David Brandt, Director of Media Relations, Rubin Communications Group

Found this article in Ad Age…sage advice:

Six Ways Social-Media Freedom Benefits Employers

by Traci Armstrong
Published: November 16, 2009

Traci Armstrong

The social-media revolution is seeping into the workplace, and employers are nervous. According to social-web blogger David Armano, approximately 70% of organizations ban social networks. USA Today reports a lower amount, but still: An Oct. 22 survey shows 54% of businesses are banning social media from the workplace. Fears about decreased productivity and/or risk exposure seem to be resulting in censorship within workplaces.

Of course, banning social media is simply a bad idea. Many agencies report partnering with marketing clients to develop social-media strategies only to discover that clients themselves are unable to access key sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, from their work computers. Marketers are at a clear disadvantage when they don’t have first-hand usage, insight and experience with social-media channels.

Allowing employees to access social media could actually result in many other benefits for the employer:

Team-building and camaraderie
U.S. employers spend billions on employee team-building activities like picnics, holiday parties and other exercises. Allowing employees to participate in the virtual water-cooler dialogue of social media gives them a chance to bond and find subjects with which they can relate to one another, free of cost to the employer. Studies show the main reason employees stay in jobs (or leave jobs) is based on their level of satisfaction with co-worker relationships. Social media enables employees to find a common bond and enhance the relationships with colleagues.

Productivity benefits from brain breaks
A Discovery magazine article reports that neuroscientists at MIT have confirmed that taking breaks helps us learn and be more productive. A 2006 study observed rats pausing after exploring an unfamiliar maze. The neuroscientists theorized the rats were using the break to re-trace their steps in the maze for memory purposes — thus leading to better productivity during the next maze run. Another example: Educators can confirm first-hand the benefits of sending students to recess — and the chaotic results if kids don’t get their downtime.

Social media is the equivalent of workplace recess. Mind breaks lead to employee satisfaction and better productivity. This results in increased morale, reduced employee stress, low absenteeism and more engaged, healthier employees. All of these employee traits help the bottom line.

On-the-job training
Social media can serve as a virtual think tank. If an employee is embarking upon a new project and needs advice from her peers, it’s as easy as posting a question to their social networks. Many professional groups are established on LinkedIn or Facebook and offer a venue for discussion and the opportunity to post specific questions. Polls and surveys enable virtual focus groups. Employees can easily follow subject-matter experts on a site like Twitter for an RSS-like feed of relevant content. While many companies offer organized mentoring programs, with social media employees can choose their own online advisor for guidance and knowledge sharing.

Trust and transparency
If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest. In September 2009, Facebook reached over 300 million active users. Gen Y-ers continue to rely less on e-mail and more on social media to communicate. Banning employees from this widespread communication tool is akin to telling your employees they can’t use the phone for personal calls or e-mail friends and family. It’s a signal your company is oppressive and in the Dark Ages. With the sale of smartphones on the rise, it’s likely that employees would access their social-media sites on mobile devices anyway — creating an environment of concealment and mistrust.

Allowing employees to access social media communicates: “We trust you’re mature and know when enough is enough.” For employees that do abuse their time on social media, managers and HR departments should address the issue on an individual level — similar to any other performance problem like absenteeism, low productivity or work quality.

Listening/monitoring
Just as many brands are monitoring customers to address satisfaction issues, employers can apply the same model. If employees are complaining about their employer on social media, it might hurt a corporate brand — but it at least allows the employer a chance to address complaints or dissatisfaction.

Many companies conduct internal employee surveys to evaluate morale and employee satisfaction. As an alternative, HR or marketing staff could consider following and creating user lists/groups of employees on social sites to easily monitor conversations. Using a monitoring tool like Seesmic or Tweetdeck for Twitter allows an employer to continuously monitor keywords — like your company name — and immediately address unfavorable messaging. Caution: If your workplace doesn’t offer a culture of transparency and openness, employees could misconstrue this as employer stalking.

Brand evangelists
Just like unhappy employees complain about their jobs, happy employees love to share their positive workplace experience. And 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations over a brand’s marketing efforts. That holds true for the workplace as well: Happy, well-performing employees will attract similar employees — a huge recruiting benefit.

The key for happy tweeps and happy tweets is creating a culture and environment in which an employee feels as though he can contribute and express himself. A satisfied employee will be an advocate for your company, might share job openings with friends and boast about the latest accomplishments. You can’t buy that kind of press. Employers that embrace social media and provide employees with a simple policy, best practices, legal no-nos and basic usage/etiquette training will create an environment of openness with lower risk to the employer.

David Brandt, Director of Media Relations, Rubin Communications Group

This is a great article I read from PRSA that serves as a reminder that we should always think before we click:

What Does Ethics Have to do With Social Media Anyway?

Ever wonder why we blog? Or where our insatiable appetite to tweet comes from? How about why we update our Facebook statuses constantly?

The first response that comes to mind is that we have an intrinsic need to share our thoughts with others and there’s a particular joy that comes from enabling conversation between both friends and strangers alike through our social-media contributions.

Additionally, and even more personally, there’s the lift of self-esteem one feels from reading a positive comment related to something you had a hand in producing — be it a video, tweet, a Digg post, etc.

This serves as something inherently more than just platonic emotional validation, because at the core, social media helps people grow closer and spread and build ideas.

To find the answer to the initial question, though, let’s track back to the theories of a man who never blogged, tweeted or created a Facebook page — though he does have countless Facebook groups dedicated to his genius: Abraham Maslow.

Roughly 66 years ago, Maslow’s “Theory on Motivation,” which is kindly referred to as the hierarchy of needs, profoundly changed the way we think about human behavior. Being as it is, Maslow detailed a hierarchical progression where each level served as a right of passage before ascending to the next level. As a reminder to those who may have not taken a psychology course in a while, Maslow’s pyramid began with the physiological needs of basic survival elements, progressed to the needs of security, then ascended to the need for friendship, recognition and ultimately maximizing personal potential through self-actualization.

But how does Maslow apply to the social-media ecosystem? Too often, it doesn’t.

Sadly, both brands and people have abused social media in the name of a cheap transaction. There is no shortage of tactical examples of brands that have attempted to use social media as, in the words of Crayon’sJoe Jaffe, a campaign vs. a commitment. Instead of asking themselves, “Why do I feel the need to participate in social media?” some companies (and people) have used existing communities to achieve self-serving agendas with very little benefit to those involved. In those cases, social media becomes an endless loop powered by ego and people seeking a vague interpretation of friendship through self-actualized authority: the Social-Media Egosystem.

Now, I concede there are individual examples of where social media exemplifies Maslow’s pyramid. Look no further than David Armano’s Daniela story, which became a powerful meme (and case study) on how digital communities can bond as strongly as a real-world neighborhood.

Additionally, there’s the lesser-known (yet equally powerful) example of hip-hop producer James Yancey, known as J Dilla, who passed from lupus in 2006. J Dilla’s legacy lives on through posthumous released records that are promoted through countless social media blogs, communities and charitable concerts dedicated in his name. How relevant has J Dilla become to hip-hop culture? His name has transcended the music he created with fans throughout the world being spotted wearing “J Dilla Changed My Life” T-shirts.

And communities such as Kiva.org seem to touch both the lower end of the pyramid, through the community-based loans given to those in poverty, and the very top of the pyramid, through the need to give back.

In my search for an answer, I stumbled upon a blog post by social-media consultant Ray Schiel, who I believe summarizes social media’s need for esteem perfectly. Ray explains, “If the need to be respected and to respect others exemplifies the category of Esteem Needs, then social media is very much a vehicle for these as well. However, this can be a gray area for many as we have seen countless incidences on social media sites where the need for personal attention overshadows the need to make a personal contribution to others.”

To brands that are deciding whether to dip their toes in the social-media waters, this is an extremely powerful question that no tactically focused advertising agency should solely answer on your behalf. Yes, you’ve got a corporate bottom line, but remember: Sustained, productive relationships — which are built through commitment, not campaigns — can pay dividends.

In closing, take inspiration from a former colleague of mine and brilliant mind, Jon Burg, who tweeted last night, “Social (media) makes us feel less alone. It turns the “I” into the “us.” This is why it’s so touching and amazing and counterintuitive to many businesses.”

Frankly, Jon, I couldn’t agree more.

~ ~ ~
Craig Daitch is senior VP of creative solutions for Measure2x and can be found on his blog, Thought Industry. He recently launched the site Hipstr.

David Brandt, Director of Media Relations, Rubin Communications Group

Here’s a great article from eMarketer about the use and application of social media marketing and the resources required to be effective.

JULY 29, 2009

Keep the dialogue going.

Marketers have become more than willing to start a conversation about their brands through social media. But that’s only the beginning of the marketing effort.

In late 2008, MarketingSherpa surveyed social media marketers about the effectiveness of their practices. Large majorities rated social media marketing effective at influencing brand reputation, increasing awareness and improving search rankings and site traffic.

Social media was considered less effective, but still good, for internal communications and driving online sales.

Marketers thought the best specific tactics were user reviews, relationships with bloggers and discussion groups. But they also found those tactics difficult to measure—only around 10% of respondents thought they were “very accurately measured.”

Measuring effectiveness can’t be easy, though, when companies don’t have a strategy in place for social media marketing. While one-third of larger businesses had a written policy to manage brand communications, only 13% of smaller business did.

Even among large businesses, 39% had no policy despite recognizing its importance, and 9% believed it unnecessary. Three-quarters of small businesses had no written policy.

Such a policy can be particularly valuable when it comes to responding to user feedback. Social media marketing is a conversation, and brands must be ready to respond to consumers.

“A lot of the time, brands will put up a corporate blog or Facebook profile and think that’s social media marketing,” Lou Cuming of social media marketing agency DEI Worldwide told eMarketer.

“It’s getting consumers into those environments and engaging with them online that becomes more difficult and requires more resources,” he said. “You really have to continue to nurture the conversation, otherwise it just dries up—it’s like having a one-way conversation, and if people aren’t listening, it does damage to the brand.”

All the same, around one-quarter of businesses of all sizes reported not monitoring social media commentary at all. Nearly one-half of large businesses kept an eye on discussions without responding publicly. Another quarter of all firms attempted to contact the writer of a negative comment.

Only tiny minorities of businesses posted public rebuttals to negative comments.

“You need to have resources for engaging consumers and answering questions, and an exit strategy,” said Mr. Cuming.

David Brandt, Director of Media Relations, Rubin Communications Group

This video on YouTube, while entertaining, offers up a great lesson in terms of public relations. Here’s a guy who says United Airlines broke his guitar  and refused to fix it. So, being a musician, he wrote a song, produced a video and posted it to YouTube. To date: nearly 3 million views. For United, fixing the guitar would’ve been cheaper than sustaining the bruising damage to its reputation.

United Break Guitars

David Brandt, Director of Media Relations, Rubin Communications Group

This article from Advertising Age is brilliant! It’s a great reminder that technology, while useful, cannot be allowed to overwhelm great ideas and creative thinking. Let’s face it: the Web is polluted with mindless content. Do I really care that someone just brushed their teeth? If those who live in the blogoshere do not development some restraint, and become more selective in what they publish, people will become weary and tune out.

Why I Hate Social Media

Because Media Itself Just Isn’t That Interesting — Not Even the Social Kind

Posted by Matt Jones on 06.17.09 @ 05:23 PM

At the risk of being branded a heretic or perhaps just being shown the door by my agency HR director, I have to say it: I hate social media. Why? Because it’s just media. And since when was media ever interesting?

People are interesting. Ideas are interesting. Stories are interesting. Real stuff is interesting. Brands are interesting (or, at least, some of them are). Even ads can be interesting. But media? Media just connects those things. It’s a conduit. Media is not interesting. Not even the “social” kind.

Far from being interesting (unless you enjoy following mutually referencing bloggers who blog about blogging), social media is just an excuse. It is, to be specific, the old marketing industry’s latest excuse to waste more money on bad ideas and lazy thinking.

So let’s ignore it. Let’s get really radical and stop trying to keep marketing 1.0 thinking alive with Web 2.0 media (because copycat content is no Band-Aid for broken brands and lackluster products and services, no matter how cost-effective or powerful the social web may be). Let’s forget the social media “revolution” and recognize that ignoring social media would be the truly revolutionary thing to do.

I’m not saying that we should ignore the social web, or the cloud, or mobile connectedness altogether. I’m not arguing that brands should underestimate the transformative power of the technology at their disposal, or their ability to connect with people and provide targeted, relevant offerings in unprecedented ways. And I’m certainly not denying the brilliance of value-adding web-based services or inspiring and engaging web-enabled campaigns.

Amazon makes it easy for people to find things they want, based on recommendations they can believe in. Local bakeries tip off nearby followers about fresh bread and cookies via Twitter, while Tony Hawk used regular tweets to facilitate a global treasure hunt for his skateboards. Adobe uses Delicious to bookmark helpful sites for its customers, connecting its community and rewarding innovative partners. Urban Outfitters has turned its Flickr page into a giant, wearer-generated catalog and style guide. The U.K.’s Guardian, a relatively niche title in printed form, has turned itself into the world’s pre-eminent online newspaper, because it understands that online news plays by different rules. Speight’s Brewery invited millions of Kiwis to follow online as a pub it built on a container ship sailed from New Zealand to France. And brands like Starbucks and Doritos have openly collaborated with their loyalists to create new products.

So we should tip our hats to brands that are leveraging the social web in smart ways, but should also recognize that these exceptions merely prove the dismal rule of social media right now. Because for every Amazon or Adobe, brands with genuinely good ideas to share and good stories to tell, there’s a Skittles (which had the brilliantly pointless idea of replacing its website with a Twitter feed), or a Pizza Hut (which openly advertised for summer interns who would be required to Tweet about the great time they were having). And for every Tony Hawk or Speight’s, there’s an Ashton claiming to be more relevant than CNN, or another Wal-Mart wannabe (including a recent top advertising-award winner) driven by the impatience of their marketing 1.0-obsessed agency masters to create fake entries, videos, content and comments to support their “authentic” social campaigns.

The question for us all right now (and I include my own agency) is: What would happen if we acted on the implications of social media, rather than just use it as cheap media? What if we recognized that social media is really only shorthand for the multi-channel, hyper-connected, user-generated, co-created, always-on world we now live in — a world where the good gets what it deserves and so does the bad? What if we stopped getting all hot and heavy over the latest new media success stories du jour, and starting realizing that the real triumph of, say, the Obama campaign was the product and the story, not the channel used for storytelling? What if we took the social media “revolution” as our cue to stop creating tactical campaigns focused on amplifying our same-same stories and start creating better stuff and better stories to tell? What if we got really bold, and focused on creating products and services so inspired that “social” media does all our storytelling for us?

Remember, this remains a predominantly analog world. Most people are still looking for real things: experiences, connections, value, stories, emotions. And this remains a world in which most brands are failing to make the most of the existing channels available to them, where basic and very real issues are left unaddressed, like customer-experience delivery, retail-partner engagement, consistent and authentic brand storytelling and better product and service development. Sure, not all of these will make a 29-year-old marketing manager an industry rock star as fast as a spending money on cool new social media app, gadget, widget or viral campaign, but it matters a whole lot more.

The truth is that the digital possibilities out there are endless (and endlessly fascinating), but smart brands and smart marketers recognize that their potential is to facilitate and amplify, not to replace the real stuff that matters. No media or channel can ever be the solution. Not even social media.

Now there’s a point of view on social media that’s worth sharing with clients. Understand it, internalize the implications of it and figure out what you can do better because of it. Use it as yet another prompt to change everything you do. Use it as the final spur to becoming a customer-centric, holistic, experience brand. Then forget about it and start doing something real.

~~~
Matt Jones is director of strategy and planning for Jack Morton Worldwide in New York. In April he moved to New York from Sydney, Australia, where his clients included Ford, Microsoft and Sony.

David Brandt, Director of Media Relations, Rubin Communications Group

After reading this eMarketer article I thought about the Law of Diminshing Returns.

Why E-Mail Subscribers Unsubscribe

JUNE 17, 2009

Next!

E-mail marketing is one of the more effective and less expensive ways to retain and engage customers.

In fact, early this year comScore found that e-mail had a 4.4% sales conversion rate in the US.

In a survey by MarketingSherpa and ADTECH, 44% of marketers said that e-mails to house lists had “great ROI.”

CMOs told Epsilon researchers that e-mail was the marketing tactic that they would cut last—but that doesn’t mean subscribers don’t cut e-mail newsletters.

According to an Epsilon and ROI Research study, 55% of e-mail subscribers in the US and Canada unsubscribe from opt-in e-mails occasionally—and 14% do so frequently.

Only 5% said they never unsubscribe.

“North Americans are receiving a lot of content, and at the same time they’re getting more and more selective about the kinds of e-mails they want to receive,” Kevin Mabley of Epsilon told AdAge. “Companies stuck in a batch-and-blast mentality see e-mail as a cost-effective medium, so they may abuse that privilege and end up turning off the consumer with too many or the wrong messages.”

Most Internet users unsubscribed due to irrelevant content.

“Instead of just throwing out a bunch of stuff that customers may or may not be interested in,” said Marcia Wilson, CEO of Daffy’s, “we target and focus on their particular likes and interests.”

David Brandt, Director of Media Relations, Rubin Communications Group

This is a great article about why advertising and PR need to be integrated. In this economy, you really need to think this stuff through before spending precious marketing dollars.

Issue Date: Daily ‘Dog - May 13, 2009

Just Married: Advertising and PR— Together Forever Thanks to Measurement

By Gary Getto, Vice President, Integrated Media Intelligence, VMS

There is so much discussion about the perceived need to shift communication spending from traditional advertising to online advertising and social media. Many so-called experts would have us believe that Web 2.0 is the new silver bullet—the be-all and end-all of marketing. But rather than replacing one tool with another, the real opportunity is integration. Not PR or advertising, social media or traditional media, but rather PR and advertising, traditional media and social media…you get the point.

Our stakeholders aren’t sure where the conversation is coming from. Ask consumer researchers and they’ll confirm that consumers don’t differentiate between sources of brand messages. We bring all the messages in, let them rattle around our brain for a while and then we conjure up a brand image from all the pieces that we’ve been exposed to.

No silver bullet will suddenly elevate our communication to a point where everyone runs out to buy our product. But, we’re learning that consistent messaging for all our communications—whether traditional or social media, news or advertising—integrates into a unique brand image. So if there are disharmonious notes, the desired, targeted message will not resonate with our audience. And yet, we generally operate in silos, which makes consistent messaging a real challenge—and we have virtually no business solution tools to make sure our messages are in-synch.

As we measure and evaluate communications programs, we almost always observe that integrating PR and advertising provides a much stronger correlation against business outcomes than either PR or advertising alone (thereby improving ROI). Think about the recent marketing efforts from Denny’s. They became a first-time advertiser on the Super Bowl. The result: Higher same-store sales in a market where virtually all of their competitors are struggling. So the advertising folks pat themselves on the back for choosing a great venue to revitalize America’s favorite family restaurant. Two days after the Super Bowl, Denny’s gave away two million free Grand Slam® breakfasts. The PR folks patted themselves on the back for such a successful program that reintroduced millions of customers to America’s best known breakfast.

Of course, the real take-away lesson here is that it wasn’t advertising or PR, but and. The advertising generated great awareness and the free breakfast generated tens of millions of dollars of positive publicity for Denny’s. Competitors have tried the same free giveaway idea, but failed because it was not integrated with a strong activation element…the Super Bowl ads.

Not only is it critical to evaluate what we are doing in an integrated fashion, but new research shows that it is much more than just combining tactics to achieve synergy.

For years we have evaluated paid advertising based on the reach and frequency we achieve with our ad investment versus how much incremental revenue we generate. Two programs that reached the same target audience were hypothesized to be likely to achieve similar outcomes. The qualitative element—the advertising creative execution—while accepted as important (creative is King) is virtually ignored. So our models suggest that if Coke and Pepsi both spend a million dollars and reach the same audience, they should achieve similar results, even if one ad delights us and makes us want to run out and buy the product and the other ad annoys us.

As we research advertising creative, we find a wide range in the ability of advertising to communicate in a way that drives results. Indexing each creative and using it as a weighting to project results will overcome this shortsighted measurement view.

The importance of creative, even if it is not sufficiently built into our modeling, is not a new concept, but integrated research is now showing us that the ability of an ad to communicate in a way that drives outcomes is not static. It is a function of the environment and that environment is primarily driven by news.

Consider Taco Bell’s ads. Think about how their ad for a Gordita Crunch made our mouths water. Let’s say their ad is average for the category and indexes at 100. But the next day we see rats running around YouTube and suddenly we worry what we might be crunching on. The identical ad that indexed at 100 yesterday may now index at 20 in today’s news environment. The $30 million in paid spending that was yielding $30 million in benefit may now only be generating $6 million in benefit. A holistic view of news and advertising would show this impact and enable the company to rapidly develop and deploy a better integrated solution to overcome the problem.  Spending your way out of this problem with ads that only index at 20 percent would not be an efficient choice.

So not only does news/PR drive outcomes directly, it also has tremendous influence on the ability of our paid advertising to achieve results (improved ROI). Integrating PR and advertising is no longer a nice philosophy; it is a critical business task that must be properly managed.

These findings elevate PR from a poor sister in marcomm to an equal partner with all the attendant benefits and responsibilities. For the PR industry, our place at the table will likely be accelerated as we educate our clients to our newfound importance in their overall success formula. In fact, as a more in-depth understanding of the strategic implications of integrated marketing evolves, we will be hosting the meals we previously hungered for. It’s up to us to make it happen. We’ll benefit and so will our clients.

I have somewhat embraced Facebook.  I have more than 300 friends, some of whom I hardly know, and have enjoyed catching up with former colleagues and long lost acquaintances. But I am far from active, compared to others who seem to live online, and certainly not engaged enough to tackle the newest form of social media, to me at least, Twitter.

Giving the world a moment by moment play by play of my fairly boring life does not seem like a worthwhile use of my time, and certainly not yours, dear readers. But I am sure there are worthwhile applications, some of which were pointed out today by the founders of Twitter, mid-30’s tycoons Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

NY Times Columnist Maureen Dowd did a hilarious Q&A with them for this morning’s edition.  ”Did you know you were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high school girls?”, she asked. “We definitely didn’t design it for that. If they want to use it for that, it’s great”, was the reply.  Queries Dowd, “Do you ever think ‘I don’t care that my friend is having a hamburger?’”  Says Biz, “If I said I was eating a hamburger, Evan would be surprised because I’m a vegan’”.

For the uninitiated, Twitter invites us to tell other Tweeters what we are doing or thinking in 140 characters or less. I am presuming that young people are its most avid audience.  I may break down and join. Maureen Dowd certainly won’t.  She says to Stone, “I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account. Is there anything you can say to change my mind?”  Biz: “Well, when you do find yourself in that position, you’re gonna want Twitter. You might want to type out the message ‘Help.’”

Joel Rubin