Alright, so one of the weird little misconceptions I’ve been dealing with for a while now is the belief that social media marketing is, well, how do I say this? “Cheap.”

It’s an opinion often held by marketers, communicators, executives, and the like, many of whom have clicked on the pony-tailed chief’s ‘DIY’ blog and the clever, professionally underproduced video on YouTube and the messy, yet oddly functional fan page on Facebook, and because of this, have formed an opinion of what social media marketing is, how it’s done, and ultimately what it must cost.

And really, can you blame them?

These folks are simply making a calculation of value based on the tangible merit of what’s being presented to them — with very little insight, understanding or weight placed on the effort required to really bring these projects to life, let alone what it takes to keep them going and make them truly successful.

Of course, to complicate things, there’s a near endless parade of free online tools and services that are surfacing every month, each in their own way perpetuating the “man-this-stuff-is-cheap” mentality as their own hype cycles crest (cough, FriendFeed) and later crash.

Lastly, and most importantly, I think there’s a tendency in ROI conversations to over indulge in hard numbers sans consideration for all the underlying soft costs of social media projects. And by “soft costs” what I’m really getting at are the *absurdly high* time and attention investments that typically come with these projects and what are the unique shared scars among many a social media practitioner. If you’ve ever administered a blog or a community of sorts, you’ll know what I mean, nuff said.

Sadly, time and attention factors are often overlooked and greatly underestimated in most marketers’ understanding and appreciation of these projects.

Now, does this mean social media work can’t be done on the cheap? Nah, of course not. You go right ahead and create your corporate Blogger account and your executive’s MySpace page and that barely-discernible-but-kinda-indie looking mobile video of your company event;)

Kidding aside, just remember that free is never really free. That time’s an investment too. And that social media marketing requires a lot of it and because of this, “cheap” investments could end up costing you a bundle if you’re not clear about what you’re buying.

[This post has been cross-published to Media Guerrilla]

Alright, so there’s all sorts of assumptions companies make about social media these days, one of the most dangerous of which is the assumption that the feedback, opinions and insights people share online are absolutely representative of their customer base.

Be careful about walking into this particular perception warp, it’s very easy to fall into and terribly difficult to escape.

Yeah, there’s a ton of valuable customer feedback to be gathered and analyzed on the web, however, more often than not, that feedback is coming from what’s best described as, well, a vocal minority. The perception warp is believing this group of customers online reflects the opinions, attitudes and experiences of *all* your customers (e.g., the much, much larger silent majority).

I was reminded of this recently on a client project where we were analyzing commenter registrations on the company’s blog. Our WordPress admin page showed thousands of comments and thousands of registrants, but as we chopped up the user data, we found that about *40* commenters accounted for nearly a third of the total comments.

I’ve seen very similar patterns on other projects, and generally speaking, I think there’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that the ratio of writers to readers online is wildly disproportionate. And unfortunately, once again, it’s one of those unique challenges that falls onto the laps of those who manage social media programs to determine just how much weight to put on the collective customer feedback culled from the web; also I suppose, how influential (or not) your vocal minority of customers are to your silent majority of customers.

Over the weekend the famous ‘measurement’ question was discussed quite a bit by Scoble and Owyang. A few months ago we talked about the monitoring and mining aspect, but Scoble asks the direct question, “how will doing this help my sales?”

Like Robert says, this question is asked quite a bit by some of the large firms we talk to. What’s the quick response? “How are you currently measuring your PR/Comms/Marketing programs?”

The answer usually can go one of two ways:

1. A company describes how they currently measure the ROI of their PR/Comms/Marketing.
2. A company admits they really don’t have a good measure on the ROI of existing programs.

If 1: then part of your work is already done for you. Find out how to apply some of the existing methodology to the project. After all if X is the standard they use to measure all other programs, then how can you integrate a way to measure X in your project?

Kami Huyse did this with the SeaWorld Journey to Atlantis project. Many of the existing programs are measured by exit surveys, why not use the same tool to ‘equally’ measure the different programs.

If 2: then you can set the precedent for measurement within and organization. One of the great things with online content is that you do have plenty of data to work with. The trick is what to do with the data, and how to determine what’s relevant to the client. Is it RSS subscribers? Comments? Links? Bookings?

If you know how and what you’re measurement goals are to begin with it’s easier to build in the proper components from the start.

Recently, we blogged about some new trends in social media PR—namely Stowe Boyd’s call for pitches via Twitter and Marshall’s request for an OPML from PR firms. We blogged about those items because they are areas where much of the PR world is afraid to tread, and exactly where Voce wants to be. I was talking about some of this with Ross Mayfield of Socialtext fame. He had some great insights from both a PR client perspective and as an innovative software vendor in the very space causing these new disruptions.

I think what he said would be of interest to some of our other clients as well as to other PR professionals. There is some good fodder in here for further discussions about:

- What is the big shift in PR and why are people split about whether or not to be happy about it?
- What is the role of a modern PR firm?
- Tactically speaking, how has the PR process changed?

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We told you we were living large in Manhattan at the BlogHer Business Conference and New York City Moms Blog launch party last month.

We knew the Today Show producers were interviewing a few of the mom bloggers at the party and the crew was filming conference panels. But we when we watched this morning’s “Today’s Woman” segment on the growing popularity of momblogging, we were stoked to see that our friends at Silicon Valley Moms Group, Graco and client Yahoo! got air time. Check out the eco-friendly Yahoo! taxis that chauffeured the moms to the party!

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Stephen Baker and Heather Green have been working on revising their 2005 cover story on blogs. They’ve wisely expanded from blogs to social media. They’re asking their readers ‘how’ social media is changing business. I have some more in-depth thoughts on this which I’ll post shortly, but for now how about these for starters:

1. How a company that created a flog and alienated its customers, bounced back and is rebuilding trust with social media.

2. How one employee is taking it upon himself to use a blog to chronicle and relay his observations inside a company.

3. How a company is using a blog to add insight/perspective on its business at a time when its business is at its most vulnerable.

Just two quick plugs for Josh Hallett and Mike Manuel this week…

Josh has a contributed story appearing in the May issue of PRSA’s PR Tactics, which was published online earlier this week. It’s about how practitioners can use social media to enhance and extend their media relations efforts. He also offers some tips on the importance of blogger relations (an excerpt from the article):

“Using blogs to reach traditional media sounds like the meeting of matter with anti-matter. Some say that blogs are the antithesis of media. Recent studies indicate that ever more journalists are looking to blogs for story leads and quotes, among other things. Combine this with the number of journalists who now count a blog as a publishing medium and the line between blogs and journalism is blurring more than ever.”

And Mike was up at the NewComm Forum this week, co-presenting a case study on corporate blogging with the good folks from PlayStation (an excerpt from his blog post).

“The case study chat with the new media team behind Sony PlayStation’s blog went well yesterday afternoon at the NewComm Forum, we actually covered a lot of ground - everything from content development and technical design to community management tactics and measurement. By the end of our session, the PlayStation guys had shared 15 “lessons learned” over the last year.”

Great stuff….

Last week at the Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations Summit 2008, I had the pleasure of watching Voce’s own Dave Black deliver a presentation with Jodi Baumann, the Director of Corporate PR at NetApp. The focus of this year’s summit was “The Power of Story: New media, New Technologies, A New Narrative for PR.” Speakers tackled topics ranging from “The Art of Story: Finding the Heart of Drama” to preparing an organization for crisis, to running attendees through a bootcamp on social media strategies for PR. Industry influencers such as Tom Foremski, Robert Scoble, and Don Clark were among the media present for the event.

All good stuff, but what if I’m an in house PR person and my budget has been slated only for “traditional PR” activities (media relations, press release distribution etc.). This is where Dave and Jodi’s presentation, How PR Can Get a Fair Share of the Marketing Budget in a Web 2.0 World, fit into the social media/PR in 2008 puzzle. The presentation focused on how to stop “thinking like PR person” start gaining mindshare in all areas of marketing, and how to use Web 2.0 as a beachhead to support various parts of the company. (Not to mention a brief foray into “what in the world does beachhead mean anyways?”)

A few weeks ago, Fortune Small Business interviewed Richard Brewer-Hay, eBay’s editor-in-chief, to discuss a new corporate blog he was developing called “eBay Ink.” This blog debuted (publicly) yesterday afternoon, and we’re happy to say our team had a hand in the development of this project with Richard and the eBay team.

In addition to this project, we helped launch another eBay blog this week, ebayinsiderblog.com. It’s a group blog for eBay’s ‘Style Squad,’ a collective that writes about pop culture, fashion, gadgets, and home design.

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So last Friday, half a dozen students from Chico State’s journalism program (my alma mater), came to Voce’s Palo Alto office and spent the day observing and discussing agency life.

As part of this visit, I spent some time talking about the web and its impact on the PR industry. It was one of those discussions where unfortunately you just end up having to go a mile wide and an inch deep on things, however, one question shook out of this talk that I thought other students and new grads might find interesting and helpful, I’ll elaborate on it here. The question was pretty simple:

What *new* skills are important to PR?

A great question, one I could chew on for a while here, but if I had to pick three things, I’d say:

Learn Another Language
Seriously, as communicators, if you really want to be successful using your first language, consider learning a second — HTML. It’s a universal language that’s becoming critically important in PR, especially as the reach and influence of the web continues to shape and inform market opinions and perceptions. I think having some basic knowledge of HTML gives you a small leg up when, for example, you’re using a tool, such as a blog in business. It also provides you with a better understanding of how metadata, markup and the like all quietly work together behind the scenes to aid in the discovery and distribution of what you’re ultimately communicating via the web.

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