In a PRWeb news release issued July 21, Canada-based Social Media Group (SMG) announced they would be acquiring Livingston Communications, based here in DC.  Actually, the release was joint-issued and read more like a merger announcement but I digress.

This news is a few days old but noteworthy because I believe the social media (SM) focused-services sector is a growth market and SMG and Livingston are two of the more prominent, sustainable businesses in this market.

It is clear in the positioning statement on Maggie Fox’s (CEO of SMG) blog that they are pitting themselves against the SM departments at larger PR agencies, a shrewd maneuver in my opinion:

Our clients have told us again and again that they want specialized expertise in this space, and we look forward to continuing to help companies in the Global 2000 understand how social media is transforming the way they do business, without having to shoehorn that experience into a traditional agency model.

I’ve met Maggie Fox on a number of occasions and have always been thoroughly impressed with her demeanor and grounded perspective on social media.  I think one of the reasons SMG has managed to assemble such an impressive client portfolio is because Maggie knows how to communicate with executives and has a very acute perspective on how social media can integrate into broader marketing and public relations frameworks. I’ve also met Geoff (most recently he participated in a Vocus panel on blogger relations) several times and have found him to be a creative, strategic thinker.  I haven’t read Now is Gone yet but it is on my short list (Geoff - I’d be happy to blog about your book if you send me a complimentary copy).

At any rate, I think their pairing is complimentary and should help SMG continue to grow it’s client list in North America.

I recently watched John Chambers press conference in Second Life at Cisco’s annual Cisco Live developers conference and wanted to offer some thoughts on the event.

Earlier in the year I made a few predictions for how I felt the so-called world of ’social media’ was going to unfold through ‘08. Regarding Second Life I wrote,

Although there is a decent chance that Second Life will simply die and go away, I am going to defy popular logic and say that it will actually crawl out of the trough of disillusionment as the technology gets better, integration with the regular Web increases, and a more realist perspective on its potential facilitates more niche, targeted applications.

I feel that Cisco’s virtual press conference was a great application of Second Life for the following reasons:

1. Second Life is inline with Cisco’s Core Strategic Vision

Cisco’s mantra, “The Human Network,” basically expresses the underlying strategic vision for Cisco moving forward. During the press conference Chambers was pretty explicit in expressing Cisco’s vision that the next stage in information-communications technologies would be network-focused and the next stage in the social applications of the Internet would be focused on collaboration - ergo, the Human Network.

At any rate, for Cisco to walk the walk as far as their core strategic vision is concerned they really need to be in exploratory spaces like Second Life that are pushing the envelop on network-based collaboration and sociability.

2. It is Good PR

I know all the naysayers claim that the reach in Second Life is not worthwhile from a cost-benefit but if you segment by vertical I think it makes more sense for high-tech groups like Cisco to engage in the space. As Eric Krangel from Sillicon Alley Insider explains, “for a company like Cisco, Second Life’s tech-loving users are a rich pool of potential developers and wannabe Cisco certified engineers.”

Not only did they hit a good targeted audience via Second Life but they also got some decent media pick-up in the trades (Computerworld, PC World, Sillicon Alley Insider, etc.).

3. It makes sense from a brand perspective

This is probably a little redundant with the first point I made (or maybe a subsidiary point to the first point I made) but if Cisco is going to be a leader in the networking technology industry and beyond, they really need to take chances like this even when there is no guaranteed ROI - and with an annual revenue of over $35 billion they can afford it.

4. Social media is a good fit for their evolving business focus

The Linksys purchase was a milestone in their gradual shift to focus on the end consumer (a point Chambers made in his Q&A). Although the Second Life tactic in this case was far more targeted on a niche audience, their general engagement in social media is a good fit for the direct-to-consumer focus that is surely beginning to unfold in their overall marketing strategy.

Chambers Speaking in Second Life

Now I think there were some clear areas of opportunity in the execution of their strategy. For one, the press conference could have been a bit more dynamic. In general it was just John Chambers standing on a podium. There were times when the visual image might as well have been static.

One of the advantages to the Second Life medium is the potential for visual expression. As Chambers talked about his vision, it would have been great to see a holographic Star-Wars type presentation compliment the things he was saying.

Second, the archived video of the event is offered via an embedded Quicktime player with no interactive functionality. I would have loved to use a widget to embed the video in this blog posting but no such luck. I ran a query to try to find the event on YouTube but again, no such luck. They could have used a few more

Third, I went into Second Life and had some problems activating and viewing the videos (albeit I don’t have a great deal of experience with video in Second Life so unfortunately I don’t have any recommendations here for what they could have done better - it may just be a current limitation with the Second Life platform.

Having issues with video in Second Life

Finally, they should have clearly used PRWeb to publicize their press conference - both before and after the event. Our blog reach is second-to-none in the industry and they could have embedded a video of Chambers speaking in their post-conference announcement.

Overall however these are all nit-picky tactical issues. For all the reasons I mentioned before, I love the fact that Cisco is experimenting in the space and they are showing themselves to be a thought-pioneer in social media by continuing to take chances.

A few months back I was talking with a former television producer who had recently transitioned to a bi-weekly magazine that was preparing to launch an online version that integrated high-quality video content.

She was a bit wary when I brought up the opportunities latent in some of the video sharing sites and it was her contention that in order to maintain control over the overall visual and audio integrity of the video they had to keep the videos hosted locally.

My counterpoint was that the sheer volume of users in the video sharing sites created an opportunity that was simply too good to pass up.  Even if the brand didn’t want to distribute their full-length videos on the video sharing sites they should still look at the opportunities to connect with potential audiences via shorter video samples that contained links (in the descriptive text) to the full-length hosted versions.

She remained unconvinced and we continued our conversation talking about other things.  After our discussion however, I did some searching for their video content and it was virtually non-existent.

The shame of it all was that the quality of the video was extremely high (she was a professional television producer before after all).  So I wanted to offer some best practices on optimizing video content for online:

Rule #1: Optimize the page that hosts the video

Unlike television, the video doesn’t exist in isolation when it is online.  It is embedded in a Web page and there are a range of opportunities and related best practices associated with this presence:

1. First, make sure the page framing the video is optimized for search.  If the video is about a cat and a dog that are friends then make sure the title tag and titling in the page refer to the content you want to optimize for.
2. Make sure there are social bookmark and sharing buttons (Digg, StumbleUpon, e-mail a friend, etc.) present.  I have yet to see research substantiating this as a best practice (I’ve heard anecdotally that most social bookmark aficionados use toolbar icons instead of on-page icons) but all it takes is one good Digg to help boost your video even further so it doesn’t hurt to include ‘em.
3. Provide a widget that will allow publishers to easily copy your code and paste it into their own Web site or blog and republish your content from their channel.  The bottom line is that you want your video to have a broad reach.  By providing the embed widget you can make it easier to achieve broad online distribution through downstream channels and also mitigate the threat of someone appropriating your content in other ways.
4. Ensure the page contains interactive functions that allow users to rate and comment on the video.  In addition to eliciting more user interaction this will also help create more opportunities down the road for placing video content and also create more opportunities for users to interact with other video content on your site (i.e. based on rating).
5. Create RSS feeds or e-mail alerts for your videos so people can easily subscribe to get updates when you add new ones.

Rule #2: Optimize your site to put your videos front-and-center

1. Put your video front-and-center - Video increases time on site and also likelihood to take some form of action.  If you have high-quality video content that is your lottery ticket. I would want your best video to be the first thing that someone sees when first loading your page. I would want them to play the video and become so enamored with the story they just experienced that they either want to watch more videos or learn more about what is on the site.
2. Make sure that you get your video indexed in Google, Yahoo!, etc video search engines.  Getting video crawled isn’t a big deal – just takes a bit of effort.

Rule #3: Increase distribution of your video content

1. As much as it pains traditional broadcast producers to see their beautiful video productions distorted and washed out on YouTube, ignoring the video sharing sites is a huge mistake.  You don’t have to put your entire video production on the sites but at the very least put a teaser of each video on the site and link that teaser page back to the full, beautiful version of your video hosted locally.
2. Consider tapping a content aggregator - There are companies out there (i.e. Voxant) that would love to aggregate and license your video content.  Forming relationships with these companies would create some peripheral revenue and also create more demand for your video content.
3. Put out video news releases - PRWeb allows you to embed a video hosted on a video sharing site directly into the body of a news release.  I worked with TLC when they were gearing up to launch a ‘webisode’ called Makeover Train.  We put out a video news release to launch the webisode and managed to use the PRWeb distribution network to promote the video embedded in the release.

Just to wrap things up a bit, video has been around for ages and even online video has been around since the advent of the World Wide Web (give or take a few years) .  With ever-increasing bandwidth, improved compression technologies, and rapidly increasing domestication of video production and distribution methods, it has been exploding on the Web over the past several years.

The explosion of video online is an opportunity for traditional broadcasters - the guys who know how to make top-tier content - to capitalize on the quality of their content but it will also require some pretty fundamental changes in the way that they need to think about the role of video.

In public relations (and I am sure other professions), you often hear people talk about the distinction between tactics and strategy.

Simplistically put, tactics are activities that are executed everyday by PR practitioners while a strategy refers to an underlying approach that drives various tactics. Tactics are easy because they involve bite-sized chunks of activity - things that we can conjure, execute, and (sometimes) measure in short order.

Strategy on the other hand, is abstract - it requires us to have an overarching grasp of the goals we are trying to accomplish as an organization as well as an ideology for how media and communications facilitates the accomplishment of these goals.

In social media the same distinction exists. In some ways it is more pronounced because even though we have made a great deal of progress over the past several years in experimenting with and assessing the potential impact of social media, most of our evidence is still anecdotal and a great deal of our effort still involves execution of different tactics.

Recently a former colleague of mine mentioned that his agency’s social media campaign was going to involve the creation of a Facebook page and YouTube channel for their company. They had already created a MySpace page the previous year but now that Facebook’s usage was surging the agency felt it was time to launch their Facebook page.

The question posed to me was, “Is this the right strategy.”

My immediate question back was, “Well, what is the strategy?”

My former colleague (being a top-tier marketing professional) responded with a framework outlining objectives, goals and how social media fit into the broader scope of the organization’s marketing goals.

When we sat down and looked at the metrics from the MySpace campaign in the context of the strategic framework it raised some serious questions as to whether or not they should launch a branded Facebook page using the same approach as with the MySpace page. When turning to the proposed launch of a YouTube channel, our approach also had a dramatic impact on our perspective of the proposed implementation.

The outlining of a strategic framework also facilitated a debate over how social media activities could best be applied, the synthesis of which was a reconfiguration of the initial framework.

To circle-back to my original point I believe we were successful in turning the agency’s approach from one that was simply a set of tactics to one that conformed more precisely into the organization’s overarching marketing strategy. Consequently, appropriate expectations have been set for what the social media campaign should accomplish as well as targeted measurement indicators.

This is not to say that the primary role of social media should be to support a marketing strategy. Social media can support a wide variety of organizational goals - public relations, human resources, investor relations, etc.

But the main takeaway should be that a clear vision needs to exist for the rationale behind why there is an organizational engagement in social media so we can avoid the trap of being disappointed should the execution of blind tactics fails.

As an aside, for large-market companies interested in support developing a social media strategy I recommend an agency called v-Fluence.

I wrote an article for the most recent version of online news releases. The metaphor that I use as a device in the article was inspired by a discussion that took place concerning the role of the newswire contextualized in the new world of social media. At any rate, if anyone is interested I have posted the clip:

Click to view full clip

The Newspaper Association of America has published recent statistics (gathered by Nielsen Online) on visitors to news sites.

Yahoo! News is still in the pole position as far as unique audience (over 35 million uniques every month), with AOL News and CNN also ranking quite high.  Google News is also a notable player in the space (over 11 million unique visitors each month).

By getting our customer’s news releases to the portals like Google and Yahoo!, we help them gain access to the nearly 50 million unique visitors that frequent these online spaces each month.

A close friend of mine Ryan Petersen recently became the managing director at a start-up based out of Scottsdale, Arizona called ImportGenius, a Web application that allows you to search international trade records to find out where your competitors are buying their products overseas,

Ryan and I go way back and even spent time working together in the online PR industry for a few years doing some pretty exciting things with blogs during the formative years of the blogosphere. Naturally I wasn’t surprised when he recently orchestrated one of the more impressive PR campaigns I have seen in a while via social media.

Using ImportGenius to analyze Apple’s shipping records he saw that they had been importing unusually large quantities of “electronic computers,” a classification that he pointed out had never been declared before on their shipping papers. Ryan put together an article encapsulating his theory that Apple was importing the next generation of iPhone and posted it onto the ImportGenius blog as well as a few social bookmark sites he participated in.

It wasn’t long until several of the tech blogs picked-up on the story including TechCrunch. From there, the story blew up, making its way to the online versions of the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, Forbes, the New York Times and scores of other mainstream online publications.

What fascinated me about the situation was the way the story became viral through social media channels.

I’m sure stories like this send shivers down the spine of those of us in the newswire industry because they bring to life the potential in social media to viralize (I just made up that word) news through channels that are 100% free.

I was reminded of the Social Media Release panel discussion that took place at the NewComm Forum last year (Mike Keliher offers a good recap.) in which one member of the audience laid-into the newswire representatives over their pricing - pointing out that he managed to create buzz by posting a news release to Facebook.

At the time remember thinking his argument was a little bit silly but it actually serves to help frame the dynamic that I am about to propose, that Viral plus Vocal Equals Visible.

What this matrix hopefully describes is how the virality (a news stories’ intrinsic likelihood to go viral) of a story and the vocality (how vocally the story is described) of a story are related. I realize that this takes into account a lot of assumptions (like the assumption that some stories are more likely to become viral than others) but I’m going to leave these aside for now (after all this is a blog and not an academic paper).

So Ryan’s blog article would be in quadrant A because the story has a high virality (it is a kick-ass story) but low vocality (he posted it on a blog that not many people read). Now, he juiced the vocality of the story a bit by adding it to several social bookmark sites and that provided all the fodder necessary for the story to go viral.

If his story had been lame and uninteresting it would have fallen into quadrant C (low virality and low vocality). On the other hand, you can take a story that is terribly written and boring and put it through every newswire in existence and it still won’t catch fire.

Or think about it another way: lets say you are trying to start a fire. If the material is highly combustible (high potential to go viral) you don’t need much of a spark. If, on the other hand, the material is not as combustible then you’re going to need more of a spark.

Now, the question is what composes the virality and vocality of a news story?

That is a question for another day. . .

Our presser went out today announcing the initial conclusions from our research into the ‘ROI of Online Press Releases.’

The top-line findings included:

• Press releases are increasingly a tool for marketing and sales - The press release is becoming a communications tool for both public relations and marketing professionals alike. Approximately one-third of respondents were marketing professionals (32.9%); 30% were public relations professionals. Small business owners and self-employed individuals accounted for 23.7% of those who issue online press releases, according to the survey.
• Additional goals and priorities for press releases are emerging - In addition to reaching the press and announcing news, today’s top priorities for those issuing online press releases include: increasing visibility and credibility for the organization, directly reaching customers, making content available to online users, and search engine optimization (SEO).
• The ascension of bloggers and new media - Bloggers have joined traditional media as highly valued targets. Respondents indicated that reaching bloggers and new media outlets were nearly as high a priority as reaching traditional media. Seventy-three percent indicated that it is “important to very important” to reach traditional media via their online press releases while 67.7% indicated that it is “important to very important” to reach bloggers and new media outlets. For small business owners, reaching bloggers and social media sites was slightly more important than reaching traditional media.
• Measures of value and success are changing - Respondents rank their top measures of value for their online press releases by how many times the press release is published on other websites and the number of online views of the release. Both of these metrics rated higher than articles or media interview requests based on the release. In fact, respondents indicated that the most important placements for the releases are online news aggregators, such as Google News, Yahoo News and online news sites like Reuters and Topix, followed by blogs and social media sites. In addition, respondents noted that the two most valuable aspects of issuing online news releases is the opportunity for SEO and the opportunity to reach both consumers and customers directly, as well as traditional media.
• PR and marketing professionals have different priorities and perspectives - Respondents who identified themselves as public relations professionals noted they primarily use online press releases to announce news and enhance thought leadership, while respondents who identified themselves as marketing professionals stated their priorities as SEO optimization for the organization’s website and reaching customers and consumers. Small business owners stated that they use online press releases as a sales tool to reach customers and consumers.
• Hard measures of value and success are a challenge - Respondents stated that their top challenges in maximizing the value of issuing online press releases include: “cutting through the clutter,” targeting and distribution, affordability and measurement and metrics.

Jen McClure will be presenting our findings in more detail at our annual users conference taking place this week.

News Coverage:

• Direct News, Small firms ‘targeting bloggers with news’
• Business Feet, Bloggers ‘as important as the press’ for business

Our annual users conference is upon us and this year we have put together a panel of local experts to discuss their experiences and recommendations with blogger relations.

Although registration for the entire conference is restricted to Vocus users, local bloggers who are interested in attending this particular panel discussion will be put on a media list and granted admission.

Just drop me a line and let me know your blog and that you plan on coming and we’ll make sure you can get in.

Some more details on the event:

• Who: Aaron Brazell, Technosailor; Colin Delany, e.politics; Susan Getgood, Marketing Roadmaps, and Geoff Livingston, Buzz Bin Blog. Panel to be moderated by Jiyan Wei, Vocus.
• What: The panel will be discussing the following topics:
  • Blogger relations compared to traditional media relations.
  • Who is the blogger?
  • Best practices of blogger relations.
  • How to get started

• Where: The Ritz-Carlton, Washington, D.C. 1150 22nd Street, NW
• When: June 5 at 3:20 PM
• How: RSVP via my contact form.

The Strategic Public Relations Center at USC Annenberg released its fifth study of practices in the PR industry late last week.  Each year, Annenberg surveys a broad sample of practitioners across organizations of varying sizes.  Their study is one of the more notable to benchmark the state of Public Relations as an industry.

I have not taken a deep-dive into their results or the full report but have taken a look at some of their top-line findings.  There were some findings that stuck out to me in particular:

1. The emergence of the PR/GR Ratio (Ratio of PR budget to gross revenue) - Many large organizations are starting to adopt the PR/GR ratio as a valid model for determining PR budget, with an average of $786 spent on PR for every $1 million in gross revenue.
2. PR practitioners ranked their evaluation methodologies as mediocre, signaling that the PR profession still has a ways to go as far as evaluation is concerned (although the perceived importance of evaluation is quite high in PR).
3. PR folks evaluation measures continue to evolve from simply counting media hits to more sophisticated measures including:
   1. Contribution to market share
   2. Contribution to profitability
   3. Contribution to sales
   4. Influence on corporate culture
   5. Influence on employee attitudes
   6. Influence on stakeholder awareness and opinions
4. Only a small percentage of PR budget (average of 6%) is spent on measurement
5. Access to the C-Suite has increased over the years - around 64% of PR professionals report directly to the C-Suite with 23% reporting to marketing and the remainder reporting to a mixed bag.  Those reporting to legal expressed the lowest level of satisfaction.