicole

“There’s so much talk about social media that it is easy for people to become cynical, perhaps losing track of the fact that it can have a positive impact on your business.”

So how can you determine whether a social media strategy is proving beneficial to your business? How do you know that it is working out for you? And is now really the best time to find out?

Rather than focusing on individual social media campaigns, I’d like to look at social media measurement from the perspective of a business that a) buys into social media, b) commits to it over a period of time, and as such c) has an integrated social media strategy. You people know who you are!

Let it breathe

The key with social media measurement, I think, is to stand back and take a widescreen approach to measurement. 

Rather than focusing on the smaller, campaign-specific metrics, such as traffic from Twitter or the number of fans on Facebook, wouldn’t it be better to look at how it helps to shift the most important business KPIs, such as sales, profits, as well as customer retention and satisfaction rates?

To do this effectively, you’ll need to give your social media strategy time. Like a good wine, it needs to breathe. In doing so you will be able to look at your overall business performance, as well as the performance of your social media campaigns over the duration. 

Take the Skittles campaign. I called it ‘brave’, ‘amazing’, ‘sensational’ and ‘ballsy’. I still think it is all of those things, and I’ll think that next year even if it fails miserably. It was a big move. But nobody yet knows for sure whether giving over a brand’s entire website to consumer-powered media channels is a smart move. Only time will tell.

Social media vs TV advertising

Here I want to make a small point on accuracy, and attribution. I firmly believe that if you can spend tens of millions on TV ads and make any kind of sense out of that investment, in terms of TV ads helping to boost sales while increasing the key brand metrics, then you can make sense of your (much smaller) investment into social media. 

TV campaigns can run for a long time, and the effects on the business are a) not known immediately and b) possibly overstated. Hindsight is a beautiful thing, and advertising executives (and creative agencies) like to take credit for improving sales, when really these sales might have little or nothing to do with TV ads. Attribution is one thing, but knowing that something works is entirely different. Social media appears to be a mixture of the two.

Maybe we can create a model for scoring the performance of social media, or for splitting up attribution by channel, but the truth is that there needs to be some room for manoeuvre when making sense of things. There are few absolutes in measuring advertising campaigns, if you work outside of paid search. You can far more accurately measure social media than you can a TV ad, but like TV advertising, or PR for that matter, there has to be some scope to play around with attribution.

Like TV advertising, social media will play a role in moving brand metrics, and perhaps more so (it is easier to make a noise and to be socially active; there’s an anytime, anywhere factor at work here. And hey, shit sticks around longer when you throw it online). There is a huge viral factor with social media sites (behold ye retweeters). You can really see word of mouth in action on social media sites, and as such there is less guesswork involved when measuring the results – less extrapolation is needed. If 500,000 consumers start saying good things about your brand, with few dissenters, then surely it is fair to say that brand favourability will have improved?

If brand indicators matter, or if you subscribe to the AIDA model, or if you care enough to undertake research to find out your own brand metrics (PDF), then by all means factor in your social media efforts when attributing the success of your overall marketing campaigns.

Take a snapshot

Before you start the clock it is a good idea to benchmark where you’re at…

1. Make a note of the obvious numbers (number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Digg links, Delicious bookmarks, and referrals from social media sites, plus existing website traffic).
2. Make a note of the less obvious benchmarks (such as SEO rankings and referrals, customer satisfaction scores and other business data). 
3. Make a note of ROI benchmarks. How much are you paying to acquire customers via other marketing channels? How vast is that advertising budget, and how is it being split up? And what proportion is being directed into channels that you cannot accurately measure?  

After that make sure you’re doing the right things. There are lots of social media experts handing out lots of advice for free. There are all manner of social media agencies out there that will help you, if you don’t have the appetite to do this in-house. And there are sites devoted to measuring social media. Get some, get some.

Measuring the effects of social media in 10 steps

1. Traffic
This is one of the more obvious ways of measuring social media. Remember that quality often beats quantity, though not always (as many CPM-focused publishers will surely testify). 

2. Interaction
Participation is a valuable indicator for many publishers (and brands). It says something about the kind of traffic you are attracting. Remember that an engaged customer is a highly valuable one. Interaction can be anything from leaving comments, to participating in support forums, to leaving customer reviews and ratings. It can happen on your website and on other websites. Keep your eyes and ears open!

3. Sales
We at Econsultancy are tracking sales from organic Google referrals and also paid search. It didn’t seem like much of a leap to track other channels, such as Twitter. Try it. Dell did, and discovered that it made $1m from Twitter in 18 months. Blendtec’s ‘Will It Blend?’ campaign on YouTube helped to drive “a five-fold increase in sales”. 

4. Leads
Some companies simply cannot process sales online, because their products or services do not allow for it. For example, the automotive industry, which tends to measure the effects of its online ad campaigns by the amount of brochures requests, or test drives booked in (as opposed to car sales, which is, in marketing terms, an altogether more macro effort). B2B operators are in a similar position. If you are a consultant and spend time interacting on LinkedIn Answers then there’s a way of tracking that activity to enquiries about your services. The same applies across the spectrum of social media sites. Choose your weapon, thought leaders.

5. Search marketing
The SEO factor cannot be understated. Social media can be far more powerful in this regard than you might initially imagine. For example, a well-placed story / video / image on a site like Digg will generate a lot of traffic and a nice link from Digg itself, but the real win here is that it will generate a lot more interest beyond Digg. Bloggers and major publishers are following Digg’s Upcoming channel to unearth new and interesting stories (Sky News now has a Twitter correspondent). One link and 20,000 referrals from Digg might lead on to 40,000 referrals and 100 links from other sites. The long tail, in action. 100 links means that your page might well wind up being placed highly on Google, resulting in lots of ongoing traffic. Remember too that you can use sites like Twitter and YouTube to claim valuable search rankings on your brand search terms (‘social search optimisation’).

6. Brand metrics
Word of mouth and the viral factor (inherent in sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg) can help shift the key brand metrics, both negatively and positively. These include brand favourability, brand awareness, brand recall, propensity to buy, etc. Expensive TV ads are measured in this way, so if these metrics are good enough for TV then they’re surely good enough for the internet? Positive brand associations via social media campaigns can help drive clicks on paid search ads, and responses to other forms of advertising. We know that TV ads boost activity on search engines, resulting in paid search success stories, so I’d bet that social media can do the same.

7. PR
The nature of public relations has changed, forever. The last five years have been largely about the traditional PR folks not really being able to figure out the blogosphere. But if PRs cannot control the bloggers, then how on earth will they handle consumers? The distinct worlds of PR, customer service, and marketing are fusing. Twitter means everybody has a blog these days, and somewhere to shout about things to their friends (and beyond). Social media sites are the biggest echo chambers in the world! In any event, if you can measure PR (beyond adding up column inches and applying a random multiple to the equivalent size on the rate card!), then you can measure social media.

8. Customer engagement
Given the prevalence of choice, and the ease with which consumers can switch from one brand to another, customer engagement is one of the most important of all metrics in today’s business environment. Engagement can take place offline and online, both on your website and on other sites, particularly social media sites. Customer engagement is key to improving satisfaction and loyalty rates, and revenue. By listening to customers, and letting them know that you are listening, you can improve your business, your products, and your levels of service. The alternative is to ignore customers, which sends out a terrible message. Our research found that an engaged customer will recommend your brand, convert more readily and purchase more often. 

9. Retention
A positive side effect of increased customer engagement – assuming certain other factors in play work in your favour – is an increase in customer retention. This is going to be a crucial factor in the success of your business in the years to come. Make no bones about it: we are moving into an age of optimisation and retention. Watch your retention rates as you start participating in social media. Over time, all things remaining equal, they should rise. Zappos, which is a case study in how-to-do-Twitter (and active on MySpace, Facebook and Youtube), is closing in on $1bn of sales this year, and “75% of its orders are from repeat customers”. Go figure, as they say.

10. Profits
If you can reduce customer churn, and engage customers more often, the result will surely be that you’ll generate more business from your existing customer base (who in turn will recommend your business to their network of friends, family, and social media contacts). This reduces your reliance on vast customer acquisition budgets to maintain or grow profits. It makes for a far more profitable and more efficient organisation. I really hope that more businesses will find a better balance between acquisition and retention, sooner rather than later, from a resourcing standpoint. Too many acquisition strategies appear to be ill-conceived, are not joined up (both in terms of marketing and also operations), and as such are ripe for optimisation. Plug the leaky bucket and you won’t need to turn the tap so hard to top it up. And remember that old adage about it being cheaper to keep existing customers than to seek out new ones.