Chris Clark , the Director of Marketing at the San Francisco Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, made social web history this past Wednesday by making their destination web site the first destination in the travel industry to integrate social network connectivity.

This execution of the METZ strategic recommendation marks a first in destination travel, and a proud moment for their team and ours.

PR Week’s Aarti Shah (SF Bureau Chief) gave us a ring to talk about it. The scoop is here , and she also got the chance to check in with some real cool cats like Robert Scoble and Stan Schroeder from Mashable’s Euro Bureau (who I haven’t had the pleasure to meet yet).

Definitely a worthwhile read, especially for your C-level friends who are just trying to make sense of the whole thingamabob.

BTW, I get my identity theft insurance from Zander Insurance .

It looks like there are 6 complimentary tickets still available, and then they’re $5 after that.

Here’s a list of 10 things that you probably don’t know right now that you’ll learn on this webinar:

1. How big the english-speaking social networks are, right now.

2. What the heck a Social Number is.

3. Who is still listening to podcasts (and whether it’s still growing or not).

4. Which video networks matter for reaching consumers.

5. Which microblogs matter and which ones don’t.

6. What’s going on with transactional mobile commerce.

7. Which English-language review/ratings sites matter.

8. What social media usage will look like in 3 or 4 years.

9. What direction spending is going, for big consumer brands.

10. How to talk to your executive team about million-dollar decision-making on the social web.

Adam and Jason from METZ will share all of the up-to-the-minute stats and figures as well as concrete action steps, so you can plan strategic actions for your team, to grow your brand (and revenue) on the social web.

Most of the travel and hospitality industry is reading the writing on the wall that your travel or hospitality brand needs to correctly approach the social web, in order to drive revenue.

But a lot of brands are very unsure about what this looks like for the first 90 days?

What KPIs should be used to measure success?

There are many ways to go about this, and there are major pitfalls you’ll need to avoid. In this webinar you’ll learn how to track if the events on the social web are actually converting to bookings.

We’ll be joined by experts like Lisa Demoney (Director of Online Marketing at Joie De Vivre Hotels) and Chris Clark (Director of Marketing at the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau).

Make sure to have your questions ready for the Q&A portion. It sounds like there

Should you be looking for a strategic consultant or a social media/PR agency?

Here are some key evaluation criteria to note and to take into account when choosing between the two:

1. Execution

The most obvious difference between a strategic consulting firm and a social media agency is that the agency executes.

Your “social media agency” would handle the day-to-day block-and-tackle—launching any social network service promotions, reaching out to influencers, and (depending on if they have a PR component) pitching your brand’s newest campaign to the key blogs and other social media entities.

Hiring a strategic consulting firm, on the other hand, means that your internal team would be handed a strategic document and be expected to execute based on the consultant’s recommendations. Your consultant should guide and train you through your social web strategy implementation, but a good consultant will NOT line-manage the implementation. (See the section on ‘Growth’ for why this is so important).

2. Bandwidth

Hiring a “social media agency” shouldn’t result in any major bandwidth strains, as you can allow the agency to just take off with the project with your occasional input and check-ins.

Hiring a strategic consulting team would require your internal team to not only have the bandwidth, but also the internal buy-in, to execute. It would also give your internal team mastery over the concepts needed to succeed in the implementation. If building a learning organization is among your company’s cultural goals, this mastery concept is fundamental.

If your entire marketing team is completely maxed out and cannot spare any extra hours—or if they do not believe that the social web effort is worthy or will be successful—then your implementation will not succeed, or maybe even happen. Of course, marketing executives are almost always already overwhelmed, as our clients love to tell us, but even the busiest CMOs out there find that they can spare some time for a campaign that can help drive more revenue and build brand awareness.

3. Scope

A “social media agency” will likely have knowledge of basic social media and public relations, and some knowledge of integrated marketing and communications. They will also know quite a bit about positioning, messaging and branding.

A strategic consulting firm that handles social technology change management will likely have expertise in all social technologies as well as web analytics, eCommerce, mobile commerce, social commerce and also understand basic supply chain management, CRM software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. They should also be able to write product requirement documents and line-manage teams of developers. If your firm cannot do this, you will be at a strategic disadvantage.

They will know some things about positioning, messaging and branding, but will expect their clients to have that fairly developed.

4. Revising Internal Structures

A “social media agency” would essentially act as an outside force, operating almost independently from your company.

This may allow your internal company structure to remain the same with everyone in the company continuing to assume their normal roles, but with this distance there is a risk: a lack of control.

You might not know or understand where the social media team’s time and resources are being focused and whether or not those efforts match your brand’s goals. While you might “get it”, others in the company who are not part of your team will most likely be out of the loop—they might see that their brand now has a Facebook Page, but they might not understand how (or why) it fits into the bigger picture or what the value is to the brand.

This lack of buy-in becomes a threat when you want to launch initiatives that would require the involvement of these other teams. Cross-functional buy-in is critical for success in change management of social technology.

When overstretched marketing teams hire a consulting team, many later discover that they need to hire a new team member or two.

A consultant comes in to make the team more efficient, and this is the part where many teams’ internal problems are surfaced and restructuring must occur. While it might feel more comfortable for your brand to just continue with the status quo, a consultant might force the team to confront and overcome these internal issues and hurdles before they start to become a serious threat to the overall success and well-being of the company and brand.

5. Growth

A “social media agency” can most certainly teach your team how to use Facebook and how to use Twitter,
but they will most likely handle everything beyond the basics. This is great for teams who don’t have the bandwidth to take on anything more.

As mentioned earlier, a good consulting team will not line-manage your implementation, which means your team needs to learn how to execute and problem-solve.

Here is where one of the greatest benefits of hiring a consulting team comes into play: once you learn how to do this ‘social media stuff’, you know how to do this ‘social media stuff’.

That means, once you’ve launched a successful program, you know how to keep it up (remember, you can’t just stop once you’ve started on the social web) and you don’t need to rely on (or pay large sums of money to) someone else to do it for you.

As they learn and begin to understand more about the social web, the team may not have the same simple questions about basic platforms (like Twitter) anymore, but they grow more advanced and start to ask more complex questions, which means more innovative and complex ground-breaking strategies for your brand.

Keeping all of this in mind, if you think a strategic consultant is a better fit for you and your team and you are ready to perhaps move forward with a social web strategy to drive more revenue and build more awareness for your brand, contact METZ for a complimentary intake call.

Guest posted by Eric Schubert

I’ll admit it: I’m a skeptic when it comes to the power of the social web. However, Adam has challenged me to utilize social web strategies to raise money for a charity, and I’ve taken the bait. Let’s prove my skepticism wrong. First go to this link and donate $5 (or more) to AIDS Project Los Angeles: Eric’s AIDS Marathon Page.

More about the charity later, but I know not to bury the lead. If just 700 people out there go to Eric’s AIDS Marathon Page and donate $5, I’ll make my fundraising goal…and you will have quickly proven the power of the social media. After all, here I am blogging about it.

I suppose that since Twitter has fueled several revolutions now, it would be my next step. Unfortunately, I have—gasp—given up on Twitter. Why? Well, while trying to finish a book and several other projects, I found that Twitter was eating up more time than it should. In the words of Gertrude Stein, “remarks are not literature.”

Now, if I had painstakingly built up a cohort of followers, Twitter would be an excellent strategy for raising a larger sum of money in small amounts. I think I’ll restore my Twitter account today—I’m going to need some followers to buy my first book and put me on the bestseller list.

Facebook. Everyone needs a Facebook strategy. Well, I messaged all my contacts, and that got me this chance to speak to all of you. Still, I’d say that tactic has been about as productive as email. So I created a page: Proving I can raise $3500 for APLA $5 at a time . Go there and become a fan. Get all your friends to become a fan. Don’t tell me you have time to poke, but no time to help raise money for charity. The beauty here is that you don’t even have to donate… just spread the word. Spread the word far enough and the donations will rack up.

Certainly I will need to hit up the other social networks out there. It would be nice if I could get something out of LinkedIn, since I’ve never gotten work out of it… has anyone? I’d like to meet you. How about you, readers? Any other strategies you can come up with. OK, one more time: Eric’s AIDS Marathon Page

Just $5. Or more if you can.

Here’s the small print about your donation: I am training for the Maui Marathon in September with the National AIDS Marathon program , and in order to complete the training, I need to raise $3500 by July 31. The money goes to AIDS Project Los Angeles , an organization that serves 10,000 people all over LA, most living below the poverty line. APLA provides more than just medication and counseling, but also meals and basic medical and dental services to a community without means.

Nothing wrong with that. These social/mobile engagements run about $12-50k each — hard cost. Inclusive of administrative soft-cost, (a marketing manager at $70k, working half-time for 2-3 months), we’re talking about a $25k-75k investment.

That means that if your company doesn’t have a million-dollar marketing budget you probably don’t need to read the rest of this post.

The upside: you’re getting in front of 200k-1.5M consumers and prospective consumers. In their pockets. At a sweet 5-cent CPM.

As far as brands and vendors go, we certainly have our preferences, but our recommendations really depend on a few different factors.

1. Current CRM: What CRM system is the brand using? We’d make a pretty different recommendation if the brand was using Salesforce’s SMB product instead of Sugar CRM. Not all mobile social media solutions are created equal, and we want to make sure that there’s a next-action prompted from how the consumer interacts with the solution.

2. Next Action: What the heck to you want people to do once they receive your SMS or use your brand’s mobile application? (BTW, next action is not to be confused with “desired social share” – one is a call-to-action, and the other is promoting your application/offer).

• Order a drink at a bar?
• Go purchase dog treats at Safeway?
• Walk up to their friend and show them their phone?
• Download a trailer for a creepy movie) ?

3. Desired Social Share and Sharing Benchmark: What social-sharing action do you want the user to engage in? Do you want them to share this mobile action to their Facebook profile? To other friends via SMS?

If you don’t tell your consulting team up-front what social share is needed, good luck getting anything even remotely “viral” on a mobile device.

If your brand doesn’t have a sharing benchmark from previous social web engagements, we’ll need to calculate a competitive sharing benchmark for you.

4. Supply Chain Compliance & Documentation: If the other entities in your supply chain (i.e. retail channel partners, big eCommerce fulfillment partners) aren’t totally briefed on how this thing works, then they’re going to have a hell of a time shipping your Mineralize Eye Shadow , once it’s ordered via mobile.

5. What Carriers Your Customers Use: If a majority of your customers are using a “budget” carrier like Metro PCS or a mainstream carrier like AT&T , makes a difference, especially if there’s going to be a mCommerce component. We’re not going to recommend a given app or action if your customers generally work with a carrier that limits them to $5 purchases, via SMS.

To get more mobile commerce tips, drop us a line .

Key #2: Integration, duh!

You need to show that your brand is hip and connected with the social web (even if it’s not hip, it can be connected) in order to prove that your brand is (1) part of the conversation and sees (2) feedback via these tactics. It should go without saying, but I’ll state the painfully obvious: you should know of popular social destinations and integrate with them.

This can be tricky because there can be a very wrong way to do this. Know your place in the conversation. You don’t have to prove you know every social web platform unless you’re trying to be funny or amazing, like this West Side Story parody video.

In fact, you don’t want to present the paradox of choice and overwhelm your users.

I suggest eight social web destinations. In addition, use some of the integration tools/services that make might set you apart from everybody else.

Here’s one to get the ball rolling: Try the Twitterboard.

I could go on and on with the best ways to integrate and make your site super social web-friendly, but I’ll spare you. If you want more. Request it in the comments or directly let METZ know you want more than just a taste.

What’s important here is that the brand will be part of the conversation, and in the same way as outlined above, you need to respond to each and every feedback entry. It’s also important to respond on the same (or multiple!) platforms. If you get slammed with bad press via a Youtube video, create a Youtube video that explains you see their complaint and you’re on the case.

Key #3: Don’t be afraid to bridge online and offline as a way to be creative!

You might remember this creative example. It was brilliant. Not only did Delfina, a San Francisco pizzeria, show they were in tune with negative Yelp reviews, but they also bridged the gap between old school and new school. I especially love that latter fact. It accomplishes a great deal. You bring a lot more people into the conversation (think inactives). I think the focus, rightfully so, was on the action of taking back the negative criticism, but it was how they did it that garnered a lot of attention.

Not to make this into a mantra, but I’m speaking to a larger theme on how to reclaim the negative online press: be creative. Two simple words, but an enormously difficult concept. If creativity is lacking (especially early on) remember that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Your brand can simply reshape an existing idea. For example to reshape the above idea, reclaim your bookstore’s negative Yelp reviews be printing them on bookmarks and include the bookmarks in every book purchase. That way on one side of the bookmark is the negative review, which catches everyone’s attention, and on the other side you print your ad and info along with a statement that tells everyone you get it.

These are just three key points to get you started. If you need more, drop me a line at jason [at] adammetz.com.

Hold it. Don’t get over-excited. With growth comes negative reactions too. So what to do? It might be contrary to human nature and your first gut response, but you need to embrace the negativity and use it to push your brand.

Yeah, I know, you just read that intro paragraph (or maybe right from the blog post title) and you’re thinking that this topic has been covered and recovered. In fact, you thought, “You’re late to the party. I’ve heard this all before.” Taking it back to the roots of basic public relations strategy, embracing bad press isn’t a new or novel idea. However, what’s new are the tactics to do this that incorporate social web strategy. In this post I provide 3 keys to get you started towards fully embracing your negative coverage.

Let’s begin with some basics.

You don’t want to ignore the bad press. There are reasons already said why not to ignore bad press and I won’t regurgitate them here. The salient theme of these reasons is that you’re blessed with an opportunity. Yes, an opportunity to shed light in the darkness, to convert haters to lovers, and most importantly, to make more money. Also, there’s more to it than not just ignoring the bad press, you don’t want to make a bad situation worse. That is to say, you don’t want to fan the flames and torch your brand online.

Key #1: Don’t get asked, “Why doesn’t your site allow (negative) feedback?”

If your company website doesn’t allow feedback (even positive feedback) you’ve got catching up to do. Like most brands out there, if your brand’s collateral includes a feedback page or section that is censored for positive comments/reviews/response, you’re getting warmer but you still don’t really have it. You need to include the negative! In fact, I would go one step further and place a heading or side panel disclaimer that states the following:

“We here at [your company] wish to provide you with honest and real feedback from customers. We’ve included the good with the bad. We might have altered or adjusted some comments to keep this webpage viewable for all audiences (besides, our mothers don’t appreciate curse words and sexual references), but we DO NOT censor the sentiment.”

It might help you to think about why the feedback must be contained (rather than externally linked or referenced) on your site.

Normal consumers have a very simple research methodology. They do a search of the product name or brand using Google and/or Wikipedia. Either way, they make a short path to the company’s own online collateral or their destination website.

In doing so, they look to the company’s collateral as the hub for everything about that brand. It frankly frustrates customers to have to look at external review sites for information about a product. Also, when customers find this hard-to-locate feedback information, they’re often disappointed that they wasted their time if all the feedback is obviously screened/filtered/censored to only include positive reviews.

If your brand can’t overcome consumer skepticism on a review page, then what’s the point. (And don’t take it from me that the humble product review never really went away as an important marketing tool in CPG).

But I digress, let’s get back to the idea of an uncensored product (or service) review page on your brand’s own website. This is not the time to be passive. You should have a reaction to each and every (or as many as possible) feedback entry.

Your reaction to the positive feedback is simple and appreciative. An example: “Great! We love that you love our product. Don’t forget that we also have these flavors too [link to up-sell them or promote new products].”

Your reaction to the negative feedback is also simple and appreciative. An example: “We want you to enjoy our product, so it’s sad to hear you had anything less than a satisfactory experience. You might not have enjoyed the [low-end product], so maybe try the [premium product] because it’s contains different advantages and benefits [than top-quality item]. Nevertheless, we appreciate your comments.”

Notice a couple of things in the suggested responses above.

• You want to show you actually read the response (automated responses are empty and pathetic).
• You want to use the opportunity as a chance to give the reader another call-to-action.
• You don’t want to argue. Instead, you want to persuade the customer agree they should give your brand another shot.
• You could get a chance to admit your company made a mistake. Take it. There’s something that consumers like (humility?) when a brand admits that it’s fallible.
• Admit the wrong by saying that you faulted and that you already addressed the problem or that you are in the process of doing so.
  

To be continued tomorrow in Part II.