Jeremiah Owyang was kind enough to tap SHIFT Communications among a dozen or so other Social Media thought leaders to investigate Best Practices in Facebook Marketing. The result is a must-read:

(You can count this as more great content from Altimeter Group — yet again offered FREE! Think they're giving the gang at Forrester and Gartner Group agita, yet?)

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Forrester Research has produced another interesting report, this one focusing on perhaps the hottest topic of the social media world over the past year: The ROI of Social Media Marketing. The piece, primarily authored by Forrester analyst and friend Augie Ray, offers what Forrester calls a balanced scorecard for measuring the ROI of social media, complete with expected Forrester graphics and interview-based insights.

Ray uses the 1996 book The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action by Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton to offer the argument that the best way to measure the impact of social media is through a wide range of metrics that are both directly and indirectly financial. The report says a balanced social media marketing scorecard will consider and monitor effects across four perspectives that balance the short- and long-term implications while looking at direct and indirect financial implications. These four are:

• Financial metrics
• Digital metrics
• Brand Metrics
• Risk Management

The report goes on to detail how to measure them and calculate your ROI.

While I applaud Ray and Forrester for being perhaps the first research organization to recognize that measuring success is more than just measuring the bottom line, I have to say I was a bit disappointed by this report. First of all, ROI is a business metric, not a media metric. Stop calling measuring social media marketing success a calculation of “ROI.” It’s not if you’re measuring all of what social media can do.

There’s also a lot of what social media marketing does that isn’t covered in their reporting mechanism. My own presentation from the Social Media Success Summit this year outlined five areas of benefit for a company’s social media marketing efforts and details how to measure them. They are:

• Branding and Awareness
• Building Community
• Customer Service
• Research and Development
• Direct Sales

I’ve added Reputation Management to that presentation since. While I’m sure you could spin each of those into Forrester’s four, and I make no claim to be the know-all and end-all to what social media marketing knowledge or opinion, it almost seemed like they edited down the various benefit areas of social media marketing to fit on an X-Y grid.

Is the report useful? For Forrester clients already paying a subscription fee, sure. But there’s a lot of great wisdom about measuring social media success out there that could have made this report better ... and that’s not including my own.

If you really want to measure social media marketing success, you don’t need this report. You need to ask what you were trying to accomplish with social media marketing. Based on that goal, ask yourself if you accomplished it or how far you got. Pull your measures from that and you’ll know how you did.

There’s more information on the unfortunate topic of the “ROI” of Social Media available on Exploring Social Media for a considerable amount less than a Forrester Report.

NOTE: Exploring Social Media, an online learning community, is in active BETA. Should you choose to subscribe, know the tool is still being tested and the full array of its content and functionality is not yet available.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Forrester: If You Think Social Media Marketing is Worthless, You’re Doing it Wrong (readwriteweb.com)
• The ROI of Social Media Marketing: More than Dollars and Cents (blogs.forrester.com)
• PR Squared: ROI for Social Media Marketing: It’s Complicated (pr-squared.com)
• Social Media Fairies And Pixie Dust (twistimage.com)

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Guest post by Indra Gardiner, founding partner and COO at BG Creative. She spends her days thinking about social media, public relations and digital strategies for her agency’s consumer focused clients. You can find her on Twitter or, if you’re lucky, behind a rolling pin making a fresh pie.

Hide! The Lawyers Are Coming

Social networks give people the ability to share incredible volumes of content. People are sharing photos, ideas, writings and video. All that stuff? It’s called intellectual property and in each case it belongs to somebody.

A recent presentation at the PRSA Counselors Academy, by Michael Lasky, Partner and Chair of the Public Relations Law Practice at the law firm of Davis & Gilbert in NY, provided a wake up call to those in attendance about how the law is slowly creeping into the social landscape and why responsible marketers had better pay attention. Download Michael’s presentation here.

Been Caught Stealing

Let’s start with content creation and copyright issues. We all know how much “lifting” goes on in the Internet. Those who create content in an environment of “sharing” often find their ideas, photos and sometimes entire paragraphs repurposed without their permission. Having clear language on blogs and websites puts the public on notice about your position vis a vis copyright. In other words put a copyright, all rights reserved on your content or the bottom of your blog. One day you may need to point to it if you or your client is ripped off and you want to take legal action.

Read the fine print. Have you read the Terms link provided by Facebook, Twitter or YouTube? In the case of Facebook, once you sign up for an account and click agree, you have granted them non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide rights to use any IP (intellectual property) content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). Did you catch that part about being transferable and sub-licensable? Basically they can take that gorgeous photo that you paid a photographer to shoot for your product, hotel or client and use it however they want. You don’t lose ownership rights, but you do lose control over how your content can be used. This is particularly important when managing branded client materials. Did your content creator (photographer, writer, designer) give you permission to post their work on Facebook or YouTube and hand over their control to Mark Zuckerberg?

A Policy of Protection

While speaking recently to a room full of ad agency folks, I asked the audience if they had a social media policy in place for their staff. I found myself facing a room full of blank stares. Yikes. If your team uses social media at work, particularly for clients, you’ve got to have a policy. Todd Defren and Dell have both shared excellent examples to build from.

The FTC encourages social media policies be in place and reviewed. Remember all the hubbub last fall when the FTC released its Guidelines for Blogging and Social Media? Marketers have a responsibility to ensure that bloggers are providing disclosure and that statements are not misleading or unsubstantiated.

Companies must also uphold privacy laws. In 2007, a breach of contract suit was brought against 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. because the plaintiff’s wife learned about her husband’s infidelity directly from the online florist who, despite a privacy policy on its site, sent a card to their home thanking him for his business. She promptly divorced him so he turned around and sued them.

Having a privacy policy or a social media policy is not enough. You have to train employees too. Having a social media policy is considered an enforcement action by the FTC, which can be important if you are sued for misleading or unsubstantiated claims on a blog or by a blogger. Plus it provides the opportunity to clearly state your transparency policies around actions like employees posting on discussion boards for clients, endorsements and objectionable content.

We’re going to see more and more case law around social media, intellectual property and online piracy and privacy. And the lawyers will be ready.

(photo by Mark Collins)

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What do you do when a client wants "the truth?"

What do you do when the client wants to know what you really think about how their in-house PR manager is doing, or howcum their story isn't getting more ink, or whether their strategy is off-kilter?

You wouldn't think "the Truth" could be such a sticky issue, but it certainly can be, due to the lopsided nature of the relationship. Truth exists only when there is some level of equality.

If the PR pro's mortgage payment depends on the client's happiness, they won't tell the client a truth that will make them unhappy. They'll try to avoid doing so, or will couch the truth in a wrapper so laden in diplomatic ribbons the client will give up on unwrapping it.

Ultimately this means that the client's program will go off the rails, and the PR pro will get blamed for it. And while the PR person's role in the program's failure may be more implicit than explicit (i.e., the explicit reason is "the product sucks;" the implicit reason is that the PR person refused to make the client face facts), they'll deserve to be fired.

When the client asks for the Truth, tell the truth. Be diplomatic without mewling.

It's better to say to the client: "I'm sorry to tell you this, but this press release is not going to generate much enthusiasm in the media, for these 3 reasons..." than it is to say, "We thought this release was truly noteworthy but the press is just not picking up on it for some reason" (unsaid: "so we're going to waste another week making fruitless phone calls, just in case.")

It's better to say to the client, "We have had some difficult moments with your PR manager recently. I'm sure we can work it out, though, especially if you are able to give us some advice" than to say, "Thank goodness we lost that account, the PR manager was awful!"

The clients pay the PR agency not just for "ink" but for the benefit of that agency's experience — including the foul-ups we've witnessed or caused!

The PR pro is not supposed to be a head-nodding, name-dropping, release-flogging flack. The PR pro is supposed to be a valued consultant whose focus on results implies a responsibility to tackle hard truths.

So make your mom proud. Do not tell a lie.

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As part of our move back to the Bay Area, I needed to have our HD-TV installed on a wall of our living room. Anything that requires a screwdriver in our household requires a call to a professional. I googled around for "home theater installers" and used ServiceMagic to identify a local contractor.

Although I've had spotty luck (at best) with ServiceMagic, this time they came through with a quality dude. Once I take a shine to someone, I can't help but quiz them about how they market themselves: how's their website doing for them, do they do any PR, do they worry about their online reviews, etc.?

After chatting with our new a/v installer, Chris Hinton (and no-doubt slowing down my own installation in the process!), I did some quick research in front of him...

"You're lucky your number was the first one ServiceMagic gave me," I said. "There's no other way I could have found you!"

"Look at my local Google Results:

"Now check out Yelp:

"So let's review. You've got poor SEO — you don't even show up in Google's Local Search results, even though you live around the corner from me."

"And look at that huge coverage gap in the East Bay on the Yelp map: you could be the top dog in the East Bay when it comes to A/V installation, if you got just a handful of 5–star reviews."

"And if you're still not convinced, check out how many people in the East Bay are on Twitter (via Twellowhood):

"These folks are affluent, they're hanging out online, and you could be interacting with them."

"For example, once 3D TVs become a bigger deal, a lot of these local Twitterati will want that equipment — and if they know about Hinton Home Theater Installation already, cuz maybe you've been tweeting about 3D tv's and video games, who do you think they will call? Don't you want them to call y-o-u?"

We'll see whether Chris takes my advice. Will you?

P.S. – Hinton Home Theaters did quality work at a good price, and Chris is a good guy. If you live in the Bay Area and need some home theater installation services, give him a call (408-823-9857). Tell him Todd sent ya.

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Four years ago, Silicon Valley blogger and ex-FT reporter Tom Foremski famously declared, "Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!"

Central to Foremski’s passionate argument that the demise of the press release would be welcome – indeed, should be encouraged – was a simple journalist’s view:

[...] Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists.

Whether you agree with Foremski’s views or not, his post unleashed months if not years of debate among many in the PR community, online and offline, about the effectiveness or otherwise of the press release, asking: If it’s so useless, what should replace it?

Spurred by Foremski’s rant, Todd Defren pioneered the concept of the social media press release in 2006, offering a template as an open source contribution to the debate.

The social media release was broadly designed to reflect an evolution in the usefulness of how reporters and editors might prefer to receive announcements, geared more to copy-and-paste and useful links to rich related content elsewhere online than just providing narratives that they ignore anyway.

So what’s happened during the past four years other than debate? Did the press release die? Many experimented with the social media release. Businesses sprang up offering distribution services for such releases (which always seemed slightly oxymoronic to me: publishing your social media release somewhere online is the distribution).

It didn’t really take off, for reasons as varied as because there is no consistent structure or presentation format, lack of understanding on how it is meant to work, and huge lack of interest from journalists.

So far from dying, the press release flourishes. Indeed, a credible survey by the Oriella PR Network shows that nearly 75 percent of journalists questioned – over 750 in 15 countries during May-June 2010 – said they like to receive email press releases if the content is "high quality and well targeted." Nothing new there!

Does the social media release have a role in the communication toolboxes of PR pros?

I believe it does, depending on many factors including the measurable objective you’re trying to achieve where an announcement of some kind communicated some way (eg, via a press release) plays a key role in you achieving your objective and the recipient of your announcement achieving his or her objective.

Rather than try and replace the traditional press release with a social media version – something that quite a few in the PR community strongly advocated when Foremksi’s post created the initial kerfuffle – I suggest using both in a complementary fashion.

That way, you’ll meet the needs of those who want to receive traditional press releases by email as well as those who will benefit from the interactivity of the social media version.

And who knows – if you offer high quality and well targeted content in both, you might start something evolutionary.

(Originally published on the WCG Common Sense blog.)

© 2010 - visit NevilleHobson.com for more great content, or connect with him on Twitter: @jangles.

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Last year, I spoke of the need to synchronize Social Media and Customer Service channels. The topic continues to come up. Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group took up the issue a few months later. And Pete Blackshaw wrote a book about it, called, "Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000." More recently, Jeremiah reminded me of this issue again with a tweet that nails the challenge:

When brands support customers on Twitter, they’re reinforcing the behavior of “complaining to their friends” to get brand attention.

And of course, as you can tell from the title of this post, what marketers need to fear is "complaints among friends" that occur online will translate into a search engine result that could haunt them for a while, especially as real-time results from Twitter, etc., become an increasingly higher-profile part of the mix of organic search results.

But while Jeremiah is absolutely correct that brands are reinforcing "bad" behavior by supporting their customers in public, as we recently learned from Apple, it's an even worse idea to try to circumvent what has become natural consumer behavior online.

For my part, I think you need to fish where the fish are: if customers complain in public, the brand should triage that issue in public, so that the millions of potential online bystanders can see a diligent, respectful effort is being made.

That doesn't mean "engage the haters."

The rule of thumb that SHIFT advocates to clients is, "Engage anyone 1 – 2x in public forums; take it offline when possible to resolve the issues in a more practical way; know that 'haters' will reveal themselves, so any reasonable person will see that at least the brand made a solid attempt to appease them."

Yea, this is wildly hard to scale for a consumer company, but it can be done in stages. Most folks just want to know they are being heard; they'll be patient for a solution that they know is coming, but tend to grow heated when they feel ignored. It's the I-Feel-Ignored customers that you need to be most wary of; they will make it their mission to shame the brand into a public response. Thus even the most resource-strapped organization should scrape together the resources to be able to monitor and respond with "placeholder" messages to their customers: "Sorry to hear about your frustrations! Let's take this offline and see how we can help."

That's the Google result you want your prospects to see. Anytime a Google search result rolls up "(Brand) Sucks" the next thing prospects should see is a polite and friendly response. "Sorry you feel that way. Let's talk offline about how we can do better?"

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We've talked about Social Media monitoring, policy-making, blogging and engagement in the first four of this five-part series. In my opinion, the FIFTH thing you should do, if you do nothing else, is: develop a CONTENT CREATION strategy.

Arguably, "blogging" is part of that content creation strategy, but I am talking about "what else" you are going to produce by way of shareable, compelling content.

"Shareability" is the key here: if you post a video to YouTube or your blog, but nobody sees or shares it, you've just wasted your time & money (though at least you didn't hurt your organic SEO). In other words, the content has to be good, it has to be relevant.

"Content" can take many forms.

If you're a restaurant, maybe you decide that the most relevant content you can offer is a bunch of coupons to local Twitterati and Yelpers.

If you're a B2B software company, maybe you decide to demystify your product via a series of 1–minute videos on your 10–best-features.

If you make sneakers, maybe you decide to send your CEO on a world tour to investigate the product manufacturing process, via a series of blog posts, from "rubber sole" (jungles of Bali?!) to "leather uppers" (moo!) to the negotiation of a new retail partnership (ka-ching).

Again, let me say it one final time in this series: follow Forrester's POST method. People, Objectives, Strategies, Tactics. Once you know WHO you want to reach, you soon realize WHAT makes them tick. You get a sense, by interacting with them, what type of content they respond to, and because you've started ENGAGING with them, you've got a ready group of prospects and customers ready to help you spread the word.

Now ... I'll bet you thought #5 would be "Measurement." Maybe that'd be #6. But as important as it is, I cringe a little inside when corporate executives start-off a conversation about Social Media by saying, "First off, measuring the success of this Social Media stuff will be paramount."

Why? Because if you can't show off a pretty ROI chart to the CEO, you'll stop engaging with customers and prospects?

Did you insist on seeing ROI when your parents told you to "Eat your vegetables?"

Create relevant, compelling content and engage in the right places with people who might care about your brand. Add value to the community. ROI will follow.

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Got your blog up and running? Swell. Now, who's gonna read it? Who's going to leave a comment? Who is going to retweet those carefully-crafted posts?

This is where it gets fun. Harken back — as I often do in this blog — to Forrester's POST method. People, Objectives, Strategies, Tactics.

Surely you know WHO you want to reach. Now it's simply a matter of finding out where they're hanging out. Are they on Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? Yelp? YouTube? Are they lurking on more industry-specific Message Boards? What publications do they read? What blogs do they follow?

These are questions you need the answers to, because if you only do *four things in Social Media, the 4^th is: ENGAGE.

I won't bore you with the umptillion reasons you ought to engage with your prospects (and the people those prospects are influenced by). If you need a refresher course, try my e-book or "Jedi Academy" posts, or read David Meerman Scott's stuff, or check out Chris Brogan's blog, or Brian Solis's book, or Jason Falls's blog.

The larger point is emphasize that thou shalt reap what ye sow. This is a Biblical lesson too often forgotten by marketers in general and CEOs in particular.

Marketing is a tramp through the mud, while attempting to keep your face scrubbed clean; it's hard work made to look easy. That hard work entails interacting every single day with the customers, prospects and influencers who converse online, with and around your brand (and, with and around your competitors, too, who are also waking up to this opportunity).

If you are conversing every single day with relevant online audiences, in the right places — and, if every single day you attempt to say or share something relevant to these folks — you are going to drive traffic to your blog and/or other content. If you further impress these audiences when they view your stuff, they will share it, applaud it, critique it, and generally make Y-O-U the topic of conversation.

Engagement will help your brand's equity grow, from organic cultivation (cost: sweat equity) vs. advertising campaigns (cost: $$$).

Notice how "enaggement" — the essence of Social Media — came FOURTH in this series? Before you think about "organic cultivation," you have to do your spadework.

Let's see if my own spadework has done me any good? Help me spread the word about this blog, using any of the links below?

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