My buddy David Gelles is now a Technology reporter and blogger for the Financial Times and I was so happy to see David writing about Twitter PR, something very dear to my heart, Companies use Twitter to pack PR punch, including Scott Monty of Ford as well as the gang from PepsiCo’s Pepsi Max controversy (via Chris Abraham and FT.com)

Companies use Twitter to pack PR punch 
By David Gelles in San Francisco
Published: December 30 2008 19:16 | Last updated: December 30 2008 19:16

Twitter, a booming micro-blogging service, is inspiring business to manage its message in 140 characters or less.

Its streams of short text messages, publicly broadcast over the web, are being treated as the new frontline of internet conversation. Companies including Ford and PepsiCo have been dousing public relations fires with pithy communication bursts to the Twitter community.

“There’s a rapid-fire element to Twitter that causes conversations to go viral when something bad happens with a company,” says Jackie Huba, co-founder of the Society for Word of Mouth, an organisation that monitors social media. “Companies that have a Twitter account are prepared. If something goes wrong they can respond.”

PepsiCo turned to Twitter this month after users began posting criticisms of a Pepsi Max advertisement, which depicted a cartoon calorie committing suicide.

Huw Gilbert, communications manager for PepsiCo International, “tweeted”, or posted a public message, in reply. “Huw from Pepsi here,” he wrote. “We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologise and please know it won’t run again.”

Critics saw Mr Gilbert’s post, with one “tweeting” back: “Thank you?.?.?.?for having the guts to get on Twitter on behalf of Pepsi and give us an update on the suicide ad.”

Such personal interaction from a company representative helps defuse a crisis, says Ms Huba. “People like feeling like they’re being heard,” she says.

Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motors, used Twitter to deflect criticism away from the carmaker after it filed suit against an enthusiast website that was selling unauthorised Ford decals. Fans of the site posted angry messages but Mr Monty used Twitter to explain the company’s position.

“Part of my job is to humanise the company – you want to interact,” Mr Monty says.

Starbucks, Comcast, JetBlue and Home Depot are among companies using Twitter accounts to promote products and provide customer service.

Bob Pearson, head of communities and conversation for Dell, said his company had generated $1m in computer-related sales through alerts posted to Twitter.

San Francisco-based Twitter is also becoming a platform for a range of media and social networking start-ups using its tools to develop communities and content rapidly, and at low cost.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

may as well take a stab at it…

1) The relationship between traditional agencies and clients will strengthen, then start to fall apart

The recession means that marketing executives will be wanting to stay with the things that they’re familiar with…meaning traditional advertising.  This is bad news for many of us who look to make our coin in the online arena.  But in many sectors, the traditionals will not be able to adequately address the then current needs of clients.  Cost inefficiencies and the lack of imagination will combine to force marketing executives to look more and more at social media.  Most traditional agencies won’t be ready.  The changes will begin to be noticeable in late 2009.

2) The conversation is NOT over when it comes to the rules and regulations of social media.  They’ll continue.  As they should.

Chris Brogan’s sponsored post on Dadomatic taught me this:  the guiding principle here will not be what seems to be right, but what works financially.  This will start to change our perception of what “is right”.

Take Izea.  It’s my guess that many of the bloggers that Izea will use will be the same type of person that the Democratic candidates talked about when they were running for office.  Or for that matter, Joe the Plumber.  Soon, many of us could look like snobs.  I mean, who am I to question a mom of three who lives in blue collar suburb of a fading Midwestern city whose husband was recently laid off and who has a son in Iraq, if she wants to write sponsored posts a few times a month to make ends meet?

It may alter the authenticity a bit, at least in theory, but it’s inevitable and we’ll need to accept that.

3) This year we’ll start to see a better balance between transparency and legal.

As we just saw in the Ford/TheRangerStation incident, the big name company isn’t always wrong and isn’t always blind to social media.  Legal isn’t always tone deaf toward the needs of PR.  And we also saw that people will give a company a chance if they feel as if they’re being dealt with squarley.

It won’t always be done that smoothly, but it will be more common in the future.

4) Brand marketing will be more greatly tied into customer experience

We’ll see less fluff and more value.  We’ll see companies working harder for your dollars.  A lot of that will be tied into customer service.  Social media will lead the way on this.

5) Ad strategies will be more directly tied into direct sales

Again, the fluff gets reduced and branding for the sake of branding gives way to direct sales and giveaways.  Companies may not have time to lay down a long term branding campaign.  Those that stress immediate value will win, as long as it’s true.

Many others will try to stress value…but it will be as empty as Motrin’s claim that they “hear” mothers who view babywearing as a fashion statement.

6) Political groups will struggle to find the right balance of top-down

The Obama campaign ensured that politicking has changed for ever.  But to what degree?  Advocacy organizations, consultants, and political insiders will struggle to find the answer.  There will be more slop ups than successes.  That’s because traditional types will try to muscle their way in, and they’ll make stupid, boneheaded mistakes.

Most of the groups will try to install pseudo from the bottom up campaigns.  These will usually fail.  But advocacy organizations nevertheless will NEED to control much of the message as social media strategies find that the variant motives to support a series of issues can create more chaos than that of a singular political candidate.

7) Specialized social media agencies begin to take off

We’ll begin to see social media practices that are more focused on types of individuals.  Example:  women make most of the purchases for the home.  Outreach practices will reflect that reality.  This goes to my thoughts that we need to be engaging people on their terms.  Moms can relate to moms better.

It will no longer be quaint to play the role of the technoboob

CEOs and other business leaders can no longer position themselves as aged idiots.  Not funny, not cool, not good for business.  John McCain needed help answering his email…John McCain is still a senator from Arizona.

The emergence of India and China will make this a necessity.  No more patience for the technoboob.  And I can be a bit of a technoboob myself.

9 ) There will be more dumb marketing mistakes by major companies

Plenty of fodder is on the way.  Just wait and see.  Social media consultants don’t have the stature - yet - of preventing overly produced, overly promotional efforts.

10) Social media on the local level begins to emerge

People will begin to connect locally at a much higher rate than before.  Smaller, local companies will need to reach them in some way.  Whether it is sponsoring local meetups or conducting localized blogger relations campaigns, it will be a trend.

I could go on and on an on…

In one business day, Scott Monty showed us why companies still own their brand, why PR still matters, and why he’s a top notch social media strategist.

TheRangerStation.com, a 10 year old fan site for Ford Ranger owners and enthusiasts, had been selling unliscenced Ford merchandise with the Ford logo on it.  This caught the attention of the Ford legal team who promptly sent TheRangerStation a cease and desist letter.  When TheRangerStation’s owner went public about the letter, chaos began to ensue as the owner conveniently omitted the fact that he had been selling counterfeited material.  This began a backlash from many online where they bought into the idea that the little guy was being knocked around by the huge company.

Scott asked his many followers on Twitter to hold off judgment.  He had established credibility with many over his active years in social media, and many did hold off.  When Scott then divulged that the site owner had been selling counterfeited items, the attacks began to recede.  He and the legal team used normal conversational explanations to tell all of us what the reality was.

For a better and deeper explanations, Shel Israel has a great post here and John Bell has one here.  Or you may want to take a look at this presentation by Ron Ploof.

Besides the fact that this shows me that Scott Monty is a top notch professional, it shows me several other things.

Companies are still in control of their brand.  As they should be.

I’ve always thought the declaration that companies are not in control of their brand anymore was relative nonsense.  While it’s true that absolute control is nevermore, the nexus remains within the companies that produce the brand.  And while there will be missteps and outright boneheaded mistakes, social media won’t change that.

What social media does is allow consumers to have greater affect on the brand and it allows companies to redefine the brand to this new reality.

Will there be exceptions?  Of course.  But relatively small faux pas will pass, especially within our 24 hour news cycle.

Public relations is still a very much needed profession.

I reread The Cluetrain Manifesto over the past couple of days and began to grimace over Rick Levine’s over hyped trashing of PR.  He was proved wrong on a larger level - it takes professionals who know what they’re doing to forestall a fiasco like this.  Therefore PR is needed.  Levine was correct though in how it should be carried out.  First you build trust and then you tell your side if need be.  What Levine didn’t get is that it’s PR’s role to do just that.  A ton of PR people in PR aren’t the snake oil salesmen like the way he describes.

Online relationships matter.  Trust and integrity is essential and carry influence.

The reason Scott Monty was able to hold off the lynch crowds the way he did was because he had built up the credibiity that’s needed to work with followers on Twitter to friends on Facebook and to colleagues overall.  It most certainly was not mostly about Ford.  How we carry ourselves online is what we become in the perception of others.  Scott’s acting as a conduit between legal and different online communities should be a great case study for years to come.  For both those of us in online marketing AND legal departments.

I posted version one of this article on my blog already. I showed it to Matt Creamer, my editor over at AdAge, and he told me he didn’t care if I had already posted it but that I would need to add a couple primer paragraphs to bring people into the history behind the Whopper Virgins controversy. I wrote a couple-few paragraphs and submitted and Matt posted it yesterday, One Whopper … and Hold the Ugly-American Sauce:

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My one question is whether or not authentic cultural garb was procured for these taste-testers. I hate to burst your bubble but Bucharest, Romania, is a proper city with a major university. I have a friend who has her Masters in genetics and her Ph.D. in immunology. She almost never dresses in these Romanian costumes. Wait, actual never. Not only that but this McDocumentary (sorry McDonalds) should have been edited because the open and honest interviews with the ugly Americans is appallingly insensitive and disgusting.

This documentary reveals as much about the provincialism of Americans as it does possibly about the “primatives” they’re documenting. Besides, the American obsession with the Noble Savage is so eighteenth-century. And this sort of untoward behavior is the furthest thing from Noblesse Oblige. They are neither being noble nor are they honoring any sort of moral obligation.

So, tell me, are those traditional cultural costumes authentic or monkey suits? Was this the decision of the bonehead producer, the director, or did this crisp, minty fresh garb just happen to be what these folks were wearing? Were they just aching to be used there in the back of everyones’ closet? Or, was this the regalia these test subject were wearing when and where they were discovered? I really want to know!

The most deplorable part of this documentary is the critique and un-self-aware commentary of the way these test subjects took to the burger, along the lines of, “these people are so authentic because they don’t even know how to eat a burger to say nothing of a sandwich.”

I am actually deeply appalled and embarrassed to be an American at just about now.

Egad!

(via “Chris Abraham)

In yet another example of why corporations don’t understand what social media really is, we now see that in a Forrester survey, corporate blogs are finishing dead last amongst eighteen categories as a source of information. The reason? The blogs are being perceived as being too promotional, as pushing positive stories on the company, its products and services. Gee. What a surprise.

Only 16% of respondents felt that corporate blogs bred a decent level of trust. Email form people one knows was the highest with 77%. This tells me four things.

1) Corporations don’t get social media. OK, that’s obvious. But with all the amount of speeches, presentations, and white papers on this stuff, you’d figure that some of the common sense guidelines would get through. Obviously not.

Josh Bernhoff of Forrester observed, “Everybody thinks their blog is an exception.” Exactly. Regardless of whomever is running the blog operation, you’ve got a corporate culture that doesn’t see beyond itself to see what the blogging culture - and as a whole, that of social media - is about. Blogging is seen as a marketing apparatus that is corporate/product/service centric and not customer centric. That’s the wrong way to go. Corporate blogs have to be customer centric first. Only after establishing a customer centric style blog could a company then add a promotional flavor to it…in limited quanities done in informal language. No exceptions.

2) Social media strategists are yet to be respected. Ouch. Whether it is department heads of communication or CXOs setting the environment for the company blog, one thing is for sure: the message that many of us have been espousing for a few years now is not getting listened to. It’s my guess is that it is being ignored, hence Bernoff’s comment that every company thinks it’s the exception.

Social media is relatively new and I’d bet that many of the real consultants on this - the ones that know what they’re talking about are either relatively young and are automatically ignored by more senior staffers and officials or are too far removed from inside decsion makers and are filited through traditional types who are basically yesmen (and yeswomen) to the people upstairs.

Most of what social media types now say is largely theoretical. Accurate theories in my opinion, but theories nevertheless. We talk amongst ourselves and we listen to one another. But the key officers in the companies that are our clients DON’T listen. At least at the rate they should. I personally don’t really follow any corporate blogs. Maybe I should. Maybe we all should and then pass to one another those that justify the findings in the survey. Maybe we should give the corporate bloggers a chance to change their ways and be less promotional. If we don’t then maybe we should go on the attack. That’s because we’re defending our industry. Which leads me to point #3.

3) This could be fatal to most corporate blogging efforts. Don’t think so? I do. For sure, we’ll see many successful blogs. But I’m betting that for those that don’t adopt the correct customer centric approach, we’ll see abandonment of efforts and then conclusive decsions that blogging doesn’t work or that blogging isn’t for them.

Try to tell one of your clients or perhaps a prospective client that went this route and floundered to look at things differently and nudge them into what is the right direction? Fuggedaboutit. It won’t work. They won’t listen. They’ve been burned by their own stupidity and arrogance and won’t want to hear anymore of it - especially by someone that they perceive to be less experienced in corporate communications.

4) We must be brave and challenge and say things that prospective clients don’t want to hear. It doesn’t have to be arrogance on our part, but we’re going to have to tell the person on the other side of the table that they’re wrong, that they’re not the exception, and that the way they want to do it will fail. That’s be cause they are wrong, they aren’t the exception, and the way they will do it will fail.

We’ll need to back it up and then not back down. Because 16% is far too low of a trust percentage of what we espouse. Those theories we espouse are worth more than that.

Back in 2000, I. along with several others here in the Washington area, started a group called Wired for Business.  It was one of those vibrant business technology groups that came about right around the millenium, one that had members enthusiastically discussing the future of business as we saw it happening.  Our focus was primarily on BtoB and telecom.

By our second event, we had 200+ people attending, potnetial sponsors calling us showing us that they were willing to drop as much as $3000, and speakers with titles such a VP of Importance Division lined up.  We rocked.  We got a prestigious Board of Advisors and also top notch organizations involved.  

Then the dot.bomb era struck in full force.  

We struggled to get sponsors.  Previous ones that spent $2000 or $3000 a few months earlier were no longer in business.  VPs of Important Divisions could no longer travel.  Some had been let go by their companies.  And the attendee number was down around 75, an unenthusiastic crowd worried about their jobs…if they sitll had one.

At a board meeting in 2001, one of our key members was a guy named Bill.  He was with a formerly “hot” company, one that would be a leading light.  At this point, however, they’d been through five rounds of layoffs.  Bill had surived.  But he warily said something that struck me.  In a conversation with a pontential client, he said the guy told him, “Forget about strategy, Bill.  We’re only concerned about ROI.”  In other words, strategy was dead.

Bill was laid off later that afternoon.  A short time later, the company he worked for folded.

That whole scenario struck me then and has stayed with me since.  

Forget about strategy.  It’s now about ROI.

Yesterday I came upon C. B. Wittemore’s post where she interviewed social media stalwart Mack Collier.  Reading it made me think back to my old friend Bill and the no to strategy, yes to ROI mindset of businesses during tough times.  And it wasn’t that I disagreed with anything Mack said.  He was spot on.

What hurt Bill’s company back then was the newness of their business models; their technologies and strategies from those technologies were very promising yet unproven.  Just like social media is today.  Meaning on a large scale.  

Now, to be sure, there are difference between the social media of today and the BtoB technology of seven years ago.  Back then it was mostly software, something that had to be purchases.  Social media is often driven by consumer usage OUTSIDE of a company.  But still I’ve got some pretty serious concerns.

First of all, let me say that I think we are in for a real deep and long recession, one that will be deeper and longer than most.  That means more intense budget battles, more focus on what’s proven, more relying on inside marketing forces or those that have longer term relationships.  For the most part, social media agencies and consultants have yet to estalish those relationships, shown long term ROI over several campaigns, and have earned an automatic place in the mindset of those who are writing and approving budget requests.  

I cover some of this in Part 3 of my series “How Social Media Will Get Screwed”.  Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.  In it I point out how most social media agenices are still subcontractors to traditional agencies when it comes to larger clients.  If there are any cutbacks, it may be on our backs, with social media taking lesser of a role or being absorbed haphazardly by the traditional agencies.  With midsize and smaller clients, those that may feel an even greater cash crunch, we may be on the outs as they try to bring their social media efforts in house.  

Social media types, thus, may get burned in two directions.  We could be one of the first cutbacks because we are unproven over the long term, and what we do may get highjacked by traditional agencies that become territorial and try to usurp what we do.  Getting around that might be tough.

The last Q&A between C. B. and Mack was what got me going on this:

CB: Any other thoughts to share about the effectiveness of social media in forging stronger relations with customers.

Mack: It sounds cliche, but you really do have to care about people. I think a lot of companies right now are excited about social media, because they see it as a cheap (time is often the biggest commitment) way to reach their customers. IOW, they want to find out how they can monetize the interactions they have with customers via social media.

Here’s why this doesn’t work; because people aren’t using social media to be monetized by companies, they are using social media to connect with other people. We use social media to create and share information with each other. We become friends and share our thoughts and feelings. We connect as ‘real people’.

So if a company wants to utilize social media as an effective way to reach their customers, they have to shift their mindset and use the tools in the same ways, and for the same reasons, as their customers do. They have to use these tools as real people trying to connect with their customers (real people). If you approach social media as a new channel to ’sell more stuff’, then your efforts will likely fail miserably.

But instead, if you use social media as a new channel to connect with your customers and create valuable content for them, to give them information that they can use, then you are giving them a reason to connect with you. You are creating value for them. And a byproduct of doing so, will be that these customers will help promote your efforts, which results in the online conversation about your company increasing, and becoming more positive.

Which ultimately, will probably help you ’sell more stuff’. But that only happens when you enter into social media with the mindset of ‘what value will our efforts create for our customers?‘, and not ‘what value can we extract from this space?‘ It’s all about shifting your mindset to using social media as a way to create value for your customers. If you can do that, you win!

The italics are from the interview, the words in bold were done by me.

Companies - escpecially during a recession - are going to look for “cheap ways” to monetize their customers and they see social media as a means to do this.  This, as Mack points out, will ultimately fail because that’s not what social media is about.  Then I go back to the Forrester study that showed 15 of 16 community building efforts on online network faltering because they were too company centric and not enough community member centric.  And that was before we knew we were really in a recession.

Now we are in one and the executive suites aren’t going to be interested in nice sounding, soft, feel good strategies that we espouse.  They want results NOW, dammit.  This, again, may be shortsighted, but it the likely hand we will be dealt with.  Companies, in hard times, become almost selfish in their outlook.  Creating value, oddly, becomes subserviant to monetizing NOW.

In the comments section of C. B.’s post I mentioneed in a much shorter version what I’ve written above, to which C. B. responded:

I’m intrigued with your observation about greater pressure to extract value/demonstrate ROI given a recession. As social media strategists, we need to demonstrate positive ROI - but don’t we also have the opportunity to broaden the definition of ROI? As Mack mentions, most companies consider social media a *cheap* way to reach customers. So, if the investment is low, and we are providing truly valuable content that meets the needs of our customers, we will hear about it from our customers. Which gives us a tangible return on that investment.

I partially disagree with some of this.  Often, it’s not us who get to define what ROI is - it’s the client.  We may try to position exactly what ROI is, but they may not accept it, especially if they’re looking at it through their monetizing eyes.  And that’s if we manage to get an audience with decisionmakers.  

And if they to continue to view social media as a “cheap” way to monetize customers and not listen to us orif if we essentially allow them to feel this way without challenging them, then we’ve lost the battle.  It won’t work.

That’s because, like my old friend Bill, we offer strategy, while they’re often blindly hyper concerned with immediate ROI.

This says to me that we have to carefully work with clients and show them how social media offers a way to strengthen a company during an economic slowdown and all the more powerful to burst out of a recession when it ends.  At that point, we let the client see the value in what we have to offer and so they can redefine the ROI that we believe in.

Please enjoy my latest AdAge Global Idea Network blog post, Social Media Are Truly Global — Just Ask a Slovakian: Don’t Underestimate the Reach of Twitter, Facebook: (Via Adage via Chris Abraham )

Social Media Are Truly Global — Just Ask a Slovakian: Don’t Underestimate the Reach of Twitter, Facebook

Recently, I was a speaker at a conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, called Daily Web. Everybody there was super-connected. Everyone was on both Facebook and Twitter. While I was at the conference, I received invites from my fellow attendees get connected on Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn.

During a break, I was told that there are about 60,000 Slovakian users of Facebook, using a mix of the available Czech interface and the English. They were all much newer to Twitter, but the conference did have a Twitter profile and I chose to create the hash tag for the conference, #dailywebsk. I was told Facebook is beginning to bogart the populations of local Slovakian communities and there are plans to localize Facebook into Slovakian the way that it is localized in the Czech Republic and Germany.

This got me to thinking. All of the Brits I have been meeting in Berlin are more keen on getting my “Facebook e-mail,” the e-mail that would allow them to easily find me on Facebook, rather than asking for a business card. Are cards going obsolete? Or, at the very least, are your Twitter and Facebook credentials more important on your site, your business card or your name tag than your e-mail, phone and fax?

All of my German friends are on Facebook as well, sharing images and adopting the social network with as much dedication and abandon as we do in the U.S. Same thing goes with my friends from Mexico and Colombia. When I attend conferences these days, I am likely to be recognized as @chrisabraham as I am by my name.

However, I admit that I live in a rarefied air and so there might be issues of connectivity, class and access that I am not addressing here. That said, I am still amazed whenever I take some time to click on over to Twittervision to watch a global representation of the whole Twittering world.

Because of the nature of Facebook and Twitter, localization works very well. Since both social networks allow you to easily communicate with your friends, and your friends are generally a lot like you. There isn’t a lot of cross-talk between English-, German- and Spanish-speakers.

There are no barriers, of course, between the different locales and the different languages. The barriers are emergent. Since I have quite a few Facebook friends and Twitter followers, 2,707 and 2,374 respectively, I get a lot of cross-talk between languages, and that pleases me. What makes me even happier is when I visit someone’s Wall, sort of like the publicly visible whiteboard that lots of students hang outside their dorm room. I often see a mixture of Spanish, German and English, all mixed up, according to each particular relationship.

The feeling I have, however, is that Twitter and Facebook are not perceived, worldwide, as American imperialism. And I think this is fantastic. Why is that? I think it’s because Facebook and Twitter created relatively neutral platforms and then got out of the way. This is especially the case with Twitter, which is perfectly inert: 140 characters. No context, only essential conversation.

After being a part of the Twitter community for a little while, the whole nature of it falls away and it becomes invisible, a simple communications vehicle, disassociated from its origins: like the phone, texting, TV, electricity, e-mail, the internet! Who cares who invented these things, after all, when each nation, culture and people ultimately make it their own. And this is what is happening with Twitter and Facebook — people are making them their own.

I really don’t use MySpace very much at all. In fact, I embarrass myself every time I look at my MySpace profile. That said, every band in Berlin has a MySpace profile, just like every other band in the entire world. Globally, you’re likely to see a MySpace address if the band you’re digging on has an internet presence. Even if your favorite global brand has its own website, there’s a good chance that they also have a MySpace address. A couple weeks ago, I checked out three bands here in Berlin and they all has MySpace URLs: Orchestre Miniature in the Park and Tim and Puma Mimi.

None of these bands think about the gross imperialism associated with their decisions; they have adopted all of this American innovation with complete ease. Back in the day, Friendster had a terribly time sorting out its business model internationally. Its success in Asia bogged down its servers while confounding its salespeople on how to make any money from all these community members who were dedicated participants but not generating any local revenue. It was probably because the worldwide ad networks and the global sales of ads were not there yet, focused mostly on the U.S. market. Now times have changed. Here I am in Berlin being served not simply German ads but also geo-targeted ads based on exactly where my data is being served.

I have taken all of this in due course and just considered it normal; however, I realized tonight that it isn’t normal. It occurred to me that folks might not know how thoroughly adopted these Web 2.0 platforms are worldwide. How many people around the world refresh Facebook and Twitter many times an hour at their workplace, the same way everyone does it, even among an ever-growing population in the Slovak Republic.

We have been using Central Desktop now for a while and really love it. It allows Abraham Harrison’s entire distributed team to collaborate and work together. We love it. Well, Abraham Harrison is being featured as one of Central Desktop’s case studies, Successful Global Task Management Across 3 Continents

The answer, of course, is “it takes about ten years of suffering hard work to become an overnight sensation.” In the case of new media and Web2.0, you can so that in a lot less time. Being an early — the earliest — adopter doesn’t hurt, but it isn’t necessary, really. However, any way you slice it, with a few exceptions, becoming an overnight sensation on Twitter, YouTube, Plurk, QIK, Utterli, LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace is going to require a lot of your resources (time and/or money) and more time than you probably planned out for your boss or your client — or yourself!

I am pretty interested in seeing how my Twitter profile has gone from nothing to 2,511+ followers. Twitterholic has allowed me to figure that out in an easy-to-read format, which I appreciate. I joined Twitter on January 6th, 2007. By October 30th, I had 441 followers. It took until May 5th, 2008, to break 1,000 followers. It only took until September 11th for me to break 2,000 followers, and now, as of December 7th (a day that lives in infamy), I have 2,511 followers. I find that interesting to study but I don’t know what it means.

I think I will venture to explain its meaning: social media requires investment and time. Growing a social media profile is like growing a coral reef: after seeding the reef, there are so many things that need to happen before a reef blooms “in its own.” There are many things that can aid the reef: safety, cleanliness, warmth, nutrients, oxygenation, etc… however, one of the most important thing is time and commitment.

Social media cultivation makes most PR and marketing professionals cringe at the thought of trying to sell these solutions to their clients. A client generally wants metrics now and right away. Clients oftentimes spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a social network platform, a blog, or a spate of social media profiles that are world class and amazingly turned; however, when the six-month mark comes around and the community is not yet bustling, most clients get severe cold feet and oftentimes abandon all of the work-in (and money out) as a failed campaign — right before the reef blooms!

It kills me to see the number of corporate blogs, home-grown social networks, message boards, and social network profiles that are like those bare and barren rocks and wrecks that never in fact ever blossomed into an emergent community manifest in a coral reef. An ecosystem as delicate and hardy as any social media space, from Twitter to Facebook, from MySpace to your corporate blog.

I forgot to also add to the resources plus time equation: commitment, consistency, calmness, dedication, generosity, and compassion. When you invest in online community as much as I do (2,511 on Twitter with 11,200 tweets, 2,734 on Facebook, 1,496 on LinkedIn, and 5,321 posts on my blog, an online presence I have had since 1999, for example) then you need to be generous — give more than you take — and you need to be committed to the long term. You will need to learn what each community will allow, suffer, enjoy, or penalize. You will learn where the borders are and you will learn what works (and draws people in) and what doesn’t (making them flee).

Well, with no further ado, here’s a lot of work, time, creativity, hours, minutes, wit, mistake, missteps, business, play, Washington, Berlin, Slovakia, San Diego, and a hundred other places. If you want to have 2,500 followers and you’re not already famous, you’ll have to put in the work. If you can achieve tens of thousands of followers, you’re probably already somebody; in that case, it wasn’t just overnight: you just put in your licks elsewhere. Otherwise, put on those work-gloves and start working!

(Cross-posted from Chris Abraham - Because the Media is the Message)

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I am the newest blogger over at the AdAge Global Idea Network, a gig that only started a couple weeks ago. I love it. My editor is Matt Creamer. Matt and I rushed this post last night. I received the email three hours ago, IMed Matt, and we got it out now. I love blogging for this. I hope you enjoy this new post, Pepsi Apologized to Me For Its Suicide Ads:

Pepsi Apologized to Me For Its Suicide Ads
A close-up look at how the marketer is handling fallout from its controversial German ads

This week, PepsiCo got into hot water with more than a few folks after some suicide-themed ads many found offensive were brought to light. Here’s how they’re using social media to apologize to consumers—including me.

I received an email from B. Bonin Bough of PepsiCo, @boughb on Twitter, responding to my tweet about the recent post that Matt Creamer wrote a couple days ago, “Pepsi Opens a Vein of Controversy With New Suicide-Themed Ads”, about some ads that were run here in Germany in a lifestyle mag—ads Pepsi says it won’t run again after they received heavy criticism all over the web.

I’ll excerpt the first part of the email from Mr. Bough, who holds the title of director-social and emerging media and is based at Pepsi’s Purchase, N.Y. campus:

I saw your tweet and I just wanted to make sure I responded personally. We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologize and please know it won’t run again. Also, thanks for the feedback and the Digg, it is important to discuss these types of issues.

My best friend committed suicide and this is a topic very close to my heart. So again I offer my deepest apologies.

Feel free to follow-up via twitter to me - @boughb or Huw - @huwgilbert or respond to this email.

Thanks, Bonin

I know you all think I am going to mock Bonin, but I won’t. I think this was a very bold and risky maneuver and worthy of praise rather than a tarring and feathering. And his outreach to me, a nobody, was accomplished within two days. When I replied to Bonin, asking if I might be allowed to post his email, he replied back that I could post his email but to try to “treat it kindly.” I hope I am.

I don’t think that Bonin knew that I blog for AdAge or that I know a bit about how the marketer is surprised about how well-traveled the ads have been. The old we-didn’t-think-anyone-here-would-see-it approach. Well, that’s the Internet for you. Someone passed along the scans of the PepsiMax ad, “One is a Very Very Lonely Calorie,” to the alert gang here at AdAge.

Within two days of tweeting, I received a note from @tweetmeme, a sure sign that my tweet had gone memetic (and that I had played at least a bit part in the mad traffic to the AdAge post as well as the resulting 40 comments.)

Here’s how fast and furious social media works. The article was posted on AdAge at 4:36 PM EST on December 2nd. I read it and Tweeted at 6:16 PM EST the same day. And then I received said email from Mr. Bough at 5:21 PM on December 4. The lesson here is that social media has eyes everywhere and the network to make sure that advertisers can no longer hide stuff in niche markets. There is a word in intelligence about just this thing, and it relates to messaging and propaganda: backwash. Social media makes backwash inevitable. Here’s another one from Intelligence: blowback. Backwash leads to blowback.

There’s no way to isolate this kind of advertisement. And there is an inverse proportion between how badly you want your ad to remain niche and the sensationalism surrounding its discovery. It’s a really obvious point, but one still clearly worth sta