Even with sea gulls circling, waves crashing and the smell of suntan lotion providing delicious distractions, it still takes a few days for vacationing PR and IR executives to force their brains into vacation mode.

Visiting the Narragansett, RI, Dollar Tree location was meant to be a simple stock-up for provisions missing from our beach cottage.  Instead, it turned into a bizarre “what if?” exercise about the brands we knew and loved when corporate communications was a simpler business.

Walking through the discount retailer’s aisles was like visiting a brand graveyard and exhuming familiar products that conjure up powerful memories.

Mallo Cup and Charleston Chew feature prominently in the candy selection.  In the breakfast aisle, Kellogg’s hasn’t paid a premium to occupy prime real estate, so shoppers get to experience Toast ‘Em breakfast pastries rather than Pop Tarts.

Remember when Lavoris stood proudly among Listerine and Scope as a leading mouthwash? Or when Bugles corn chips commanded the same respect as Fritos.

If Dollar Tree was a B2B supermarket offering steeply discounted services that still worked fine, but lacked advertising support or the latest technology update, what brands would we find?

Thick, phonebook-sized directories figured prominently in our industry a decade or two ago. IR officers religiously thumbed through the Nelson’s directory of analysts while the PR function carefully guarded their Bacon’s book of media contacts.  They’d definitely appear in the PR/IR dollar store.

Some of the earliest digital tools would be on the shelves, too.  The Reuters-owned Inc.Link product was the first generation of what we know today as the IR web site.  PR Newswire morphed Inc.Link into Virtual IQ, which Thomson then turned into its competitor to CCBN.

Streetfusion was another oldie but goodie, publishing a calendar of corporate earnings calls and webcasting them for investors.

Unlike consumer food and beauty products, most of the deceased PR/IR brands truthfully could not survive in a heavily discounted B2B environment equivalent to the Dollar Tree.  There are big data-gathering, fact-checking and technology costs to produce a product of high enough quality for corporate customers.

So even though Wyler’s lemonade is the powdered drink mix of choice at the Dollar Tree, it’s unlikely corporate buyers will be willing to drink the Kool-Aid offered by familiar suppliers of years gone by. Even for a buck.

Life would be much simpler if those responsible for defending corporate reputations only had to worry about good old-fashioned F-bombs.

But four-letter words are just one of a growing list of fears for marketers and corporate communications pros striving to keep their social media channels brand-safe.  What happens when an organization runs afoul of new standards, guidelines, codes of conduct, terms and conditions, or — this is where it gets serious — actual binding rules from a regulator?

Anyone responsible for their organization’s social media engagement, and those community managers on the front lines, should have a thorough understanding of why their activities are being scrutinized, and by whom:

• FTC — Most consumer marketers are well aware the U.S. Federal Trade Commission created Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising last fall.  What they may not know is that Washington is already starting to take action against companies for things like inadequate disclosure of sponsored posts and blogger payola.  Women’s clothing retailer Ann Taylor was on the receiving end of one such rebuke (PDF).

• FINRA — The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees brokerage firms and investment professionals, is worried about consumers getting duped through social media.  In a regulatory notice, “Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites,” FINRA warned the financial services industry they had better pull in the reins and increase surveillance on those selling stock, insurance or other similar investment products online.  Just last week, FINRA fined Piper Jaffray $700,000 for not archiving old emails.  Imagine what will happen when the regulator gets around to searching for a bank’s years-old Twitter posts or deleted Facebook wall posts.

• FDA — Long known for tightly restricting the marketing messages from pharmaceutical companies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration held public hearings last year to better understand how social media changed the game for drugmakers, healthcare professionals and patients.  Even before new rules are published, a few gutsier brands are betting their one-way approach (brand talks but consumers can’t talk back) will pass muster.  Two examples: Johnson & Johnson’s ADHD Moms page and Boehringer-Ingelheim ’s DRIVE4COPD page, both on Facebook.

• Facebook — Much of the debate about Facebook’s new heft as a marketing platform has centered on rights of consumers to protect their private data.  Yet the responsibility for preventing abuses falls to the brands that use Facebook to reach consumers, and to developers hired to build applications on the platform.  Facebook is not a government agency or a utility company; it’s a private company.  Just like the Seinfeld episodes where Kramer, Jerry and George are barred from various eateries (i.e., Poppy’s Pizza and the Soup Nazi, pictured above ), it behooves social marketers to truly understand the letter and spirit of Facebook’s rules rather than risking a misstep on a platform used by 500 million consumers.

There, I’ve ranted about F-bombs for all this time without actually dropping one.  I’ll probably lose some SEO points for that.

Jittery marketing pioneers at big brands have chugged antacids, taken up yoga and updated their resumes as they await proof that their early forays into big-budget social media programs will be successful.

Quite frankly, it’s hard to hide from data-rich digital platforms like Facebook, which are increasingly hard wired into CRM databases or, scarier yet, the cash register. And the C-suite has made it clear they want to move the needle and marketing executives are at the very tipping point of success.

When the authors of a Harvard Business Review case study reported in March that they had proven a small chain of Texas dessert cafes was experiencing a business spike because of its consumer outreach on Facebook, marketers smartly took note.

In the piece, One Café Chain’s Facebook Experiment, Utpal M. Dholakia and Emily Durham revealed that fans of Houston-based Dessert Gallery visited the restaurants 20% more than non-fans, spending the highest share of their dining-out dollars there.  The finding: the long-term financial payoff of building a fan base far exceeded Dessert Café’s investment cost.

A month earlier, a similar eats-for-likes campaign had been launched by the Colorado-based bakery and quick service restaurant chain, Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, Inc (disclosure: Einstein Bros Bagels is a client of my company).  Because Einstein Bros Bagels is publicly traded – under the apt NASDAQ ticker symbol BAGL – the company is required to share details of its financial performance each quarter with investors, so it’s not difficult to see the shmear on the wall.

A Bloomberg television interview on Feb. 8 disclosed Einstein’s inaugural campaign to distribute a coupon for a free bagel and cream cheese to every one of the brand’s Facebook fans. eMarketer’s social media analyst Debra Aho Williamson interviewed the company’s chief concept officer, James O’Reilly, who stated:

“The conversion rate we’re seeing in the Facebook-printed coupons is far greater than what we see in our regular printed coupons — well more than double our normal redemption rates,” O’Reilly said.

When the Bloomberg interview took place, Einstein was celebrating growth of its Facebook fan base from less than 4,000 to more than 300,000.  Based on the success of subsequent free bagel campaigns, through an application developed by Context Optional and promotion on Facebook, the fan base had grown to 600,000 by May.

How has Einstein’s business fared during the unprecedented bagel giveaway?  CEO Jeff O’Neill announced on May 6 that first quarter system-wide, same-store sales grew for the first time in five quarters.

“For the quarter, product innovation and creative promotions drove improvement in system-wide comparable sales and transactions, and we were pleased that consumers responded positively to our check building efforts despite intensifying competition in the breakfast daypart. We also improved our gross margins through our supply chain initiatives, and realized efficiencies in our manufacturing and store-level operations, which together facilitated 25.9% growth in adjusted net income for the period.”

On the quarterly Einstein Bros. analyst conference call, also on May 6, the enthusiasm that O’Reilly exhibited during the Bloomberg interview had not waned.

“Finally, on the advertising front, we placed a portion of our planned increased advertising investment in March and, just a few days ago, began our second national promotion on Facebook, which has already generated incredible buzz.  It provides a free bagel and cream cheese coupon to customers who choose to become a fan of Einstein Bros. on Facebook providing a significant base of customers we can market to directly and efficiently.  We already have more than a half a million fans on the Facebook network and expect this new effort to create even greater customer trial.”

In the same conference call, O’Reilly detailed the company’s multi-pronged strategy to bolster profits at the same time it was redeeming a large number of free bagel coupons.

“To counteract the check impact of our free bagel promotions, we implemented some check-building efforts, including the launch of two new, limited-time-only premium espresso drinks,” he said.

Based on its success using Facebook to boost Einstein’s fan base, brand awareness, in-store traffic, sales and profits — along with the company’s operational improvements and menu innovations — management told investors to expect an extension of this program in the months ahead.

“Looking forward, I know I speak for our entire team in saying we have the right strategies for delivering continued improvement in our comparable-stores sales performance throughout 2010 and will keep executing on what we already view as successful initiatives that are moving our business forward,” said O’Reilly.

Chief financial officers have dealt with auditors since the days of the abacus. Smart chief technology officers bring in friendly hackers to test the ability of firewalls to withstand cyber attacks. Facilities managers conduct evacuation drills.

However, aside from airlines and a few industries susceptible to high-profile incidents, it is rare to see mandated, periodic reviews of a company’s crisis communications plan.

Update with care

For organizations that have a mandatory annual review of their crisis communications plan, the task may be relegated to a junior staffer who lacks the skill or authority to make major changes. This is a mistake.

A rubber-stamp process that simply updates staff phone trees and media lists is dangerous because many of a company’s newest communications channels and techniques to reach stakeholders could be missing from a legacy crisis plan.

Many PR professionals used 2009 to experiment with social media, speaking with influential audiences directly rather than through one-way messaging with the help of mainstream media gatekeepers. The numbers told the story: As Facebook surged past 350 million unique users, a record number of daily newspapers folded in 2009, plagued by a deepening recession and debt.

As organizations of all sizes began building social media communities, their dalliance was often short-lived and lacked scale. Other organizations have proven that they are worthwhile enough to earmark significant marketing dollars.

Any 2010 crisis communications planning needs to consider an organization’s new social channels — whether on internal networks like Jive Software andYammer or externally via platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Learn from others’ crises

Following the devastating January earthquake in Haiti, communicators who used social media channels not only reached customers and brand loyalists, but also reached influential mainstream media. For instance, when American Express waived fees for merchants accepting earthquake-assistance donations, the company found that their tweets quickly made their way in news coverage.

Pleas for doctors and nurses to help in Haiti also spawned rumors that American Airlines and JetBlue Airways were flying medical personnel to the ravaged nation. Within minutes, the @jetBlue Twitter feed, which has attracted an astonishing 1.5 million followers, dispelled the misinformation and directed would-be volunteers to an organization that validates credentials of nurses and doctors willing to help.

Of course, the nature of social media is that everyone is a publisher. Because consumers can generate content that is sometimes incorrect — or, worse yet, deliberately disparaging — organizations that embrace social media must be extra vigilant.

If left unchecked, third-party postings and comments on the wall of a brand’s Facebook fan page can spread rapidly and become amplified by a social media influencer or a mainstream outlet. The damage can be immediate and profound.

Use your own channels

Brands that are proficient in distributing their own content — from simple tweets to polished thought-leadership white papers, webinars and videos — should ensure that their fans and followers know about critical news as it happens. Waiting hours or days to comment leaves room for rumor mongering and speculating.

As we’ve learned from mature social media programs, like the one run by Ford Motor Company’s Scott Monty, the crowd generally accepts that instant answers are not always available during a crisis. Monty and his staff have earned respect from fans and followers by promptly replying, even if the Ford response is something as innocuous as, “I just read your tweet and am looking into the situation.”

For fans, just knowing that someone is on duty and moderating the channel may be enough to calm the frayed nerves of an angry consumer.

But being awake and in touch via social media channels is not enough to keep a corporate reputation intact while under siege. It’s one thing to promise a reply and something quite different if no one in senior management is willing to go on the record in social media, just like in mainstream print and broadcast. An organization’s social media team should have access to senior communications executives to address the issues of those making noise online. Common sense should dictate whether to do this outreach publicly or privately.

Tone down commercial content

On Sept. 11, 2001, my office window in New York overlooked the flashy billboards in Times Square. The brands advertising their wares in lights just two miles north of the World Trade Center should have been unplugged immediately. In reality, it took a day or two for most of the signs to go dark or for advertisers to replace them with appropriate messages of sorrow, charity or patriotism.

Just as airlines have long enforced a policy to immediately pull their ads from TV and print after any major crash involving a passenger plane, brands using new media must have a kill switch built into their crisis plans.

It was hurtful to see animated beer ads on Broadway on Sept. 12, 2001. As crisis communications plans are created and updated, it’s critical to remember the many consumer touch points between a brand and its publics: the Web site, ad campaigns, events and pre-scheduled company announcements unrelated to the crisis.

Stay aware, active

While I don’t know of a magical solution that lets a company’s entire marketing program instantly switch off, there are powerful tools to prevent gaffes within the most widely used social networks. Among the features that apply to crisis situations:

• Moderation consoles that capture posts and comments, matching them against “black lists” of words and phrases that an organization may not want on its Facebook wall. These tools also display comments made to pages that are only weeks or months old, eliminating the possibility of disparaging content being buried deep within a fan page. An “escalation” feature allows questions posed by fans to be e-mailed to experts for faster responses.

• Page management tools to schedule the publication of content in advance. Some crisis scenarios can be anticipated, so approved responses can be loaded into the tool for faster responses. These tools also let administrators suspend campaigns without the intervention of third-party vendors.

• Self-service application dashboards allow organizations to publish customized content quickly for their Facebook page. Using these tools, a company, agency or nonprofit could quickly move from a sales-oriented page to one that distributes information about an incident or engages fans to support benevolent nonprofits.

Many of today’s consumers gather information in real time. This can lead to big rewards for organizations that learn to behave like media companies, attracting an audience and then earning trust by communicating continuously through the good times as well as the bad.

(I wrote this piece for PRSA’s monthly newspaper, “Tactics.“  It was published in the April edition.)

PR Week was kind enough to make me a guest blogger for the week of SxSW.  Like any reporter, I captured more material than I was able to use.  Here’s some interesting happenings that caught the eye of my faithful Flip:

Check In For Charity — Use of the location-based social network FourSquare was central to a promotion at SxSW to benefit Save the Children’s Haitian relief effort. Porter Novelli worked with StudioGood President Chris Noble, interviewed here, to execute the campaign, in which Microsoft and Paypal contributed 25 cents for each check-in on Foursquare in Austin during SxSW Interactive. As of March 14, the goal of $15,000 had been achieved.

FourSquare — Tristan Walker chatted with me about FourSquare’s involvement in the http://checkinforcharity.com benefit for Haitian children, and how organizations can work with his company on similar campaigns. Walker also addressed the competitive energy at SxSW between FourSquare and Austin-based Gowalla.

Move over Facebook Connect. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams used his keynote speech at SxSW Interactive to demonstrate how the micro-blogging platform will integrate more easily with third-party web sites.

A key benefit of the new @Anywhere platform is the ability to follow people directly from web sites they visit. Web site owners will see additional “tweets” about their content, said Williams, adding that the inclusion of Twitter’s full stream of public content on Google, Bing and Yahoo has allowed users to find relevant information more easily.

“There are 50 million tweets a day,” Williams told a packed auditorium in the Austin Convention Center. “You may see 100 of them. But are they 100 that will really help you out?”

Using a short video to demonstrate @anywhere, Williams said launch partners will include The New York Time, Amazon, Salesforce, eBay, the Huffington Post, Meebo, Yahoo, Advertising Age and Digg.

Among the features is the generation of a “hover box” that appears when visitors to a @anywhere partner sites mouses over a bold-faced company name or the byline of an author. With one click, and without leaving the partner web site, users can add that individual or organization to their Twitter followers list, said Williams.

The SxSW session used a slow-moving interview format, with no input from Twitter users or audience members, resulting in a steady stream of people exiting the auditorium as well as a online complaints from Twitter users.

A sampling:

@omarg: “How dry would you like that keynote? REEEAAL dry?”

@MattSummers Half expecting the moderator to ask @ev his favorite color

@jackiehuba: Just heard sirens outside. Too late to resuscitate this keynote

@daniel7720this has fail whale written all over it

A presentation by corporate product manager-turned-cartoonist Tom Fishburne captured the complex vibe of this week’s South by Southwest Interactive conference.

Angry at the way “blood-sucking corporations” systematically dull the sharpest ideas, the Harvard MBA grad and author of “Brand Camp” has fought back with his pen and, over 10 years, earned a loyal following of 50,000 like-minded brand managers.

The connection between drawing cartoons and innovation struck a chord among the eclectic mix of software developers, marketers, artists, PR pros and others attending SXSW, as seen in the live Twitter feed of the event.

@escapetochengdu: Most organizations are better equipped w/ cutting tools than with growing tools

@brianrudolph Ideas are like a muscle. The more you work and exercise it, the more you get out of it

@mercurek Most frustrating & inspiring core convo

@jenn__chen The criticism sandwich – start and end with good, keep the bad in between

@frenkie the remarkability of a cartoon is determined by its simplicity, comparable to Apple’s innovative designs

With his cartoons mounted on fabric sheets on the walls, Fishburne recounted his frustration working at General Mills and other consumer products companies that spurred the creative process through highly structured “ideations” where participants sang Kumbaya and sat in beanbag chairs. Following the retreats, Fishburne said, remarkable ideas were systematically whittled away by his risk-averse colleagues.

Despite the bitter start, Fishburne’s cartooning session was uplifting.  His attributed his career happiness to being “deliberately exclusive” to connect with a highly targeted audience fanatical about his cartooning, and a day job where collaboration on product development is encouraged every day.  Tools he uses at Method Products include floor-to-ceiling white boards and a 3D printer capable of churning out prototypes of new laundry detergent bottles overnight.

With its start in 1987 as a music festival, SXSW has long had a knack for melding technology, design, music and filmmaking in a way that’s irresistible for marketers searching for the next great genre, gadget or platform on which to build a brand.

A milestone this year is the explosive growth of SXSW’s interactive portion. Registration was up 40 percent over last year’s 11,000 attendees versus a 25 percent rise for film and flat attendance at music, according to spokeswoman Elizabeth Derczo.

Fishburne’s presentation was just one example of the juxtaposition of deep-pocketed corporate sponsors trying to be edgy and the starving artists that provided the foundation for SXSW.

During a “How to Rawk SXSW” panel advising newcomers how best to navigate the five days of sessions, events and parties, a speaker noted Miller Lite was a sponsor before telling a joke:

“What’s the difference between American beer and making love in a canoe?  They’re both fu@*ng near water.”

Welcome to South by Southwest.

A roundup of other key events during SXSW’s opening weekend:

– The news-sharing website Digg used a SXSW party to announce a simpler, one-click process for uploading content. CEO Jay Adelson a technology overhaul of Digg is expected to speed ingestion of articles, video and other user-submitted content from the current level of 20,000 items a day to as many as a million.

– AT&T bolstered wireless coverage in downtown Austin to satiate the bandwidth appetite of the iPhone-wielding throng.  The telecom giant stationed trucks outfitted with wireless transmitters trucks in parking lots near the convention center and hotels hosting SXSW.  Among other image-improvement initiatives were distribution of coupons offering 25 percent off items purchased at an on-site AT&T booth at SXSW, and charging stations that resembled the miniature lockers used to secure wallets while working out at the gym.  My iPhone functioned fine on the AT&T network during the conference.

– Google took a hit for vastly underestimating consumer concerns about the privacy of their Google Mail and address book data during the recent launch of its Buzz social network. SXSW Interactive keynoter Danah Boyd, a self-described “social media scholar, youth researcher and advocate” who works for Microsoft Research, attacked Google for connecting Buzz to Gmail, which she described as “one of the most private systems imaginable.”  Boyd’s remarks also addressed privacy policies at Facebook and other Internet companies. “I can’t help noticing that more and more technology companies are exposing people’s information publicly and then backpedaling a few weeks out,” she said.

(Editor’s notes: This post was written for PR Week; Photo of Tom Fishburn by Joshua Duncan, Austin, TX)

GM’s been all over SXSW.  Branded power strips juiced up iPhones and laptops while select visitors at the Chevy lounge scored test drives of the 2011 Volt electric car.

When one of Chevy’s fleet of SXSW sedans cruised to the curb at Frog Design’s swank party at Austin’s Mexican American Cultural Center last night, my New York City cab-hailing instincts kicked in.

I opened the passenger door and asked the drive if he was heading toward the convention center.  Before he could answer, I sensed someone else was vying for the same cab, er Chevy courtesy shuttle.  Was it another slightly toasted SXSW reveler?

Nope, it was Christopher Barger, global director of social media at General Motors.

Needless to say, it wasn’t a good time to start talking about the cool Facebook apps my colleagues at Context Optional, had created for Kia, Audi, Hyundai and Toyota.  I managed to mumble a goodnight and told Chris that, while sober in Austin, I too was driving a Chevrolet: a base-model Cobalt, courtesy of Enterprise Rent-a-Car.

Chris drove off in his chauffeurred Chevy.  I shoe-horned myself into an aging Austin taxicab (Dodge) with five newfound SXSW friends and headed for the HappyCog party.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/coloradosteve/

It was my first trip to Austin so, naturally I wanted to explore how such a culturally alive gem of a city thrives in a state long identified for its conservative values.

After sharing beers with dozens of hip designers, filmmakers, artists, software developers and social media pros at a tweet-up last night, I caught a glimpse of the Texas State Capitol. That’s when when I vowed to do more than just attend SXSW while in town.

So I went to the daily newspaper’s website, Statesman.com, to familiarize myself with the area.  The top local story was about a murder suspect being sentenced to death.  That’s when I entered the term “lethal injection” into the site’s search box to see if recent legal challenges surrounding that form of execution had been resolved.

The search results weren’t what I expected.  In one of the stranger examples of poor ad word management, Amazon popped up at the top of the paid search rankings offering “low prices on Lethal injection.”   It’s probably great news for Texas which, like every other state, has a large budget gap to close.

Let me be the first to suggest Texas outsource its lethal injection program to Amazon.  They’ll even throw in free shipping.

During the dress rehearsal for a meeting with Facebook executives, one of my colleagues took some ribbing for her use of iteration when talking about the reason a Fortune 100 company’s social marketing program worked so well.

Getting called out for use of Web 2.0 jargon was funny, but the joke was on us an hour later when the Facebook honcho leading the session used that very word.

Also called successive approximation, mathematicians refer to iteration as a problem-solving or computational method in which a succession of approximations, each building on the one preceding, is used to achieve a desired degree of accuracy.

For public relations and marketing pros who have spent most of their careers winning and retaining business on the strength of their creative ideas and execution, the word might be defined as extinction unless they can quickly adapt and begin to incorporate science alongside their art.

The point was made again in a brochure promoting the Public Relations Society of America’s “Digital Impact” conference on May 6-7. One of the sessions features Gabriel Stricker, director of Global Communication and Public Affairs for Google Inc., the company famous for training its employees to say “Data shows…” rather than “I think…”

“Google has a strong innovation culture of ‘launching and iterating’ – that is, making products and features available for public use, and refining them over time,” reads the PRSA brochure blurb. “Google’s public relations team uses the same approach of Beta testing, then polishing, communications tool.”

One of the allures of social media – particularly on the Facebook platform — is the relative ease for a brand to gather information about how its fans are behaving (or not!). That stream of data gets even deeper when brands start inviting their fans to use applications.

There are relatively easy stats like growth of a fan base during a sweepstakes or product giveaway. Then there are subtler findings that fall under the category of  “social optimization.” Examples:

• One tab name or app design – launched at exactly the same time and served up randomly to 50% of users — attracts X% more fan interaction than another

• Users are willing to share something with a friend X% more when they are not compelled to first become a fan

• Walls with brand participation in the discussion X or more times a day achieve X% more fanning up and sharing versus those with less interaction

Whether the word is iterate or optimize or just improve, the concept is the same: an organization that blends creativity with strong data analysis skills will be able to demonstrate their online marketing successes better than any time in history. That you can share with a friend.

(Image credit: samyakonline)