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.)

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)

Hats off to two retailers for getting creative giving freebies to consumers in February.  Neither had a damn thing to do with the Vancouver Winter Olympics, but Americans have medals on their minds this morning.  (Sorry, lame attempt at SEO boost.)

Beauty school and products operator Aveda set up six-spigot water fountains in front of a half dozen of its Manhattan stores to give away, drumroll please, New York City tap water.  Tying into Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, Aveda partnered with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection to use fire hydrant water and branded water fountains to diss bottled drinking water.  Despite the fact that no one used the Fifth Avenue fountain while I stood by last week, I applaud Aveda for being creative.  Next time, they should design the fountains so they don’t look like autopsy tables.  They win silver!

Of course, gold goes to those smart purveyors of bagels at Einstein Bros. and their West Coast sister chain, Noah’s.  Starting with a Facebook fan count of 4,000, the company launched a “Schmear Campaign” application that first rewarded legacy fans and then new fans with coupons redeemable for a free bagel and cream cheese.

Einstein Bros. not only saw its fan base surge past 400,000 last week, the publicly traded company also benefited from earned media coverage. Anyone who doubts the PR value of social media should just shut up and eat a toasted everything bagel with lox spread.

Most academic institutions are highly structured organizations, not unlike large corporations and the military.

Students must abide by a code of conduct, faculty members have rigid tenure requirements, and campus security will boot and tow your car if you park alongside a curb that’s painted red.

The stakes are especially high for universities with prestige brands that have been built over centuries.  Harvard, with its $26 billion endowment and top rating among global academic institutions, has a long way to fall if its reputation gets tarnished.

Yet Harvard is also the place where great minds are encouraged to challenge the status quo.   It’s where Mark Zuckerberg, his roommate and their computer science chums founded Facebook.

It’s against that backdrop Brian Kenny accepted the challenge of becoming the chief marketing and communications officer for the Harvard Business School.

“We have to get comfortable being uncomfortable,” was the advice Kenny gave those who lured him to Harvard two years ago.

Among the tactics Kenny and his team have employed to battle what he calls an undeserved reputation for being “old and stodgy and technology-averse” are the use of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and consumer-generated content.

Kenny and I spoke at a Business Development Institute session called “Social Integration: Harmonizing Social Channels into the Marketing, Communications & Service Platform.”

Every industry has its own vocabulary.

“ANFO” was lingo I learned in my first PR agency job, writing a monthly column called “Shot Rock” for Pit & Quarry magazine.  My account was a commercial explosives business that had been spun off from DuPont, and ammonium nitrate was a mainstay for blasters.

At UPI, articles we promised to write for newspapers were called “skedders,” because they were scheduled ahead of time.

PR Newswire loved to refer to its clients’  heifers.  It was newsroom lingo for “HFR — Hold for Call.”  Nothing to do with cows.

So when I took on my first operating role since leaving PRN, I expected that I’d have to learn a new vernacular.  Context Optional, where I’m vice president, strategic accounts, has developed many of the most popular branded applications on Facebook. Clients include Clinique, Target, OpenTable, Microsoft and the U.S. Census Bureau.

I’m no newbie to Facebook. But it isn’t until you look beyond your “wall,” “news feed” and “live feed” that you realize how damn confusing the platform can be for anyone — let alone a brand — trying to harness the power of the medium as a way to attract and engage fans.

Facebook does have a sales team to work with deep-pocketed consumer brands.  Often, though, CMOs want to do more than advertise to create a tighter bond with online consumers.

That thirst for engaging content has created a nice business for the select few who understand the always-changing technical underpinnings of Facebook and the rules concerning user privacy and best practices.

The fact that Context Optional has earned the coveted “Facebook preferred developer” label is just a starting point.  It’s my job to bring my new colleagues’ API-driven creativity to those marketing and PR pros charged with attracting and retaining fans and followers, and to do it in a manner that achieves business goals and is culturally acceptable on Facebook.

So I’m learning about the differences between canvas applications and apps that live on tabs.  I’m diving into Facebook “boxes” and trying to understand why they are about to be discontinued.  And just when I was starting to forget about the investor relations profession’s nightmare transition to the financial reporting language XBRL, I am told that Facebook code is written in FBML.

Luckily, the fans of Einstein Bros Bagels don’t have to worry about any of that to get a coupon for a free bagel and schmear.  All they have to do is click on the “free bagel” tab.  My new employer has handled the back end integration with Facebook to make this special offer work.  My guess is that the fan base will soon be well north of today’s 22,000.

The 548,000 fans of Chanel were awarded this week with the option to download screensavers that display the time with two vividly recreated J12 timepieces.  Budget-wary teens were given a fun set of viral “Stop Me From Spending” tools.  Still other soon-to-launch apps are aimed at Valentine’s Day, the Vancouver Winter Olympics and even a mobile phone texting competition.

Needless to say, I am having a ball working with brands to creatively earn the right to have a relationship with consumers on the Facebook platform and beyond.  Just forgive me if I don’t yet know the difference between a poke and a nudge.

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(Note:  I remain an active board member at dna13.)