Merging onto the Highway of Social Media

Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting Chicago area PR professionals for breakfast. We were also lucky enough to spend an hour interviewing Allan Schoenberg (@allanschoenberg on Twitter), director of communications at CME Group. Allan’s team has been using social media for several years, and he shared some tips and best practices.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Allan’s objectives for his social media strategy are to create enthusiasm for the CME Group brand, distribute information, provide customer service and advocate for the brand.
• The team’s primary channels are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and social bookmarking tools like digg and delicious.
• Allan compares starting in social media to merging onto a busy highway. He suggests joining existing conversations and engage in dicussions around current topics of interest. Eventually, you can incorporate your own messages and create conversations that positively affects your brand.  
• On Twitter, he follows a 70/30 rule:  70% of postings are focused on market drivers and news, but only 30% is about news and events that are designed to drive people back to CME Group’s website.
• He recommends that employees understand disclosure rules and best practices. His advice: “If you don’t want your CEO to read it, don’t post it.”

Allan also said Mashable.com was one of the best sources for keeping up on new social media trends and tools.

Diane Thieke is marketing director at Dow Jones.

Fat Cat Strut

“I’m flat broke but I don’t care, I strut right by with my tail in the air.”

 – Stray Cat Strut by the Stray Cats

Wall Street firms have been taking a beating by the public for a good while now – and some of their employees have gotten fed up with it.  Just last week, in fact, a rally was held in New York’s Financial District to mark the formation of restorewallstreet.com, a group devoted to “putting the pride back into Wall Street.”  The group was started by brokers and traders who feel the tone and language used to describe their jobs has been unfair, even childish.

Just how bad has the criticism been? Whether you think it appropriate or childish, one phrase sums up the critique of Wall Street these days: “fat cats.”  According to research using Dow Jones Insight, the term “fat cats” has been used to criticize Wall Street more than 6,000 times in the past three months alone. 

Specific events, largely related to President Obama, drove mentions of "fat cats" in the news.

However, looking at the trend above, you can see that even this coverage has been event-driven, rather than persistent and pervasive.  The biggest spike hit in mid-December, due to coverage of President Obama’s call on Wall Street to stop lobbying against regulatory reform and boost lending, and his comments on CBS’s 60 Minutes about “a bunch of fat cat bankers” (Dow Jones Business News, 14 Dec 09). 

In fact, 85 percent of stories that use the phrase “fat cats” mention Obama as well, in many cases quoting the phrase from the President.  However, all mentions of “fat cats” in the news haven’t been expressed devoted to criticizing banks.  President Obama received criticism when coverage of “fat cats” spiked in mid-January, due to a stock market plunge precipitated by President Obama’s seeking a new tax on banks.  “It was the fat cats’ fault before.  But now its becoming Obama’s,” wrote the Bernard Condon and Tim Paradis for the Associated Press (24 Jan 10). 

"Fat Cats" Company Index

Which companies earned the inauspicious honor of ranking first in the “fat cats” league table?   Goldman Sachs and Citigroup topped the list.  For Goldman, Obama’s bank plans and public outrage over H1N1 flu shot availability drove mentions, while Citigroup coverage focused on paying back stimulus funds.  Many stories also expressed skepticism that Obama’s proposed plans to regulate the banking system would have any real effect on big banks like Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America.  

It seems that categorizations of the nation’s bankers as “fat cats” may be on the decline, as President Obama receives more criticism about the Main Street effects of his criticism of Wall Street.  Watch this space for updates to the Fat Cats Index.

Looking for the E

You will probably agree when I say that PR is first and foremost about persons and relationship. If we take for example the typical MADE workflow process of a PR professional (Monitor – Analyse – Discover – Engage), the most compelling and interesting part is definitely the E (Engage).

I’m very grateful that our teams at Dow Jones are offering many opportunities to meet media professionals, both from the “traditional” as well as from the social media space. During the recent launch of the Dow Jones Media Relations Manager, several roundtables and webinars have been organised. Influential bloggers and journalists participated and mingled with collegues and clients and discussed the impact of the Social Media revolution. I joined a webinar hosted by our team in Asia. Among the participants were Peter Stein from the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong and David Meerman Scott, named as one of the “Top Social Media Strategists to follow in 2010” by the Boston-based 451 Marketing.

My main take-aways from the event:

• “Know your reporter and how to reach him” (Peter Stein) – PR people who want to engage with journalists should know exactly where they are sending their information to. Who are the reporters in charge? What are those reporters covering? What’s the best way to get in touch with them? Who are the backups?
• Content is King – David Meerman Scott argues that 95% of the pitches he receives are spam. Like journalists, influential bloggers are also looking continuously for interesting stories and news. And if these are exclusives, even better. They will be picked up and go viral. Creating really good and valuable content has to be a key competency of the PR department.
• All channels are possible – Traditional media are embracing social media. The Wall Street Journal is searching the web and Twitter for story ideas. Editors and journalists are also spreading news on Twitter. PR departments can’t ignore this.

I especially like the content argument. Traditional media releases are generally considered as dull and often of less value for journalists and bloggers. If the audience is considering them as spam, something is wrong and has to be changed. New forms of engagement will have to arise.

Georg Ackermann is the Barcelona Team Leader in the Dow Jones Media Lab.

New Media Realities Still Underappreciated in World of PR

To say that the Aughts have not been kind to traditional media is an understatement. Newspapers and broadcasters have been caught in a swirl of changing reader and viewer habits with competition from literally millions of new sources of cheap information. It has resulted in nothing less than the near dissolution of a business model that had served the press well for centuries.  

But amid this turmoil in the mainstream media (that we require a retronym is telling of the depth of social media’s impact), corporations and organizations still have to find ways to get their messages out to their publics and then measure its impact.

The job of identifying the influencers in this new media world is increasingly hard for those who have acknowledged it is necessary. However, it seems many have yet to fully accept the fact that the old rules largely no longer apply.

I know I’m no futurist. I’m not going to attempt to predict what the news media will look like a generation from now. But what I’ve seen is that the corporate PR pros of today seem to be largely going about as if it is still the early ‘90s when the Internet was mostly background noise and newspapers and broadcast TV were still the most important influencers.

Those I’ve spoken with and those I hear about from my colleagues selling media monitoring products still seem largely focused on sending their press releases to, and measuring their messages in, newspapers and magazines and on TV. It is true that many know the impact that blogs, Twitter and YouTube can have. But I think they are clinging to the old ways for two reasons: Managing their message directly to millions of voices seems overwhelming; and the PR practitioners of today, a growing number of whom are digital natives, largely are still accountable to bosses who are digital immigrants.

By now they know social media matters, but they may not yet appreciate how much or what to do about it.  I’m amazed when we witness clients who are still measuring their media impact by (literally) the thickness of their clip books and those whose measurement plans intentionally exclude measuring blogs, YouTube and Twitter.

I think we’re still in for more old-school thinking until a few things happen: Print newspapers become specialty items, digital natives move into the corner offices, and easy social-media measuring tools are developed.

Right now the tools are still less mature than they should be and the content they access is incomplete. Too many silos make it difficult to measure impact comprehensively. Walled communities like Facebook and LinkedIn continue to make this a hard problem, and pay walls and newspapers taking their content off Google will make the problem even harder.

So for a little while longer, those in the corner office in too many companies will keep flipping through clip books and counting headlines, all the while their junior associates Tweet about why they need to be evolving faster.

Tiger scandal follows Clinton trajectory…

Is Tiger the new Bill? Using Dow Jones media measurement tools, we compared media coverage of the current Tiger Woods scandal against five other indiscretions to see how long the golfer might expect his name to stay in the news for something other than golf.  We looked at news mentions of Tiger Woods, David Letterman, Mark Sanford, Eliot Spitzer, and Bill Clinton in the months their scandals hit the news, the preceding three months to get an idea of “normal” coverage, and for six months after to see how quickly the scandals died down.

The Tiger Woods scandal just keeps getting worse...

Of the five, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had for the most dramatic rise in March 2008 when his sex scandal broke.  Coverage increased a whopping 158% compared to his average volume of news in the three previous months.  The scandal just as dramatically fell off the media’s radar, with a 171% drop in coverage in April.

Remember South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s dalliance in Argentina? Sanford experienced the second largest increase in coverage when it was reported he went “hiking the Appalachian Trail” in June 2009.  However, in July, his coverage dropped only 20% – it took Sanford about 5 months to see the same proportional decrease that Spitzer experienced in his first month following the crisis (fast forward to the present and Sanford is back in the news recently as his wife has filed for divorce).

David Letterman’s scandal, if you can even call it that, is the biggest success story – news of sex with female coworkers received about the same amount of play as Sanford’s affair.  Compared to a Southern governor, you’d expect much more from a scandal involving a celebrity national talk show host – just one more piece to the growing body of support for Letterman’s handling of the issue.  His coverage only bumped up 70% in October 2009, quickly falling 99% in the first month following the scandal.

Tiger? Well, he certainly didn’t pull a Letterman out of his golf bag.  Tiger’s trajectory is starting to look far more like that of former President Bill Clinton.  When rumors first broke of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in January 1998, mentions of Bill Clinton increased at a similar level to Letterman.  The problem for Clinton is that it didn’t go away – coverage of the scandal stayed pretty constant for the next 6 months.  Tiger’s coverage rose 78% in November 2009; a considerable increase considering the scandal only broke around November 21.  In the first two weeks of December, coverage of Tiger Woods is already 44% higher than in November.  

With recent news about sponsors like Accenture dropping Tiger, coverage of this scandal isn’t likely to go away anytime soon either.  Just don’t tell us it depends on what the definition of “is” is, Tiger.

Coca-Cola’s World Cup Sponsorship Looks to be a Winning Strategy

My colleague, Inma Canti, and I recently prepared a report on media coverage of the corporate sponsors of the 2010 World Cup football (soccer) tournament.  We thought this would be an interesting topic because the event is the world’s most watched sporting event and a big platform for corporate sponsors who are willing to shell out millions of dollars to have their names and brands affiliated with the event.

A noteworthy finding in the report is Coca-Cola’s strong emphasis on marketing events associated with the World Cup and its efforts to promote these activities in the media.  For example, Coke had more than double the number of media placements for its World Cup activities than Visa, which was the company with the next highest volume of placements.  Also, Coke CEO Muhtar Kent was the executive quoted or mentioned most often in the coverage.

These results should not be surprising, considering Coke’s recent strategy that emphasizes growth in global markets.  Kent noted in the company’s 2008 annual report that, “critical to expanding our global beverage leadership is achieving balanced growth across a range of geographies. We have identified emerging markets as critical to our business growth. We are [also] taking aggressive actions to reinforce our business in key developed markets like Japan, North America and parts of Western Europe.”

Being a World Cup sponsor is an expensive proposition: official sponsorships cost $125 million, which doesn’t include the marketing activities undertaken by the companies to promote their involvement with the tournament. It’s logical for Coke to devote considerable resources to this effort, however, since the event is an ideal platform for a company emphasizing a growth strategy focused on emerging markets (16 of the 32 participating teams are from Africa, Latin America, or Eastern Europe), Western Europe (9 teams) and Japan (also a participant).  Our data show that 74% of the media coverage for World Cup corporate sponsors in Q3 came from either European or African sources, which confirms that the World Cup is probably an ideal vehicle for Coke’s marketing strategy.

A copy of the World Cup 2010 Sponsors media report can be found here.

David Breg is a media consultant based in Washington, D.C.

Creating Communities: Quantity vs. Intensity?

It’s fascinating to watch how different companies attempt to harness social media to create what Seth Godin describes as tribes.

Clearly there are many benefits to organisations creating online communities and engaging with their customers and potential customers via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter – the most obvious being that communication is interactive, direct and instant.

One school of thought says its best to amass huge tribes (some companies by virtue of their brand power are able to do this anyway). Coca Cola’s Facebook Page for example, has some 3,773, 653 fans. But does size really matter, or is it more important to have a small, but highly interactive tribe?

Blue Dog Photography is one example of a small company who has created an engaged tribe. This photography training company is run by commercial photographers Danielle and Nick Lancaster out of Tamborine Mountain, in Australia’s Gold Coast Hinterland. Their Facebook Group page is relatively new and small – about 250 members. I joined the group after attending some Blue Dog workshops this year.

Blue Dog Photography - tribe-building via Facebook

Blue Dog engages with its workshop participants by offering a weekly photo competition. Open only to people who have attended a workshop, this competition instantly creates a feeling of exclusivity. Participants are asked to list the camera settings of the shots they submit, which promotes ongoing learning and information sharing. Members are invited to comment on each other’s photos, which promotes much discussion amongst the group, and is leading to the formation of many new Facebook friendships.

 Blue Dog lists details of upcoming workshops and retreats so that group members are always aware of when the next event is on – but it never feels like a sales pitch. You can practically hear the cheers from the community each time new workshops dates are announced. More recently, Blue Dog started posting daily updates from its photography tours on Fraser Island and Vanuatu. What better PR than to have happy customers posting amazing pictures to their Facebook and Flikr profiles, and the photo album on the Blue Dog page.

From a customer perspective, the regular interaction between the Lancaster’s and their “customers” (who they more frequently refer to as friends), is really valued. They converse online with the same friendly, professional approach they adopt in their workshops, so the “Blue Dog experience” is consistent wherever the interaction takes place. Blue Dog uses Facebook to provide advice and commentary on people’s images, regular tips about photography via the Blue Dog blog, links to photographic exhibitions, and information that is generally useful to their growing base of fans.

From a marketing perspective, it’s a positive example of how a relatively small business can engage instantly, regularly and cost effectively, with its clients and prospective clients. Importantly, it demonstrates that tribes don’t have to be huge to be effective. In the case of Blue Dog Photography’s tribe, intensity is definitely winning out over quantity.

Melanie Surplice has more than 12 years of experience in international BtoB marketing communications and is a former public relations professional. She is a part time Report Writer in the Dow Jones Media Lab based in Australia.

I Use Facebook, Hear Me Roar

As an officer for a certain women’s business group, I created and subsequently was asked to remove a Facebook group, as it was deemed an “inappropriate social media channel.”

This made me think: Are women’s business organizations missing an opportunity to connect online?

Facebook touts more than 300 million active users, with 50% logging on in any given day. Among US users, women outnumber men in every age group. The gap is most notable in age groups that correspond with prime career years: 26-34, 35-44, and 45-54. Women outnumber men by more than 2 million in each of these groups. In the US alone, that’s nearly 7 million more women than men potentially in the prime of their careers.

So why wouldn’t professional organizations want to reach women through this channel? Using MainStreet.com’s Top Women’s Organizations and PINK Magazine’s Favorite Women’s Business Organizations, plus a smattering of personal favorites like 85 Broads, I compared 62 women’s organizations and their presence on Facebook with LinkedIn, the traditional source for online business networking.

Encouragingly, more than three-quarters of organizations researched have some social media presence, and a slight majority maintains a presence on both Facebook and LinkedIn. There doesn’t seem to be any theme about what “types” of organizations fall into each category – nationals vs. regionals, for example. The only potential stand out is with ethnic women’s organizations. Of the four included, none fell into the “LinkedIn only” category.

Most orgs are on both Facebook & LinkedIn

For organizations with a presence on both channels, there appears to be a positive correlation on group size: the bigger the Facebook group, the bigger the LinkedIn group, and vice versa. So it would seem members aren’t flocking to one channel over the other. LinkedIn groups are usually better populated than Facebook groups at present – this could be accounted for by the fact that LinkedIn is a bit longer in the tooth.

Groups are better populated on LinkedIn, but not always

So what does all this mean for women’s professional organizations, and the use of channels like Facebook for business networking? First, you can successfully promote and recruit members through more informal networks, but you shouldn’t pick one over the other. A good social media strategy combines interesting content and awareness efforts across multiple channels. Click here to see the full list of organizations we reviewed and which seem to be following this best practice.

Jennifer Hoffmann is Manager of Customer Engagement at Dow Jones and is based in New York City.

Why does measuring social media in a recovering economy matter?

Corporations hobbled by dwindling budgets in an economic downdraft should consider disregarding ROI on their social media measurement programs (at least for now), and instead think of it as another cost of doing business. Most corporations are still slow to molt or modify their “time-tested” PR programs to evaluate their performance in traditional media, much less the Wild West of social media.

What is perhaps more critical at this juncture is to start understanding some of the rudimentary rules of the road while it’s in its infancy, especially with respect to guard rails and hazard signs. Indeed, as the rules and tools of old school PR shift as social media continues to eclipse traditional media outlets in terms of sheer volume, engagement in the era of Web 2.0 will be more important than standard PR metrics, such as messaging and impressions, which is a suspect metric by many even for traditional press outlets.       

There are many more questions than answers at this nascent stage of measuring the ROI of social media  — and there’s no time to wait for PR wonks to hold scores of social media summits to build consensus, but one thing is clear: the new medium poses risks … and opportunities. Achieving ROI results isn’t worth waiting for when the value proposition for measuring social media is instantaneous awareness.

It’s perhaps more imperative now than ever to monitor discussions on blogs and message boards about products/services, reputations and brands, as corporations in nearly every sector have dialed back their spending on their traditional marketing and PR/corporate communications mix, and are now devoting more time and resources leveraging social media to convey their messages and to promote campaigns.

And, yes naysayers, when it comes to social media, you can manage what you cannot measure. Companies that are savvy about understanding how they are being positioned against their competitors in a down economy are more likely to (1) have a handle on increasingly heavy traffic on social media sites (2) quickly react to the likelihood of unfavorable attention when companies across all industries are under pressure (3) manage the greater potential for unfavorable coverage as the tendency toward negativity in social media intensifies in a cratering economy (4) tap into a comparatively low cost highly accessible way to drive messages by stakeholders who are no longer first adopters.

Brian Panton is a quality assurance specialist and report writer in Washington, DC.

Changing attitudes on Social Media in Russia

Many PR and communications professionals I met in Russia are still very cautious about the social media and its benefits. Internet usage in the country is still significantly lower than in the Western Europe and the US. According to the research by the Public Opinion Fund, only 35% of the population were using the Net in summer 2009 though there is a growing trend of low-income citizens getting access in the past year. Another barrier is a large number of agencies offering evaluation of the blogosphere with relatively limited knowledge about the social media and how it can improve customer engagement and become a tool for defending company’s reputation. Financial and time resources also pose limitations. But perhaps conservatism and fear of change are the decisive factor.

 A press-secretary of one the top Russian oil companies which also owns petrol stations across the country said that the CEO hardly used Internet or email in his work. He was unlikely to be interested in evaluating the company’s social media coverage. However, the press secretary started preparing fortnightly two-page reports about company’s mentions in blogs and forums. Eventually he discovered that social media provided an invaluable feedback about the operations at petrol stations and the quality of service that influenced company’s image. The reports became a vital tool for the company. Now they go straight to CEO and other top managers weekly, allowing for timely decision-making and keeping them being ahead of the competition.

 Last winter I was talking to a Director of Communications of one of the leading Russian mobile providers. The guy was in his early thirties, very knowledgeable about the latest technologies and new gadgets. But when we started to discuss social media, he cut me short: “The social media evaluation in Russia is of no value for us and it is not going to be for the next 10 years”. Fortunately, many PR professionals in Russia are taking a different stance on social media as they see the benefits brought by monitoring and analysing it. They find different ways of introducing their management to the social media.

Perhaps the most important thing for the companies looking to evaluate their social media presence is being open-minded and creative. Monitoring and evaluating social media can be used as radar to prevent PR disasters and blows to company’s reputation, as product feedback or as a source of quotes to publish in the corporate magazines. But more importantly it will increase the transparency and engagement with the customers. “The power is with people…People will judge you, your company, and your brand. Reputation management requires new skills in this radical transparent world” (Andy Beal, Judy Strauss “Radically Transparent). I believe Russian attitudes toward to blogs and forums will change and it will become an invaluable tool for PR and comms people in Russia in the near future.