I’m both heartened and worried by the number of PR and marketing agencies that are offering social media.

I’m heartened, because it means the business world is that much closer to accepting social media as a real form of communication. It means they know it’s going to be around for the long haul.

I’m worried, because a lot of these agencies don’t even understand social media. They just threw their new junior account exec at it because she has a Facebook page and they think that means she knows enough to run a large-scale campaign for them.

Make sure you know your stuff, AND that it works.

Social media is not an entry-level position, people. It’s not something you turn over to the brand new employee who has never even run a traditional campaign. And it’s definitely not something an agency should try to learn on a client’s dime.

NOTE: This is not to say that entry-level people shouldn’t do social media, or that PR or marketing agencies shouldn’t get into social media. They absolutely should. But, your social media experience needs to be more than resuscitating the nearly-dead Twitter account you started six months ago with the “Still trying to figure this twitter thing out. Does this make me a twit?” tweet.

I’ve seen a number of agencies now that are starting to offer social media as part of their service offerings, but I think they’re out of their element, and are only going to screw it up.. For one thing, their Twitter accounts are less than six months old. The agency accounts have fewer than 500 followers, and the employee accounts are all hovering around 100, and are filled with retweets from the agency account.

That is not social media experience. Not enough to start providing services for clients.

Strong social media experience means running campaigns where you can measure the ROI and show how much money you made. Strong social media experience means having more than 2,000 followers, because you know the ethical way to break past Twitter’s 2,000 following cap. Strong social media experience means you have a blog that’s more than a year old, and it’s filled with new social media knowledge and opinions, because you publish 2 – 5 times per week, not per quarter.

Look, I know how to write a press release, and I know how to pick up the phone and individually pitch journalists and bloggers. (Jason Falls would say that puts me ahead of the game for knowing that.) I even know how to do good TV and radio interviews. But that doesn’t make me a PR expert.

If I wanted to open a PR agency, I could probably do a passable job. I could fool a couple of small clients, and learn on their dime. But I wouldn’t be giving them the best I could be (or, if I was, the best I could be wouldn’t be good enough).

If you’re in PR or marketing, and you want to offer social media to your clients, you need to do a few things before you ever you’re ready to start:

1. Put together a team of people who are responsible for social media, not just one person. You at least need someone who can write and someone who knows how to read analytics and research. You also need one person who will be responsible for it all. This is not a time for committees and democracy. You need a social media account executive to take charge.
2. Understand that social media is as much about sales and customer service as it is about marketing and PR. If you’re going to manage social media for a client, you need someone who can sell and deal with problems.
3. You need to invest heavily in the ongoing education of your social media team. Require them to read industry blogs, read or listen to social media books, attend social media networking meetings, and pay for any learning they can get their hands on. I met an advertising agency that pays its staff to read books and give book reports to the rest of the agency at a monthly meeting. They pay $25 per book read (they even have a copy of Branding Yourself (affiliate link) in their library).
4. Send your social media team to at least one conference a year, if not two or three. Better yet, have them learn enough so they can present at those conferences. The great thing about being a presenter is you have to know more than your audience, which means they have to stay on the cutting edge.

If you’re going to do social media, do it right. You can’t sign up for a new Facebook account and pronounce yourself a social media consultant any more than you can record a video on your mobile phone and call yourself a video production house. Take the time to learn as much as you can before you offer it. Don’t feel like you have to rush. There are plenty of clients available, and they’ll still be there in a year or two when today’s agencies are being fired by their clients for bad social media execution.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Inky (Flickr)

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• 

A corporate blog is more than just a company diary where someone from marketing talks about the latest trade show. A corporate blog is a support tool that can lighten the load of several different departments within your company. Here are four ways a corporate blog can help your company.

1. Reduce Marketing Costs and Improve Reach

In the past, Marketing put a lot of time and money into developing, creating, and printing new sales literature and brochures. But once the specs changed on a particular product you got a new area code (it happened to my company in 2002), or you made an egregious error (guilty), the remaining 8,500 copies of the brochures were rendered obsolete, or you had to hand correct every single one of them with a black marker.

A blog can replace a lot of sales brochures and literature, introducing customers to the new product, letting them read the new specs, and finding out the latest features and prices. A blog will also let you show new photos and video demonstrations, tell people about the upcoming trade show or the show you just finished, or even post a video of the CEO talk about the product and what it means for the industry.

By turning to electronic publishing, you can reduce printing costs, reduce costs per lead, and ultimately, costs per sales.

2. Serve as a Newsroom

The PR department spends a lot of time chasing down the industry media or traditional media, trying to get them to talk about your latest product or service. The problem is, the media isn’t always willing to listen, or they can only publish on their own schedule, not yours. But by posting news articles to your website, you become the news source, not the traditional or industry media.

A blog will let you disseminate the latest news to your customers, helping your most loyal customers not only read what you’re up to, they can share it with their readers, which promotes your news as well. The media can use your blog as an information-gathering source as well. This lets them see what you’re doing, rather than waiting for a press release. They can find your press releases, product photos, and HD video clips, and get everything they need with ease. They can also get further information and details without calling your PR person while she’s on vacation and unavailable.

3. Sell to New Customers

Corporate blogging can greatly benefit the sales department, because salespeople can talk about the benefits of the new product, use blog posts to answer frequently asked sales questions, and preemptively overcome any objections potential customers may have.

While this won’t answer every question and objection for every customer, you’ll find that it cuts down on the time per sale. When I started selling on the Internet in the late-90s, I found I had cut my time per sales call down from 40 minutes to 10 minutes just because of the information I was putting on my website.

Again, this is where video demonstrations can be invaluable to potential customers. This also helps improve search engine rankings, so your site is more easily found during web searches, which means more customers could find you, which in turn means means more sales.

4. Provide 24/7 Customer Service

If you have a product or service that has frequent questions, don’t just rely on an FAQ section. Turn your blog into a knowledge center, and ask your customer service reps to write posts that answer those frequent questions. Make them as easy to find as possible (proper keyword tagging, links from the FAQ page, or even listing them in your “popular posts.”

Ask other customers to leave comments on individual posts about different fixes and solutions they’ve found as well. Incorporate their answers into the official blog posts to continue the discussion, and to make your customers feel like they’re contributing.

Finally, customers can search your website and find in-depth answers to questions they have. This saves phone calls about basic constantly-asked questions, which means you can help reduce customer service costs.

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• 

Crisis communications professionals, especially those dealing with environmental and man-made disasters, will often find themselves in a position where they need to relay information to the public fast. The great thing about social media is that it lets us communicate a lot of information immediately. And for the crisis communications pro, speed is often of the essence.

When I was the Risk Communications Director for the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH), we needed to communicate a lot of our information as quickly as possible. But the technology — at least the technology we had access to — meant being tethered down to a desk or finding a coffee shop that had passable wifi. And in 2006 – 2007, those were harder to find than they are now.

But the technology has caught up with the citizen journalists, surpassed the traditional media, and lets many crisis communicators become the direct source of the news, rather than waiting for the mainstream news people to catch up.

Here are five tools, both online and offline, that crisis communications professionals need to communicate quickly:

1. A smartphone

If you said “duh!” you’ve obviously never worked in government. In 2006, I was handed a Blackberry with the thumbwheel and keyboard. That was five years ago, and most of the agency people I know are still using them. The ones who have upgraded have upgraded to another Blackberry. The problem is, the good communication apps are being developed for the iPhone and Android. The Droid will let you take photos, videos, send tweets, and tap directly into your blog with apps from Posterous or WordPress, and they often cost as much or even less than Blackberry. Yes, the Blackberry will do all of that too, but it has fallen behind in the mobile communication arena, and may soon go the way of the dodo.

Mobile phones are now mini-computers that can make a phone call, not a phone that takes pictures and sends text messages. Sticking your crisis communications pros with flip phones or less-than-current technology hampers your crisis communications efforts severely.

2. Twitter & Facebook accounts

The problem with mainstream media is that you’re bound to their schedule and their filters. Not only do you have to wait until the 5:00 and/or 11:00 news to get your message out, they only spent 60 seconds on your story, and they missed three important points. Meanwhile, people are on Facebook and Twitter talking about the big emergency, and are asking questions that are either going unanswered, or being answered with bad information.

On the other hand, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are updated constantly. People ask questions, and you answer them. You provide people links to the most up-to-date news and numbers, shoot down rumors and misinformation, and get news out to the public without waiting until the media airs it several hours later.

3. A Posterous blog

This may not be your “official” blog, but Posterous is a great distribution channel. You can email photos, videos, and critical information to your Posterous blog, and have it automatically create a new blog post from all the content. Plus everything gets distributed to Flickr or Picasa (photos), YouTube or Vimeo (video), and your official blog. It can automatically notify Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn when there’s a new post up (or you can shut that off, and let your regular blog do that for you).

Writing a new blog post is a snap. Just open up Gmail or your smartphone’s email program, type in the subject line (that becomes the headline), attach the photos or videos, type in a few lines of text and you’ve got a blog post. Rather than waiting until you can get to your laptop and spending several minutes getting it up and running, you can do this on your smartphone in five minutes or less.

4. A WordPress blog on an external server

If you’re in a crisis communications position, you need a blog that is never, ever subjected to the whims, downtimes, and issues that a 3rd-party provider like WordPress.com or Blogger.com would face. It’s also important that your blog’s server exist outside your city, or even state. When I was at ISDH, one of the things we trained for was a nuclear attack aimed at the center of downtown Indianapolis, less than 50 yards from my office. If that happened, our subsequent replacements would need a way to continue to share information, since the melted slag of metal that was once our server was not an option. So our emergency backup was somewhere else far, far away.

I recommend a WordPress.org blog on your server because there are so many plugins and add-ons to increase the functionality of your blog — functionality that WordPress.com and Blogger.com just don’t have. Of course, you need someone who knows how to do all this, or at least an IT department who won’t insist that the blog needs to reside on the server in their building, just down the hall from your office (see Attack, Nuclear: Devastating Effects of). If they won’t help you, then go with WordPress.com or Blogger.com (or even your Posterous blog), until you get someone helpful in IT. Don’t let a bottleneck delay you; find a way to work around them until the bottleneck clears.

5. Mi-fi

Mi-fi is the portable wifi hotspot that fits in your pocket. It’s smaller than a deck of cards, and will support up to 5 users. It’s always on, and extremely secure. For crisis communications pros who rely on their laptops, but don’t always have access to a coffee shop or McDonald’s, this is a must. It’s also easy to recharge, and can plug into any wall or car’s cigarette lighter, which means you can communicate while you’re on the road.

A Mi-fi is also useful when combined with a digital camera and an Eye-Fi card, a wifi-equipped photo storage card. Set it up to automatically upload all photos to your agency’s Flickr or Picasa account, and you can keep people up to date with what’s happening via these two photo sharing sites.

There are a lot of other online and offline tools a crisis communications professional should have, but these are the five I wish I’d had when I was in state government. They would have made life so much easier, and we could have gotten information out a lot more quickly.

Now, if someone can only find a cure for bureaucracy, then life would be perfect, and I would even consider going back in to public service.

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• 

I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Dan Clarke (@speedydanclarke), an Indy Lights racer from England who lives in Indianapolis, and learning about his struggles this off-season. He’s looking for corporate sponsors so he can race in the upcoming season.

Dan Clarke at Carb Day 2010

If you don’t know what Indy Lights racing is, then you’re starting to see Dan’s problem. Indy Lights is the developmental racing league for IndyCar — Indianapolis 500 — racing. In a sport with fewer US fans than the NHL, he’s in the minor leagues.

Think of your favorite baseball team. Can you name its AAA minor league affiliate? Can you name their players? Do you know who their best hitter was last year, or their best pitcher?

Now you understand Dan’s problem. He’s looking for sponsors for a sport outside the big three — NFL, NBA, MLB — trying to convince them that the developmental league is a great place for them to be seen.

This is where social media can help. A personal branding campaign, even for athletes, can help build their brand, find new fans, and hopefully, bring in the big sponsors. It doesn’t matter if you’re an IndyLights driver, a minor league baseball player, or even the veteran right guard for the New Orleans Saints. If people don’t know who you are, they’re not going to care, and you’re going to have a tough time getting them to notice you. But by doing some basic personal branding, you can use that network to bring in new opportunities that contribute to your total success.

Start with Twitter

Twitter is one of the easiest places to start. This is where you can immediately see your fan base (# of followers), interact with them, and even measure the impact you’re having. Turn followers into fans, turn fans into evangelists. And as more people follow you, demonstrate to potential sponsors that you carry a lot of weight with your network.

Most athletes ignore their fan base on Twitter, choosing instead to communicate with each other publicly about private issues. For example, most IndyCar drivers have only a few thousand followers and only follow a few dozen people. Helio Castroneves, one of the most famous drivers in the world today, only has 31,000 followers, Ryan Briscoe has 8,600+, and Penske Racing (“one of the most successful teams in sports history with 330 race wins”) has 9,900 followers. To put that in perspective, I have 7,200 followers, I write blogs for a living, and the last thing I won was “Best Comedy Script” in a theater script competition in 2005.

If you don’t follow people, they won’t follow you. When you’re in a small-market sport, you can’t afford to be picky about who you follow. If you’re worried about privacy, don’t tweet your personal life. If you’re worried about managing a large Twitter network, get TweetDeck and use Twitter lists. But don’t make yourself seem unapproachable. Twitter is the one place you can interact with fans and still keep them at arm’s length.

Tip: Use Klout or Twitalyzer to measure the influence you have. Show sponsors that a positive word from you can influence buying behavior among your fans.

Create a blog

The blog is really the hub of your personal branding campaign. The point of being on those networks is to drive traffic to your blog; the point of your blog is to get people to join you on the other networks.

Your personal branding campaign is a wheel, with the blog at the center.

A blog is a place where you can share a behind-the-scenes look at what you’re doing. Share your exploits on and off the field/court/track, post photos, post videos, and tell stories. Fans love feeling like they’re connecting with their favorite athlete and learning stuff the casual observer or fair-weather fan doesn’t know. This is why celebrity news is so popular. People get to learn something about their favorite stars. But since small-market athletes don’t get the rave coverage that the Peyton Mannings and LeBron James of the world, you have to make your own news.

Blogs are becoming more important and popular among the PR crowd, especially crisis communicators, because they avoid the whole filter of mainstream media. For athletes, this avoids the filter of the sports media, which only gives a scant amount of attention to your sport anyway, and even then, only to the victories of the marquee stars and screwups of everyone else.

Tip: Use Google Analytics or Yahoo Analytics to measure web traffic. Demonstrate to sponsors that you 1) can get traffic to your blog, and 2) can send that traffic to sponsors’ websites.

Social Media PR

Adopt a strategy of sharing with other bloggers in your sport. Even though I’m not a big open wheel racing blogger (I’ll get to blog from the media center of the Indy 500 for the 3rd year running, but won’t be going to any other races), I can name at least five other race bloggers who all have a decent readership. And they’ll gladly share some digital ink with anyone from the sport who will talk to them.

So, talk to them. Tell them stories, give them exclusive news, and grant interviews. In short, treat them like real journalists, and they’ll pay you back with space, exposure, and kindness. Let a few bloggers break the news about your new team, your plans for the year, or even your struggles. They’ll become your fans, and tell their fans all about you, which will make them your fans too.

I’ve been listening to Wall Street Journal sports writer Stefan Fatsis‘ book, A Few Seconds of Panic (affiliate link), about his weeks spent in training camp with the Denver Broncos as a kicker. While I have never been a Denver Bronco’s fan, Fatsis’ look at the danger and drudgery of training camp and football has me looking at the Broncos in a whole new way, and I may have to cheer for them a few times this year (something I would never have done until this week). Can you find bloggers to do that for you? What about bloggers outside the sport? When less than 1% of the country knows who you are or what you do, non-industry bloggers are a rich, untapped vein. (Just don’t blanket every blogger out there. You’ll be labeled a PR spammer.)

Tip: Let other bloggers tell your story. If they make it compelling enough, they’ll win your fans for you. If you connect solidly with 10 bloggers and they each have 1,000 readers, you’ll reach 10,000 people. Now, compare that to the effort you would need to put out to reach 10,000 people yourself.

Build a Facebook Brand Page

You may already have a Facebook page, but that should be kept private. Try not to connect with your fans on your personal Facebook profile, since that’s where you’re also connecting with family and friends. Instead, create a Brand Page, and connect with people there.

However, it’s crucial that you actually use this page regularly; don’t ignore it. Promote your blog posts there. Post status updates when you publish your tweets (but don’t feed your Twitter stream into Facebook; it’s annoying. Just rewrite them to be more Facebook friendly.)

Tip: Republish your videos and photos to your Facebook page too. Ask your fans to share them with your friends. It’s a well-known adage in social media circles that we consumers trust recommendations by our friends. Let your fans evangelize to their friends about you.

There are a whole lot of other strategies I could recommend — posting videos to YouTube and photos to Picasa/Flickr — but that’s for another post. Use these strategies as a place to start and start building your personal branding campaign as a way to get sponsors, build name recognition among fans, and add new fans.

Do you have any strategy suggestions? Anything you’ve done as an athlete, or anything you wish an athlete would do? Share your wisdom in the comments section and let’s learn from each other.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Just_Bryan (Flickr)

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• 

It was a disappointing night in Indianapolis tonight (I’m writing this at 12:00 on a Sunday night/Monday morning). Our beloved Indianapolis Colts lost the Super Bowl to the New Orleans Saints, 31 – 17.

I followed the game with many of my Twitter friends, and we had a good time chatting with each other, and some of our Twitter buddies down in New Orleans. When the game was over, we congratulated the Saints fans, and wished them well. Everyone but one person. They tweeted what was one of the most egregious tweets I had seen in, maybe, ever.

Fine New Orleans. Go back to your stupid flooded shit hole of a city with the trophy.

Our collective jaws dropped. People were offended, and the whole thing created quite a firestorm here in Indianapolis among several PR and social media pros. It even got some serious attention in New Orleans.

This hateful tweet was made by a supposed PR professional — we’ll call them X — who didn’t seem to understand that when you’re in PR, you’re on all the time. If you make public statements, you and your organization will be judged by those statements. And when you make a joke about a city that lost over 1800 people to the country’s most devastating hurricane in a century, that reflects poorly on you, on your company, and even on your city.

We’re sorry, New Orleans

First of all, let me apologize on behalf of the entire city. This one person does not speak for the rest of us. For the most part, we were gracious in our loss, and I saw a lot of tweets congratulating the city of New Orleans for an awesome win. You fans have shown real class and pride over the years. You love your team as much as we love ours. And this was a great game. I’m very sorry one person said something that awful. We don’t think like that, act like that, or talk like that in Indiana. This person’s tweet is not indicative of the entire state’s way of thinking.

A Quick Aside

I have since learned, after I wrote the first draft, that X received death threats for their offending tweet. Totally uncool, people. While what this person did was hateful, death threats will land you in all kinds of trouble with the law. Do not make death threats, or violent threats of any kind. Be better than X, rise above it. Let’s keep our heads.

Back to the Story

So someone publicly tweeted X’s boss “Hey, congratulations on the AWESOME hire.” A follow-up tweet called on X’s boss to fire them. X deleted their tweet, and protected their account (because of the death threats), but the damage had been done. Screen shots were already circulating, and many people were discussing it online.

While I’m not calling for anyone’s resignation, I do think the entire incident was handled poorly this evening. As a PR practitioner, I would hope X would recognize that:

1. there is no compartmentalizing of personal life and private life when you’re on Twitter and social media.
2. Google lasts forever. Just because you delete something doesn’t mean it’s gone. The screen shots are out there forever.
3. Anyone with even a basic understanding of crisis communication should understand that you need to react to the situation with remorse and speed, not hiding evidence or closing down. One would hope that a PR professional would understand this.

This is the kind of PR that no public figure — corporate, government, or otherwise — would ever want. And yet, it’s the kind that someone, who truly should have known better, got.

Think beyond the present moment

Whenever I give social media talks, especially to college students, I always say the same thing: If you don’t want skeletons in your closet, don’t stick bodies in there in the first place.

If you don’t want potential employers to find stupid photos of you on Facebook, 1) don’t do stupid stuff, 2) don’t take photographic evidence of your stupidity and 3) don’t associate with people who post photos of your stupidity on Facebook.

The same is true with Twitter. Don’t tweet things that are hurtful, painful, and just plain wrong. Don’t wave it off as sarcasm. And always, always apologize when you screw up. Don’t hide, don’t cower, don’t turn on your protective force field. Admit your mistake like an adult, and then quit acting like a child in the first place.

(X did apologize for their tweet in their blog post.)

This incident is just one more reason why businesses are loathe to let their people get on social media on behalf of the company. They don’t want someone tweeting, Facebooking, or generally communicating with the world when they shouldn’t be.

Actions like this hurt the social media community as a whole, and they makes our job harder when we try to convince C-level executives to trust their employees to do the right thing. If the people who should know better can’t do the right thing, why would the average employee?

Finally, I hope the person in question will apologize to the people of New Orleans, and follow it up with a donation to their rebuilding efforts. I also hope X’s employer will use this as an educational moment. Use it to learn and grow from.

And quit using Twitter after 5:00 if you can’t be trusted.

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• 

I’m beginning to realize that as much as PR and marketing folks don’t trust each other, the Maginot Line that separated them is starting to get a lot smaller.

And it’s all because of Generation Y.

Generation Y — people between the ages of 11 and 30 — have shunned traditional media and are regular consumers of online media. This is important, because Generation Y now outnumbers Baby Boomers, about 81 million to 78 million, depending on who you ask.

Gen Y consumes their media online: they read online newspapers instead of dead tree versions. They watch YouTube and Hulu.com, rather than traditional TV. They go out of their way to avoid marketing messages, rather than sit through 2 – 3 minutes of commercials (traditional “interruption marketing.”)

This has forced marketers to start reaching out to the Millennials where they are: video games, online videos, skate parks, social networks, and extreme sports sponsorships. They do this to build trust.

Public Relations 2.0 is all about building trust too. They use social media to expand their network to reach more consumers, and then try to create trust with the consumer. New marketing does exactly the same thing. They use social media, and try to build trust.

The ultimate difference is the motivation. Marketers try to make money for their clients, PR flaks try to get press for their clients.

I think we may see a day where PR and marketing agencies are no longer at odds, but begin cooperating, merging, or at least hiring someone from “the dark side” to handle that other side of the same coin.

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• 

Social media continues to grow and have a big impact on the way corporations are communicating, both internally and externally. And now we have proof.

In their paper, An Analysis of the Increasing Impact of Social and Other New Media on Public Relations Practice, Dr. Donald Wright, professor of Public Relations at Boston University (official motto: “No, you’re thinking of Boston College”), and Michelle Hinson, director of development, Institute for Public Relations, found that social media continues to have a positive effect on the way organizations are communicating.

Every year for the last four years, they have looked at the impact social media has on corporate communication, mainstream media, the perception of blogging, and the public relations industry. They surveyed PR professionals from around the world, and received 574 usable responses. The 2009 study compared data between 2008 and 2009. The results may surprise you. (Or not. You’re a hard bunch to please.)

In a nutshell, the belief that social media is having an effect on external communication has grown by 11% from 2008 to 2009; internal communication has grown by 7%.

Similarly, the duo found similar results when they asked whether social media complimented traditional mainstream media, or conflicted with it. In 2008, 75% believed it complimented, but in 2009, that number grew to 85%

While the report is chock full of useful statistics (yes, I said “chock full;” I’m from Indiana, what do you want?!), these two are rather important for PR professionals. These two stats speak volumes about what PR professionals should be thinking about social media, and how they can and should be pitching it to their clients.

• Companies are beginning to use social media to speak to customers. The fact that this number has increased by 11% from one year to the next says that companies are starting to take notice. And this trend will only continue to grow over the next few years. If your clients aren’t using social media, point out that their competitors are. And unless your client wants to slowly melt away into irrelevance, they will start using social media to get their own message out.
• Publicity should no longer rely on traditional media. I recently wrote a blog post for a client about Generation Y, and how some marketers are calling this 82 million-strong demographic “The Unreachables.” That’s because they don’t read newspapers or watch TV. They read Yahoo, watch YouTube, and text the bejeezus out of each other. If you want to reach Generation Y, go to where they are, don’t make them come to you.
• Your biz dev job just got easier. If more companies believe social media is beneficial, conversely fewer companies believe it’s detrimental. As a (thankfully) former salesman, the customers I truly hated where the ones who never saw the need for whatever I was selling, and were often stubbornly obstinate in refusing to try to understand why it was important. Now, while these stats don’t mean that 84% of all companies are open to using social media for external communications, it does represent a decrease in the number of companies that refuse to participate in social media. For the salesperson, this means fewer puzzled looks and steadfast refusal to accept that their thermal fax machine is now passé.

There are a lot more data points the study demonstrated, and a lot more surprising results that bloggers, social media pros, PR pros, and the mainstream media can all learn from. We’ll discuss some of them in future posts.

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• 

A couple of days ago, I took the Canadian Council of PR Firms (CCPRF) to task for asking media monitoring agencies to submit an RFP to help teach the members about good media monitoring and what they can expect to pay.

I said, finger pointed to the heavens, “It sounds like the CCPRF is just information gathering. There’s no chance of winning a project. There’s no definite work that’s going to come out of it. It’s just hours of work that doesn’t really educate, answer questions, or teach people about what that particular company does.”

Boy, am I an idiot.

Joseph Thornley, president of the CCPRF, very calmly and kindly responded with why I was a big idiot, without ever saying so. He left a comment on the blog, saying:

My post may have left you with the wrong impression. I’m talking about why we’re asking for proposals. But we are asking for proposals and we are planning to issue contracts at the end of the process. You can download the actual RFP from the link in the first paragraph of my post. (Link added — Erik)

So it sounds like the CCPRF is actually going to issue contracts, which is great. This isn’t just an educational effort. It’s an honest-to-God RFP that’s going to result in a nice contract for someone.

So rather than just bury a mea culpa in the comments, I wanted to write this post so I can correct the record and make sure that the corrected version gets some Google love.

Thanks for taking the time to educate me, Joseph.

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• 

I’m a little angered and disappointed by the Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms.

According to Joseph Thornley’s blog, they’re calling for a Media Monitoring RFP to ask media monitoring companies, especially those who provide social media services, to fill out an RFP so they can “propose the most comprehensive set of offerings they are capable of.”

From there, they want to identify who has the best offerings, and then use that to compare costs to find the provider who offers them “the best value.”

We find ourselves dealing with a monitoring industry that has adjusted to the new environment in different ways and at different speeds. Following what’s going on has become a complex process that can involve setting up dashboards with several different suppliers. And each provides us with a unique view of different things.

Multiple offerings. Multiple methodologies. Increased complexity. Increased cost.

Thornley is the CEO of Thornley Falls, a Canadian PR firm, that combines PR with social media and word of mouth advertising. He’s also the president of the Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms (CCPRF). So, I’m sure he’s a smart guy. (And he’s Canadian. I love Canada.)

Which is why I’m disappointed in the CCPRF.

I’m not a big fan of RFPs. I think they’re mostly a waste of time, and an incorrect way to evaluate whether a company is good enough to do a project. In most RFPs, the vendor is not allowed to speak with the client, which means they may miss out on an important point that makes or breaks a proposal. (I’ve been on RFP committees. They were awful.)

RFPs force the vendor to start selling on price, not on value. I don’t know of a single large PR firm that will try to match the pricing of a small boutique firm. But if they offer the same services on paper, then the temptation of the client is to assume the quality and scope of work is exactly the same. Yet, this is what RFPs do to vendors who can’t demonstrate value over price, because they can’t speak with the client.

Finally, the companies submitting RFPs have no way of knowing if the client even knows what they truly want. I’ve known companies that actually spoke to the client, and found they not only put the wrong specs in the RFP, the client didn’t know enough about the problem to know what to ask for. Again, a simple meeting would allow a vendor to educate the client, and could make the whole process much easier.

So it sounds like the CCPRF wants to be educated, since they don’t know what the different media monitoring services can do. But it also sounds like they’re not sure what’s most important, since they’re dealing with different offerings, methodologies, and complexities.

I’m morally opposed to RFPs on general principles, but this almost seems a bad practice.

(Having said all that, the really smart media monitoring agencies will do whatever they can to educate the different PR firms about what “good” media monitoring looks like. And if they haven’t, they’re a big part of the reason this is happening at all.)

It sounds like the CCPRF is just information gathering. There’s no chance of winning a project. There’s no definite work that’s going to come out of it. It’s just hours of work that doesn’t really educate, answer questions, or teach people about what that particular company does. The agencies will put in several hours of work for which they will not be paid, only have an outside possibility of getting deals out of it, and the CCPRF is getting the benefits of the work for free.

If the CCPRF wants to learn more about media monitoring, they need to do it on their own time, or invite the media monitoring agencies to an educational session, webinar, conference, or white paper on what their particular agency does. And the CCPRF needs to pay for it.

CCPRF, you know how frustrating it is to spend time and money on projects and RFPs only to have them not make the final cut. You’re asking people to put time and money that will essentially be an RFP to another RFP, which you may or may not submit in the future.

Joseph Thornley says this RFP is an industry first. I hope it’s the last too.

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Okay, maybe your company should, but not some of the more. . . tightly-clenched companies we’ve seen.

(Yeah, I realize we just pulled the social media equivalent of “SEX! Now that I have your attention. . .”, but this article truly is about social media.)

BL Ochman, over at the What’s Next blog, wrote a great post about why certain companies shouldn’t be on Twitter. A few reasons include “every Tweet has to be approved by Legal,” and “you are not going to respond when people direct Tweets at you.”

We see this a lot at Pro Blog Service. There are companies who want to enter the social media realm, but they shouldn’t.

With apologies to BL Ochman, here is our own list of reasons your company should not be doing social media.

1. You have to deal with Legal or Regulatory Compliance issues. Ochman may have said it, but it bears repeating. A lot. I’ve had to deal with Legal departments in the past, and at best, they’re mild annoyances. But when they feel they need to actually dictate the marketing message, they become a roadblock to everything. That’s when the Marketing Department either needs to turn control of marketing to Legal, or ask for the rights to edit and rewrite all legal briefs. Then point them to Alexander Kjerulf’s post about BMW’s latest ads about how bureaucracy sucks.

1. You don’t have the time to invest in it.We tell people all the time that you should spend at least 1 hour on social media per day. Every day. Week in, week out. Yes, you can take a break once in a while, but don’t let that break turn into a regular pattern of not doing anything. An abandoned blog or rarely-used Twitter account will wreck any social media goodwill you have gained. People will believe that you can’t stay committed to anything, whether it’s social media, or even customer service. (And yes, people do make this illogical leap, and then tell their own social networks about it.)

1. When you’re in the middle of a crisis. Let’s face it, if you find yourself smack in the middle of a crisis, you’re too late. Domino’s learned that the hard way, after some employees posted a gross-out video on YouTube on April 13. Domino’s had a YouTube video and Twitter account ready to combat the negative fallout. Two days later. That’s right, Domino’s didn’t react to this PR nightmare for nearly two business days. Long enough for 1 MILLION people to see it on YouTube. Long enough that Google searches for “Domino’s” brought mention of the video up in 5 of the first 12 results. The time to set up social media is now, before a crisis or emergency hits, not after it does. Still, better late than never, so if you find yourself embroiled in a crisis, grab the closest recent-college-grad, plunk them in the PR department, and put them in charge of your social media response.

1. You don’t want to track the ROI. Actually, this isn’t a bad thing, but measuring ROI is something we take seriously in the social media world. We measure things. We determine its effectiveness. We leave un-measurability and the “we’re just building the brand” excuses to PR and billboard companies. But not tracking the ROI often leads people to believe that 1) social media is not working, or that 2) something else resulted in the increased sales. If you want to be sure, measure it.

1. Your IT department has a stranglehold on what websites and services the entire company can use. This one isn’t a deal-breaker, but when it comes a showdown between your department and the IT department, you’d better hope IT blinks first. Most IT departments take a Theory X “if you have fun, you’re not working” view of the rest of the company, and won’t allow anyone access to anything not directly related to work or occupational torture. For example, several months ago, one state government agency’s commissioner released an important public service announcement through YouTube, yet no one in the entire 900+ person agency was able to see the video, because the IT department blocked all access to YouTube, except for the one person who was able to upload it. If you want to get past the IT roadblock, make sure you have buy-in from someone with enough authority and firepower to make IT do their bidding.

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