Did your Public Relations strategy lose steam this year? Or were all of your projects overwhelming successes?

As 2012 winds down, it might be time for some reflection. What went well? What didn’t go so well? What will you repeat and what will you shelve in the New Year?

Once you’ve reflected on 2012, it’s time to gear up for what’s ahead. Here are a few fresh ideas to kick-start your planning for 2013.

Give the people what they want

This one begins and ends with listening. Customer complaints, while seemingly negative on the surface, are actually good opportunities to make adjustments. Any suggestions are opportunities for improvement (and earned revenue).

If your company doesn’t have a solid feedback system in place – meaning no way to gather customer feedback – then 2013 is the year to implement that infrastructure. Add a satisfaction survey if you can or solicit client feedback online. Depending on the resources available to you, social media might be a platform you can use to engage and improve.

No matter your budget, finding a way to listen to your customers just makes sense. But it’s not just enough to hear them, be prepared to make the necessary changes (that make sense for your business) to please the masses.

Focus on relationships

Following suit, focusing on the relationships important to your company can never fall to the wayside. You may not follow the flock when it comes to social media, but whatever your strategy, partnerships are probably the cornerstone of your business.

For 2013, focus on at least 2 partnership-building opportunities. Host a customer-appreciation event (online or in person) and try reaching out to a person or business (maybe via LinkedIn) that might add positively to one or more of your campaigns.

It’s important to remember that even your most steadfast fans can’t be forgotten, but trying new things has to be part of your plan.

Gather expertise and share it

Those positive business relationships need to be used. This year, add a panel of experts to your arsenal. Build your thought leadership program.

You could arrange to have your thought leaders draft a new content series. Or maybe they’re more suited to live interaction. Maybe they can host an online event on a burning issue important to your social media audiences. You might even choose to host a live event with your thought leaders as the expert panel.

There are many options available; the beauty of partnerships and thought leadership is that you don’t have to do all the thinking on your own.

Engage with rich multimedia

With the advent of Pinterest and Instagram, it’s obvious that more and more audiences are attracted to companies who offer something visual.

This year, you’ll have to spend some time figuring out how to create or revamp your company’s visual identity. That’s the fun part.

The trick here is to stand out from the crowd. This visual marketing has been a popular strategy, so the key is differentiation. If your videos, images and infographics are flat, it might be time to call in the help of the professionals.

Try something new

Has your use of Facebook and Twitter become tired, second-hand marketing decoration? If you’re bored of the same ol’ social media platforms, why not try a new one this year?

Take the plunge: explore Pinterest or Intstagram. And maybe Lino or Twiddla could be of some use to your business? Take the time (before it’s too late) to do some research on an up-and-coming tool, or a well-known (but untapped to you) platform.

Get moving because social media will always be changing – this year and the next. Your social media strategy can make the difference for your success in 2013.

For a brand known primarily for its above-the-line marketing campaigns, Gatorade’s new mission control center suggests a major move by the company to amplify its online engagement efforts.

The Gatorade Mission Control Center-a room that literally sits at the center of the marketing department in the company’s Chicago headquarters-is a hub for all things social media monitoring, from data visualization and sentiment analysis, to real-time conversation tracking (see video clip below for a snapshot of Mission Control in action).

According to a report from Mashable, the goal of creating this custom monitoring solution is to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into largest participatory brand in the world”-this from Gatorade’s Senior Marketing Director, Consumer & Shopper Engagement, Carla Hassan. To this end, the brand is fully leveraging insights from Mission Control to inform brand marketing strategies as they roll out, often times tweaking programs mid-campaign based on their findings. Consider the following example, courtesy of Mashable’s report:

• Following the launch of its G Series in early 2010, the Pepsi-owned company rolled out its “Gatorade has evolved” campaign to promote the product line’s newest variant, G Series Pro

• As part of the marketing program, the brand aired TV commercials featuring snippets of a song by rapper David Banner

• Almost immediately, Mission Control data showed the commercial was being heavily discussed in social media channels, with conversations pointing to a high level of interest

• In response to the volume and sentiment of conversations, the Gatorade team put together a full-length version of the song and distributed it via Facebook and Twitter, all within 24 hours

As for Mission Control’s day-to-day application, Hassan says the marketing department uses it to optimize landing pages to ensure users are driven to place that immediately captures their attention. And it appears to be working, with the marketing team reporting up to 250% increases in engagement and 15+% decreases in exit rates for specific pages’ content.

The bottom line: This is one of the best examples we’ve seen of a company using insights from proactive, real-time conversation monitoring to inform online, offline and above-the-line marketing strategies. Kudos to Gatorade for being the one to do it!

Last year, every public relations and corporate communications conference wanted to address one hurdle: how to prove the value of social media to a C-suite that was technology averse or hopeful all this friending and tweeting was just a fad.

Too many CEOs were too hesitant to give social media any kind of meaningful budget, particularly in a recession.

As our last post suggested, however, the C-suite is finally starting to catch up. Chances are, your CEO is already on LinkedIn and sees the potential for corporate growth accelerating with the right social media strategy.

The PR department is faced with a new question: should we hire a full-time social media specialist, or should we reach out to a PR agency with proven social media experience?

Listed below are the merits of each option, followed by suggestions of how to leverage the relationship you do have with IT, Marketing, Customer Service, Internal Communications and other corporate functions that may lay claim to social media turf.

See these articles (Hubspot’s argument for PR firms, Rise’s questions to ask social media consultants, and Jennifer Van Grove’s qualities to pursue in social media candidates) for in-depth discussion of what kind of professional can make or break a social media initiative.

 HIRING IN-HOUSE

 -Their attention to your business’s goals will be undivided; there are no other clients to distract them from your company’s goals.

 -In the short run, an in-house social media specialist can cost less. They usually bring a mix of PR and technology experience to the position — enough for some content creation and enough for some basic coding.

 -In a world that values authenticity, a customer will want the person they correspond with on Facebook to be a full-time employee and may even feel cheated if they find out their online conversation is with a PR firm and not the company they thought.

HIRING A PR FIRM/SOCIAL MEDIA CONSULTANT

-A PR firm will have more experiences to draw from and may bring a broader understanding of your company’s industry to the table.

-A PR firm may cost more, on average, but will bring in a greater number of deliverable results — sales leads, business partnerships and other “measurables that matter” (not just how to measure social media, but how to link its success back to the company)

-It’s possible for a PR firm to address the “authenticity” concern by being upfront with customers.  Many will appreciate the broader experience of an agency representative rather than someone with a narrow focus. 

Of course, there is a third option that we haven’t addressed: spreading the duties of social media across the company.  Zappos and Best Buy are two retailers that have embraced this approach.

I’d argue that, while it’s feasible (even encouraged!), to make every employee of a company a brand ambassador, it’s best to have one entity in charge of the messaging strategy. Otherwise, it’s too easy to lose sight of the company’s goals. 

Of course, the greatest danger of any public relations initiative is to jump in blindly without setting measurable benchmarks or delegating responsibilities at all. 

Anyone who doubts the ubiquity of online social networking need only look to the New Oxford American Dictionary, which chose “unfriend” as its 2009 word of the year.

When the verb describing the act of removing someone as a friend on Facebook earns an official place in a respected dictionary, it’s time to validate social media as more than a fad.

Clearly, 2009 was the year of digital dabbling — from Twitter to Facebook, Flickr to YouTube, FourSquare to Google Wave — and scores of brand communicators are now ready to move from experimentation to large-scale execution.

There’s no shortage of guidance from early social media marketers, as well as not-so-far-fetched parodies of the gurus (adult language) who feigned knowledge where none existed.

Those brave enough to organize their thoughts and publish books on the new paradigm for consumers and business opened themselves up to robust online conversation, accolades and criticism.  Thanks to people like Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, Shel Israel, Gary Vaynerchuk, Deirdre Breckenridge, Courtney Barnes and Paul Argenti practicing what they preached, we all learned a tremendous amount this year.

The dna13 team went a step further, polling the published thought leaders as well as brand managers, PR officers, CMOs, analysts, journalists and academics about their social media experiences.  The goal: to provide concrete advice from early adopters for those about to take the plunge into a new world where consumers are in charge.

In essence, “Social Media Lessons Learned in 2009” is a crowd-sourced white paper containing tips and video from early SM adopters.

Rest assured, we put it together knowing that it had better be good or we risk you using that brand new New Oxford Dictionary word.

Enjoy!

Photo by CC Chapman: Chris Brogan signing his book, “Trust Agents,” at the Inbound Marketing Forum.

Wikipedia has raised $1.4 million from individual users since launching its annual fundraising campaign Nov. 11. The “encyclopedia written by the people” is well on its way to reaching its $7 million goal by 1) creating a popular product, 2) leveraging its relationships with users, and 3) using the Wikipedia brand to signify a cause more important than an online encyclopedia – an online community that supports open access to global information.

With this campaign in mind, let’s review the five best ways to use social media for end-of- year cause-related marketing efforts, fundraising campaigns and general “good works” with some of the best uses of social media for good deeds we’ve seen in 2009:

1. Partner with a charity that represents your company AND your online audience.

The chosen charity’s mission must fall in line with the goals of the company without appearing inauthentic. Ask company employees which charity to support – it’s crowd-sourcing at the most basic level, and it’s asking the first line of company advocates to have an impact on the future of the company and on their own communities – share their story online, ideally in their voice. Hyundai, for example, adopted a cause that was already being championed by branches of the automaker’s own company.

2. Listen first, but don’t be too afraid to ask for help online.

The first commandment of social media has always been to listen before jumping into the conversation. That being said, there is more leeway to ask for fans to join you for a charitable project.  It’s still considered rude to spam followers, but there is a bit more flexibility when advocating for a cause. Ask for RTs on Twitter, message fans on Facebook and send emails to thought leaders. This is an opportunity to use practices that might otherwise be a little too forward for everyday use.

3. Leverage relationships with like-minded organizations

It is possible for the holiday season to bring multiple companies closer together in the spirit of charity as a lead-sharing opportunity. Reach out to the charitable organization’s existing partners. After the campaign is over, you will have proven your value to these online communities and be in a better position to continue the online conversation.

4. Remember you’re managing PR for two (or more!) organizations

When a company partners with a nonprofit or publicizes their charitable giving, be sure to vet the organization to ensure that your values are aligned. There are numerous sites that help PR pro’s find out more about charities. Charity Navigator and GuideStar are two great ones. You can also use the Chronicles of Philanthropy publication and online resources.

Make sure you put the “charity first” and drive traffic to both the corporate sponsor’s site and the “funding” or action page of your partner’s Web site.

5. Twitter is your friend

The “tweetup” is an ideal strategy to raise money using social media – gathering social media specialists in a single room to network and raise awareness of a charity or community-giving event. Learn more about how Miriam’s Kitchen raised money with a great Tweet-up in Washington, D.C., recently with our friend Geoff Livingston of Tanaka PR, who blogs for Buzz Bin, heading the fundraiser.

Mix one part hot dog vendor steam with vapors from paint and lawn fertilizer, add the piney scent of freshly milled lumber and the sweat of thousands of contractors and you’ve just created a very unusual cologne.

The surprising part about Eau de Home Depot is that customers identify it with the brand just as much as their cheap prices and the beeping sound of forklifts in the aisles.

With nearly 2,200 stores and a market cap of $46 billion, the Atlanta-based home-improvement chain has tentacles into just about every community it serves. Yet it credits its relatively new Internet social media engagement program for delivering insights like the fact that customers like the way The Home Depot smells.

Sarah Molinari, corporate communications manager and the voice of @homedepot on Twitter, generously shared her social media experiences with attendees at PR Week’s Next conference in New York.

She praised the immediacy of Twitter as a communications channel, saying it has proven invaluable when customers are trying to prepare for or recover from a hurricane and other crises.

Tweeting along with customer care reps Michael and Stephanie, Sarah has built the number of followers to 15,000 with folksy video about the arrival of the first Fraser Fir Christmas trees and polls on whether Thanksgiving turkeys are better deep fried, baked or smoked. 

Social media efforts also include additional Twitter feeds for sale items and the company’s charitable foundation, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel.

So far there are no scented candles, incense or cologne available. If The Home Depot makes good on delivering an olfactory experience, I recommend they license Lynryd Skynyrd’s “That Smell.”

Engagement has taken over as the measurement standard for those seeking to quantify the time, money and intellectual capital they are spending in social media.  According to social media thought leaders (like Katie Paine or Jeremiah Owyang), it is infinitely more valuable to build sustainable, interactive relationships with customers online than to reach a wide audience with a single universal message.

Nonetheless, if that’s the case, how should a PR professional balance attempts to build a meaningful following without getting distracted with too many individual conversations?  Debra Askanase, former non-profit exec and now head of Community Organizer 2.0, argues that the key is in qualifying the value of those relationships in reports to executives.  As she noted in “The Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers Who Don’t Care” on her blog:

“What I discovered was that, of the 4,000+ followers (on a client’s Twitter account), only three were truly interested enough in what the organization was tweeting. Three. Twitter utilizes the concept of social media karma: give and give and then others will give back. This company didn’t offer help, advice, support or anything else personal.  Obviously, Twitter did not drive people to the website - no one cared enough about the company to go there.”

It’s easy to build a large following using Twitter. Simply follow as many users as possible, then ‘unfollow’ anyone who hasn’t followed you back within a couple of days. A few hours of work can easily lead to a thousand Twitter followers. But do those relationships lead to sales?

Askanase goes on to illustrate, step-by-step, how to evaluate the quality of an organization’s existing social media following and how to build significant relationships without getting distracted by individual conversations. In the case of the two most prevalent social networks being used by marketing and PR today, Askanase has two simple pieces of advice:  

• Continue to measure the number of followers on Twitter, but vet them first.
• Only include the number of ‘valued’ followers or Facebook fans in reports to the c-suite

It’s this kind of triage that will allow PR departments will stay on track to cultivating new, real relationships without losing track of the existing social media relationships the company has already developed.

Visitors learned plenty by observing their fellow passengers on the long elevator ride up to the 50th floor of McGraw-Hill headquarters in Manhattan yesterday.

The few getting off at the offices of Business Week had a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, knowing not everyone would survive publication’s transfer to its new owner, Bloomberg LP. Other staffers were downcast, avoiding eye contact with those of us wearing Visitor badges as we headed to the top floor of the power tower, where the vaunted media holding company’s executive dining room is located.

The workers would have been even more bummed if they had listened to the brutally frank discussion about how deep-pocketed consumer and B2B marketers will be communicating with their customers and prospects in the years ahead. Media empires like McGraw-Hill, Time Warner and News Corporation just didn’t figure into the equation. The aims of new PR and marketing campaigns will be trust and audience engagement, rather than column inches and product placements.

Paul Argenti set the stage for a panel discussion by citing recent Arthur W. Page Society research showing enterprises that want to be seen as authentic can no longer use a top-down approach to their communications. “Those days are over,” warned the professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck business school, whose new book Digital Strategies for Powerful Communications was the focus of the event.

Courtney Barnes, the PR News editor who co-authored the book with Argenti, was blunter still. She drew liberally on the event’s “social Darwinism” theme, saying only the fittest communicators would survive. Anyone ignoring the power of social media and not utilizing digital tools to create content, conversation and engagement would become extinct.

View the video:

Photo credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

For the better part of the last decade, advertising, marketing, and media thought leaders have all predicted a massive increase in mobile technology – that our mobile devices would eventually replace television and computers as the #1 place where consumers follow the news and watch videos.  (See here, here, and here as examples of years past where the mobile industry was predicted to be the “next big thing”).

While the average consumer’s use of mobile technology has remained relatively low due to limitations such as small screens and compatibility issues, Adobe’s recent introduction of its new mobile Flash Platform may change all of this.

As Stan Schroeder of Mashable noted, “this is the version of mobile Flash you’ve been waiting for. You can expect faster rendering, lower memory consumption and less battery drain.”

It’s not just about the ability to watch video; Adobe Flash has the potential to change the way consumers gather and disseminate information, and it’s something PR professionals need to be aware of. The ability to easily view and distribute video on a mobile device increases the speed at which any message can go viral.

With new opportunities for multimedia viral marketing campaigns, as well as an increased potential for a widespread crisis, this is not a development to go unnoticed. Video has always been more viral than text, and with Adobe’s release, video’s sharing capacity is now greater than ever.

The best way to address this development is to start integrating videos as part of your company’s public relations plan. Start thinking about ways to include a social media release or a product launch in a simple video that captures the attention of consumers – it just may prove to be vital in achieving the bottom line.

The next time you see someone on the subway looking at their Blackberry with their earphones on, just think – it could be your company video that they are watching.

The second day is coming to an end here at Inbound Marketing Summit. Of the 45+ sessions and 73+ social media ninjas speaking here (warning: don’t call them social media experts or you’ll get barked at), I’m fairly confident my marketing peers are walking away from Gillette Stadium with a new and relevant perspective into best practices for integrating social media listening and engagement into their existing marcom mix. A big shout out to Chris Brogan and the New Marketing Labs producer (including their newest recruit and friend of mine, Bob Collins) for putting on a great show.

While dna13 was one of many media monitoring vendors exhibiting here, it was interesting to hear attendee’s concerns as it related to taking the social media plunge. Monitoring and tracking their efforts so as to prove their investment to the C-suite is particularly daunting. Fortunately there are plenty of free and paid ways to get your feet wet in social media monitoring.

But – something is amiss. People are getting so caught up in the social media hype, that they have the potential to lose sight of the impact, influence and (share price) devastation that TV and print coverage can have on a brand’s reputation.

As ambassadors of our brand, it’s our role to protect our company’s reputation and ensure our corporate messages are getting out accurately. If everyone diverts 100% of their focus towards listening and engaging to online media, then they’re going to miss the fact that Fox News 4 minutes ago incorrectly reported their company as having gone bankrupt. How can established media do this? Well they’re no dummies; they’re looking to social media as a source for news stories too.

Unfortunately, you can’t control what conversations are going on out there, and what web pages are returned in everyone’s search results. But ensuring that your monitoring strategy maintains vigilance across all mediums, will make certain that if something like this was to happen to you – that you’d be able to catch and control your message before it hits the mass media and escalates completely beyond your control.