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.”

Graphic from Time

Pfizer’s Twitter feed seems to be benefiting from the same ingredient that powers its blockbuster erectile drug.

After only six days @pfizer_news had jumped to 631 followers by 8 o’clock this morning.

Kudos to communications SVP Sally Sussman and global media VP Ray Kerins for prevailing in a heavily regulated industry whose litigation-wary greybeards are notoriously conservative when it comes to social media.

Pharma lawyers have argued that any communications through channels feeding directly to patients — without the traditional bureaucratic review of copy, photos, video and other content — could go south quickly.

“What if” scenarios abound.  In a litigious world where the prescribing information required by regulators is often the size of an encylopedia, it’s easy to see a plaintiff complaining that he or she notified a drugmaker about an adverse reaction via Twitter but got no reply only to suffer….

For those and many other reasons, pharma has arrived later to the Twitter party than many other consumer-facing brands.  Those brave enough to tweet about remedies, clinical trials and medical conferences have taken markedly different approaches.

The most conversational pharmatweep this far is Johnson & Johnson’s Marc Monseau, who is followed by 1,745 and follows 1,096.  He has updated 316 times since launching the @JNJComm feed to supplement the New Jersey firm’s two-year-old “JNJ BTW” blog.

Novartis, based in Switzerland, has published 86 updates on its @novartis Twitter feed since November.  Unlike Monseau, there’s no named personality behind the tweets,  which are mainly 140-character teasers of releases on the Novartis media web site and some occasional industry news.  The lack of interaction is stark — with the company following only 10 on Twitter despite attracting an audience of 2,328.

Germany’s Boehringer was lauded by Jim Edwards on the life sciences news site BioValley Basel for allowing its Twitter personality — 2,178 followers and following 1,657 — to “engage in some harmless banter” rather than toeing the corporate line.

Merck seems to be using the Twitter community only as a recruiting tool, but I question how many Twitter users want to work for a company that’s afraid to engage in a more meaningful way.

In New York, Pfizer’s new Twitter staffers were quick to reply today when I sent a direct message to ask why there were a separate @pfizer (”it’s not Pfizer and not official”) and @pfizer_news Twitter pages.  That kind of willingness to snap quick replies to customers, media and others can only help build trust and goodwill with everyone except the legal department.

An unfortunate truth is that many kids’ breakfast food choices are based on the appeal of cartoon rabbits, toucans and elephants touting sugary cereals.

But we grow out of that kind of consumerism, right?

Similar marketing seems to be working well on grown men and women. Advertising the solutions to solve some of the human body’s most repulsive maladies now is done with the help of comical animated characters.

Digger, the sharp-clawed enemy of toe nails, spread faster than athlete’s foot when introduced by Novartis as the cartoon personification of its Lamisil brand. I am sure Digger’s face is being used as an avatar by more than a few teens.

Reckitt Benckiser Inc.’s over-the-counter line of expectorants, Mucinex, has a whole family of green phlegm characters to illustrate how fast a booger can move when the right medicine arrives on the scene.

Outside of pharma, the Düsseldorf, Germany, office of BBDO recently introduced a tiny blue cartoon being, in the form of a single calorie, for PepsiCo’s Pepsi Max diet cola. Print ads were posted on the European ad-gallery site adgoodness.com, prompting plenty of controversy over the fact that the calorie commits suicide because it’s lonely. AdAge has since written on the campaign and subsequent outcry from those arguing the issue of suicide is sacrosanct.

I recall one B2B company in the investor relations industry that successfully linked its brand to a cartoonist’s creation. an online database of fund managers and other financial industry contacts, used the image of a baby, dressed in a top hat, throwing around cash. At one memorable conference for the National Investor Relations Institute, Big Dough startled more than a few of normally staid IR officers when it employed a Disneyesque costumed character – a seven-foot-tall baby – to walk around the exhibition hall. Whether the non-traditional marketing approached helped I don’t know, but Big Dough captured plenty of market share among corporate users before being rebranded as part of a larger suite of Ipreo’s services.

I’m guessing we don’t see more B2B businesses tied to fictional characters or cartoon imagery because so much of an organization’s success rides on the credibility and message of the CEO. Marketing officers at B2B firms spend their time making sure the CEO succeeds as chief storyteller and cheerleader for the brand and its heritage.

But given the global crisis of confidence regarding the integrity of executives leading businesses of all sizes, I can’t actually see the downside of making a B2B firm’s CEO sharing the limelight with someone a bit more believable and, yes, fun.  The “Why is Dora Crying?” ad in major newspapers last week was a damn effective way for Viacom to pressure Time Warner to cut a better deal to keep Nick Jr. on its cable systems.

Granted, most specialty chemical companies, makers of superconductors and developers of enterprise accounting software do not have the corporate culture or desire to support borrowing from the consumer marketing toolbox.

But many of the customers and employees of those same conservative organizations privately cheer for the underdog breakout firms who occasionally pop onto the scene and take our breath away because they refuse to conform to conventional wisdom.

Assuming we ever get the steel industry going again in the United States, I’d love to see a fire-breathing dragon conduct the quarterly results conference call.