Lucy, the "itchy scratchy, wiggy" three-legged dog

My brother in law, Rob Fitzpatrick, has written a song for our family’s pet miniature poodle, Lucy.

It’s sung to the tune of the children’s song Head and Shoulder, Knees and Toes. The lyrics are “Itchy, Scratchy, Wiggy Dog.”

Lucy is a mess.

Ever since we adopted Lucy from the woman who rescued this three-legged poodle from an animal shelter outside Cleveland, Lucy has suffered from rotten teeth, ear infections, itchy skin and a never-ending propensity to bite her hind quarters.  Medicated shampoos, antihistamines, antibiotics and topical lotions offer little relief.

Of course, New York City is always ready to offer help to the seemingly endless supply of deep-pocketed pet owners willing to spend generously to correct Fifi’s overbite or restore Lance’s coat to its puppy-like luster. We took Lucy to a doggie dermatologist, who charged us $750 to rip a cell sample from her hair and skin with a piece of transparent packing tape, which they studied under a microscope to see if the infection was bacterial or yeast.  Novel, but damn expensive.

Several years and millions of scratches later, Lucy paid another trip to a vet this week.  Our goal in bringing her to see Dr. Thoulton Surgeon (yep, that’s his real last name) was to get her teeth scaled and to extract the rotten tooth.

Dr. Surgeon, who made a point of telling me he didn’t attend Cornell University’s veterinary college so he could sell expensive dog food, is a serious practitioner.  He looked at Lucy’s skin condition and frowned.  He then proceeded to share the contents of a presentation he gave a month earlier during the Veterinary Dental Forum conference in Boston, where he lectured about early successes his patients were experiencing with clinical trials of nitric oxide therapy.

Huh?

PLASON device - NO (Nitric Oxide) therapy

After assuring me he didn’t mean laughing gas (nitrous oxide), Dr. Surgeon wheeled in a machine about the size of a small cappuccino maker and explained the Russian-made Plason device could generate heat of 3,000 degrees Celsius.  But the cool “arm” of the machine emanated a steady stream of puffs that, when applied to lesions, seemed to kill bacteria, yeast and other cells that inhibit the healing process.

Lucy didn’t mind being blown on by the machine.  I loved knowing that a machine capable of creating a lightning bolt was being tamed by a doctor willing to buck the veterinarian establishment in the interest of science — and reducing Lucy’s wigginess.

We’ll bring Lucy in for a few months and let you know how the treatment progresses.

Unfortunately, the one promise Dr. Surgeon was able to make about the Plason device was that it could not stimulate her missing leg to regenerate.  “This isn’t stem cells,” he chuckled.

I grew up during Rochester’s Top 40 wars as a WAXC groupie.

When I couldn’t find the weekly hit list next to the 45s at Duke Spinner’s or Neisner’s, I picked up a copy in person at the Channel 10 building on East Avenue or, later, at 50 Chestnut Plaza.

Program directors Larry White and Bob Scott tolerated my nerdiness and allowed me to hang around — first answering the request lines and later running the board during the Sunday morning God Squad shift (and American Top 40!).  I was 14 when I trekked to the FCC’s offices in Buffalo to take the test for a third-class certificate, allowing me to run the 5,000-watt WAXC transmitter.

My on-air debut occurred during summer school recess, when I was in the WAXC newsroom volunteering my services as the kid who makes calls to police agencies looking for juicy stories.  The newsroom CB radio crackled to life about a car crash in the infamous Can of Worms highway interchange east of downtown Rochester and I ran a note into Bob Scott, who was doing afternoon drive.  Rather than reading the item himself, Bob found a helicopter sound effect, told me to hop on a telephone and pretended I was “Dandy Dave in the Beanie Copter.”  The chopper was phony but the traffic information was real – and my radio career was born.

Doing morning and afternoon traffic reports on WAXC and its successor, WWWG, was a dream job for a 14-year-old kid.  Having my crackly adolescent voice mocked occasionally was part of the fun – especially when DJs like Springer Jones, Dan “Money in the Morning” Money and Tom Keller were doing the ribbing.

My move to WHAM and WHFM happened at the ripe old age of 15, thanks to program director Jack Murphy.  I worked morning drive with the “world’s tallest midget” Jack Slattery and the dean of farm radio George Haefner, and Maggie Brooks and Bill Lower were our news anchors.  After Jack Murphy, other WHAM talent of the era included Dave Laird, Paul Trembley, Mike Harvey and Chet Walker.

As if being the on-air traffic reporter at the top-rated radio station wasn’t good enough, another big career break happened in 1978 when Mark Frank, the local reporter for United Press International, wrote a feature story.  The lead focused on me being too young to drive a car while, at the same time, directing tens of thousands of drivers each day. Mark’s article got lots of play and I relished the attention.

To this day, I have wonderful memories of riding my bicycle from the Browncroft neighborhood, through deserted pre-dawn streets, to WAXC and WHAM.  The day mob boss Sammy Gingello was rubbed out, I heard the explosion, went back to sleep and, hours later, pedaled past the crater outside Ben’s Café Society at Stilson and East Main streets.  These are not storybook childhood memories, but they contributed to my career in journalism and business – and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

This weekend, I head back to Rochester for a reunion of the city’s radio industry professionals.  I am very lucky to have been a part of the business.  Thank you to everyone who made it possible.

Disruptive digital media businesses has long been a passion for me.   Below is the release noodls wrote when I joined the board.

GENOA, ITALY ‐ January 27, 2011 ‐ noodls.com, the first global aggregator of official information in real‐time, today announced the appointment of former PR Newswire President and COO David Armon to its Board of Directors, effective January 31.

Armon, 47, has 23 years’ experience in the PR industry, with specific focus on press release distribution.

“Dave will bring vertical expertise to our Board to help accelerate our penetration on the distribution side with a focus on the U.S. market.  We are especially pleased to have a new member with Dave’s credentials, industry standing and business experience on our Board,” noted noodls Chairman and CEO Giacomo Cambiaso.

“Dave brings us a range of skills and expertise gained not only as a senior manager and leader, but in such areas as sales, marketing and product and business development.  This is an important time for noodls,” said Cambiaso, “as we continue to pursue our revenue and positioning strategy to enhance shareholder value. Dave will be a valuable asset and play a key role in providing important strategic guidance as we focus on our presence in the U.S. We welcome Dave to the Board and look forward to his counsel as we pursue our goal of fulfilling the potential we created for noodls over the past three years.”

Armon, based in New York, was president of PR Newswire from 2004 to 2008.  He started with the company in 1989 as Cleveland Bureau manager, becoming vice president, Midwest Region in 1993; senior vice president, Sales in 1998; and president, Americas in 2001.As president of the leading U.S. press release distributor, Armon acted as a business development executive, forging marketing alliances, joint ventures, product extensions, acquisitions and disposals. He also led broad expansion of PR Newswire services to include social media, video, international and multicultural distribution and launched the industry’s first use of Facebook and Twitter.

Subsequent to leaving PR Newswire, Armon was a corporate board member of social media monitoring pioneer Techrigy and advised the group through its acquisition by Alterian in August 2009.  His next board post, for the PR and social media software provider dna13, also resulted in the sale of the company, to CNW Group, in April 2010.

In 2010, Armon started advising NASDAQ OMX on issues involving PR and IR services for the global marketplace and players.

A key focus for Armon throughout his career has been counseling the issuers of news on best practices to broaden the reach of their often market‐moving and time‐sensitive information.“Investors and other key stakeholders will benefit as noodls aggregates content that was previously very challenging to find,” said Armon. “I believe noodls has the potential to be a powerful force in the global disclosure, distribution and information markets.”

Armon has a BA in journalism from Utica College of Syracuse University in New York.  He has been active in the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, the Public Relations Society of America and the National Investor Relations Institute.

About noodls

noodls is the first global aggregator of official information in real‐time.  The mission of this fast‐ growing, VC‐backed global startup is to introduce a new distribution channel aggregating in real‐ time all the corporate communications of the world to overcome the limitations of the traditional disclosure practice for the benefit of media organizations, financial markets and PR/IR professionals. Thanks to an innovative technology and business model, noodls is able to capture the voices of the leading organizations of the world and make them available to the media and markets. Every day, noodls distributes +13,000 press releases, company announcements and corporate news issued by +30,000 leading organizations from 160 countries and 84 financial markets.

For more information, go to www.noodls.com

A $100 bill was tossed onto our family dinner table by my wife, Maureen, last night.  The story that accompanied Ben Franklin’s green-tinted mug was a jaw-dropper.

Maureen cooks three days a week as a volunteer sous chef at a gourmet soup kitchen in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood.  On Wednesday, an elderly patron pulled her aside to hand Mo $100 willed to her by a man who liked the beet soup she prepared — and the kind words she shared — before he got ill.

Yet again, the neediest are the most appreciative and generous.

A marquee brand in American retailing took a credibility hit this week.

J.C. Penney was caught utilizing black hat SEO techniques to inflate its ranking on Google.  A New York Times reporter, David Segal, exposed the tactics and Google downgraded Penney’s from the top ranking in numerous product categories to as low as No. 70 in natural search results.

Penney’s fired its SEO firm, but the damage had already been done.

The Plano, Texas-based chain will undoubtedly feel some sort of sales impact both in its dot.com and bricks-and-mortar operations.  On the flip side, merchants who truly sell more beds, dresses and bow ties than Penney’s may finally achieve the search ranking they have long deserved.

CEO Mike Ullman could restore confidence among people like me by referencing the Times article during his February 25 earnings conference call.  A simple sentence or two saying the retailer was the victim of a sleazy digital agency would help.  A donation to one of the causes supported by the not-for-profit foundation Google.org would be even more convincing.  Silence, which is the most likely reaction, would be an indication that Ullman views Segal’s revelations as non-material to a company with a market cap of $8.51 billion.

During my years working closely with public relations firms and corporate communications officers, investigative reporters like Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes were  feared for their tenaciousness and interviewing skill, which made even the most camera-savvy CEO look like a crook — after savage editing.

The New York Times has wisely given Segal the role of truth seeker in the world of search abuse.  His November 26 piece on a thuggish Brooklyn e-merchant peddling bootleg eyeglasses was so thorough that local, state and federal law enforcement agencies tripped over each other to build a case against Vitaly Borker.

Segal, a former Washington Post reporter who jumped to the Times in 2008, smells blood and will continue to hunt down misbehaving online businesses.  But the real money will be made by the crisis communications firms that will rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees helping corporations clean up their reputations after Segal shines a light on their darkest digital secrets.

I’ll bet Kekst, Brunswick Group, Abernathy McGregor and Joelle Frank have Google Alerts set up for Segal’s byline.

For those who see the glass as half-empty, don’t worry.  Marketers and PR folks will start focusing on you in 2011.

Jonathan Evans, my longtime colleague and friend, attended the annual Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, D.C., with me over the past few days.  Like Jon, I suffered social media overload.

Which brings me to Jon’s snarky prediction for the possible theme of the 2011 conference in Orlando:

“Anti-social media: How to reach those who are not interested in you, indifferent to your products and are quite frankly annoyed with human interaction.”

Jon had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek while prognosticating about the next big thing in PR.  But I don’t think we should be so quick to dismiss the concept that there’s a large group of constituencies who consciously choose not to engage.

These are the people who like phones that just make calls, proudly show off their small TVs without cable, and love New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” mantra.

The first step to luring this crowd into social media is in Facebook’s hands.  Introduce the ”Don’t Like” button, Mr. Zuckerberg, and you’ve got ‘em.

Dow Jones is hoping martinis will do the trick.

NASDAQ OMX is appealing to the sweet tooth, with cupcakes.

PR Newswire seeks to build buzz around a treasure hunt involving QR codes.

The annual gathering of the public relations industry is under way at the Washington Hilton, attracting PR types of all stripes as well as a growing corps of suppliers who provide the tools of the trade.

Like last year in San Diego, I will try to be balanced in my coverage of who’s pitching what at the PRSA 2010 International Conference. But a disclaimer is still on order: I spent 20 years at PR Newswire and, in the two years since I left, have provided varying level of counsel to Techrigy (now part of Alterian), dna13 (now owned by CNW Group), the Facebook apps business Context Optional, NASDAQ OMX (owner of GlobeNewswire) and PitchEngine.

Suppliers have been busy with acquisitions, software releases and new pricing models over the past year.   Startups are experiencing rapid expansion.  The better-managed legacy players have returned to growth, following an unprecedented number of layoffs and budget cutbacks in the PR space during the U.S. recession.  Even though many sectors of the economy have yet to recover, social media has accelerated convergence between PR, investor relations, marketing and customer service.  In many cases, PR is driving the social bus.  There are plenty of entrepreneurs, investors and large corporations who have either boarded or are about to hop aboard.

So the exhibition floor will be pretty packed Sunday to Wednesday in DC.  Among my earliest takeaways:

• NASDAQ OMX seems like an unlikely exhibitor at PRSA, at first glance.  A few years back, the company best known as an electronic stock market bought GlobeNewswire and Shareholder.com.  Now, NASDAQ distributes tens of thousands of press releases to media and online, and hosts media centers, like the one on the Yahoo! corporate site.  The new wrinkle for PRSA is self-publishing to GlobeNewswire – something PR Newswire, Business Wire and Marketwire have yet to introduce.  With proper client authentication to ensure the validity of content, DIY promises to be a big time saver for clients. There’s also a DIY angle with the  free booth cupcakes: frosting and toppings that allow you to fudge the process and blame the sugar.

• The content repository formerly known as Factiva  is back at PRSA as Dow Jones Insight. No longer just a LexisNexis competitor, Dow Jones now monitors all crevices of mainstream media as well as the social web.  Analysis tools allow users to evaluate coverage and manage reputation. There’s also a media database that promises to relieve subscribers of the need to buy data from Cision, Vocus, MyMediaInfo or PRN’s MEDIAtlas. So you don’t look at the data too closely, Dow Jones is serving up martinis inside the exhibition floor.

• Two weeks before PRSA, PR Newswire took the wraps off a long-awaited social network around its best-of-breed ProfNet experts service.  While ProfNet remains a pricy subscription offering versus the Vocus-owned copycat Help a Reporter Out (HARO), the new features allow non-paying experts to build a nice online presence on a platform that’s bound to be a destination for the higher caliber of media using ProfNet.  To draw attention at PRSA, PRN is asking attendees to jump through a few technical hurdles: download an app to read QR codes, find hidden codes throughout the conference, compete on a leaderboard for prizes.  (Hopefully, PRN is located near NASDAQ and Dow Jones so you can be sugar- and gin-buzzed when you’re doing this.)

• Late to the party, after Radian6, Alterian and a zillion other social media monitoring solutions, Vocus started offering its subscribers a service to keep tabs on blogs, microblogs and social networks.  That, and the addition of HARO, give it some added momentum for this event.

• Vocus archrival Cision took the gloves off Friday when it announced that editorial calendars would be available for free.  This kind of data – a schedule of when periodicals are planning to focus their articles on various topics of interest to PR people and their clients – has previously cost a pretty penny.  So the great sucking sound at PRSA will be the ed cals revenue flowing away from the P&Ls of those data providers impacted by Cision’s new “freemium” offering.  On top of the relatively minor ed cals gesture, Cision’s more significant news is the introduction into the U.S. market of a powerful distribution capability, Cisionwire. The pricing is disruptive and could draw volume from PRN, BW, Marketwire and Vocus’s PR Web.

• The television monitoring company Critical Mention launched an upgraded platform it’s calling CriticalTV 4.0, which allows subscribers to track their share of voice over competitors, watch their clips on mobile devices, edit the video on the fly, and order burgers from Shake Shack (That last feature is not yet released. Just seeing if you’re still awake.)

• Demonstrating its commitment to be different, the social sharing site PitchEngine used its booth space to create a living room that feels a bit like the set of the 1960s Merv Griffin Show (yes, the one spoofed on Seinfeld).  Rather than standing at demo stations, founder Jason Kintzler is hoping visitors stop for conversations about how he’s powering PitchEngine with wind energy and to meet #JournChat host Sarah Evans, who is PitchEngine’s community manager.

• Marketwire’s purchase of the Toronto-based social listening platform Sysomos will provide plenty of fodder for the number three newswire.

• RedEgg Solutions, which operates the low-price leader in media data, will continue to sell direct to PR professionals as well as forging partnerships with platforms seeking to include the MyMediaInfo database.  A three-way partnership between PitchEngine, Technorati and MyMediaInfo was announced earlier in the year.

• Business Wire is fighting back against the Thomson Reuters IR/PR website hosting service with an online newsroom product called NewsHQ.

• Thomson Reuters is demonstrating how its ThomsonONE platform now includes mainstream media and social web monitoring and analysis.  Thomson Reuters also bought a small Norwegian IR disclosure service called Hugin Online and is positioning it against PRN, BW and MW for press release distribution.

• BurrellesLuce announced that it has an integrated platform to better compete with CisionPoint and Vocus.  The technology is being provided by Engage121.

• iPressroom prepped for PRSA by announcing expansion from media site hosting into content distribution.   Basically, it’s a deal with The Associated Press.

• Meltwater Group has come a long way from its roots as an Oslo, Norway, company called Magenta News.  With 700+ staffers and an intensely aggressive sales culture, Meltwater is now selling online media monitoring, social media monitoring and a service that purports to create media pitch lists by matching press releases against a database of journalists.

• mBlast sounds like an energy drink or a new procedure for targeting kidney stones.  It’s actually a very sound technology platform used by publishers and others who run awards competitions.  Haymarket, for example, white labels mBlast for entries to its annual PR Week Awards. Now, mBlast is trying to build up PR agency and corporate use of its software.

• Speaking of the AP, the news service is on-site shilling for business at PRSA this year.  AP has been the “Intel Inside” for PRN, BW, MW, GlobeNewswire and PR Web.  Stepping too hard into the retail business could jeopardize wholesale distribution agreements for AP, especially now that web delivery to news outlets is ubiquitous.  What’s the ruse to get you to AP’s booth? A free download of the AP Stylebook iPhone app (in case you want to conjure up memories of losing a full letter grade off assignments in Intro to Newswriting for making style errors).

That’s the roundup for now.  Back tomorrow with reviews on swag, video from the show floor, and apologies for all those I neglected in this piece.

It’s never easy for a corporation to introduce products that, if successful, could jeopardize the core business.  

Kodak’s Steve Sasson was heralded as the inventor of the digital camera, way back in 1975 in my hometown of Rochester, NY. But management at the Big Yellow Box weren’t about to threaten a global imaging business that relied on the manufacture of silver-coated film and processing of that film with chemicals made by Kodak. The executives in charge buried Sasson’s achievement and prayed they could earn their bonuses and retire before digital pictures toppled their empire.

Blockbuster honchos made similar decisions by not embracing the mail-and web-based Netflix or kiosk-based Redbox business models

In my own career in the commercial newswire market, it was clear as early as 1990 that alternatives to the transactions models used by PR Newswire and Business Wire would someday gain steam.  Former stock analyst Tad LaFountain introduced a dial-up service called CDX, Corporate Data Exchange, for corporations to post their releases, on a subscription basis, for the investment community, journalists, students and others who dialed in using their snazzy Hayes 1200-baud modem. 

While CDX never took off, the race was on for our team at PRN to broaden our product offering and double down on customer service to gird against an anticipated tidal wave of players and playbooks for conducting PR and IR.  Surprisingly, even today, the vast majority of public companies continue to rely on BW, PRN, Marketwire and the NASDAQ OMX service GlobeNewswire to facilitate real-time disclosure of their market-moving news to financial news services, print, broadcast and trade media, and the many Internet information portals that serve investors and the social web. 

Sure, there has been plenty of hot air over the impending demise of a paid distribution model that dates back to 1954.  CCBN promised to take out the commercial newswires, as has ThomsonReuters, the company that acquired the investor relations website hosting firm.  Then, former SEC Chairman Christopher Cox foisted extensible business reporting language on mega-caps and early reporters. And the SEC ‘s “web FD” interpretive guidance  (PDF) of August 2008 cleared the way for companies to disclose via their web sites and a filing to EDGAR. 

But there’s been nothing in the investor relations disclosure and distribution space as revolutionary — cheap and easy to use – as a subscription to Netflix or a Redbox machine stocked with the latest videos on Blu-ray. 

Thankfully, the opposite is true for non-regulatory announcements, the product introductions, events, promotions and other content issued by marketing and PR departments at large and small organizations.   Innovation has been rampant in the PR services arena for the past couple of years.

It’s such a dynamic market these days that I don’t even mind being branded “official suit” as the by PitchEngine founder and CEO Jason Kintzler, who invited me to join the organization as a strategic advisor last week.

I’ve been tweeting, Skyping and emailing with Jason for a few years. At last year’s PRSA international conference in San Diego, Jason invited attendees to his booth (a living room couch and coffee table) to see a unique subscription model that allowed issuers of news to build their own optimized multimedia page with just a few mouse clicks.

When I needed to generate media interest in a good New Year’s story last December – the “gourmet” soup kitchen where my wife is the volunteer sous chef received a donation of expensive caviar — I used PitchEngine  and scored massive coverage (video).  I was hooked.

So now, as the suit, I’m the only guy choking in a neckwear  on the “About PitchEngine” page.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Jason’s dog, Maddie, is wearing a collar. 

Tweeting from industry conferences is a doubled-edged sword.

Those interested in the content from the event are thrilled to pull in a stream of interesting observations without having to plunk down the cash to attend.

But your followers who chose not to attend the conference because they don’t value the material are likely to be annoyed tweet after tweet on a moot topic.

Which brings me to radical decision to stop zapping 140-character observations, accolades and barbs from sessions like today’s Monitoring Social Media conference in Boston.  But I will update this blog throughout the event and send a tweet or two, containing the #MSM10 hash tag, to alert the three or four people — my mom, secretary, an out-of-work PR agency staffer and a prison inmate named Hector — who care about this kind of stuff.

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Katie Paine opened the session with a deck that included many of the same slides in this deck. In her “10 signs that it’s the end of ROI as we know it” slide, she claimed United Airlines lost brand value of $180 million over its handling of the “United Breaks Guitars” episode.  By not quickly replacing Dave Carroll’s damaged instrument, the carrier suffered losses equal to the cost of 5,100 guitars, Paine said.

If that’s true, why didn’t the newly formed United Continental Holdings choose to fly under the Continental brand?

In a less far-fetched pitch to attach quantifiable business measures to social media involvement, the food services giant Sodexo chopped a $300,000 employee recruitment spend with Monster.com and instead began using Twitter to attract staffers who expressed an interest online in flipping burgers.

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Amber Naslund took a swipe at Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter score, saying Radian6 is toying with introduction of a “net advocacy score” that will ask whether a consumer actually recommended a business or service.  Net Promoter focuses on willingness or likelihood to recommend.

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Keith Woods-Holder –  who, in the words of conference organizer Luke Brynley-Jones, ” has been doing sentiment analysis since before many of us have been using the internet” — poked fun at social media gurus who ridiculous graphics that resemble Spirograph (my interpretation).

Keith’s key takeaway, looking at the tweet stream, was that PR and marketing types should not be fixated on the volume of mentions of their company or brands.  It’s volume matched with context, expectations and objectives that matter, said Keith, who now works with Glide Technologies.

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Two NASDAQ-listed companies pinning their growth to sales of social media tools to small- and medium-sized enterprises are Vocus and Constant Contact.

Mark Schmulen, general manager of social media for Constant Contact, told the crowd at Monitoring Social Media they don’t need the large budgets required for Radian6 or Compete.com. But they need to do something.

“There’s no cure for sucking,” said Schmulen, adding, “We”re not talking about spamming people, we’re talking about permission-based marketing.”

Like Naslund earlier, Schmulen made the broad generalization that no robot can properly analyze sentiment.  That kind of slam was unnecessary and unfounded, especially with providers like Glide Technologies knocking it out of the park with precisely that kind of insight. Yes, it’s big-budget stuff, but it does exist.

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Machines aren’t enough.  Humans aren’t enough.

Analytics pro Seth Grimes zipped through dozens of tools — from “toys” such as “We Feel Fine” to expensive enterprise solutions like Clarabridge and Crimson Hexagon — and actually had the guts to tear a few of them apart.  Unlike many of the speakers at today’s conference, he wasn’t shilling for one particular process, consultancy or tool.  His deck is worth a look.  You can find it at this link.

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Tools are commodities but the ability to segment the data and use it could save you hundreds of man hours a month, says self-described analytics guru Marshall Sponder, ex-Porter Novelli.  Good workflow capabilities are the differentiating factor, and vendors are not going to volunteer to show how to do the work.

“They’re going to be brain dead by the time they are ready to analyze it,” Sponder said during a “How to Choose the Right Monitoring Tool” panel with Katie Paine and Forrester analyst Zach Hofer-Shall.

One pitfall is that companies and agencies will often put social media management in the hands of relatively inexperienced personnel because of the “funness” of it, said Hofer-Shall.  They lack the analysis skills to provide management with key insights and metrics.

For self-service tools, Sponder advised attendees to evaluate Brandwatch, Radian6 and Sysomos.

More sophisticated are solutions from Synthesio, Brandology and Attentio, which can construct a custom dashboard, sanitize data, and provide multinational extractions of meaning for you, said Sponder.

For companies that do not yet have dedicated social marketing functions, Sponder suggested outsourcing to firms like Integrasco, where they will choose the right tools, methodologies and do the work for you.

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What works and what doesn’t in social media at industry trade shows? 

Aafia Chaudhry, MD, gave an example of a medical conference where Novartis tweeted the most.  But the tweets were very repetitive and aimed only at convincing those reading the tweet stream to visit the Novartis booth.  She chartacterized it as a fail.

On the other hand, Novartis received positive feedback for smartly displaying the tweet stream at its booth.  This allowed attendees  — some of whom were not yet active on Twitter — to see the real-time social media conversation about the conference.

Chaudhry is CEO of JuvoLab and founding partner of Noesis.  She seems like a highly informed resource for those tracking the use of social media in pharma.

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I’m convinced having Queen Elizabeth on your currency is the best way to get invited to speak at Influence People events.

In addition to all the Brits, CEO Carol Leaman of the Waterloo, Ontario, social measurement firm PostRank shared wisdom with us.

Telling your story is far more important than measurement, she said, echoing advice heard earlier in the day from Katie Paine.

“Creating of content is absolutely the first thing you should think about, and then seeding that content in social networks,” said Leaman.

Brands producing content benefit handsomely when they understand how their information is shared, and by whom.

“The half life  of data on the Internet is under an hour,” she said. “More than half of the engagement happens in the first hour.”

Update: A low-level Jacksonville, Florida-based Citi customer service rep telephoned me six days after my blog post to say the company was sorry.  She had not read my post and was simply working off a lead from the @Citi or @AskCiti Twitter team.  There was no explanation for the Target incident, no resolution to protect against future problems (i.e., Citi would initiate a call to my cell phone to see if I was using my card at a particular merchant) and an offer of 5,000 AAdvantage points as a consolation prize.  I told the rep I was in the process of changing my autopays to American Express and would need the $85 Citicard annual fee refunded to keep me from canceling.  “Only a supervisor can approve that,” she replied before ending the call.

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Among the more embarrassing experiences in life is having your credit card declined during a business dinner or at a busy check-out line.

That embarrassment is compounded when your card is in perfectly good standing — no outstanding credit balance or history of late payments.

Citi, which issued my Platinum Select AAdvantage World Mastercard, had no qualms about rejecting the $588 in back-to-school purchases we attempted to make at a Target store in Westchester County, NY, today.

The cashier was not prompted by Citi to ask me for identification, due to the size of the purchase.

No request was made to call Citi’s toll-free hotline to answer a security question.

The purchase was simply refused, leaving me red-faced, my kids puzzled, the shoppers behind me miffed, and the cashier with a belt full of apparel that either had to be purchased or put back onto racks.

I paid with my American Express card.

When I called Citi’s 800 number, the “fraud specialist” told me there had been a wave of large-dollar fraudulent transactions at Target so the bank was protecting itself by rejecting my purchase.

Hmm. The same thing happened to my wife two weeks ago at an Esprit store in the Wrentham (Massachusetts) Village Premium Outlets.

Citi clearly doesn’t want my wife and I to use our credit cards — the same cards that costs $85 per year and allow us to earn American Airlines AAdvantage miles for purchases.  The bank’s fraud prevention tactics are abhorrent, making it very clear to customers that providing them with reliable service is not its first priority.

We all know credit card fraud is rampant.   But there are better solutions than alienating a customer who charges tens of thousands of dollars a year, yielding healthy merchant fees for the bank.  And Citi is actually good at this high-tech security stuff.

Citi was one of the first issuers to imprint customer photographs on cards. The bank could promote any number of opt-in security techniques — PINs, biometrics, furnishing government-issued IDs, etc. — to guarantee customers will be able to use their cards wherever and whenever they want.

Instead, the Citi approach is to err against issuing credit for legitimate purchases and then beg for forgiveness after the bank leaves a loyal, paying, law-abiding customer in a lurch. It’s no wonder Citi ranks ninth worst, just ahead of HSBC, in the JD Power and Associates 2010 Credit Card Satisfaction Study Rankings.

The only way I will remain a Citi credit card customer is if I receive an apology and refund of my annual fee. Oh, I’d also like CEO Vikram Pandit to take my daughters back-to-school shopping.