Confessions of an Ex-Dinosaur posted by Steve Eisenstadt at Monday, September 29, 2008

On a sunny morning in March 2008, hundreds crowded into the Santa Clara Convention Center to hear the morning's speeches at EclipseCon. I sat beside Eclipse marketing chief Ian Skerrett and watched him type brief dispatches in a text box at the top of a strange website.

Twitter?

Back then, I thought "tweet" was just a line in the Jackson 5's "Rockin' Robin."

On a more recent morning, another client, CEO Jonathan Lindo of Replay Solutions, is asking about the role of Twitter and other social media in PR. "Do you have an hour to talk about this?" I asked.

How did a guy who spent 15 years at dead-tree newspapers, then most of the next 11 as a PR guy who believed the three most important things in this business are clips, clips, and clips, start to grasp the power of social media?

When I first heard some early-adopting clients and colleagues talk about Twitter or their latest Facebook friend, my reaction was: These are toys; real men and women get clips. But as I started actively using the sites myself, their power and potential for business became evident. At the same time, the traditional media are dramatically shrinking. So, clearly, "communications" is widening and moving in new, unexpected directions.

On a personal level, I've sensed this is a moment that people of a certain age in every generation face, during a major industrial or cultural shift. You can rue or resist change, or you can get excited about being part of it.

I have used Twitter and Facebook to say something interesting (one hopes) about a client; strengthen relationships with reporters and analysts; stay better connected to agency colleagues. I work with one client, Appcelerator, who essentially told us: "We know you can help get us media coverage. We also need your help building a community of developers through social media."

I've learned that perspective is important. People tend to fall in love with the latest "bright shiny object" -- and social media are very bright and shiny. But social media remain just one element of a smart communications strategy. I don't imagine a day when strong quality and quantity of clips will stop being important. I agree with those who feel social-media-for-social- media-sake is silly. As with any communications strategy, measurement tied to business objectives is needed to assess success or failure.

What do you think? Please tweet: seisenstadt.

Review of Commercial Social Media Monitoring Services posted by David Robbins at Friday, September 26, 2008

Social media is radically transforming the PR business. But like anything in PR, one of the biggest challenges is measuring and metrics. One of my first jobs at Page One PR was figuring out the best way to help our clients measure the value of social media programs.

Tapping into social media in a meaningful way for clients is not as easy as a Google Blog, Technorati, and Twitter search. To narrow in on the right conversations, we needed an automated system for monitoring all types of social media. I recently led a project to find the best commercial social media monitoring service for our purposes, which we could use to tailor comprehensive analysis and services according to our clients’ needs.

Here’s a brief summary of what I found:
Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Visible Technologies service large clients and charge correspondingly large fees. A Visible Technologies product called Trucast uses sophisticated web crawlers to stay current with the most influential voices on the web and provides an easy platform for engaging social media communities directly through the software. One downside to TruCast – it is difficult to filter information according to different categories of social media. The lack of flexibility in that case, along with the high price tag for both of these services, told us that these are not good options for PR and marketing firms that deal with startups on a limited budget or larger companies with small-scale social media campaigns.

BuzzLogic is a more reasonable value option for startups and smaller campaigns. The interface allows you to divide tasks across workers and search results are easy to filter by influence metrics for blogs and the posts that appear as subheadings. The service includes other useful features like social mapping and recording engagements with bloggers. Downsides – they only offer yearly pricing schemes (too rigid for us) and it is difficult to narrow in on categories of social media.

The Radian6 interface is intuitive and allows you to filter results based on categories of social media, including rich media sites and microblogs (but not social networks). However, the "Influence Viewer" widget requires some manual follow-up. While the widget uses criteria such as number and length of comments and votes on social bookmarking services to determine "influence," it doesn't do enough to highlight the blogs that have power or authority in general on the web (as opposed to the ones that have a few comments and are on topic). Other downsides – search results track back only about 30 days prior to the query (other products allow you to get better historical data), and while the product might be affordable for primary research, buying many separate topic profiles after the seven day grace period would become cost prohibitive for many small firms.

There are a few other products I’ve checked out but haven’t mentioned here. But right now, we’re going with Radian6. Any suggestions? Something we’re missing? Feel free to comment below.

Japanese Open Source Pioneer Enters US Market, Increases Sales Leads 1,300% posted by Jesse Casman at Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Plat'Home, a Linux pioneer in Japan, turned to Page One PR to expand into the US market in late 2007. Plat’Home sells a line of small "microservers" not much bigger than a smartphone but with enough power to handle a wide range of IT applications. A publicly-traded company and an established brand in Japan, Plat'Home was essentially unknown in the U.S. With a conservative budget for overseas operations, they needed to rely on online sales and low-touch, Web-based marketing (including PR). Their initial marketing efforts focused on product flexibility and a wide range of possible uses because, hey, that's what their Japan customers had wanted!

Plat'Home, in discussions with Page One, realized that they needed more specific differentiation in the U.S. market and re-positioned the product value proposition around the microservers' hidden strengths – low power consumption and extreme temperature resistance. In our rollout strategy at Page One, we also offered review units to reporters. You have to see these things to believe them. Out of the box, the high quality Japanese engineering and small size – a fully functional server that fits in the palm of your hand – has a big impact.

Plat'Home has the advantage of having market-tested products. While they appear to be a startup here, the products they sell in the U.S. market are in their fifth generation, with many large satisfied Japanese customers such as KDDI (telecom), HitachiSoft (software), Yomiuri (news), and Shimizu (construction).

Page One, in media outreach and Web-based guerilla marketing, focused on "tiny, green and extreme toughness," to re-launch Plat’Home products in the U.S.. Clips piled up quickly, with coverage in CNET, Wired, The Register, Slashdot (with 188 comments), E-Commerce Times, and many other important IT trade publications.

U.S. web site traffic, the main barometer of success and where all sales leads originate, jumped 20-fold and then 70-fold and finally 90-fold. It was like an online firehose. In-coming sales leads tracked a similar trajectory, overloading Plat’Home’s ability to respond, initially (they subsequently added "Buy Now" buttons on most of their Web pages). That's a nice problem to have!

The U.S. market is large and noisy for foreign companies entering for the first time. Adjusting to the landscape of U.S. media can also be daunting. But Plat'Home now has increased interest in the U.S. market, both in the media and with customers. They still have work ahead of them but they have built a good foundation for long-term success by focusing their messages and playing to their strengths.

Plat'Home-At-A-Glance
Daily U.S. web site traffic before Page One PR: life support, almost flat line. Minimal inbound sales queries (see trend lines in graph below).

March 31, 2008, first press release with Page One PR (clips in CNET, others):

• Web traffic up 2,000%;
• In-bound sales queries up 500% over historic traffic level.
  

April 21, 2008, second press release with Page One PR (clips in Wired and Slashdot, others):

• Web traffic up 7,000%;
  
• In-bound sales queries up 1,000% over historic traffic level.
  

April 28, 2008, follow-up Page One pitching on second news release sparks second round of media coverage (clips in The Register, others):

• Web traffic up 9,000%;
  
• In-bound sales queries up 1,300% over historic traffic level.
  



(percentage increases in plathome.com website traffic)

Data Centers Don't Make Sex Tapes posted by Kyle Peterson at Friday, September 19, 2008

Hollywood may have Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and whoever the latest “American Idol” winner was. It can have them. In Silicon Valley, we have our own celebrities. Sure, teenage girls probably don’t have posters of Larry Ellison hanging in their rooms, and certainly no paparazzo has thus far snapped photos of Jonathan Schwartz in his skivvies. But damnit if these stalwarts of software aren’t deserving of that kind of attention.

At Page One, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with one of these Silicon Valley icons. Bill Coleman founded BEA Systems (the B stands for Bill) and is the current CEO of Cassatt, a company that he began in order to rethink the way data centers are operated. In lieu of poorly conceived reality shows, however, the leaders of our valley contribute to society by offering thought leadership articles on the industry they are most closely aligned with. For Bill, this means green technology and cloud computing. For me, this meant working with Bill to craft his message as clearly and with as much impact as possible, while also making sure it was an interesting read. After all, some people don’t readily see the utter sexiness of data center management. Yes, yes, I know, I’m not one of those people either.

Collaborating with Bill has been a delightful experience, and it’s exciting to see the articles come out in print or online. After some brainstorming, it’s always fun to see what the final piece looks like. Where else have you heard Columbus and Magellan compared to data center energy efficiency, or learned about the strange coincidence between fantasy football and data center power usage? Putting a message together is easy when there are a lot of interesting things to say. Fortunately, Bill's innovative years on the floor of the Valley make my job that much easier.

So keep living The Simple Life, Paris. We’ve got business to take care of up here.

PyCon 2008: Small Project, Big Impact, Lasting Effect posted by Daniel Schneider at Thursday, September 18, 2008

When the organizers of the main community conference for the Python programming language contacted Page One to do PR for them, their goals were modest -- just stir up some interest… oh, and turn it into the JavaOne of Python. Yikes!

Fortunately, Google (and YouTube), Microsoft, Canonical, and many, many other big brands backed PyCon. Page One loves working with developers so we accepted a small project to give back to the open source community and to gain experience with the Python community. Due to the small size of the project, PyCon organizers were only expecting a few press clippings here and there. A couple clips = success. Not hard, right?

Right away I realized that PyCon had almost zero name recognition. “What is PyCon?” or “Who do you represent?” reporters and bloggers kept asking me. Pitching the conference as a standalone event proved quite challenging. So I moved on to coupling it with other Python news (oh, by the way Guido Van Rossum is leading a session on that topic at PyCon next month!). In my opinion, that was the most fun part of the whole experience – looking for story pitches where I could legitimately insert a PyCon angle. And it worked. One story in particular was completely focused on a separate issue altogether, yet the PyCon people dominated the copy.

So what effect did Page One actually have on PyCon? Statistically, we blew away the coverage of any previous PyCon with 25 press clippings (versus a half dozen clips for the 2007 event). But it’s not the multiple podcasts, radio interviews, features in publications such as Dr. Dobb’s Journal, InfoWorld, and Internet News, or the 77 percent increase in attendance that really stands out. More important were the intangible effects – we got the word out there. People stopped asking me what was a PyCon? And that was the real aim of our work for PyCon – to maintain the grassroots, community feel while putting PyCon on the map and stimulating interest in Python in general. I'm sure attendance and press interest will increase next year… maybe not entirely because of Page One, but we definitely got the ball rolling. Have you heard of PyCon?

The role of listening in business – is it really new? posted by Bret Clement at Monday, September 15, 2008

Hip tomes like Groundswell (2007), The Clue Train Manifesto (1999) and even a recent webinar done by monitoring service Radian6, all point to the importance of corporate listening. It’s seen as one of the foundational components of social media strategies.



A few quotes:
• “What is listening in the Groundswell – it is learning what your customers are saying. It’s tapping into that conversation. They are talking about your company, if you can listen, the information can flow back into your company.” – Forrester research vice president Josh Bernoff and co-author of Groundswell.
• “And if a company is genuinely confused about what it is, there’s an easy way to find out: listen to what your market says you are.” Clue Train Manifesto, 1999
• “Marketers are trained to do nothing but talk. Listening is not part of the traditional marketing profession.” Paul Gillen, Paul Gillen Communications, 2008 Radian6 webinar

I actually disagree a bit with Gillen’s take. The best marketers over time have been great and unapologetic listeners.

For example, in 1991, Regis McKenna, the legendary PR and marketing consultant who helped launch brands such as Apple – wrote “a feedback loop is making advertising's one-way communication obsolete.” Blogger and VC Brad Feld paraphrased this idea here in 2007:

Today, it’s more than listening. It’s active listening. Companies need to hear, analyze and engage in the uncontrolled conversations that are taking place about your company and your market. It’s analyzing what is being said and using that information to improve your brand.

At Page One PR we do more than listen. Sure, we use tools to monitor. We build the strategy and plan for how we respond. And we analyze the information in a way that is packaged back to various stakeholders to our clients. Product managers listen for one thing. Marketing and advertising folks listen for something else. Crisis communication folks listen for something different.

One of our clients LogLogic had marketing guru Andy Lark work there for a period of time. Lark is now at Dell – which is one of the most acclaimed big businesses in terms of how it participates in uncontrolled conversations. Its entire business infrastructure is set up around active listening. Dell community members directly impact new product functionality. They help create ads. Heck, community members even help each other with customer service.

At our agency, we see the power of listening and engaging with our client’s communities – we don’t see it as new, but we do see it as a foundational component of any company committed to success.