This is the final post in a five-part series exploring the trends laid out in our webinar, Facebook Bootcamp for PR. Look out in the coming weeks for some interesting updates to the original presentation!

One of the oft sited benefits of Facebook is its ability to keep us connected to friends and family who may be thousands of miles away, but there is a missed opportunity to better connect with the friends and fans in our own backyard. That’s why we’ve identified geolocation and mapping as a Facebook trend we’d love to see blossom in the near future. A hat tip to Trendwatching.com is due here- they’re January piece on Mapmania was an inspiration to notice all of the ways that virtual maps make daily life easier and with maps and social networks both growing in use on mobile phones, the two trends must eventually intersect.

There are already some good uses of maps on Facebook: you can know link Google maps to all your event posting, you can grab the uber-popular Where Have You Been? App, you can map the H1N1 virus,  and Yahoo’s Friends on Fire app,-which competes with Google latitude or Twitter depending on who you ask- keeps you connected to where all your friends are at all times. But last month Facebook began to phase out regional networks which suggests a move away from the possibilities that a hyper-local Facebook could offer.

The most obvious evolution for Facebook maps would be further partnerships with networks like Foursquare or local service sites like Yelp! but there are also possibilities for creative brands to get in on this trend, even using the existing map options. The current Beermapping project would be a great opportunity if partnered with a premier brew or an organization of microbreweries, and with the instant notifications of networks like Foursquare you can imagine Facebook groups or fan pages being tapped for flash mobs or Tweet-ups in major markets. There are also possibilities for local civic organizations and local businesses to offer local guides and useful applications connected to Facebook fan pages.

Have you seen any awesome geolocation applications on Facebook lately? Any ideas?

The New York Times article features one PR practitioner in particular, who places her success on the sheer number of contacts she has in her rolodex.  The TechCrunch piece says it all in the title – “The Reality of PR: Smile, Dial, Name Drop, Pray.”  The comments on the TechCrunch blog following the piece were mostly cynical toward PR folks and mostly painted all of us in the industry with the same, unfavorable broad brush.

While I can only imagine that Ogilvy’s newest digital strategist should be expected to write about…well…digital strategy, I could not stay quiet after these two, mostly critical articles about the PR industry.  Neither piece fails to take into account those PR practitioners who do more than “smile and dial,” an incredibly outdated view of the industry in my mind.  In this day in age, PR people need to employ a number of tactics in an effort to be successful.

For example:

1.    Smart PR people do their homework on their clients, understand their products and services inside and out and look to leverage unique angles or trends to share with media and the blogosphere.

2.    Those involved in PR and social media need to fully understand their clients’ target audiences and why those audiences are important to the clients’ success.  This step is often overlooked when there is a lot of buzz about a particular company.  Missing this step has also resulted in countless disconnected campaigns, product launches and PR fiascoes.

3.    Good PR strategies usually employ a number of diverse tactics to reach target audiences, including incorporating social media to build online communities, thought leadership and meet influencers.  Social media can be a direct way to engage in conversation with passionate consumers, as an example.

As Ogilvy’s newest addition to the talented, forward-thinking 360° Digital Influence team, my goal is to serve as a strategic guide both internally and externally when it comes to the world of social media.  I also am a believer in building the most complete plans of action, including incorporating a number of tactics – both online and offline – to ensure our clients meet their objectives.  We are not “smilers and dialers,” but among the best and brightest in the industry.  I could not be more excited about joining the Ogilvy team and look forward to working with all of you to build the absolute best strategies for our clients.

Looking past these small points, the report does share some fairly interesting observations and stats as well if you dig a bit deeper. Here’s my read on the 10 standout conclusions that the report offers to help you (and your brand) better understand the potential uses of Twitter:

1. 21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.
2. Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.
3. March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.
4. 150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to “follow back” all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for “lifecasting” their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.
5. A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.
6. Half of all Twitter users are not “active.” If you take a general description of being “active” on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.
7. Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
8. APIs have been the key to Twitter’s growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter’s notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.
9. English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
10. Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.

Bonus Geographical Stat/Quote: “The cities with the biggest Twitter populations are New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston. Los Angeles is the fastest growing city on the list.”

Download the full report from Sysomos at http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/

One topic that I have written about extensively in this blog is consumer relationships with brands and, in special cases, Brands Worthy of a Weekend (BWOW).  When I started writing about BWOW, it was still a relatively lofty  bar - a brand for which you care so deeply that you would spend a weekend away from your family to connect with other people who feel the same way about this brand, learn more about the “inside” of the business, meet the people who make the magic happen, etc.   With the seismic shift in the blogosphere, however, brand “weekends” have become more and more common, but with a major difference - they are largely designed for influential voices versus passionate fans.   In the mom blogger space in particular, these events are happening in rapid fire succession with some players covering  multiple per month.  While these executions absolutely hold water as communications strategies - at least for the time being - they are no longer about “passion”.  I would argue it is very difficult to be truly passionate about more than a handful of things.

Enter compassion.  I’d never stopped to give compassion much thought, but having begun work on a project that centers on compassion, I am now hyperconscious of it in the world around me and there are a lot of business applications.  While we expect compassion in/from our fellow human beings, we don’t expect companies - with their one-size-fits-all policies and protocols for front line reps - to want or choose to show compassion.    But upon further reflection,  a lot of brand fan creation stories have an act of compassion at their core.  A couple of examples:

• This weekend, the waitress at Inside Park at St. Barts who came outside (where I was exiled with my toddler-gone-wild) to chat with me, suggest some places where I could entertain him, and take my order on the go made me a fan.
• My St. John Knit fan creation story is ALL about a VP of Customer Service reading my letter and breaking the rules to help a desperate bride (now customer for life).
• Every Twitter/online customer redemption listening story - from @comcastcares to the Dell outreach team or non-tech areas like the Vermont Teddy Bear Company reading a complaint I had made about some spam affiliate marketing and correcting the problem (that turned me into a supporter of their sister venture Pajamagram).

The first step in codifying compassion into your business or brand as witnessed above is listening.  You can not understand “the other” or “walk in their shoes” unless you pause to try to understand and consider an issue, opportunity or problem from their point of view.  In the examples above, “listening” took the forms of watching a situation visually, reading a letter from a customer, and blogosphere monitoring respectively (note: great post on active listening from John Bell here).

The second element is trusting those human beings who do represent your brand with the power to act.  Ritz Carlton famously gives front line reps a budget from which they can do whatever they need to do to correct any problems in a customer’s stay and send them away happy.  That not only creates customer evangelists, it proves that the brand trusts the human beings that they have selected to embody the brand.

So, next time something happens that turns you into a positive-WOM machine for a company or a brand, think about the role compassion plays and whether or not you are in turn entrusting your team with the power to pass it along to your own customers.

Thanks to Governor Sanford, the Appalachian Trail has received tremendous press this week as a great place to clear one’s head, recharge batteries, and get away from a stressful job.  Had Governor Sanford actually hiked the Appalachian Trail and done these things, he certainly would not be in the mess he’s in now.

While Sanford’s opponents stand the most to gain from his time not on the Appalachian Trail, the Sierra Club has seized the moment as well with a highly topical enewsletter sent yesterday morning from Greg Haegele, the deputy executive director:

We heard the governor of South Carolina had some trouble finding the Appalachian Trail last week.

We don’t want that to happen to anyone else, so now’s a perfect time to let you know about our new online community: Sierra Club Trails. Members of the community are adding trails from around the country, sharing spectacular photos, and discussing topics such as whether guns should be allowed in our national parks.

But so far only two sections of the Appalachian Trail have been added by our members. No wonder the governor got lost!

If you’ve hiked the Appalachian Trail, join the Sierra Club Trails community and add a stretch or two. Share your photos of the trail, too!

If you haven’t hiked that trail but have other favorites, we’d love you to share them on Trails as well.

Thanks for all that you do to protect the environment.
P.S. — Don’t forget your (moral) compass.

The same newsletter was also posted on the Sierra Club Trails’ blog and while some blog commenters were critical of the Sierra Club’s “cheap shot” that, according to one, was “not in the best traditions of the club,” the newsletter has already helped.  In just one day, an additional section of the trail was mapped and someone started an Appalachian Trail group.

The Sierra Club Trails site is a wiki and online community that aims to help Sierra Club members find new trails, learn more about ones they’ve already been on, and connect with fellow lovers of the outdoors.  Like any wiki, it’s only helpful to its members if more trails are completed and more information is available to those on the site.  So any opportunity to get visitors to the new site and adding content is taken advantage of.  While the Sierra Club did take a risk in offending some members with its tongue in cheek tone, ultimately, jumping on a news event just as it happened succeeded in opening up the Sierra Club’s new community to people who might not be paying attention otherwise.

I’ll be keeping my eye on the Appalachian Trail section of the site to see if the newsletter helps to complete any more parts of the AT in the next week or two; since I’m not a hiker, the Sierra Club has already increased their traffic by one unlikely visitor!

To do this, they have posed 6 big questions:

1. How can the agency better explain its operations, activities, processes and decision making?
2. What specific information should FDA provide about agency operations, activities, processes, and decision making, including enforcement actions, product approvals, recalls and other actions?
3. What tools, techniques, processes, or other mechanisms should FDA use to be more effective in providing useful and understandable information?
4. What, if any, legislative or regulatory changes are needed to improve FDA’s ability to provide useful and understandable information to the public?
5. As FDA becomes more transparent, what information should remain confidential in order to promote key internal and external policy goals, such as preserving patient privacy, and how, in these cases, should FDA explain the importance of confidentiality?
6. What metrics should FDA use to gauge the effectiveness of its transparency efforts?

Yesterday, this task force had their first public meeting to start to gather input to answer these questions. The meeting was open to any member of the public, and was live webcast over the Internet as well. I watched some (not all) of the proceedings to prepare for this post. The topics in conversation ranged from how the FDA should release information to ideas on how to improve their website by segmenting it into very defined consumer and industry focused areas.

As you might expect, several of the participants on the speaking roster had a very definite bone to pick with the FDA. From an irate ousted doctor to several underappreciated public interest groups - many of the 5 minute panel segments seemed less constructive then therapeutic … helping individuals who have felt silenced for too long to have a stage to share their emotions.

Yet this combination of the passionate neglected with the involved optimists was part of the beauty of the entire meeting. Ultimately, in my opinion there were three key factors that made this meeting a big success for the FDA:

1. Asking big questions. If you look at the questions copied earlier in this post, you’ll agree that none have overnight solutions. They are tackling big issues at a big agency during a big time of change in the healthcare world instead of taking the easier and more traditional government entity approach of implementing smaller more watered down initiatives.
2. Listening without getting defensive. The variety of opinions shared in the public meeting and through comments on their blog is wide, however they are demonstrating a willingness to listen that many are unaccustomed to receiving from the FDA. Most importantly, they heard the criticisms from yesterday (for the most part) without feeling the need to get defensive or justify things they are currently doing.
3. Demonstrating a desire for help. On more than one occasion during the session members of the task force asked for opinions, guidance and help from those presenting. It was a telling moment that will likely do more than anything to reduce the perception of the FDA as a closed organization. If they can effectively use all these partners willing to help and create stronger ties with their immediate community - they will leap ahead in terms of becoming more open.

The first step in transparency is a willingness to stand in front of your detractors, listen to their problems, and show your commitment to improving. The day after this first public forum meeting, it is tough not to feel the palpable sense of hope that anyone who watched or listened should feel about the future of the FDA. As the world continues to evolve thanks to social media, virtual relationships and real time communication at least one government agency seems determined not to be left behind. And if the FDA can do it, any organization can.

The model was developed by our team to provide brands with a comprehensive, recognizable framework for tracking social media campaigns.   We relied heavily on our experience with a range of social media campaigns for both B2B and B2C clients, and considered the types of questions and reporting requests we receive with every new project or request for information.

We focus on simplicity and comparability across media - the latter, to help guide marketers with media allocation.  We categorize our metrics into 3 areas, corresponding roughly to objectives and “marketing funnel” stages; each is shown below, with representative metrics (the metrics are selected based on unique client needs).   Included are both familiar and new metrics.

Image courtesy of Crimson Hexagon

Reach and Positioning

• Unique monthly visits
• Time on site
• Overall volume
• Share of voice within category or brand family
• Search visibility

Preference

• Sentiment index (% positive - % negative) in social media
• Share of positive voice in social media, within category
• Relative Net Promoter Score, absolute or within category

Action

• Registrations
• Sales
• Advocacy

Some of these metrics we measure using software such as Crimson Hexagon, Radian6 or TruCast; other metrics we measure with more traditional panel or intercept survey-based instruments.

We invite discussion - this is the first phase of what will be an iterative process to arrive at a simple, effective way to help marketing and communications executives make better decisions on social media spend allocation and scaling.

Students at an O.A.R. concert at Clemson University April 18, 2009. Photograph by Chris Newman.

This week I had a chance to sit down with Corey Ellis, an agent at the Auburn Moon Agency, to find out how digital media has influenced his profession. Auburn Moon specializes in booking entertainment for colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Corey is also the large-scale event specialist for the agency and coordinates sponsored tours.  Prior to joining Ogilvy PR I had the privilege of working with Corey on an artist management and development venture for the band FLOREZ. We still find time for weekly conversation and debate over the state of the music industry, trends within the college marketplace, new online resources and artists to watch. He’s undoubtedly a rising star in the music industry and I expect to see him among many 40 under 40 lists in the years to come. As a result I’ve decided to put him in the hot seat this week to answer a few questions about how digital and social media has impacted the way he does business.  

Corey Ellis, booking  agent, Auburn Moon Agency

Brian: Generally speaking, what opportunities has the proliferation of digital and social media generated for your business? 

Corey: The proliferation of digital and social media has truly opened up (and arguably evened out) the playing field in the entertainment business.  The barriers of access are crumbling rapidly.  For us it is much easier to gather information on artists.  Instead of waiting on someone to send you a CD/DVD/press kit I can go online and find all the information about an artist I may need in less than 30 minutes.  It has also made it more cost effective for us to deliver content to our buyers.  As of last year we are no longer producing CDs or DVDs to provide to buyers and instead we are providing download cards to deliver content to everyone.   As the world has moved toward digital/social media the ways in which our artists can create and shape their appearance to the world is endless.  But as much as we as agents try to shape our artists’ spheres there is an equal force (fans, bloggers,etc) that we no longer have strong influence over.

Another benefit (that does not directly impact my daily work) is that the music business has returned to the control of its rightful owners: the people.  I believe we are going to look back and see that artists that successfully navigated and monetized their relationship with their fans are the ones that have long-term success as the music business changes.  The nebulous concept of “fan management” is the key concept for artists to grasp.  

Brian:  In the same light, what challenges has digital and social media created for your business?

Corey: The biggest challenge (and I think most interviewees will agree) is the size and scope of social and digital media—It can be overwhelming at times.  As a booking agent I feel like there is no end to the work I can do to get shows for my artists.  There are always more venues to call and more emails to send…Now that has been compounded with “there are always more websites to check”.  I am constantly searching the web to see if there are mentions of my artists.  We have even had to create and maintain a YouTube page for our agency.  Even though I have videos of our artists on our page I know many of our buyers are going to YouTube first so I have to be diligent about making sure the right content is there.  I had an incident where the administration at a college was upset with a buyer because they saw a clip of one of my comedians on YouTube—T \hey thought he was going to be too dirty and racy.  The clip they pointed to was from his set from the “Bad Boys of Comedy”.  He was instructed to structure his show that way.  I had to provide them with multiple other clips of his “normal” show before they would approve the show. 

Another challenge for our business is that the college market has become flooded with artists.  Our buyers are being inundated with (in my opinion) sub-par and not fully vetted artists.  It is now much easier and cheaper for artists to appear larger/bigger/better/more important/more seasoned than in the past.  The personal touch that goes with being a great agent does not seem to carry as much weight.  The role of an exemplary agency is being diminished.
 
Brian: What digital or social media channel(s) is your company currently devoting the most time, energy and resources to? Why?

Corey: The aforementioned YouTube page could be a full time job since we represent over 50 artists.  We also work with sonicbids on a regular basis since each of our artists maintains an EPK (electronic press kit) there.  I am in constant contact with dropcards.com because they supply our digital download cards.  Our website currently has sections for each of our different buyer groups (colleges, military, and performing arts) but over the next few months we are going to create a separate site for each of those constituent groups.  They will have a similar look & feel but the content will be tweaked for each buyer group.  I also spend a fair amount of time on our artists’ myspace pages to explore what comments are being left.  I can often turn these comments into selling points.  Finally I just added an account @ artistdata.com as an agency.  I am going to export our internal database calendar for my artists and use it to help them keep all their calendars up-to-date. 
 
Brian: Thinking ahead three to five years from now, what do you think could be the next “big thing” in digital and social media that will impact the way you do business? In other words, what would you like to see?

Corey: I would love to see a social media site that could really be used for business.  Most artists have myspace pages but I do not really like conducting business there (nor is that the purpose of myspace in my opinion).  Sonicbids was built more for business purposes and they do not have enough users in the industry to be truly affective.  I really like some of the tools provided by reverbnation but there are not enough buyers using it to work for our business. 

Brian: How do you keep up to speed with industry news? Is there a Web site or blog that you just couldn’t live without? 

Corey: Google Reader is a godsend.  I subscribe to the feeds from Topspin, Pitchfork, Billboard Biz, Hypebot and Kings of A&R.  I also frequent Alternative Addiction, Celebrity Access, Starpolish.com and the Hype Machine. 
 
Brian: What social media network do you personally use the most?

Corey: Personally I’m always on Facebook.  For business I use YouTube, Reverbnation and groups on LinkedIn.
 
Brian: Do you have a social media pet peeve?

Corey: That I’m only 32 and I feel “old” when it comes to social media.  And I’m a technophile!  I feel bad for people trying to navigate the current industry who are not tech savvy (or cannot hire people that are).

Brian: Ok, let me put you on the spot. Above you put an emphasis on fan management. So how about leaving us with three “things” that you equate to good fan management?

Corey:

1.) Sincere communication with your fans.  I do not think you should post something just to post something. Your communication should be relevant and totally transparent. 

2.) Be available everywhere they might go.  Facebook, MySpace, Last.fm, Pandora, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Unfortunately I do not think you can pick and choose.  You have to be everywhere.

3.) People want to hear from you,  not your publicist or manager.

Interestingly, those who used the internet to actively engage with citizens and communities online saw this translated into seats – the Greens and Sweden’s Pirate Party in particular. Yet volume of conversation online did not necessarily indicate votes, and vice versa: Libertas topped the monitoring charts but failed to reach the threshhold to secure a seat in the European Parliament, whilst the rise of far-right, nationalist parties seemed absent from online conversations.

So what did we conclude? Amongst other things, that European politicians are behind their US counterparts when  it comes to engaging with citizens online. That citizens are discussing issues online, but mostly at a national level. And that the European Parliament needs to start talking now with the online influentials if they want to engage voters in the next European elections.

The President Obama effect inspired many candidates in the EU elections. The thing is that as in art, inspiration does not meet all the time the publics you were expecting.

That’s probably also one of the main insights of the EU campaign : there’s a huge gap between pushing information and engaging conversation with citizens, whereas in a few months, according to this Microsoft study, Internet will be the most consumed media across Europe. Citizens need interactions, and that’s what they’re already doing together online. And if they can more and more talk directly with brands, why not with their representatives?

Our hypothesis was that this lack of transmission is one of the reasons for the record low turnout. And this lack of transmission has now several explanations:

• except some groups (like Europe Ecologie in France), the campaign started very late. How to create a great attention around a deep topic like Europe in only few weeks ?
• low level of interaction between politicians and citizens in social media. A great majority of direct questions or quotes in microblogging platforms like Twitter ended with no answer. Why promote the fact that you’re closer to European people if they don’t “feel” it and get the information they’re looking for ? The word-of-mouth could not propagate in a wider extent because of this very low dynamic
• low maturity in social media : the majority of groups used social media to only diffuse information in a very vertical way. So that just after the elections, on a lot of official groups or politicans’ twitter accounts, you could not see any updated content. Maybe a disappointing proof that it was not an authentic and faithful long-term relationship…
• the diversity of languages across Europe is a strong limit to interaction. In order to share your views, you need to be able to communicate in several languages. It seems that it’s extremely complicated for citizens to talk together, first because speaking an international communication language like English is not possible for everybody, and second because there was not an identified European platform of discussion

Finally, this lack of European digital public space does not mean there’s not a common interest for the European issues. Why not shape a European platform centralizing diverse points of views that are happening online and moderated by citizens in diverse languages?

Post written by:

Natalie Todd, Public Relations Director, Ogilvy Group, Belgium

Laurent François, head of 360° Digital influence hub, France

Karine Jazra, Digital influence analyst, France

For more on this and the Step-by-Step Twitter for Business Guide, check out our presentations on SlideShare.net, and be sure to follow the 140 Conference at which John Bell will be speaking. #140conf.