The aim of increasing your website’s Google ranking is to feature high up in the organic search on the left hand side of the page. The right hand side is paid or sponsored ads – known as Adwords. In addition to search engine optimising (SEO) your whole site, you can write articles on the main keywords people use to search for you.

Choose your keyword
The first step is to determine your keywords. You can do this by looking at a keyword selection tool such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool or check your web stats to figure out which keyword you want to rank highly for.

You don’t want to place all your keywords into one article. Just like a website page, keep the article to one topic. Don’t try to jam 3-4 ideas into one; split them up and have 3-4 smaller articles, focused on one set of keywords each.

Article topics
Your keywords will be general such as public relations or marketing. When you are coming up with topics delve into more detailed topics under that more general one. For example, if you take a look at our resources section you will see we have written articles on specific aspects about PR including how to write media releases and case studies.

Key word density
Getting the keyword density ratio correct is critical. Google can tell when you are overusing keywords just to get your site to appear higher in search engine rankings.

Using Keywords in your Article is important – but remember ‘real people’ want to read the article too, not just Search Engine Robots. Avoid ‘Keyword Stuffing’ as this usually results in a fairly unreadable article for regular people.

Follow the simple rule of thumb of using a keyword no more that 3 to 5 times per 500 words. Aim to use your keyword in the heading, the first paragraph and last paragraph.

Write a great article
There is no point in writing an article that is poorly written – even if it does have keywords. I have read articles on websites that make me cringe as they are obviously written for search engines. If you are going to write an article it needs to be relevant to your audience and written well. For guidelines on how to write an article go to our website.

Don’t just put it on your website
Sure you are writing a search engine optimised article for your website, but think about how to promote it. Tweet about it, post it on your Facebook page, put a link to it on your Linkedin status. We also place our articles on free article websites such as evancarmichael.com and EzineArticles.com. Your article on heaps of other websites with a link back to your site is even more Google SEO goodness.

Thanks to Michael Quinn from Mildura Internet for helping me with this article.

It is a known fact that the fear of public speaking ranks higher than the fear of death. This means most people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy at a funeral! However public speaking doesn’t have to be a traumatic experience; in fact when done right, it can often be to the most effective form of communication. It is so powerful we build speaking opportunities into the PR strategies we do for clients.

Here are some useful tips for effective presentations.

Practice practice practice
If you are a nervous public speaker as most people are, the best way to overcome nerves is to practice your speech over and over. Practice in front of family and friends, the bedroom mirror – wherever.

Practicing a speech is the most important thing you can do before presenting. Familiarisation is the best deterrent to panic and anxiety. When you ‘wing it’ you’re guaranteed to stumble because of a lack of structure and constant over thinking. Remember the audience can sense your nerves and your ‘thinking.’ Practice the best deterrent to that.

Know the audience and the venue
Before your presentation find out who the audience will be and how much knowledge they will have on you topic so you can pitch it at the right level. It is essential that you tailor the presentation to the bulk of the audience and understand what makes them tick and drives them.

Familiarizing yourself with the audience and venue is a great way to decrease nervous tension. Get to the venue early, and speak to some audience members. Also check that your audio visual and PowerPoint presentation is working effectively.

Get to the point
Try and make the point at the beginning of the speech, and let that be the underlying theme that runs through the speech. This will give the speech shape and understanding, and it will allow the audience to connect.

The purpose of a speech is to inform the audience. Also, there is no need to tell the audience everything you know, rather, tell them what they need to know. The expression ‘less is more’ is pertinent in public speaking. There is nothing worse than sitting through a rambling long speech. It is important to be concise and brief.

Use efficient body language
Remember, 93% of communication is nonverbal. The audience will not just be looking at your face; they will be looking at your body as well. Be confident in what you say; stand up straight, look at the audience, and smile from time to time. Put your hands by your side, not in your pockets and not behind your back.

Don’t forget to dress properly and be comfortable as well. Getting your point across means showing the audience you are confident. Remember, presentation is not what is said but how it’s said.

Don’t read the whole time
Nothing is worse than listening to a speech where the presenter is reading the entire time. If you want grasp the attention of your audience you must keep the presentation interesting. Add some humour, talk to the audience, and use some visual aids. The purpose of the speech is to be relatable; the audience has to identify with you in some way. If you are reading the whole time, you are not identifying with the audience and your presentation will become meaningless.

Clients can share your story
Often co-presenting with a client, or using case studies or anecdotes will help reinforce your story and build credibility. Your clients have a unique perspective that is often more convincing and ‘real’ compared to your story. Often the audience want hear how your service or product was used in real life rather than just a simply description.

Freelance Journo Mia Freedman, Mark Scott of the ABC, and Paul Cutler, head of SBS News, will speak at the Media140 conference. Media140 Sydney will investigate the issue of digital online media and online interaction, through important discussions intended to teach and encourage debate inside the media industry about a range of social media issues and practices.

As a reader of this blog you receive 20% discount on tickets.  If you wish to attend the event with the   discount, all you need to do is enter the CP140 code when registering.

Media 140 will take place on the 5 and 6 of November at the ABC Eugene Goossens’ Hall, Sydney.

For more information or tickets to the event, follow Media140 on Twitter via @sydney140.

In my experience, the answer to that question is a resounding YES. But just turning up isn’t enough. And it isn’t just about getting new business either.

Building your professional networking contacts is not about attending a few events and flicking your business card around. It will take time before you start seeing measurable results consistently flowing into your business.

You can never have too many contacts
Networking isn’t just about acquiring new business; it is about surrounding yourself with a support network for your life in general. I have never met anyone who said they have too many contacts!

Running a business can be an isolating and stressful experience, but when networking you learn so much about different types of businesses, what is happening in the business community and have the opportunity to share your experiences.

A cost effective alternative
Networking can also be the most cost effective way of reaching hundreds of potential clients, which is particularly worthwhile for SMEs with tight marketing budgets.

While the cost of attending a lunch or event can add up, I see it as personal advertising. It takes your time but when you connect with people on a personal level it is so powerful. In fact, so powerful, we build it into all of our client’s PR strategies.

Take control
Instead of waiting for people to find you, you are taking control of the situation and finding them. For this reason networking is an essential element to business development.

Through networking you instantly have access to a room full of people who, by simply chatting with them, you can discover if they have a need for services like yours. The more people who are aware of a business means the more people who will make contact when the need arise.

Networking for business development
So who should you network with? Your peers, your industry or your potential clients? Obviously from a business development perspective, it is a good idea to network with potential clients. For example if your target market is small business, then participate in groups for small business owners such as your local chamber of commerce, The Last Thursday Club and The Women’s Network Australia.

Join an industry specific network
It is also a good idea to belong to your industry specific network – such as one run by the professional association you may belong to – and also a non-industry specific network. Doing this means you can keep up to date with your industry and competitors’ knowledge, and a non-industry network will expose you to a good cross section of business people.

Be committed
Like any marketing activity, networking needs to be consistent and long term. Many people make the mistake of not networking when everything is going well for them. When things go bad they are left with few contacts, many of which they never bothered to build a relationship with.

How to become a successful networker
The key to good networking is to go alone. Do not take someone with you for support as you will inevitably use the event as a catch up. If you invite a colleague to attend with you split up during any networking period and catch up after the event.

It’s not about selling. In fact it’s not about talking. It’s about listening. A savvy networker knows that networking and building relationships is about taking the time to find out about others, and from there working out if there is any synergy.

Good networkers also always follow up those they meet. It’s not about getting as many business cards as possible, but connecting with people. Try setting a goal for each event to get two business cards with the invitation to contact them and arrange a coffee meeting to chat in more detail.

After each networking function I attend I add the people I have met to my LinkedIn connections so I can easily stay in touch with each other without having to email or call.

The big picture
Networking isn’t for people who want instant results. If you’re not willing to regularly attend events and build relationships, you will spend most of your time attending events in the hope that one day a potential client will be coincidently placed at your table.

The international article, conducted by Valeria Maltoni of ‘Conversation Agent,’ alphabetically listed PR people who contribute thoroughly to their Twitter page, share valuable information, and contribute to the profession.

The list featured major giants in the PR world through to boutique agencies who ‘pay it forward.’ The article, consisting mainly of US PR director’s, featured only three Australians including @paulyoung (based in the US) and @trevoryoung.

It’s great to see boutique agencies getting some recognition as well.

Follow me on Twitter at @CatrionaPollard or http://twitter.com/catrionapollard

To easily follow everyone on the list go to http://tweepml.org/PR-100/

The typical Australian YouTube user could just as easily be your grandmother as your brooding teenage son, according to the results of “Australia’s most comprehensive” study into how Australians use the popular online video site.

Conducted by Research International on behalf of Google, the project interviewed 3,000 males and females from across Australia aged 14 and over who had visited YouTube in the past three months. The 20-minute online survey was completed between 14 and 21 May, 2009.
The results reveal that the pool of Australian YouTube users is:

Large and diverse
• Includes all the family
• 14-17 year olds only make up 7% of Australian YouTube users
• 18-29 = 32%
• 30-39 = 20%
• 40-49 = 18%
• 50-59 = 13%
• 60+ = 10%
• Are workers, students, stay-at-home mums and retirees – 57% are working, 19% are stay at home, and only 15% are studying
• Encompasses all life stages – 55% are married, 35% are single and 9% are divorced
• Are not just techies and nerds – 61% of YouTube users are not tech-savvy

Active and engaged
• 86% of the community say YouTube is their favourite place to watch videos and 63% agree YouTube is one of their favourite websites
• 79% stay longer than they intended (on average 1 hour, 09 mins per week).
• 62% visit at least once a week
• 47% share videos when they find a video which they love
• 86% spend time on YouTube for entertainment
• Two out of three people do more than just watch videos in YouTube
• 20% uploaded video

Australian YouTubers watch a broad range of content:
• 51% music videos
• 31% movie trailers
• 27% user-generated content
• 26% TV shows
• 25% TV ads
• 22% news clips
• 18% sports news/highlights

“There is only one tool, one platform, one medium that allows the American people to take their government back, and that’s the internet…”

It’s one of the more famous lines in recent American political campaign history, and it’s bang on the money. Literally, the internet has changed the way candidates communicate with their electorate, but more than anything, it’s changed the way they raise dough. Interestingly, that quote came not from a candidate, but from a campaign manager. His name was Joe Trippi. You’ve probably never heard of him. He worked for a man called Howard Dean. You may vaguely remember him – in 2004 he was widely tipped to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination thanks to his revolutionary embracing of the internet. He read blogs, organised rallies through meetup.com and emailed people to organise events. Trawl through news archives from 2004 and you’ll find thousands of articles on how amazing his use of the internet was. Then he went and screwed it all up by screaming. John Kerry beat him to the post, and America voted for George W. Bush anyway. Game over.

So if Howard Dean had such a revolutionary internet strategy back in 2004 and managed to raise enough money to become his party’s prime candidate, why does no-one remember him, and what was different about the 2008 race?

Two things. In fact they’re the two handiest things to have in any modern marketing campaign.

   1. Remarkable
   2. Social Media

Obama was a remarkable candidate. No one can argue against that. He is a gifted orator, a Harvard Law School graduate, an inspirational politician, a catalyst for change, loved by the most powerful celebrities in America and, of course, black. Democrats and Republicans both agree that is the most remarkable politician since JFK (not counting the effect Watergate and Monica Lewinsky had on buzz for Nixon and Clinton).

Howard Dean, on the other hand, was a bit of a toolbox. And, while Joe Trippi ran a great online campaign for him, they weren’t operating in a world with 100 million American Facebook and MySpace users.

Fast forward to 2008 and the landscape has changed dramatically. In four years social media takeup, and internet usage in general has skyrocketed. In 2004 it was a teenage novelty, four years later it has become the main way friends and family communicate online. Barack Obama’s campaign team used social media better than anyone else and it gave them a huge advantage. Here’s how…

Facebook – treat friends as friends and they’ll like you

    * Number of Obama Supporters on Facebook on election day: 3,000,000
    * Number of McCain supporters on Facebook on election day: 600,000

Yep, for every Facebook supporter McCain had, Obama had five. In the online popularity stakes, there was no contest. However, that in itself wasn’t so much of a big deal. When Hilary Clinton was up against Obama she only had 20% of the friends he did, but the nomination contest went down to the wire. Obama’s real competitive advantage was a man named Chris Hughes. Before he was brought on board the campaign team he’d been busy running Facebook with co-founder, and college room-mate Mark Zuckerburg. With the co-founder of the most popular social networking site in the world on your campaign team, it was going to be hard to lose the popularity contest. Obama ‘got’ Facebook, while his opponent pretended not to care. As McCain’s deputy e-campaign manager put it, “Facebook users aren’t McCain voters anyway.” Which is a load of bollocks really, given that there are 36 million Facebook users in America.

McCain had a Facebook account of course, but in the same way John Howard had a YouTube channel in the 2007 Australian federal election, it was there because he would have looked out-of-touch without one, not because he’s the kind of guy who would have had one. McCain’s team spoke about him on his own profile in the third-person and his updates were lifeless. In fact, he didn’t even bother thanking his Facebook friends for support when he lost. Obama, on the other hand, came across just like one of your other friends would. Messages were signed-off with his first name and before he went and gave his victory speech in public, he sent this personalized note to Facebook fans:

“I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign. We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next. But I want to be very clear about one thing… All of this happened because of you.”

When Dale Carnegie wrote the world’s best-selling self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, in 1936 (the same year John McCain was born), his number one rule was to ‘become genuinely interested in other people’. You don’t need to be a self-help guru to figure out why Obama had five times as many Facebook friends as McCain. And you don’t need a degree in political science to understand that friends = votes.

My.BarackObama.Com – a virtual army and fundraising juggernaught
Facebook was the most public social media component of Obama’s campaign, but in terms of overall effectiveness, it will be a small footnote in history. The crux of Obama’s social media marketing strategy, and the main reason he raised so much money, was the custom social network created for the campaign, My.BarackObama.com.

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece for Marketing Mag called ‘Does your Company Need a Facebook Page’. It proved quite popular and I can sum up the gist of it with with this quote:

“Social networks exist to facilitate dialogue between passionate people. Their passion might be for a particular product, a cause, a celebrity or a football team, but they’re all in it together and they want to find other like-minded people to share their feelings with. If your business isn’t the kind of organisation that people are passionate (or at least mildy enthused) about, creating a social network around yourself will only serve to highlight that fact. At best, you’ll get a few staff members and cousins join, at worst, you’ll quickly find out no-one actually cares, which can end up looking rather embarrasing. If you honestly can’t envisage your clients or customers starting a Facebook group for your brand all by themselves, you probably shouldn’t have one.”

Applied to your average business, it makes sense. You can’t build a social network around something that people don’t care about because no-one will have anything to say. On the flip side, Obama isn’t your average business. Bush is the least popular president in generations and people were hankering for change. Obama was the most remarkable candidate since Kennedy and, suffice to say, he had a lot of fans. There was no way a custom social network dedicated to Obama was not going to work and hiring the co-founder of Facebook to run it was a stroke of genius.

My.BarackObama.com ended up with more than 1,000,000 members, which makes it (as far as I know) the biggest private social network in the world. McCain had nothing like it and Hilary couldn’t come close. Members were passionate and campaign management empowered them to enact the change they wanted to see. My.BarackObama.com was, in no uncertain terms, an army.

Instead of relying on an external tool, like Facebook or MySpace, which was beyond their control, campaign managers used My.BarackObama.com to maintain complete control the dialogue and craft their messages precisely how they wanted them. They used it as a rallying tool to get supporters excited, a messaging centre to communicate with supporters and allow them to directly contact interested voters on behalf of Obama, a revenue raiser and a planning tool to put local supporters in touch with each other and allow them to set up meetings and arrange events.

Watch this video overview of My.BarackObama.com and you’ll see exactly why it worked so well. It’s probably the best example of a corporate social network the world has ever seen.

Pay particular attention to the fundraising section at 3:22. By getting a million supporters to hassle everyone they know for small amounts of money, they were far more effective in raising huge piles of cash than they would have been if they’d asked a hundred thousand people to donate large amounts. Anyone who’s a fan of Chris Anderson’s long tail theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail) will know exactly why this is such an effective strategy in the social media age.

At one stage in the nomination race Hilary was forced to loan to her own campaign $5 million to try and keep up with Obama’s fundraising. By June 2008 Obama had raised more than three times as much money as John McCain. My.BarackObama.com was, in Barack’s own words “the largest grassroots campaign in history”.

YouTube – you don’t need broadcast media when you’re this popular online
Obama’s use of YouTube was staggeringly successful. Every modern politician has a YouTube Channel (even our very own John Howard had one), but the world had never seen anything like http://au.youtube.com/user/BarackObamadotcom. Look at the stats:

    * Subscribers: 141,678
    * Channel Views: 19,865,534
    * Videos Uploaded: 1,823

Those figures sound impressive enough out of context, but compare them to the next most popular celebrities and you’ll see just how popular Obama’s YouTube site was:

Oprah:

    * Subscribers: 46,352
    * Channel Views: 1,790,402
    * Videos Uploaded: 76

AC/DC:

    * Subscribers: 28,302
    * Channel Views: 1,180,100
    * Videos Uploaded: 20

While YouTube views aren’t a measure of voter support, they are definitely a measure of popularity. If the American Presidential race is the world’s biggest popularity contest, Obama was definitely the prom queen.
Flickr – bypass the press

As Stefano Boscutti from Australia’s own SBS put it on his New New Media blog:

“So which news organisation landed one of the biggest photo stories of the year, exclusive behind-the-scenes pictures with the Obama family on election night? None of them. Obama’s personal photographer snapped the photos and uploaded them to Flickr under a Creative Commons license, skipping the media altogether. The popularity of the photos subsequently crashed the site. This is what happens when you get the first post-boomer president who actually gets the net. The future just got brighter.”

Obama at Home
Check out Obama’s Flickr stream at http://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/ and you’ll see literally hundreds of examples of the Obama team using the world’s most popular photo-sharing site in exactly the way it was designed – for giving your friends an insight into your life. By providing that ‘behind the scenes’ footage, it served to humanise Obama, which in turn won friends and influenced people.
Twitter – you don’t have to talk back

Obama’s Twitter account was a great example of how politicians can use this micro-blogging service as a one-way communication channel. Rather than trying to message back the 133,000+ people who follow him, which would have been logistically impossible and ended up hugely impersonal (the antithesis of social media dialogue), Obama’s campaign team used it as a broadcast tool.

The danger of using social media in a campaign is that once you start engaging with one person, everyone else will expect you to be their friend. By being up-front and not engaging anyone in this particular medium, there was no expectation amongst followers that they were going to get any attention. Australian politicians Kevin Rudd (http://twitter.com/KevinRuddPM) and Malcolm Turnbull (http://twitter.com/turnbullmalcolm) might do well to follow Obama’s lead sooner or later, or they’re going to end up with lots of angry followers wondering why no-one writes back to them.

Furthermore, in a sign that Obama took Twitter seriously during the campaign, but doesn’t see it as part of a viable long-term communication strategy for a world leader, Obama stopped tweeting once the election was over. Fittingly, it was with a message to his supporters that neatly sums up why engaging social media (and the people who use it) won him the election:

“We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks 5:34 AM Nov 6th”

Truer words were never spoken.

Media is circular
News no longer just generated by journalists. With the help of social media, media has evolved to become a circular process. Individuals are looking to the media for stories, but at the same time, the media is looking to online for stories and trends.

Individuals are now both a consumer of media and a creator. This idea can be as simple as engaging with media by reading an article, followed by posting a comment online. Blogging is the more serious way to become a media creator, allowing individuals to generate their own stories and ideas.

The media are increasingly looking to these blogs to help them pick trends before they happen, possibly making bloggers the ultimate source of news.

Unlock the passion of accidental spokespeople
One of the most noticeable effects of social media is the emergence of the ‘accidental spokesperson.’ This concept is the idea that key voices for organisations are fast becoming accidental ones from either employees or customers. As more and more blogs and social networking sites emerge this concept is quickly growing.

Voices can range from passionate enthusiasts to determined detractors, plugging or criticising your organisation. The best method is to listen to these voices rather than monitor. If negative comments arise, do something about it and rectify the situation as customer service would, hopefully turning an unhappy customer into a satisfied customer.

When positive comments arise – encourage these individuals as they are positively promoting your brand with an authentic voice.

Speak with a human voice
Social media is providing organisations with the chance to humanise and authenticate their organisation. In the past, many organisations have lacked personality or a personal voice, making them almost robotic.

With the emergence of blogs and sites such as Twitter, organisations have been given the opportunity to bring their organisation alive by delivering a vivid personality through a spokesperson such as the CEO. Readers feel as if they actually know the company and it gives them a personal and credible voice. This activity builds trust and more often than not – customers.

Faceless doesn’t work anymore
Consumers are no longer OK with being put on hold or talking to recorded messages. They want to talk to a real person and get a personal reply to their individual questions. Social media is allowing organisations to do this.

Social media is the easiest way for an organisation to create a personal connection with customers. Questions can be asked online and a ‘real person’ can reply directly with a suggestion or answer doing wonders for the organisations reputation.

Virtual trust trumps all
Current research has shown that consumers are starting to trust online reviews over recommendations from their friends and company produced product information. This highlights just how important online reviews are for your organisation.

It is a good idea for organisations to regularly check blogging sites to understand what is being said about a particular product or service. It is an even better idea to implement processes to encourage happy customers to submit reviews online. You will be rewarded with a dramatic increase in sales.

While marketing is responsible for email marketing and natural search engine optimization at most organisations, PR leads in social networking, micro-blogging, blogging, podcasting, social bookmarking and even web content management.

Insight:  Social media is more important that updating web content
There are very high levels of adoption in online communications, demonstrating that new media and social media are now a core part of the web-based communications mix. They have become integral to organisational communications. Social networking adoption out ranks natural search engine optimisation, with 70% utilizing them compared to 66% for SEO and social media is prioritized and utilized more than  managing the company’s  website content (70% vs 50%)

Insight: Ease of Use Drives Adoption
Not surprisingly, micro-blogging has grown slightly bigger than blogging, 62% versus 59%, demonstrating  that lowering the barrier to entry — the “140-character news cycle” as Shel Holtz puts it — drives social media adoption by making it easier for people to participate.

Insight: Small to medium-sized enterprises lead the way in social networking and Twitter
Small to medium-sized enterprises are significantly ahead of larger organisations when it comes to adopting Twitter (64% versus 47%) and social networking (74% adoption versus 38%) but not in blogging which is now squarely in the large organisation’s repertoire. But larger organizations are managing the content on their web sites more actively than small to medium-sized enterprises.

Insight: Public Relations is leading the social media revolution inside organizations of all types and sizes
• PR leads marketing in the management of all social media communications channels. Marketing leads PR in managing only email marketing and SEO.
• In 51% of organisations, PR lead digital communications compared to 40.5% where marketing leads

• PR is responsible for blogging at 49% of all organisations. Marketing is responsible for blogging at  22% of all organisations. PR is responsible for social networking at 48% of all organizations. Marketing is responsible for social networking at 27% of all organizations.
• PR is responsible for micro-blogging at 52% of all organisations. Marketing is responsible for microbloggingat 22% of all organizations.

Insight: When searching for prospective candidates, knowledge of social media is almost as important as traditional media relations skills
• Among those responsible for hiring PR and marketing employees, 82% of respondents said mainstream media relations expertise was either important or very important. But over 80% said knowledge of social networks is either important or very important. Nearly 77% said knowledge of blogging, podcasting and RSS is either important or very important. And almost 72% said an understanding of micro-blogging services like Twitter are either important or very important.
• Other new media communications skills that hiring decision makers found important or very important are search engine optimization (62%), email outreach (56%), web content management (52%) and social bookmarking (51%).
• Hiring decision makers recognize the importance of social media in organizational communications. To meet the needs of internal and external communications today’s organizations, public relations or marketing job seekers need to develop a comprehensive portfolio of digital communications skills.
• 18% of hiring decision makers have no interest at all in traditional public relations skills, signalling a shift from a mainstream media relations-focused approach.

Ford Motor Co., PepsiCo Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co., among others, are deploying software and assigning employees to monitor Internet postings and blogs. They’re also assigning senior leaders to craft corporate strategies for social media.

One morning last December, Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, saw Twitter messages alerting him to online comments criticizing Ford for allegedly trying to shut a fan Web site, TheRangerStation.com. The dispute prompted about 1,000 email complaints to Ford overnight.

Mr. Monty, who joined Ford the previous July from an advisory firm specializing in social media, didn’t wait to learn the facts. He posted messages on his Twitter page, and Ford’s, saying he was looking into the matter, adding frequent updates.

Within hours, he reported that Ford’s lawyers believed the site was selling counterfeit goods with Ford’s logo. He persuaded Ford’s lawyers to withdraw the shut-down request if the site would halt the sales. By the end of the day, he Tweeted that the dispute had been resolved.

Jim Oaks, who founded TheRangerStation in 1998, credits Mr. Monty with resolving the problem so quickly. “My relationship with Ford has been better because of this,” he says.

Mr. Monty’s response won plaudits from social-media watchers. Ron Ploof, founder of consulting firm OC New Media LLC, posted a case study of the incident on the Web, to show clients how companies can use social media to their benefit.

“Social media have magnified the urgency of crisis communication,” says Shel Holtz, a communications consultant in Concord, Calif., and co-author of “Blogging for Business.” He says seemingly small incidents can quickly spread into bigger PR problems via the Web.

PepsiCo intensified its social-media efforts last November after employees saw critical Twitter posts about an ad in a German trade magazine for a diet cola, which depicted a calorie killing itself. A popular commentator, whose sister had committed suicide, asked, “How could Pepsi do this?”

A Pepsi spokesman quickly posted an apology on his personal Twitter page. So did Bonin Bough, who is Pepsi’s global director of digital and social media. Mr. Bough, who was hired for the job in September, says the incident prompted Pepsi to create a corporate Twitter profile; in May it launched The Juice, part of the networking site BlogHer.com.

Monitoring a corporate image in cyberspace is a daunting task, even with technological help. Tracking software can identify hundreds of posts daily, and managers must decide which could prove troublesome. “If you start seeing a lot of people retweeting it, then you know” to pay attention, says Marcus Schmidt, a senior marketing manager for Microsoft Corp.

Some companies use the information to shape responses to news. On July 13, a Southwest Airlines flight from Nashville to Baltimore made an emergency landing in Charleston, W.Va. Southwest’s six-person “emerging-media team” scanned Twitter, Facebook and other Web sites for passengers’ reactions — and found mostly positive comments. The Southwest employees quickly posted Tweets praising the “great work by crew and customers onboard.”

Linda Rutherford, Southwest’s vice president, communications and strategic outreach, says she might have reacted differently if passengers had been more critical. “We would still be complimentary of our crews, but we might not emphasize that as much,” says Ms. Rutherford, who added responsibility for social-media initiatives last summer.

Some companies are training staffers to broaden their social-media efforts. At Ford, Mr. Monty plans to soon begin teaching employees how to use sites like Twitter to represent the company and interact with consumers.

Read the full article.