Jeffrey Hayzlett’s groundbreaking social media work for Kodak made him into one of the biggest brands in marketing. Did Kodak stumble when the CMO left the company?

Similarly, the departure of Frank Eliason from Comcast and Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines made social media headlines and raised the question: Should the power of our company brand be shared with our community manager?

Best-selling author Charlene Li, CEO and co-founder of Altimeter Group, discusses how organizations should be thinking about structuring their social media engagement. She spoke with Dave Armon during the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, D.C.

“They shouldn’t be scared about somebody leaving,” said Li, using former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble as an example.

“Goodness, Microsoft benefited so much from Robert’s involvement early on. He left, but Microsoft still really benefited from the time he was there,” she said.

In the video, Li also praised the work of Ford Motor Company social media chief Scott Monty, saying the automaker is well poised to thrive even if he moved to a different role.

She also addressed her departure from Forrester Research, saying the firm’s controversial blog policy was appropriate for its business model.

Budget season is in full swing inside organizations with calendar fiscal years.  Chances are a few new line items have made their way into the public relations spending plan for 2011.

More than any other corporate function, PR is leading their organizations into social media, says Charlene Li, founder of research firm Altimeter Group and author of the best-selling business books Groundswell and Open Leadership.

Li, a former journalist, was a keynoter at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, DC, this week, telling 3,000 attendees that PR continues to outpace, by a good distance, the customer service function in the use of and spending on social media engagement.

Although Li maintained the dollars required for social engagement are modest, when contrasted to other corporate earmarks, I have noted four or five separate buckets that many organizations are now funding. The addition of staff for social media community management, a platform for monitoring and analysis, and publication tools for scheduling posts are routine investments for any company or agency trying to meet business objectives on the social web.  Many consumer-facing companies are going a step further, spending on technology to build Facebook applications or integrate social into CRM systems.

My interview with Li will continue next week, focusing on how companies cope with the departure of highly recognizable community managers, and the use of digital agencies versus social platform specialists.

Image credit: Tom Humbarger

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.”

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.)

Underdogs are often in the best position to do things right.

That’s what I’ve been seeing at Spring Nextel, the beleaguered wireless player in a space dominated by AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

Despite having retail stores that resemble 1970s-era bus depots, iffy network coverage in rural areas and a lack of sexy gadgets like the iPhone, Sprint Nextel is getting a few things right:

• Pre-paid businesses that operate on the Sprint network, like Boost and Virgin, are going strong

• Adoption of Google Android-ready devices offer a welcome alternative to those who have not pledged their lives to RIM or Apple

• Customers actually have a voice thanks to Sprint’s commitment to social platforms

Led by Dan Hesse — a CEO known for accessibility to employees and partners, and for starring in the brand’s TV spots — Sprint has attracted a large Facebook following of 165,000+ fans, with whom the company engages using tools like a vanity video upload tool. Fan posts and comments are plentiful, and Sprint quickly enters the dialog to when queries are lobbed in its direction.

The latest social media extension for Sprint is the creation of a Twitter feed — @sprintcare — that acts as a giant fire extinguisher for smoldering service issues.  Richard Pesce, who manages social media and digital communications, for Sprint Nextel, chatted with me at a recent BDI event about how the company is successfully using Twitter.

Along with brands like @jetBlue, @southwestair, @comcastcares and @americanexpress, Sprint has made it convenient for customers who would prefer to be a VIP in social media rather than calller number 652,985 in a queue at a generic call center.  Social customer relationship management is in its infancy, but efforts like these are important first steps.

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.)

There’s something special about a guy who isn’t a rock star yet has three times the Twitter followers of Bob Dylan.  He’s not a deep-pocketed electronics retailer, yet his social media presence dwarfs Best Buy.

Jeremiah Owyang is an influencer in Web strategy, a futurist, a gadfly and — most important of all — someone who listens, studies, engages and shares.  A partner in the newly formed consulting firm Altimeter Group, Owyang earned his nearly 60,000 followers the hard way.

Since I dived into the social web after leaving PR Newswire, I found that Owyang’s Forrester research reports provided a well-grounded reality check that validated fundamental shifts in consumer behavior, marketing methodologies and the demand for new PR and marcom tools.  He’s routinely quoted by CMOs during conferences and, unlike many celebrities, @jowyang almost always tweets back immediately.

During my recent visit to Altimeter Group’s new headquarters in San Mateo, California, Owyang showed no signs of being jet-lagged, despite returning less than a day earlier from one of his frequent overseas speeches.  He also demonstrated keen knowledge of an increasingly confusing vendor community supplying social media monitoring, analysis and curation tools.

To illustrate why the public relations industry should familiarize itself with social customer relationship management systems, Owyang shared an anecdote about how appliance maker Whirlpool  failed to appease a disgruntled customer, and the damage it caused due to that customer’s ability to influence millions through social media.

“Customers do not care what department you’re in,” said Owyang, predicting that some forward-thinking companies will take on the challenge of building smart systems that inform Support, PR, Marketing, Product Development and offer a single view of the customer no matter where they touch the company.

I am aware of one large food manufacturer whose PR department is heading into the new year with amped up monitoring capabilities and a plan to pipe real-time data into their customer service call centers.  If the readers of PounceNow are aware of organizations where PR is embracing the challenge, please comment on this post.

Don’t let the mustard-colored sports coat fool you.  Tom Kunz is one hip CEO.

As head of Cenury 21 Real Estate LLC, Kunz is in an industry that’s being disintermediated by the Internet      and ravaged by the recession.  Yet I have never met a more positive, open-minded and technology-friendly executive.

What does he do right:

• He’s not afraid to experiment. Century 21 pulled its TV advertising budget and spent the cash to bolster its presence online. Kunz says brand recognition for the franchise was already in the high 90s, so there was no reason to spend millions on 30- and 60-second image spots.  The company is contemplating a switch back to TV, but it would be a web-based format where Century 21 branding was visible at all times on the screen.

• He understands the time-sensitive nature of news. When Congress extended incentives aimed at first-time homebuyers, Kunz dropped what he was doing to record a 2 minute presentation on a tiny, inexpensive Flip video camera. His comments were up on Century 21’s YouTube channel within minutes.  As of today, the video had been watched nearly 1,700 times.
• He takes counsel from Matt Gentile, Century’s 21’s director of corporate and brand communications. In an interview with PR Week’s Eric Iacono, during the Next conference, Kunz talked about making media outreach in local markets a priority.  By incorporating interviews with local print and broadcast media into trips, and inviting local Century 21 franchisees to participate, the organization lands extended coverage rather than the short soundbites afforded by national media.
• He doesn’t hoard good information. While many CEOs would stay silent about marketing strategies, Kunz is a walking dictionary definition for transparency, even sharing his age (61) with the crowd.  As for naysayers, he advises them to watch the AT&T  “Lost Dog” YouTube spot to explain power of social media.

I also liked Tom’s ability to be self-effacing in a manner that seemed genuine:  “I’m a gadget freak,” he told those attending the Next event at the Waldorf Astoria. “It doesn’t mean I know how to use them all, but I buy them all.”

Tom was kind enough to do a short interview with me following his appearance at Next. Please excuse my camera work, as his head is halfway out of the frame for portions of the video.  Yet another reason I never worked in TV.