Today I am going back to the four social media trends Beverly Macy predicted would be hot in 2012 in the Huffington Post

• The rise of Social Intelligence

• Better use of analytics and more focus on measurement

• Content creation and curation

• Social media education and training

Social Media Intelligence is a sure bet in my view – see this post.

Let’s take a look at Analytics and Measurement.

Measurement

One of the aspects of social media that is changing as it matures is measurement  When businesses first started to experiment with social media activity no-one was particularly concerned with measuring anything.  Kind of like we found a new game of water polo, we all jumped in at the deep end, splashed around a lot and the more people in the pool and the more people we splashed, the better.  We were playing the game, but we weren’t too sure who was on our team or where the goals were.  But since everyone else was there, it seemed like we should be too.

Social media is no longer a game or an experiment.  It’s an accepted and effective business strategy.  It is on the CEO’s radar.  According to a report by Useful Social Media, 12% of the companies surveyed claimed that social media was under the direct control of the CEO.

There is certainly an increased pressure on corporate social media practitioners to deliver on investment – there’s an ever more pressing need to demonstrate ROI, along with progress against other crucial KPIs. But this simply represents social media being treated as a regular business investment, says the report.

74% of CMOS agree that social efforts were finally tied to hard ROI.  What are they measuring?

Some of these are outputs and outtakes, but a good number of them are outcomes: what did people do as a result  of reading your content or engaging with you on a social site?

Did they click a link, share your content, visit a landing page, fill in a form, download a whitepaper or a coupon, watch a video or recommend you to a friend?

CMOs are also measuring purchases and customer satisfaction via  reduced returns, lower call center volume and fewer complaints.

One measurement that rarely gets mentioned in these studies is amplification. We know that word of mouth is powerful and it’s even more so on social media.  When a friend shares something with you it has a much deeper effect that if you received it from the brand.

It is possible to measure how many times your message gets shared by your fans and followers in Facebook and Twitter and it gives you a good measure of the success of your social content.  It also highlights brand affinities and identifies your brand advocates.

Analytics

This is an area that traditionally has not been a PR skill, but it is one we have to master.  And we need to do it in a hurry!

Several years ago Jim Sterne of the Web Metrics Summit said that someone who can understand web analytics and interpret the numbers for the marketing and PR people is worth their weight in gold – and I believe that is still the case today.

So how can you measure all these items?  What tools can you use?

Start by learning the basics of Google Analytics.   Buy this book and spend 10 minutes a day reading it.

Facebook Insights has a fairly robust set of analytics.  Read their product guide here and watch this video tutorial.

TweetReach is a good tool for tracking amplifiers in Twitter.

And what about Google+?  Christopher Penn has a very smart idea of what to do with your amplifiers – create a G+ circle for them

Although measurement, statistics and analytics have not been top of the list of PR skills in the past, they are going to become more and more important going forward.  It’s no surprise to me that they are on the list of hot trends for 2012.

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Around this time of year we tend to see predictions from the cognoscenti ( those in the know) about what will be hot in the coming year.  I saw one today in the Huffington Post that caught my eye because I agree with the 4 trends Beverly Macy highlighted:

The rise of Social Intelligence

Better use of analytics and more focus on measurement

Content curation

Social media education and training

Social Intelligence

For several years now we’ve been told that at the very least we have to listen to the online conversations.  The number of social media monitoring tools has exploded and at last count there were over 200 on the market. However, there is much more to be learned from these conversations than just brand mentions, complaints and sentiment.

Savvy PR and marketing folk are digging deep into the conversations – mining that data to find insights that can drive strategy, inform product R & D, give the competitive edge and improve that pesky bottom line.

You start by listening and gathering information about your brand/s, your company and your competitors.  Once you have the data use that old PR skill called content analysis.

• Map your brand’s social graph
• Find the influencers in each node of the graph
• Discover what different groups within one node are talking about and what’s important to them
• Find out where they are talking about those things
• Tap into what your competitors are doing and what people are saying about them
• Identify threats and opportunities
• Share the data you find with your team and others across the organization
• Brainstorm how best to implement what you find to support the organization ‘s goals

There is a ton of information available in the social networks and conversations, but it takes commitment and work to find all the threads.  A monitoring tool can do a lot of the work, but there is still a lot that  has to be done manually.  And the analysis cannot be done automatically. It takes a  live person with a bright and inquiring mind to read the content and figure out what’s important and what’s connected.  To see those  brewing threats and spot the low-hanging fruit that will bring big rewards.

Stacy Poliseo, Internet Marketing Project Manager, Marketing and Communications for Johns Hopkins Medicine has just recently completed a thorough social audit and will share her insights on Friday November 18 on the Bulldog Reporter Social Media for Hospitals webinar.

Johns Hopkins Medicine, like most companies and organizations, started in social media without much of a strategy.  They just jumped right in.  They had a Twitter feed, a Facebook page and a YouTube Channel going, but the weren’t too sure who they were talking to in which channel.

One of the biggest AHA! moments Stacy had during this audit was discovering the demographics of the audience in each social channel.  She now knows exactly who they’re engaging with in each social site, and what kind of content works for that audience.

There is an old PR saying – “Know before you go.”

For the past few years Social Media has been treated as a warm and fuzzy experiment.  Now that we know it works, it’s time to get serious about this data stream and use it to discover really useful information that can move the needle.

Social Media Intelligence is definitely a trend to watch in 2012

Learn how to do social audits and provide your company with the data they need to make the tough decision. It  will definitely get the attention of the C-Suite and might even earn PR a seat at that elusive boardroom table.

A timely guest post from Andy Havard at Skeleton Productions,  a UK based Internet video production company.

I presented my new Social Media News Release Guide at the PR News Digital PR Summit on Wednesday. One of the elements for a good SMNR is video – it’s a great PR tool.

Andy has some excellent video tips in this post:

Since 2007 YouTube videos have had the great benefit of being able to influence the search engine results on page 1 of Google. Many Internet marketers have been using this benefit to their full advantage over the years, but there are still many businesses, brands and bloggers missing out on some fantastic underused YouTube Internet marketing tools. The following article outlines five key underused Internet marketing tips and assesses how they can help to boost your SEO, improve conversion rates and generate higher levels of traffic to your site.

Closed Captions
Closed Captions have been around on YouTube for years, they are by all accounts one very old YouTube feature, yet so many videos lack them. Closed Captions (Transcripts) are not only practically useful by providing a visual aid for viewers hard of hearing, but they also offer a great deal of SEO value. All text fields on YouTube are scanned by both YouTube and Google search engines and the same goes for the text submitted in your Closed Captions. This means you can textually include keywords and phrases within your video content to help your content get found by searching Internet users.

Keep Your Old Videos Updated:
As YouTube videos impact Google searches you want to be on as good terms with the YouTube search engine as possible. One of the easiest and most powerful ways to do so is to keep your old video content updated. Changing video titles, descriptions, tags and adding Closed Captions to old videos are great ways of doing this. Keeping your content updated showcases your Channel to YouTube as being active and useful. YouTube rarely flags up old content in searches, especially content that is not being used, so by maintaining your old content and keeping it fresh you will help to give it a great chance of appearing in the search results.

Use It As A Social Platform:
YouTube has and always will be a social platform, yet so many users forget that. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are all very popular social media websites, but that doesn’t mean YouTube is any less of a social website. Its nature as a ‘sharing’ website has always brought about huge amounts of audience interaction in its video content, and that shows no sign of stopping. Become Friends with other users, Subscribe to other users content, Comment, Video Respond and Like/Dislike content similar to your videos niche. By being an active user you will help to encourage activity and engagement with your own content. This will give you great promotional benefits and help to spread the awareness of your video content across the web and get the message it’s portraying out to the world.

Use Calls To Action:
YouTube Annotations are ironically an ‘overused’ YouTube feature, but an incredibly ‘underused’ marketing tool. Annotations can be carefully placed in your Internet video content to give viewers extra pieces of information, whether it’s a website URL, a link to another video or an important call to action. One of the biggest difficulties of using a video to market content is to then send traffic from that video to a desired location. By using calls to action in your Annotations you can make sure viewers get essential instructions and encourage them to go beyond watching your video, and get them to check out your website, article or download.

Embed Your Videos

A stigma attached to using a site like YouTube as a marketing tool is that it’s a giant diversion, that it takes audiences away from blogs and websites and onto a very distracting media platform. This is actually a very good point, and in fact quite a true one. Yet, so many users neglect to use the embedding ability YouTube gives videos in order for users to promote it on their own websites. Many websites and blogs get a huge amount of traffic already and have no need to fragment their audience by sending them to other websites. Embedding their YouTube video on their website is a perfect way to use the power of Internet video and still keep audiences on their site.

Although, one of the biggest pitfalls with this approach is that so many people forget to Sitemap their embedded video on Google. A Sitemap informs the Google search engine that your embedded video content is actually on your website, which gives both video and your website essential SEO power. If you want Internet users to check out your video content on your website then creating a Sitemap is essential. Especially if you don’t want them to end up on that pesky ‘distracting media platform’.

Summary
So there you have it, five essential underused YouTube Internet marketing tips. By using these tips and tools to your full advantage you can help pick up extra SEO value for your videos and boost  traffic to your site and your newsroom.  And encourage those sought after conversion rates to increase.

While I have been researching the elements needed to  make a press release relevant in the digital age I’ve become a big fan of Diigo. I’ll be presenting this research at the PR News Digital Summit in NYC on October 5th.

One of the additions to a social media news release that journalists find useful is a bookmarked research page with all resources and notes they might need to write the story. Very few PR people are providing this with their releases.  It really helps a journalist to have this information in one place.

Many educators and researchers have discovered Diigo and once PR people realize what it can do, it’s bound to become a staple in the Digital PR Toolkit  too.

What is Diigo?

Diigo is a free social bookmarking tool that makes it easy to share content and facilitate conversations around that content.  It certainly makes it easier and faster to produce a resource page for a news release.

There are three main areas of the site:  My Library, My Network and My Groups.

The Research feature allows you to annotate, archive and organize your content, crating the resource page.   You can highlight text on a web page, just as you would on a paper document.  You can choose different highlight colors for various sections and add personal notations using their sticky note function.  These highlighted sections and notes will be visible on the page when you, or someone else you have invited, visit that page in the future. These pages are bookmarked and become a part of your online archive.

Adding Sticky Notes

Highlight a section of text in the supporting article or news release and right click it.   You will see an option to ad a sticky note.

Use folders to organize the supporting data for different releases. You can even make a folder with a specific blogger or journalist’s name on it. Put in 3 or 4 links and notate each one with commentary like “this supports the quote on hotel growth.”

When you bookmark a page in Diigo you can choose to capture a snapshot or cache of the page.  This way Diigo saves both an HTML version of the page and captures it in an image.  This way a link you have bookmarked can never disappear.   The links on your resource page for your news release will always be available, even if the link breaks or the content goes away.  This is particularly useful for links to articles in the mainstream media that are open to view for a short period of time and then go behind a pay wall. There’s nothing as frustrating for a journalist on deadline as receiving a link that does not work.

Adding tags is a feature journalists have requested in news releases so that the content is easy to find online.  Since all your bookmarked content is in the cloud it can be accessed and searched from anywhere.  All the links tagged with a particular keyword can be shared via an RSS feed.  Be sure to choose a tag that fits the list of  links for each release and don’t duplicate this tag in other releases,  otherwise you won’t have a clean list of links for each release.

Once you have them all tagged correctly simply click the RSS icon and copy and paste the feed URL to your Social media news release.   You can also promote the feed URL to your custom list of bloggers and journalists.  Remember to bookmark your own release and tag it with this keyword too, so it appears in the feed.

Another way to organize and display a collection of bookmarks for a specific release is the “list” function.  Create a list and name it with a relevant keyword and write a short description of the links in that list.  Find the resources you want to share with the bloggers and journalists, bookmark them and assign them to that list.   Once your list is complete you can share it with others in several ways:

• Email the list to colleagues, bloggers and journalists

• Tweet it right from Diigo

• Use the Share This button which gives you the option to share the list on a plethora of social sites

One of the most useful features of Diigo is the collaboration and sharing tools.  You can create a network of people on Diigo  and invite industry experts as well as bloggers and journalists you work with on a regular basis to join Diigo and become part of your network.  You might even find some bloggers and journalists who are already using the site.

In the My Network area of the site you can create a network of people interested in your industry and use the tools provided to generate conversation around your releases.  If they are not Diigo users you can still send them your annotated links.

You can create a group and invite people to join.  Group members automatically get email notifications of new bookmarks added to the list, comment on or off the bookmarked pages and have threaded discussions about the content.

As your bookmarks are stored in the cloud they can be accessed via any mobile platform that Diigo supports.  With Diigo Powernote for Android smart phones or the Diigo Offline Reader for the iPhone you can read your bookmarks or the pages you marked Read Later while standing in line, on a train or a bus, or waiting for a meeting

Watch the video

Getting Started

Sign up for an account and install the Diigo Toolbar. Click the Install Diigo Toolbar button. It’s easy to do on Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome.

Read later: Diigo incorporates a read later button in its Firefox toolbar. You can save an item directly into Diigo to review and tag it later, which is a great time-saving feature.

Publishing to my blog: Diigo has a very useful feature for bloggers – you can publish links you’ve saved along with annotations directly to your blog.

Diigo also offers a web‐based “Diigolet” that provides limited functionality, but does not require installation like the ful toolbar does. the Diigolet is also available for the iPhone and iPad.

Educators have adopted the use of Diigo and are using it to great effect in the classroom.  It’s just as effective for PR use and it’s the perfect choice for organizing, annotating, and sharing supporting information for social media news releases.  The tools on Diigo make research and collaboration much easier, and allow for a better flow of communication between PR colleagues, bloggers and journalists.

There are currently just 386 people on Diigo who have tagged their profiles with PR or public relations. I see only a handful of the Digital PR luminaries, such as Brain Solis and Chris Abraham.

Get in on the ground floor – join my network on Diigo and start using this tool with your news releases.

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Brian Solis laid out the finding of his recent study on social advertising and how marketers are using this tool in this Fast Company article

“The future of advertising will be largely influenced by consumer behavior in social networks. Those brands that listen, measure, and evolve programs as a result, will push advertising forward — to the benefit of consumers and ultimately the brand.”

Advertising is not commonly a component of PR strategies, but social advertising is going to change that.  On the Food and Beverage Social Media Webinar on Friday last week, Grace Leong of Hunter PR talked about several successful Facebook promotions they’ve done for clients and every one of them had a social advertising component.

Here are some of the key findings of this study:

• 60% think social advertising will be very valuable to them
• 67% are currently using social advertising
• 18% intend to use social advertising in the next 12 months
• 54% are satisfied with their social advertising results
• Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the top platforms used
• Introducing something is the most common objective
• Biggest obstacles are ROI and budget

Social advertising definitely should be a part of the new Digital PR toolkit.

Read the full article and find a savvy social advertising partner to team up with before you  launch your next social media initiative.

Here are some suggestions:

SplashLab Social – ask for Geoff, he’s awesome!

Wildfire – I spoke on a panel at the Facebook Expos with Victoria and I know Firebelly use them for all their contests and promotional campaigns.

Buddy Media-  one of the fastest growing start-ups closely tied to Facebook and social advertising.

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I lived in South Africa through what was referred to there either as the Terrorist War or the War of Liberation.

Whether you agree with these names or prefer to call it a civil war, it was a time when bombs were being placed in restaurants, buses, bars, shopping malls, office buildings, train stations and sports stadiums.  Our young men were conscripted into service on both sides of the conflict, which lasted for 23 years.

I was a teenager when this war began in 1966.  I was at University and I was dating a guy who was  very involved with the ANC.  We had security police following us all the time.  One Sunday night after we’d been to a film  festival he asked someone else to take me home. In the morning I heard on the news that three of his friends had been arrested and were being held under the South African version of the Patriot Act and that my boyfriend had fled the country.

During the eighties the attacks accelerated. My kids grew up in the thick of it – it was all they knew. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when conscription ended one year before my oldest  son graduated high school.

During this time every building and shopping mall had strict security- similar to what you have at the airports now.

My sister has lived in America since the 70s and on one visit to South Africa  we went to a mall and she commented to the security personnel that she had never seen anything like this in America. Their reply? “You must live in a very dangerous place.” They could not conceive of a place where you did not need that level of security.

When I came to the US in 1999 it was a relief and a joy to live in a country with no need for security checks everywhere. And then came 9/11. And it all went back to “normal” for me.

I went to NYC within days and spent two weeks there documenting the work of volunteers, firefighters and rescue workers.  I interviewed many people who had been on the scene and some who had missed being there by a quirk of fate.

One interview stands out for me – Frank Fazano.  Frank was an EMT in the military and he was on his way to the Trade Center for a meeting that morning,  but got caught in traffic.   When he heard the news on his car radio he went to help.

It saddens me that America has had to experience the effects of terrorist attacks and things like the Patriot Act, the War of Terror, young Americans going to war and all the after-effects this has had on the country.

But it is still a great country and I am glad I am living here now.

The latest stats from StatCounter show that StumbleUpon’s  recent jump to the top  spot for referring social media traffic in the US was not a blip.  In July when they passed Facebook they hit 43% with Facebook coming in at 38%.  Now, a scant month later,  Stumble has edged up to 50% while  Facebook gained just 1% to finish at 39%.

This is only in the US – globally Facebook still trumps all other sites by a large margin

If you are practicing PR in the US, and you’re including social media to extend the reach of your news content, you should be engaging the 15 million loyal SU users in the US and nurturing those relationships.

Here’s how:

1. If you have not yet done so, create an account and set up a profile
2. Link to your SU profile in your About page or in your press contact listing
3. Add the StumbleUpon button to all your news pages (instructions here )
4. Start to build your network on SU, just as you do in any other social site
5. Get to know the members of the community
6. See who Stumbles the kind of content you have in your news releases, articles and videos
7. Stumble their content  – it is not considered good form to Stumble your own content
8. Use the SU ads feature to promote your release headlines – it costs just 5c per impression and more than 60 000 brands have already used this paid discovery option
9. SU recently added a search feature to their site so it is more important than ever to have your news content indexed there

What makes this search function different is users are searching by interest, introducing thousands of new interests and millions of new websites.

As with any other social site StumbleUpon is not a quick fix.  There is no one-shot way to tap into this traffic.  You have to do the work and become a genuine member of the community.  But at least you are investing time in the #1 social referrer.

If you have not used Stumble Upon before it will obviously not show up as a referrer to your website.   Give it try – wouldn’t you rather spend time on a site that has the potential to send you 50% of your social traffic?

Caveat:  do not drop out any currently successful actions.  Keep doing what you are doing and add Stumble Upon to the mix.

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One of the strongest reasons emerging for businesses to take a closer look at using Google+ is the integration with their other apps.  HealthWorks has figured out a few ideas for healthcare organizations, and these uses could as well apply to most other businesses too.

Google+ product manager Christian Oestlien says, “The business experience Google is creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses.”

G+ is still in the crawl before you walk stage, but there is a apparently a hive of activity in the background as Google throws resources at G+ to incorporate apps like Blogger and Picasa, which are being renamed Google Blogs and Google Photos.

Ways to Use  Google Apps

Google Map Maker -  HealthWorks recommends that healthcare orgs use this feature to help people find the nearest place to get assistance. That started me thinking of other ways to use it – how about destinations?  Most hotel and CVB sites have a map on their site now.   Why not use mapmaker and encourage local people to add local insights on places of interest? It’s a natural for any type of travel site.  You could incorporate Google Places to get the list of best restaurants, for instance. and then add Google Offers for the deals in the area.

Google+ and Mapping Your Social Graph

Circles is a great feature for an individual to organize thier friends and connectionsinto logical groups.  Just  imagine how useful this would be for a business.

A destination could use Circles to create a group of  loyal or premium visitors to their venue.

A PR pro might use  it for circles of influencers, bloggers and reporters in the area.

When Google releases its G+ business model,  Circles will address the need for clustering stakeholders and community members: employees, customers, bloggers, media people, analysts, vendors etc. Voila!  You’ll have your social graph at your fingertips.

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Seth Godin has had smart things to say about internet marketing for many years.

Back in January he spoke to John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing and they spoke about why some brands don’t get any comments or conversation.

“If people aren’t talking about you, there’s a reason. You’re boring,” said Seth.

Here is an example of interesting content and it has been viewed by almost 10 million people and generated 4,400 comments on YouTube.

The Future is Here

While the world in “A Day Made of Glass” might seem like something out of a fantasy movie Jim Clappin, president of Corning Glass Technologies, reminds us that, just a decade ago, pay phones, VCRs, and film cameras were also commonplace. Today, we’re accustomed to movies streaming on demand to a 60-inch television hanging on the wall and to video calls on notebook computers, essentially for free.

And this ‘fantasy’ world is closer than you think.  Take look at this.

Good Video on a  Budget

Producing something like “A Day Made of Glass” takes a lot of resources and a decent budget.

But you can produce great content without a huge budget – what it really takes is bright ideas and a creative approach.

Take this video made by T-Mobile to forward their brand positioning  “Life is for Sharing”

It’s had almost 8 million views and has over 9,000 comments.

Now I bet it took a lot of organizing to pull this off in a busy airport terminal like Heathrow.  But there were no fancy effects or expensive computer generated elements in it. It’s just a very clever idea beautifully executed.  The ‘candid camera’ aspect and the surprise and bewilderment of the people in the terminal make it fun to watch.  And the message supports the brand positioning perfectly.

Can a small business or nonprofit do this too?  Absolutely.

This 1:30 public service announcement for safer roads has been seen by 13.5 million people, has almost 30,000 likes and 7,000 comments.  It has been so successful because this creative and different approach to a familiar scenario makes it almost impossible not to feel some sort of emotion.

It’s all about how you tell your story.  When it’s interesting and creative others will spread the story and talk about it.

Are Likes the New Links?

Hypertext links have served as the web’s traffic signal network.  Links guide where our clicks, attention and, therefore, money flows. It has given rise to multi-billion-dollar businesses and even entire industries. Likes are explicit endorsements rather than implicit ones. Google and Bing aren’t sitting on the sidelines of this new trend – both are increasingly relying on social ranking factors. Read the article >>

The Social Media Measurement Debate: CIPR Weighs In

The newly appointed CEO of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) talks about the way the association is responding to new expectations as a result of social media. Successful social media strategies aim to build reputation through conversation and engagement. They are used to underpin an organization’s objectives to grow relational rather than merely transactional customers. Read the article >>

Tips on Writing Good Social Media Content

There are many places that require digital content creation such as, blogging, posting on Facebook, engaging on Linked In, or tweeting – but these all mean “writing” to most folk. Appropriate content based on listening to your audience is a good place to start.  Grammar, punctuation and spelling matter.   Just  be yourself, be positive and keep at it. Read the article >>

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Image credits:  TopRank Marketing    StudentHacks.org