There is a social media position open in Rhode Island.  Here are the details:

Job Description:

Put your social media skills to work with an organization that is looking to increase their visibility through an expanding social media presence.  Using tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, manage community relationships for a major software organization that focuses on making the life cycle of product development easier.  Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and HP use their technology to assist in the process of developing consumer and busines materials.

Here’s what we’re after:

• Educate the Marketing and current Media team on Social Community awareness and how to use the tools in a business to business manner.
• Stay current with social media trends, language, outlets, and resources on how to best promote awareness around our client.
• Maintain an appropriate schedule for updating material and researching trends in the social media community.
• Work with internal teams to create compelling campaigns to drive awareness across all key constituents.

Requirements:

• An ideal candidate would have 2-4 years in public relations, internet marketing, communications, and/or journalism.
• A saviness in Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube with proven skills
• An understanding and interest in using the social media outlets for B2B interaction.
• The ability to write compelling messages and raise a general interest in the project you are working.
• Must be able to work onsite.

For more info, contact:

Tim Sullivan
Recruiter
Onward Search
800 West Cummings Park, Suite 3250
Woburn, MA 01801
P: 877-662-7932 F: 866.914.6195

BusinessWeek recently published an article titled “Beware Social Media Snake Oil” about self-proclaimed social media experts who don’t deliver on their marketing promises or, worse, actually do more harm to their clients than good.  The article has prompted a number of responses from the social media blogosphere, including those from David Armano and Mitch Joel and Jordan Kasteler.  A while back, I wrote my own list of questions for companies looking to evaluate social media marketers and avoid the snake oil salesmen.  However, I wanted to make a few points defending social media marketing gurus, who I think were unfairly critiqued by BusinessWeek:

1. Measuring the ROI on traditional media is just as, if not more, difficult than with social media. BusinessWeek writes, “Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube (GOOG) hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment. This approach could sour companies on social media and the rich opportunities it represents.”  The implicit argument is that traditional marketing has great ROI tools.  In many cases, however, this simply isn’t true.  During my fourteen year stint in the broadcasting industry, I worked for five different radio stations (and four different broadcasting corporations) across the country.  I can assure you, the radio industry does not have an accurate way to measure the number of listeners it has, let alone measure what those listeners might be buying and why.  Radio’s Arbitron ratings system is riddled with problems, starting with the fact that the sample size is so small that a single person can wreak havoc on the measurements for an entire market.  Considerable effort has been made in recent years to adopt a more “scientific” ratings system with the introduction of a tool called the Portable People Meter.  This has been so fraught with problems that radio companies refused to use it at first and the FCC launched a probe into the new system.  The same is true of television.  Likewise, how do you measure the amount of people who purchase your product because they saw it on a billboard or in a newspaper?  The direct mail industry has increasingly turned to the internet through the use of tools like Personalized URLs in the hope of demonstrating ROI, to some avail.  Every industry has its own set of measurements, and with very few exceptions, these metrics actually measure various forms of “buzz” but are deeply flawed as a tool for determining real ROI.

(See this article on comparing traditional media measurements to social media measurements.)

2. Any marketing and media can be misused. BusinessWeek cites a number of examples where the use of social media has resulted in negative consequences, from a poorly written Motrin ad to a comment about a town being racist.  But to blame the medium for bad content is literally blaming the messenger.  Is there any reason to believe the Motrin ad would have been received better if it had been aired on television instead of the web?  Certainly caution should be taken with social media; you should always think twice before broadcasting any message out on behalf of your company.  And yes, it is much easier to broadcast out a message (bad or otherwise) with social media than it is with traditional media, but that’s the trade-off: The upside to social media is that any idiot can do it.  The downside is that any idiot might do it.

3. All social media experts are self-proclaimed. Let’s face it, this is a new field.  I’m a self-proclaimed social media expert and so is everyone else out there.  This field is so new that there are no university degrees offered in it; there are no certification program; there are no standards.  Yet.  That’s not the fault of the the industry or the people in it, it’s simply the nature of the beast.  Over time, this will change.  In the meantime, that’s not an indictment of the industry.  Einstein didn’t have a degree; that doesn’t mean he wasn’t an effective scientist.

4. Social media tools are very new. It is, as the article states, like the Wild West.  Frankly, that’s what’s so exciting about it.  Twitter was introduced to the public only two years ago.  Facebook fan pages for business have only become truly useful in the last year or so.  WordPress plugins that allow content to spread over the internet, such as SexyBookmarks or the TweetMeme button, are very new.  One of the main reasons there are no great metrics of the media yet is because it’s changing all the time.  As soon as a case study is written using one tool, a better tool is introduced.  But the fact that this marketing method is rapidly improving is not a reason to dismiss it.

5. Social media gurus are very new. Because the rise of these tools gave rise to the the gurus, social media marketing companies are very new.  Case studies may help separate the wheat from chaff, but many may not have built a portfolio of case studies yet, or those case studies may quickly become outdated due to emerging technologies.  It may be more useful to look at the background of the social media marketers.  BusinessWeek dismisses most gurus as “refugees from the real estate bust” – a claim which they failed to substantiate or qualify – as if we had gone from flipping houses to giving Facebook seminars.  I suspect many gurus actually have backgrounds in either technology, marketing or media (like myself).  In any event, it does not logically follow that by indicting somebody’s background you thereby also indict their ability to produce results.  Social media is new, so naturally these people were doing something different five years ago.

6. Social networking is like networking in the real world. At my seminars, I am constantly asked about the ROI on social media marketing, and my response is always the same: Social networking is like networking in the real world.  Is there a direct correlation in sales?  No.  But the more you do it, the more you get out of it.  It’s impossible to tell if today’s conversation will lead to a sale from a friend-of-a-friend six months from now (and thank God! How boring would life be if our every action could be reduced to a numeric formula?).  But the fact that it can’t be measured precisely doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have an effect.

At the end of the article, BusinessWeek warns of a backlash against the budding social media marketing industry that could kill it off just as it is becoming truly valuable.  Ignoring the fact that the author just spent the last sixteen paragraphs perpetuating this backlash, the blame is laid at the feet of the social media experts.  They need to “shift the focus from promises to results” and “flush out the snake oil.”  Implicit in this statement are two premises which I reject: 1) the focus is currently on promises and (2) the industry is rife with ill-intentioned snake oil salesmen looking to scam people for a quick buck.  In fact, many social media experts rose to prominence precisely because they railed against the lack of results delivered by traditional forms of marketing.  Yet here is a call for the social media community to turn against its own.  While I think that a certain degree of self-policing is valuable, I don’t think inciting people to ‘root out the traitors in their midst’ is particularly healthy for a fledgling industry.  In short, social media experts should aim to raise the standards amongst their peers by helping each other and spreading knowledge, not conducting witchhunts.

It’s been tough to find time to blog lately, between a new job (with a long commute) and the holidays.  I have, however, squeezed in a couple of social media seminars over the last several weeks, including one for the New England Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives and another for Bryant University.  All of which got me thinking about how much I enjoy teaching the principles of social media marketing.  Now that I am relocating to Boston, I would love to find a local university that would have me as a guest professor for a semester to teach a course on social media marketing.  So today I am using my blog for my official pitch: I want to come teach (part-time, preferably in the evenings) at your university!

My qualifications are straight-forward enough: I graduated with degrees in Political Science and Philosophy from Brown University.  I went on to a successful fourteen-year career in traditional media, working at radio stations all over the country, including New York, Boston, Seattle, St. Louis and Providence.  After a brief stint as a filmmaker, I launched my own business, which evolved into New England Social Media.  I now work full-time as the Marketing Campaign Manager for the executive development firm Linkage, where I am orchestrating and implementing the social media marketing strategy (including some cool, cutting edge work with WordPress MU and BuddyPress).  Along the way, I have given numerous seminars on Facebook, Twitter, and social media.  I have hosted seminars for universities, chambers of commerce, state economic development corporations, casinos, radio station clusters, realtors and more.

I’ve done some research into similar courses at other universities around the country, including UC Berkeley and Brigham Young.  Generally speaking, I agree with the  curricula I have seen.  A course would be structured something like this:

• Week 1: The rise of the internet and its impact on marketing. Permission Marketing, Conversational Marketing.  Data as king.  Granular, real-time, and location-based data mining.  The power to opt out.
• Week 2: Email Marketing, Message Boards, Instant Messenger, Skype.
• Week 3: Blogging: WordPress, TypePad, Blogger. The effect of blogging on journalism and marketing.
• Week 4: Web 2.0. User-generated content.: Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, Vimeo.  Tagging.
• Week 5: Social Networks:  Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning.
• Week 6: Microblogging:  Twitter, Identi.ca, Tumblr, Plurk, Ping.fm.
• Week 7: Listening:  RSS feeds, Google Alerts, Radian 6, Scout Labs.
• Week 8: Peer-to-Peer Reviews: Yelp!, Get Satisfaction, Angie’s List, Amazon Reviews.
• Week 9: Social Bookmarking:  Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon.
• Week 10: Audio: MP3, Napster, Podcasting, iTunes, Pandora, LaLa. Video: YouTube, Vimeo, Animoto, iMovie, Facebook, Hulu.
• Week 11: Collaborative Learning, Crowd Sourcing.  Wikis.  Memes.  Open Source: GNU GPL, Unix, WordPress, Firefox, Gimp.  Cloud Computing:  GoogleDocs, Salesforce.
• Week 12: Search Engine Optimization:  Google, Yahoo!,  Bing, Alexa.  Suggestion Algorithms: Amazon, Netflix, Pandora.
• Week 13: Mobility.  iPhone, Google Droid, Location and GPS-based services.  BrightKite, Loopt, Dodgeball.
• Week 14: Revenue Models: Advertising, Data Mining.  PayPal, GoogleCheckout, Craigslist.  Price Comparisons: Froogle, NextTag, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla.
• Week 15: Legal Issues.: Privacy, Security, Intellectual Property.  Napster, BitTorrent.
• Week 16: Week 14: Real-time data.  Virtual Worlds: Second Life, World of Warcraft.

As I’ve looked though other syllabi, I’ve noticed a tendency towards shorter articles.  However, I think there quite a few longer texts that ought to be included in such a course, including:

• Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
• Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searles, Dave Weinberger
• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
• Tribes by Seth Godin
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

Boston has a wealth of local social media experts who could be invited in as guest lecturers as well.

This is a rough sketch of the course I’d like to teach.  If you are a faculty member or student at a Massachusetts higher learning institution, and you think a course like this would be a valuable addition to your marketing track – I’m available!

Unlike Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, the relationships on Twitter are not reciprocal.  While both parties have to agree before a connection is established on Facebook (you send me a friend request and I approve it or vice-versa), the same is not true on Twitter, where I can follow you regardless of whether or not you are following me (and vice versa).  As a result, when you repeat (or “Re-Tweet”) a message on Twittter, it is forwarded on to an entirely new set of people.  The retweeting meme was quickly and spontaneously adopted by users of Twitter, and represents a powerful way to spread messages virally.  The custom is simple: just indicate that you are retweeting a message with the prefix RT, then give credit to the original poster by including @[Poster's Username], followed by the original tweet.  For example, if we tweeted:

Have a great day!

it would be retweeted as:

RT @NESocialMedia Have a great day!

Dan Zarella has spent more time investigating the science of Re-Tweeting than perhaps anybody on the planet.  For those who are interested in learning more about Re-Tweeting, I highly recommend that you subscribe to his blog.  In the meantime, I’ve taken some of his insights and distilled them into an easily digestible format.

According to Dan, 1.44% of all tweets are retweets.  So, how do you get other people to retweet your messages?  Here are some tips:

1. Have a Lot of Followers. It stands to reason that the more people following you, the greater the likelihoodthat some of them will retweet your message.  However, not all followers are created equally.  For example, men are more likely to retweet opinions, while women are more likely to retweet entertainment information.  There are a number of tools that will help you build followers, such as TweetAdder, and the internet is littered with suggestions for attracting followers.

2. Leave Room. Twitter allows you to post messages that are up to 140 characters in length, but if a message is to be retweeted without editing, you’ll need to leave room for the retweeter to add “RT @[username]” to the front of it.  Many retweeters like to add a comment of their own to the original message, too.  If you don’t leave enough characters available for this, the retweeter has to do more work to shorten your original message, which not only makes them less likely to pass it along, but also increases the chances of your message’s meaning being altered.  Avoid these issues by leaving room at the end of your tweet (Dan recommends capping your tweets at 120 characters).

3. Choose the Right Words. Dan’s research shows that some words are more likely appear in retweets than others.  Top words include: you, twitter, please, retweet, post, blog, social, free, media.  Here’s his comprehensive list. In general, messages that are retweeted tend to be written at a higher reading level and, on average, contain more syllables per word.  Retweets also tend to contain a lot of nouns.

4. Avoid the Wrong Words. Dan has also compiled a list of the 20 least retweeted words.  He points out some patterns: words ending in “-ing,” words revolving around sleep/bedtime, and slang.

5. Choose the Right Subjects. Messages that are conceptual (as opposed to emotional) are more likely to be retweeted.  Tweeting about social behavior or instrumental behavior also increases the likelihood of a retweet.  Dan points out, “Tweets about work, reli­gion, money and media/celebrities are more ReTweet­able than Tweets about neg­a­tive emo­tions, sen­sa­tions, swear words and self-reference.”  News is more likely to be retweeted.

6. Include Links. Dan’s research shows that retweets are far more likely to contain links than regular tweets: “…in a ran­dom sam­ple of nor­mal (non-ReTweet) Tweets, 18.96% con­tained a link, whereas 3 times that many ReTweets (56.69%) included a link.”

7. Use Bit.ly to Shorten Your Links. There are a number of URL shorteners out there that can translate a long, nasty looking link into something, well… short and nasty looking.  Dan’s research shows that links shortened with Bit.ly are far more likely to be retweeted than those shortened with other services, including TinyURL.

8. Tweet at the Right Time. Dan’s discovered that retweeting grows steadily during the course of the weekday and is heaviest after 3pm EST.  He also discovered that Friday is the heaviest day for retweeting.

9. Ask Nicely. It sounds simple, but asking people to “please” retweet your message works.  (Just don’t overdo it.)

10. Do Unto Others… I know of no research on this particular point, but it stands to reason: just as you are apt to notice when others retweet your message, they are likely to notice when you retweet theirs.  So if you want other people to retweet your messages, get in the habit of doing the same.

How do you track retweets to see what’s working and what’s not?  Although there are tools out there that claim to be able to do this, perhaps the easiest way is to use Twitter’s own search function.  In whichever third-party application you use to manage your Twitter account (I recommend that people never manage their account from Twitter.com itself; instead, try TweetDeck, Seesmic, CoTweet or HootSuite), set up a search for “RT @[Your Username]“.  This will show you each time your messages are retweetsed   You probably won’t have so many that you’re unable to count up the various retweets for each original message, but if you wanted to further subdivide your searches, you could set up a search with the the RT @UserName prefix and the first few words of each tweet.

Good luck…and pass it on!

I get asked this question in my seminars a lot, so I thought I’d put my answer into writing for all to see.  Once you create a Facebook page, how do you get word out to potential fans?  Here are some ideas:

1) Give Your Facebook Page a User-Friendly URL: You can give your Facebook a customized URL, such as www.Facebook.com/NewEnglandSocialMedia, to make it easier for people to remember.  Simply go to www.Facebook.com/UserName to register your URL.  (Note: You must have at least 25 fans before you can register a customized URL.)

2) Add a Facebook Fan Box to Your Website: Facebook recently introduced a new-and-improved widget that you can incorporate into your company’s website, called a Fanbox.  The Fanbox allows people to become a fan from your site, see other fans and/or see updates from your fans.  Set up your Fanbox here, then paste the code in your website.

3) Suggest the Page to Your Facebook Friends: Beneath your Page picture, there is a link that allows you to recommend your page to your friends.  Your friends receive these Page Suggestions in the “Requests” section of their Facebook Home page.

4) Run a Facebook Ad Campaign: You can create a Facebook advertising campaign by launching the Ads and Pages application (in the lower left corner of your browser).  Click the green “Create an Ad” button and follow the instructions to create an ad that targets your potential customers.  Be sure to click the link that says “I have something on Facebook I want to advertise” under the Destination URL box and select your page from the drop-down menu.  Advertising will cost you money.

5) Add a Facebook Badge to Your Email Newsletter: If you have an e-mail newsletter that you regularly send out using a service like Constant Contact or MailChimp, incorporate a linked Facebook badge.  Facebook is rather particular about the verbiage and graphics you use to promote your page, so use the badges you find here and follow the guidelines found here.

6) Tag People in Photos, Videos and Notes on Your Page: If you want word about your Page to spread, you need to constantly update it with new content.  This content shows up in the newsfeeds of fans, where they can interact with it by commenting or approving of it.  The more your fans interact with your Page’s content, the more likely it is to show up in the Highlights section of friends of fans.  This is how the content spreads virally, encouraging new people to become fans.

You can help this along even further by posting photos, videos and notes and “tagging” or identifying people in them, increasing the likelihood that these items will be discovered and shared.  Click on the item you want to tag, then click the “Tag this Photo/Video/Note” button and enter the name of the person in the item.  You can even tag people who aren’t actually in the item, but be sure to only tag people who would be interested in this particular content, lest ye be spamming.  You must be friends with somebody through your Profie in order to tag them in an item.

7) Encourage People to Become Fans via Text Message: Facebook allows people to become fans of a page even if they don’t have their computer with them.  All they have to do is text “fan [PAGENAME]” to FBOOK (32665).  (This, of course, assumes that they have already integrated their cell phone with their Facebook profile.)

8) Add a Link to Your Email Signature: You include your phone number or even address in your email signature, don’t you?  Add your Facebook link, too – especially since you’ve now (after step #1) got a lovely, customized URL.

9) Put Your Facebook URL on Your Business Card (and All Other Printed Materials): Put your customized Facebook URL on everything – from your business card to your stationary to your prospectus to the back of your CD.  Of all the things you can print text message instructions on, wristbands are my favorite because they don’t get lost easily like business cards and people often still have them on later, like when they’re in front of their computer.  So if you participate in any events (concerts, trade shows, etc.), aim to get your Facebook URL on the wristbands.  You can have your own printed up by Trendy Wristbands.

10) Automatically Send Your Facebook URL to Your Twitter Followers: There’s a lot of controversy over the use of this last technique, which involves using a Twitter application like TweetLater or  TweetAdder to automatically send a Direct Message to anybody who follows your company.  The argument against auto-DMs is that they are really spam, and that social media ought to be used to build relationships through genuine human interaction, not automated responses.  Certainly, my own Twitter inbox is overrun with obnoxious promises that I can make millions a day through Twitter, so I sympathize with the spam argument.  The counter-argument is that simply alerting somebody who is connecting with you to another way in which they might also be able to connect with you is not nearly as offensive as false monetary promises.  (After all, they have clearly expressed an interest in connecting with you, so you’re just giving them more of what they want.)  Moreover, even if it is a bit spammy to send out the same message to all of your followers, who cares if it’s effective?  I am unwilling to categorically declare myself opposed to or in favor of auto-DMs (I use it for some clients but not others), so I’ll simply encourage you to tread very lightly if you do decide that this is a technique to try.

*Note that tips #8 and #9 can be used to promote your Twitter page as well.  So how do you promote your Facebook Page?

Exercise daily? Yes.  Floss daily? Maybe.  Blog daily? Hmmm…

I write this blog with a particular eye to what is both actionable and practical for the modern business.  I want to give my readers specific steps that they can take, but not give them so much that they are overloaded.  Sometimes the most useful information I can offer is telling them where they don’t need to spend their time.

Given that social media is still in its infancy, it should come as no surprise that its practitioners are not of a single mind.  Every once and I while, I respectfully disagree with one of my peers.  The other day, I happened upon a blog post by Chris Brogan, the author of Trust Agents, offering suggestions on how to blog every day. The suggestions themselves are good ones.  However, the article is premised on the notion that a company needs to blog every day.  For many businesses, particularly small businesses, blogging is a time consuming process when employees have a lot of other work to do.  Naturally, if you are in the business of social media, it makes sense to blog frequently (although I am in that business and I don’t blog every day).  But if you are an attorney or a restaurant or a retail outlet, do you need to blog every day?  What if you are a larger company?  Ford Motors offers several blog posts a day, but Wal-Mart doesn’t seems to have a blog at all.   What about internet companies?  Google appears to blog on a daily basis, but Facebook doesn’t, and neither does Twitter.

So do you need to blog on a daily basis?  Here are a few questions to consider when deciding:

1. What purpose does your blog serve (for your company)?

Does your blog directly produce revenue for your company, or is it a tool to market your revenue-generating services?  If blogging is your core business, like The Huffington Post, TechCrunch or Perez Hilton, it stands to reason that you would blog at least once a day.  There is a simple explanation for this: most revenue-generating blogs cover current events.  However, these blogs are unlikely to benefit from Chris’ suggestions, because their content is largely reactionary.  The Huffington Post writes about politics, while TechCrunch writes about the latest technological news and Perez Hilton writes celebrity gossip.  In each case, the material is dictated by what other people do; they do not need to generate completely on their own, but rather base it on what is happening in the world around them.

If, on the other hand, your blog is a marketing (or customer service) tool designed to be useful for consumers, you may not be focused on providing the latest information, but rather the most useful information.  In this case, you should post only as often as you are able to generate truly valuable information.  There is a potential pitfall here, in that if you succumb to the temptation to blog every day, you may in fact be watering down the quality of your blog with inferior posts.  (The suggestion that you “Get the post up fast, not perfect” strikes me as somewhat reckless for many companies.)  Never lose sight of the fact that social media is about providing value for others in the community.   You only get as good as you give, so I would argue that companies who are not covering current affairs avoid daily blog posts unless they can dedicate the time to provide their readers with excellent quality.

2. Who is your audience?

First and foremost, are you writing for humans or are you writing for search engines?  Many businesses use blogs as a tool to increase their ranking in the results of search engines like Google by cramming their posts full of keywords (words that they think potential customers will type into a search engine when looking for their product).  I know former journalists who now specialize in writing articles this way.  If you are writing for search engines, then you should determine how often to post based on what you think your financial return on a high ranking is.  If you think it would dramatically increase your sales if your business appeared at the top of Google’s results page, you should blog frequently.  If, on the other hand, you think that search engine results are not a determining factor of your sales, blogging daily becomes unnecessary.

On the other hand, you may be blogging for customers, not computers.  If your blog is to be judged by humans, the question becomes…

3. What purpose does your blog serve (for your readers)?

If you are writing for people, why do those people read your blog?  Are they looking for the latest headlines, the latest product information, detailed analysis, commentary or instructions?  Your audience’s expectations will inform your blogging frequency.  Ask yourself:  Do my readers expect content that is timely or timeless?  In other words…

4. Should your content be time-sensitive?

Timely content will increase your traffic because people will visit your site repeatedly as events change.  However, this web traffic may not lead to increased sales of your product or service because it is the same people visiting over and over again.  If you make your money by generating numerous small sales to the same people, a timely blog may be effective.  If, on the other hand, you generate revenue through large purchases that people make only once every several years (such as cars or homes), the effort that goes into daily blogging may not be worth it.  Instead, you may want to write timeless articles that will be just as relevant months or years from now as they are today.

5. Is a blog the most appropriate forum?

If you do decide that timely information is important to your audience, you may want to take a closer look at whether or not a blog is the most appropriate format for delivering that information.  Some companies may want to deliver information that is both timely and detailed.  Daily blog posts are well-suited to this task.  On the other hand, sometimes you want to be timely and brief.  Perhaps you are a restaurant looking to tell your customers that there is a special dish on the menu tonight, or a radio station about to give away concert tickets, or an attorney hosting a seminar.  Do you need the length of an entire blog post to tell your customers or is micro-blogging (via Twitter or status updates) more appropriate?  Perhaps posting your message in a social network like LinkedIn or Facebook would be more effective.  In some cases, an email or eVite would be most appropriate.  Given the sheer number of different communication tools available on the web, ask yourself if focusing on one time-consuming tool like a blog would is the most effective use of your daily resources.

6. Do you really have something to say?

I saved this point for last because I think it’s the most important.  Don’t blog just to blog.  Blog because you have something important to communicate that provides value to your readers.  Too often, people blog because they are concerned with the value it could bring to themselves.  But if you dilute your blog with posts that readers don’t find useful, you will do more harm than good.

To put it succinctly, blogging can be a very powerful marketing strategy, but you only need to blog daily if timely, detailed articles directly impact your revenue.  Otherwise, focus on quality, not quantity.  There’s a good chance your better time is spent on something else.

Last night, I was fortunate enough to partake in Yelp!’s Passport to Kendall Square at the Microsoft Research & Development Center in Cambridge.  The event showcased over two dozen local businesses, including restaurants, coffee shops and gyms, who were sampling their wares as an introduction to the neighborhood.  Yelp! invited a select group of their power users in the Boston area and also other users chosen at random. The event’s conception and execution was handled by Clearly Creative.

As somebody who both enjoys social media and has produced events for a living, I must say, this was a fantastic affair.   Attendees were given a passport book upon entry.  They made their way from table to table, as each business served food, drink or other goodies (the lobster ravioli was a personal favorite) and stamped the booklets.  The stamped books could then be used as coupons back at the participating venues.  It was well organized, well attended and well executed.

The location is beautiful – Microsoft has a great space and has been generously opening it up to the community after hours for events like these. I was at an SEO meetup in the same space the week before, but this time we had access not only to the second floor, but the beautiful balconies on the tenth and eleventh floors as well, which offer tremendous views of the city.

I like to see online companies go offline and bring people together in the real world.  It is easy to see how this event is a great marketing tool for Yelp!, allowing them to engage the local business that are reviewed and advertise on their site, and at the same time reward their most valuable users.  Although I suspect this event was incurred as a marketing expense and not  a source of revenue for the company this time, it’s easy to see how events like these could grow into revenue generators.  Of course, such events are not as easily scalable as the websites that  internet companies like Yelp! traffic in, but it could certainly grow into a nationwide program with the right team in place.

One complication for Yelp! has always been a revenue model based around charging the businesses that are reviewed on its website.  After all, if bad reviews appear on the site, these businesses are unlikely to spend money on Yelp! or, even worse, will put pressure on the site to remove negative reviews.  I would like to see Yelp! publicly adopt a policy (if they haven’t already) of strict separation of between its content and its clients, like you see in reputable newspapers.  This event didn’t complicate this particular issue any further, but it did bring the potential conflicts to mind.

Nevertheless, the value for the businesses in events like this is clear.  You can write about food all you want online, but the only way to judge for yourself is to taste it.  This event enabled Yelpers to do just that, and I know that I discovered some new restaurants that I will be trying.

I heartily congratulate Yelp!, Clearly Creative, Microsoft and all the participating venues on a fantastic event.  I sincerely hope this is just the first of many, if for no other reason than I would selfishly like to attend more events like this.  Great job!

These days, businesses want to be continually engaging with their customers.  This requires the constant creation of content.  Some of this content can be self-promotional in nature, but the quickest way to find yourself ignored in the social media universe is to repeat yourself like a broken record.  I recommend that companies looking to engage customers without overloading them with advertising find ways to position themselves as an expert in their industry, either by creating original content or passing along useful content from others.  For example, I work with a modeling agency that’s constantly posting content about the fashion industry.  It’s not a novel concept, by any stretch, but it works because when people choose to follow you on social media, they are signaling that they are interested in your field and look to you as a reliable source.  This makes social media an excellent way for companies to keep themselves on the top of consumers’ minds.   In short, creating and passing along information in a particular field brands you as an expert in that arena.

For companies looking for ways to brand themselves as experts in their fields, I recommend the following social media strategies:

1) Blog. If you’re an expert in a given arena, the best way to prove it is to write about that field.  It’s easy to set up a blog these days (I use WordPress).  The harder part is investing the time to do it on a regular basis.  There are a ton of tips for writing blogs on the internet, such as these, so I won’t reiterate them here.

However, I will urge you to consider your blog in the context of your overall online branding strategy.  It takes a while for a blog writer to discover their voice, and also to figure out how much time they can realistically devote to writing.  For example, I discovered early on that I go through up and down cycles when I blog.  Some weeks, I’ll post an article every day; other weeks, I won’t blog at all.  This is because while I consider blogging important, it’s not central to my business.  As a result, it makes little sense for me to be overly concerned with writing timely blog articles.  I am not writing news (like TechCrunch or Politico) or topical opinion (like the Huffington Post or Perez Hilton).  Instead, I write practical social media strategies for businesses, which ought to be just as relevant months from now as they are when I first write the words.

My blog’s “voice” also informs the way in which I measure the success of my blog.  Because my blog is not necessarily topical, I am not overly concerned with the traffic it receives in the first 24 hours after it I post an article.  My blog entries may still receive traffic much farther down the road.  However, you may decide that your blog needs to be topical and thus, the immediate traffic matters a great deal.  This will influence the way you write and measure your response.

2) Comment on Blogs. In addition to writing your own blog entries, engage with other people by commenting on their blogs.  Don’t overtly use comments as a means to direct traffic back to your blog; use it as a tool to engage in actual conversation with other people.  Remember, the goal here is not to drive traffic to your website, but simply to brand yourself as an expert in your field.  Comment enough and people will begin to recognize your name and discover your site on their own.

3) Ping Things. As you keep up on the latest news in your industry, pass the most relevant articles along to your social media followers.  I could suggest that you utilize any number of micro-blogging tools: Twitter, Tumblr, status updates on Facebook and LinkedIn, etc.  Instead, I recommend that you update them all in one fell swoop by setting up an account with Ping.fm, which lets you post to multiple social media sites at once.

Once you’ve got your Ping account up and integrated, there are a number of tools that make it easy for you to forward web pages along.  If you are using Firefox, consider adding an extension like PingFire.  If you use Google Reader to find the latest news, you can forward stories directly to Ping by following these instructions.  Many blog entries will give you the option of Pinging the post (or forwarding it through any other number of social media networks) right there on the page.

My use of micro-blogs affects and is shaped by my use of blogs.  I choose to use micro-blogging to pass along topical content by others, while I use my blog for original articles that are less time-sensitive.

4) Re-Tweet. In social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, all of the relationships are reciprocal; that is, a connection requires the approval of both parties.  This is not true of Twitter, where you can follow somebody regardless of whether or not they are following you, and vice-versa.  As a result, somebody may alert you to a particularly interesting piece of information through a Tweet that your own followers don’t receive.  You can pass this information to your own followers through a convention known as Re-Tweeting.  Get in the habit of regularly re-tweeting information that you think will be of interest to your followers.

5) Answer Questions. There are a number of sites that allow you to offer your expertise, such as eHow and Answers.com.  Personally, I like to use LinkedIn.  Once you’ve created a profile, go to the “Answers” menu and select “Answer a Question.”  Browse the categories based and answer questions when you feel you have insight to offer.

6) Create a Tutorial Video. YouTube allows users to create channels with their videos, while other sites such as HowCast specialize in how-to videos.  So create a video that allows you to show off your expertise.  If you’re filming in the real world, pick up a Flip MinoHD camera – a cheap way to film your video in high definition.  If your video simply requires that you capture the the actions you perform on your computer screen, use a program like Screen Toaster.  After you’ve recorded your video, plug your camera into your computer, upload the footage into a program like iMovie and edit it.  Or, send the footage off to a company like Pixability and have them edit it for you for just a few hundred dollars.  If your video is more informational and less instructional in nature, consider using a site like Animoto to create a super-cool slideshow, complete with music and a MTV-style transitions.  (The “Introduction to Social Media” video on this site was created with Animoto.)

7) Help a Reporter Out. Reporters regularly write articles that require quotations and insights from experts like you.  When that needs arises, they are increasingly turning to Help a Reporter Out, an ingenious email newsletter.  Three times a day, the newsletter is sent out, requesting experts on a wide array of topics to contribute to stories by any number of media outlets, including newspapers, magazines, blogs, podcasts and more.  Contribute to a reporter’s story and you’ll not only market yourself, you’ll also do your good deed for the day!

8) Host a Webinar. Use the power of the internet to host your own online seminar.  There are a wide range of tools for doing this, from the free DimDim to the paid Webex.  (Instructions for using DimDim are here – on eHow!)  You know what they say: Give a man a fish and they’ll assume you bought it at the store; teach a man to fish, and he’ll think you really know what you’re doing.  Or something like that.

9) Launch an E-mail Newsletter. Send out a monthly newsletter with articles in your area of expertise.  Don’t just repeat the information that is available to the public through your website.  Offer exclusive content only available to subscribers, such as extra information, secret contests or special deals.  Make your subscribers feel like they are getting rewarded for subscribing, not just receiving an advertisement (read: spam).  Be sure to include a photo of yourself in the newsletter, along with your ontact information, a link to your webpage, links to your social media accounts and a link that allows people to forward your email to others.  Constant Contact, iContact and MailChimp are great integrated email services.

10) Interview Other Experts. Nothing beats the power of association.  John Peel of the BBC and Kurt Loder of MTV may not be in bands themselves, but they are widely recognized as experts in rock music.  Why?  Because they have conducted hundreds of interviews with people who are in bands over the last several decades.  Position yourself as expert by conducting your own interviews in your blog/email newsletter/blog to associate yourself with other experts.

And here’s what I left out: There are a number of other things you could do to spread the word about your genius, but frankly I think they should only be used by the most aggressive companies that have a lot of time and resources to dedicate to these undertakings.  These include recording podcasts, which are technically difficult, less interesting than video and need to be updated regularly; writing white papers which are an excellent way to position yourself as an expert if you have the time and inclination to do some serious research; writing a book, if you also have the ability to track down somebody who will publish it for you; issuing press releases, which may or may not get picked up by other media sources; and pay-per-click advertising touting your expertise, which will put a dent in your pocketbook. These tools may work for some, but probably not for most.

What social media do you use to position yourself as an expert in your field? How has it worked for you?

As social media continues to explode, businesses are realizing that they must adopt an official policy regarding their employees’ use of social media.  Lately, it’s been a topic everywhere from The Washington Post to the NFL.  The real question is not about when and where employees should be allowed to access social media (obviously, if your time on Facebook is impeding your productivity it’s a problem) or how they should conduct themselves while acting as an official representative of the company (on the company’s Twitter account, for example), but rather what is or is not appropriate use of social media by an employee when they are acting in a personal capacity.

In short, when I’m tweeting on my own time with my personal Twitter account, is it any of my company’s business what I tweet?  We already know that it’s become common for employers to peek at your Facebook page before hiring you, so what’s to prevent them from continuing to monitor your page once you’ve been hired?  And can your employer hold you responsible for content that’s on that page?

With the health care debate raging these days, you hear a lot of talk from certain sectors about the rise of a tyrannical government.  Personally, I am not nearly as concerned about the government exerting control over my personal life as I am about my employer.  When the Founding Fathers drew up the Constitution, their fear of a tyrannical government was palpable, so they explicitly crafted protections against this.  However, they had no conception of multi-national corporations like Wal-Mart spanning the globe.  So while people rally to protest government intrusion into personal choices like what they can say, who they can marry and which doctors they can visit, they turn a blind eye to the fact that businesses are already dictating those choices for them.  The media outlets scream, “Don’t let Washington come between you and your doctor!” in the hopes that you won’t notice that your insurance company and your employer have always been between you and your doctor.  Big Brother is far more likely to take the form of a corporation than a government these days, but we all miss that fact because we assume that “freedom” means “freedom from government restriction,” not “freedom from any restriction.”

Given my stance on personal freedom, it should come as no surprise that I don’t think your employer should have the right to govern your personal online behavior, so long as it is clear that you are not representing your company.  After all, we are not required to represent our companies during every second of every day.  We ought to be allowed to act and speak as we wish on our own time.

Of course, the counter argument is that even though these acts are in our private lives, they are in a very public forum.  After all, saying something in a conversation at a dinner party with a few guests is not the same as saying something on Twitter, where the whole world can see it.  And yet, my answer remains the same.  If I were to engage in a public offline act, such as participating in a political rally, it would be wrong for my employer to punish me for it; the same holds true for issuing an opinion on social media.  In short, I don’t believe than an employer should have the right to restrict a person’s freedom of speech outside of work.

My argument so far assumes that we are talking about a “normal” 9-to-5 job.  There are, however, many jobs that put an employee in the public eye, and employers often expect more of these people: athletes, celebrities, journalists, late night talk show hosts, etc.  These employees often sign contracts with morals clauses, that specifically forbid them from engaging in any behavior that would reflect poorly upon their employer.  They do this because they are so intricately linked to their company’s brand that the public automatically views their opinion as the company’s official stance.  For example, when ABC’s Terry Moran recently tweeted President Obama’s off-the-record description of Kanye West as a “jackass,” was it possible for the public to separate his personal tweet from his company’s reporting?  The New York Times published a very thought-provoking article this week on how many public figures, from singer Courtney Love to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, have gotten themselves into trouble by tweeting.  If you specifically sign an agreement in which you state you will abide by a certain code of conduct in public, it seems to me that your social media communications would be covered by this agreement (although social media ought to be addressed specifically in such contracts moving forward).  However, I see no reason to implicitly hold every “normal” employee accountable to these standards, and I think it is unreasonable for companies to demand that employees abide by such contracts unless they are public figures.  Disney may suffer financially if Miley Cyrus goes on a bender and posts photos of it on MySpace, but Wal-Mart won’t suffer if a check-out clerk does the same.

Moving forward, I think there ought to be legal protections against employer retribution for employees who use social media to exercise free speech.  Free speech is vulnerable, but not nearly as vulnerable to government restriction as it is to corporate restriction.

In some social media circles, there is an inclination to lecture public relations experts on the social media revolution.  Public relations professionals are told that if they don’t learn the new rules they’ll be cast aside.  I certainly believe that social media represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between companies and their consumers, and that public relations agencies will need to adapt accordingly, but in many ways I think this makes the skills of PR pros even more important.  After all, when few people have the tools to reach an audience, you don’t have to be very good at crafting your message as long as you’re one of them; but when everybody has the tools to reach an audience, you have to be very good at connecting if you want to stand out.

Here are some of the public relations skills that are transferable, if not more desirable, in a social media society:

Identifying Audiences: The first task of any public relations agency has been to identify the target audience for a product or service.  Social media increases the need for proper targeting.  As it lowers the barrier of entry for marketing by reducing costs, more small businesses will get into the game.  In the past, targeting has been based largely on demographics: age, location, income level, etc.  With the rise of social media, people are using the internet to volunteer more information about themselves than ever before.  You no longer need to guess if somebody is into sports cars based on their age and gender; we know because they tell us in their Facebook profile.  So the method of identifying audiences will change as we focus more on keywords in profiles and conversations and less on demographic data, but the importance of being able to identify an audience will not change.

Identifying Outlets: Once the audience has been identified, a public relations agency must decide which mediums are the best way to reach that audience.  Again, the specifics may change, but not the process itself.  In the future, the choice may be between Facebook and LinkedIn instead of radio or television, but the ability to critically examine different media outlets and craft a proper campaign will still be of fundamental importance.

Crafting a Message: Everybody loves a good story, and great public relations professionals are great storytellers.  At its core, public relations is about crafting a narrative.  It’s the difference between a political candidate who’s “a recovering drug addict” or a “human who has triumphed over great adversity.”  Heroes and villains must be cast, a conflict must be created and the audience must be given somebody to root for.  Social media may make it possible for anybody to publish, but that doesn’t make everybody a good storyteller.

Writing: In a world where everybody can write, great writing skills become a key way to distinguish yourself.   The ability to write a great headline has never been more important than in the age of the 140-character Twitter limit.  (I read a lot of blogs; I don’t read a lot of good headlines.)  As writing moves from the printed page to the screen, where people are far more apt to scan, a mastery of word economy reigns supreme.  Likewise, language is key.  The rise of search engine optimization, keyword generation and tagging makes the ability to choose the correct word of fundamental importance.

Creating Creative: As the rise of user-generated content crowds cyberspace, it becomes harder and harder to stand out.  Coming up with the compelling creative pieces to support your message becomes important.  However, traditional public relations thinking may get turned on its head here.  In the past, production values mattered.  Your commercials needed a shiny, glossy look to attract attention.  No longer.  (Fanscape CEO Larry Weintraub recently blogged about the fact that his kids were more interested in grainy Lego Star Wars videos on YouTube than in the actual Star Wars movies.)  Yet the ability to create creative, to A-B test that creative and to measure the ability to reach an audience will continue to be important.  Again, the specific methodology will change, and public relations agencies will need to adapt, but the fundamental thinking that underlies the process will not.

Influencing Influencers: In many ways, public relations professionals are lobbyists.  Their job is to influence the opinions of key people, precisely because those people influence others.  Over the weekend, my girlfriend and I had dinner at Los Andes, a new Bolivian restaurant.  One of the owners told us that a recent positive review in The Providence Journal by Food Editor Gail Ciampa drove an enormous amount of traffic into his establishment.  The Providence Journal is a dying paper that loses more advertisers and more money every day.  And yet, the rise of the social media has, in many ways, made Gail Ciampa more influential because she can now reach even more people.  I don’t subscribe to any newspapers, but I read content from more newspapers than ever before.  I didn’t pay for The New York Times before the internet, and I certainly don’t pay for it now.  The difference is that I didn’t read The New York Times before the internet, and I read it every day now.

Why does Gail Ciampa still have the ability to drive dozens of people to a tiny restaurant if her paper is on the brink of extinction?  Because she has built a relationship with her readers over many many years.  People trust her opinion when it comes to dining.  There will always be people we trust as authorities on particular subjects.  Just because social media makes it is easier to access everybody’s opinion does not mean that we suddenly give equal weight to everybody’s opinion.  The ability to identify and influence these authorities, which has long been the providence of public relations, will continue to be important.  In the future, the key influencers may be bloggers or tweeters instead of journalists and cable television pundits, but they will still exist and public relations agencies will continue to maintain relationships with these people.  As I’ve said before, social media facilitates relationships, it does not replace relationships.  The job of a great public relations agency is to have great relationships, which will stay the same with the rise of social media.

Technological evolution always brings about mindset shifts.  It’s been argued that Gutenberg’s printing press paved the way for democracy.  But these technological shifts don’t invalidate the skills and experience of entire classes of workers overnight.  It doesn’t not follow that just because everybody now has the ability to market, everybody is now good at marketing.  In fact, in a world where everybody has the tools to do what you do, the ability to be the best with those tools in more important than ever.