The NFL operated a 2,800 square foot Social Media Command Center for two weeks during Super Bowl XLVI festivities. Fifty staffers monitored hundreds of keywords to help improve fans’ onsite experiences — reaching nearly 50,000 people directly on social networks and creating 1.8 million online impressions daily.

And last month, the Collegiate Marketing Group launched a social media command center to help provide a “fun, safe and informative” spring break for the half-million students who visit Panama City Beach, Fla., each year.

Large-scale endeavors like these work well when people and budgets are in place. However, you don’t need to have a big operation to achieve similar awareness and engagement benefits.

Develop your own digital Doppler

Set up digital tools like these once, and the information will find you:

• Free Google tools — Create Google Alerts with keywords including brands, products, executives and competitors. Google Trends provides top-10 regional topic searches with baseline metrics. Google Reader organizes relevant RSS feeds you want to track, and Google Analytics provides revealing website stats.
• Social dashboards — PR practitioners widely use TweetDeck and HootSuite for managing  Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Create keyword and hashtag searches as well as lists of media, analysts, competitors and customers to watch.
• Other aggregators — Customer relationship management (CRM) systems integrate a contact’s social streams, along with email and phone histories. Some CRM systems search a journalist’s name and associated keywords each time you view their record, so their recent articles, social mentions and interests appear. NutshellMail emails daily summaries of your social mentions, and more sophisticated, fee-based systems like Sprout Social are available too.

Monitor trends

Set up your social command center to look for the following:

• Trends and unique interests — News trends emerge as you monitor industry influencers and competitors. Watch specific journalists and learn what trends and topics pique their interest, and monitor the types of stories that result. If you don’t find any connections to your messages, then develop relevant, complementary topics.
• Communication triggers — Refer to media databases to learn journalists’ contact preferences and the social channels they use, but study their behaviors to learn what they want. Does a journalist use social media to simply broadcast their articles, or do they have conversations? What topics do they respond to?
• Common connections — Track the experts journalists regularly reference for their stories. Are the results positive, negative or untapped opportunities for you? A journalist may contact the same Forrester industry analyst when writing about mobile technology.  Learning about an analyst’s general outlook can help communicators position clients for stories or repair misunderstandings. Full-scale analyst relations programs can develop from such examination.

Assigning someone to consistently manage monitoring is your most essential step. Consider assigning responsibility to a social media manager or to each practitioner per their coverage areas.

This post also appears as the April “Digital Dialogue” column in the PR Tactics Journal published by the Public Relations Society of America.

Consumers gather 60 percent of information needed to make purchase decisions before contacting vendors and read about ten pieces of content before buying, according to data from Come Recommended, LLC, a digital PR consultancy. Brand journalism and the related practice of content marketing are strategies communicators are using to profit from this behavior. Each is expanding due to focus on creating news and educational material audiences really benefit from, rather than purely promotional advertisements. Companies across diverse industries are wielding the compounding influence of brand journalism and content strategies for tangible returns.

Catalytic Products International, a manufacturer of air pollution control equipment, implemented a content strategy in 2011 with its agency, Arment Dietrich, Inc., to generate product quotes from new prospects. Newsletters, web copy and whitepapers addressing prospects’ interests including EPA regulations, natural gas industry rule changes and advice for designing preventative maintenance plans garnered 66 quote requests for an additional $2.2 million in revenue.

“In an economy where businesses are concerned about spending large sums of money, the consistent visibility, thought leadership and accessibility of resources we’ve helped create form a special bond between our client and their prospects,” explains Arment Dietrich, Inc. account executive Molli Megasko.

Newsroom mentality

A key distinction between content marketing and brand journalism is the latter takes newsroom approaches to developing information. An online newsroom is the foundation of these efforts. Newsrooms are populated regularly with compelling stories, blogs and visuals that go beyond a brand’s own concerns and product news to cover broad perspectives about an industry including other players within it. Companies immersed in brand journalism often staff their newsrooms with full-time editorial personnel and augment them with curated posts from other thought leaders.

The Louisiana Seafood Board worked with News Strategies LLC following BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill to launch an online newsroom covering people and businesses impacted by the crisis through articles, photos and videos. Its stories were also picked up by mainstream media and the Board cites newsroom efforts as a catalyst for securing $30 million in relief assistance from BP.

Organic Valley, America’s largest cooperative of organic farmers and a popular national food brand, blends brand and industry news on its site plus provides a “Who’s Your Farmer?” web app so visitors and journalists can enter zip codes to ‘meet’ farmers in specific regions via brief or extended summaries about their farms.

General Motors uses Google+ as a social newsroom to share tailored information with individuals or groups of journalists, bloggers and customers via the site’s Circles feature.

While brand journalism requires effort and budget to sustain, it puts information for sales, donations, memberships and elections in a more logical sequence people can act upon as needed. Keep these ideas in mind when managing your content:

Customer experience pays off – Organizations reap rewards by putting themselves second, sharing valuable information while patiently waiting for moments their offerings can assist people.

Leverage lifecycles – If prospects read ten pieces of literature before purchasing, design yours to address questions they have along the way. For brand journalism, gauge trends you can cover multiple times versus news requiring one timely post.

Thought leading over lead capturing – Lead capture forms can brand your material as advertising. Just include your contact information; when your messages are good people will happily come find you.

A version of this post appears as the March Digital Dialogue column in the PR Tactics Journal, published by the Public Relations Society of America.

Gamification helps organizations crowdsource ideas, drive and even train people for improved job performance.

Tech research giant Gartner suggests that these activities are less compelling in their normal settings but more appealing when gamified to engage people in completing a series of tasks.

Gamification, which integrates gaming elements like points, levels and leaderboards into campaigns to encourage engagement and guide specific outcomes, isn’t entirely new. Many of us participate in frequent flyer programs, advancing through gold and platinum mileage levels to earn rewards.

Many people credit McDonald’s as a pre-digital gamification pioneer with its Monopoly game, where customers collect game pieces for food prizes.

In the digital realm, geo-location apps like Foursquare let customers earn badges by visiting various store locations or patronizing a business multiple times.

Communicators can leverage gamification to carry messages, create awareness and affect measureable actions.

Matt Simpson, marketing director for Bulbstorm’s social engagement platform, considers gamification a means to an end.

“Center your objectives around driving endorsements through social channels, building affinity through entertaining user experiences, creating loyalty through reward programs, or providing compelling online experiences for direct-response results,” he says. “Gamification supports all these.”

Bulbstorm developed a Facebook idea contest for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), where fans shared dream matchups of current vs. former stars. Other fans interacted with this user-generated content by commenting and voting the best of 6,800 matchups submitted to the top of social leaderboards.  The contest yielded 197,000 fan engagements and seven times the average WWE page views, communicating WWE’s legacy and supporting successful pay-per-view events.

Marshall Lager, managing principal of New York-based Third Idea Consulting, believes that the PR function is well-suited to gamification.

“Wherever you have quotas to reach and opportunities for role play, you have the foundation for adding a game-like layer to performance. Imagine an online pin map showing where press releases get read or rebroadcast — just watching it propagate is great motivation,” he says.

Lager suggests that adding a competitive component, where a PR team or individual achieving the broadest reach or landing the most coveted market receives recognition, makes top performance a compelling goal.

Lager adds that since media training is already a roleplaying exercise, why not make it a roleplaying game?

“Bringing challenge, positive feedback and recognition to tasks can increase their impact tenfold,” he says.

This post also appears as the February Digital Dialogue column in the PR Tactics Journal, published by the Public Relations Society of America.

Pop music star Sting held a news conference at a New York Apple store on Nov. 15 to announce his Sting 25 “appumentary,” an iPad app with historical interviews, music videos and concert footage promoting a career-spanning CD box set of the same name.

Similarly, Clear Channel Broadcasting, Inc.’s iHeartRadio app repurposes audio and commercial messages from 750 U.S. radio stations, extending its traditional content to a more interactive format.

The app era is in full swing, from mainstream to niche. Online searches show an abundance of apps spanning business, entertainment, news, productivity and lifestyle categories. Apps are even getting age-based ratings this year, like those used to rate video game content.

Half of all U.S. adult mobile phone owners have apps on their phones, according to a study by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The study reveals that 74 percent of adult app users download news-oriented apps, including those updating weather, sports and investments, followed by 67 percent who download apps to communicate with family and friends.

Another Pew study (in collaboration with The Economist Group) regarding tablet news consumption says that 11 percent of Americans have purchased tablets in the less than two years the iPad has existed. Fifty-three percent of them read news on tablets daily, with 33 percent read from sources that they did not previously consider and 41 percent read articles that they tagged for later.

Fanfare for the common man

Much of this app-tivity, so to speak, lends itself to public relations.  You don’t have to be a music mogul or global brand to use apps as a communications medium. Development cost estimates range from a few thousand dollars for simple apps to tens of thousands for elaborate apps. Communicators typically have strong relationships with creatives and design experts, so tap your networks for possible cost advantages.

Communication strategist David Meerman Scott developed his own iPhone and iPad apps with Newstex, a real-time content technology company, which include his blog posts, Twitter updates, videos and links to his Amazon bookstore profile. A perfect content marketing activity for someone who makes a living teaching such tactics.

Apps can support many messages and purposes. Hunter Public Relations of New York created its “Faceboo” app, allowing users to simulate Halloween-themed press releases while generating agency awareness.

The Roberts Group, a health care communications agency in Waukesha, Wisc., helps client Saint Francis Medical Center of Missouri populate its Saint Francis Medical Partners app. Created by Dr. Edward Bender, the app helps patients locate offices and learn about their physicians’ specialties, medical school affiliations and residencies.

“Technology is helping people take better control of their health care,” says Katie Stensberg, emerging media specialist for The Roberts Group. “Apps that successfully create awareness and communicate with an audience benefit from a focus on basic human needs.”

This post also appears as the January “Digital Dialogue” column of the PR Tactics Journal published by the Public Relations Society of America.

When Steve Jobs died Oct. 5th, digital media outlets published instant tributes to the man who changed how people consume media and software.

Every major news source covered his death; tech gurus like The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg wrote essays, the President issued a statement and millions of social media users posted their respects.

Wired magazine took one of the more interesting approaches, publishing an eBook about Jobs two days after his passing and weeks before Simon and Schuster’s Jobs biography arrived in print.

The magazine, having reported on Jobs and Apple through the years, assembled a greatest-hits package of their articles. The magazine’s editors added a new essay and quickly published it in iBook, Kindle and Nook formats.

Meanwhile, National Geographic used a similar approach anticipating the world’s seven-billionth citizen, publishing its “7 Billion” global demographics iPad app.

The free app is an excellent example of content marketing, showcasing the publication’s editorial while promoting magazine subscriptions and fee-based apps.

These are the new realities of digital publishing. Of course, quality is important, but being the first can be the difference between profit and loss.

Purpose-built publishing generates real-time attachment to topics that organizations can associate with their value proposition. Blogs and other social media naturally support it and more tools continue to reach the market.

Broadcast appeal

Purpose-built publishing isn’t limited to the written word. It includes audio and video broadcasts as well. Creativity, regardless of format, best distinguishes success.

Salesforce.com secured a keynote speaking opportunity for CEO Mark Benioff at this year’s OracleWorld conference this past October. But when competitive sparring between him and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison prompted Oracle to cancel the engagement, Salesforce found accommodations across the street and offered a livecast of Benioff’s speech on Facebook that they later posted on YouTube.

The workaround drew media and analysts away from Oracle’s event during prime time, and an online audience of thousands watched Benioff de-position Ellison’s views, hours before his own keynote.

Format variety

Audio alone can be effective when applied in a timely manner. Hal Bringman, president of the Los Angeles-based NVPR, used Spreaker, a free online app that the agency represents, to broadcast commentary from the TechCruch Disrupt conference in Beijing on Oct. 31-Nov. 1.

According to Bringman, Spreaker does for audio what Twitter does for text and  what  YouTube does for video, making it easy to broadcast live radio from your mobile device to Facebook and other platforms.

Regardless of which format that you choose, you must have content that can be shared in more meaningful ways with digital communications.

To start, consider what you can repurpose from seasonal or trending perspectives. I write a “12 days of  Tactics” blog post in December summarizing and linking to my Digital Dialogue columns from the year.

What content do you recast? I’d love to hear (or see) them.

This post also appears as the December Digital Dialogue column in the PR Tactics Journal, published by the Public Relations Society of America.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,” Ferris Bueller said in the 1986 film, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

Bueller’s comment is still true in today’s consumer technology market, where users of ubiquitous services like Netflix and Facebook endure rapid changes to features, user agreements and privacy settings with little choice in the matter.  The way that companies announce such changes has also become faster in the digital era.

In September, Facebook further obscured users’ ability to maintain profile privacy with the introduction of the Timeline and Open Graph functions, which post notifications about everything users read, view and listen to.

Meanwhile, Netflix fueled an already-controversial price increase by renaming its DVD-by-mail service Qwikster, dismantling the convenience of managing  DVD and streaming movie queues seamlessly and distancing itself from mail customers altogether. Both companies’ moves ignited massive criticism on social networks. (Neflix abandoned its Qwikster spinoff in October.)

“Many tech companies don’t do a good job building relationships with customers and influencers in advance of significant changes,” explains  Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz and Associates and author of  “Smart or Lucky: How Technology Leaders Turn Chance into Success.”

However, fostering these relationships vets market reaction and creates more enthusiastic constituents.

How, where and when

Industry events and conferences gather constituents in a format successfully used by companies like Amazon and Apple to make big announcements. Some annual events become known entities where attendees and media expect news.

Facebook used the familiarity of its annual f8 conference to announce its latest changes. Positive reasons for doing so include surrounding your news with supporters to influence favorable reaction and the magnetism that these events create, even encouraging others to tune in and live stream or blog the event.

In addition to logistic and cost realities, cons include the pressure to impress. Consider Apple’s “failure to launch” last month, when event attendees expected an iPhone 5 unveiling but saw an improved iPhone 4S instead.

Netflix chose passive approaches for its announcements.  A customer email broke the price-hike news, setting off  customer threats to leave the service. CEO Reed Hastings later posted a YouTube apology for how he handled that communication.

Positive reasons for these approaches include controlling succinct messages while targeting both specific and broad recipients. Cons include perceptions of greed, considering the success of Netflix’s business.  The Qwikster announcement looked hastily delivered — it did not have a Facebook page or the @Qwikster Twitter handle at launch.

Netflix displayed panic according to Hurwitz, who encourages communicators to position themselves to write the story during transitions. She suggests testing strategies with experienced outsiders under NDA.

“Even if you say ‘I’m going to do it my way,’ you are at least informed how the market may react and can develop messaging in advance,” she says.

Above all, define your objective, outcomes that you seek and how you want the headlines to read.  “Netflix didn’t want ‘prices raised, customers fleeing’ but that’s what they got,” Hurwitz said.  “There is no substitute for well-crafted announcements.”

This post also appears as the November “Digital Dialogue” column in the PR Tactics Journal, published by the Public Relations Society of America.

They’re everywhere! Fancy graphics fused with interesting and even humorous facts, collectively known as infographics, are taking over the Web in a similar manner as viral videos, retweets and e-books have before them.

But aren’t these just visual aids? And haven’t newscasts and publications like USA Today used them for decades to help tell stories?

Yes and yes, but the social sharing aspect of infographics is what sets them apart.

“We can thank Twitter and other social sites for their rise in popularity, but also their decay in quality,” explains Joe Chernov, vice president of content marketing for Eloqua, a marketing automation company. “Infographics awaken opportunities for publications to write about your issues and possibly include context about your organization, but they must be authoritative and creative to be effective.”

Well-designed infographics can help your audience understand your message.

“If you can make large amounts of data easier for people with short attention spans to digest, then you’re golden,” adds Sally Falkow, president of online newsroom provider PRESSfeed. “Some infographics translated to text alone would total several pages. Nobody would read that. Anyone who does presentations knows information is retained better when accompanied by visuals.”

PRESSfeed researches how corporations use online newsrooms. The company learned that infographics work better than spreadsheets and long tables for sharing its findings, and noticed it garnered much more traffic after re-releasing data as infographics. Now, every time Falkow researches a new industry, she issues an infographic.

Eloqua gets up to 10 times the coverage from infographics than do new product announcements or other content types. Its Content Grid v2 infographic spawned 60 articles and blog posts, hundreds of retweets and inquiry calls from Fortune 500 prospects.

Chernov cites three reasons why infographics spread so broadly and rapidly:

• They convince people of your subject matter expertise.
• They generate clicks in the same way great headlines do for press releases and blog posts.
• They offer gestures of goodwill and helpfulness.

SEO and PR potential

Infographics also improve search engine results via inbound links. Google likes it when websites link to your unique content, so infographics provide a visibility boost that keeps working for you 24/7.

But Chernov warns that first, you need an SEO strategy, including optimized webpages to host your infographics.

Chernov also advises forgetting about products or services when creating infographics. Instead, pretend that your company hired you to visualize a difficult message. This content-marketing mindset prevents blatant sales collateral or unfocused infographics and helps you produce compelling ones. When you score a hit, consider updating it several months later with fresh data.

Today, personal brands and thought leaders are on the rise, while credentialed media representatives grow scarce. Chernov suggests doubling down on visual communications like infographics, as engaging content appeals to new information-consumption preferences.

As journalism changes, communicators need to deliver messages in ways that help editors do their jobs efficiently. One thing Falkow knows is that the company wants multimedia content to feed its websites.

“Practitioners are still learning to do digital PR,” she says, “and since infographics are finding favor, adding them to your arsenal can only increase your coverage.”

This post also appears as as the October Digital Dialogue column in the PR Tactics Journal published by the Public Relations Society of America.

Google+ debuted in June and amassed its first 25 million users faster than any other social network, according to PC Magazine. This finally established Google’s social media presence, after its previous Wave and Buzz experiments received little fanfare. Google+ functions similarly to Facebook, including requiring users to register their real names.

Google experienced crisis-level backlash in July when the company enforced this policy deleting thousands of pseudonym accounts and those of some celebrities, tech gurus and people with uncommon names.

As a result, Google updated its policy and offered concessions such as notifying users with naming violations before deleting their accounts and creating an “other names” field.  While Google+ continues to grow, this name-transparency episode illustrates trust issues with digital citizens, social platforms and, by extension, brands.

Augie Ray, executive director of community and collaboration for United Services Automobile Association, an association dedicated to military personnel’s financial well-being, agrees that there are instances when anonymity can protect people online, though he generally prefers transparency.

“More business can be transacted when people are open,” he explains. “Trying to identify ‘@princess5827’ on Twitter is difficult, whereas if members post concerns on our Facebook wall, we can easily contact and assist them.”

Ray, a former Forrester social media analyst, thinks that Google is wise to follow Facebook’s lead regarding name transparency because it encourages authenticity.

Yet, we live in an era of asynchronous transparency where consumers leverage social networks to demand brand honesty but offer less details about themselves in return. Consider consumer “distress” messages on Twitter:  Some are legitimate pleas for help, while others are shortcut attempts for support or freebies.

This transparency imbalance did not always favor consumers. Brands more or less controlled their messages since advertising’s inception until the social-networking revolution.

Ray argues that this divide between brands and consumers impedes social networking’s vision for transparency. For instance, brands could post service-issue specifics that are customarily kept private when consumers post aggressive complaints online.

Like it or not

Questionable online activities manifest in ways beyond anonymity and deception. Some real-life behaviors create confusion when exhibited online. Facebook Likes are one example. People often Like brands to get deals, not as an endorsement.

When Netflix announced subscription increases in July, thousands of angry customers posted negative comments on the company’s Facebook page, and many Liked the page in order to do so.  Some visitors may assume that those Likes are from adoring fans. The value of a Like depends on context and interpretation, which skew impact.

Communicators must be clear about their intentions online. Ray says FTC guidelines can aid Facebook transparency. The guidelines require that companies promoting customer endorsements disclose the material exchanges, or perks, offered.

“Transparency leads to authenticity then listening, which should lead to honest communication,” he says.  “This is what social media is all about.”

This post also appears as the September “Digital Dialogue” column in the PR Tactics Journal published by the Public Relations Society of America.

The President completed a social networking trifecta in July, hosting a Twitter town hall meeting that generated 119,000 #AskObama tweets containing 40,000 unique questions, according to TwitSprout.

The President’s digital communications strategy may focus on balancing activity across several channels, but in the private sector, Facebook, Google and others are waging the battle for social media supremacy.

Migrating, defecting and reflecting
Facebook, Twitter and other networks on the otherwise openly social Web covet a “walled garden” model. Generating the most traffic can likely wield the most influence and yield the most revenue. It’s a successful approach for Facebook with more than 700 million users, most of whom will never feel restricted in a community of such size.

Competition for users is fierce as social media mania settles into normalcy and users can only manage so many profiles. New networks continue to emerge and compete for attention and lucrative market share, defined by impending IPOs and the aforementioned monetization.

Google’s previous attempts to enter the social space with Google Buzz and Google Wave were short lived, but initial hype for its more robust Google+ with Facebook-influenced features like “circles” (groups) and “stream” (newsfeed) has prompted defensive tactics from competitors.

Facebook blocked an exporting tool that allowed users to export contact information to Gmail as well as Google+ related advertisements on its network while Google suspended real-time search that had included Facebook fan page updates and tweets. Facebook also integrated with Skype in what came off as an over-hyped response to the previous week’s Google+ launch mirroring a video chat capability that Google already offered.

Tumblr, the short-form blogging platform, has drawn competitive comparisons with Twitter. In June, former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez declared Tumblr “the next great tool for reports and news organizations.” Likewise, Edelman communications guru Steve Rubel adopted Tumblr after previously using the competing Posterous service. Rubel and Sanchez both admire the blog and social media hybrid that  Tumblr provides, expanding content sharing and curation capabilities beyond Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Of course, these are not the first instances of social media migration. MySpace users defected in droves when Facebook became the social heir apparent.

What do such movements mean for digital communications professionals? Most are not worrisome. Technologies evolve. Communicators must focus on positioning clients where their audience is already, which often means managing presence on several communities.

Keeping abreast of each network’s maneuvers is helpful for counseling clients appropriately, and clear thinking can guide you the rest of the way.

Navigating your way
Committing to social media means managing a network of networks. It’s a heavy workload for big brands and niche players alike. In this column, we’ve evaluated strategies and tools that can help.

• Popularity trumps allegiance. Critical mass is not difficult to identify even when it shifts. Standing out is the real challenge, so focus on message and differentiation matter regardless of location.
• Social networks are evolving and new ones emerge constantly. Evaluating your options is healthy, but when one social network is working for you resist the urge to change it.
• Technology and complacency don’t mix. Embrace change.

This post also appears as the August “Digital Dialogue” column in the PR Tactics Journal published by the Public Relations Society of America.