Last week I listened in on the Cision webinar “Engaging Social Media,” in which Cision’s own Jay Krall and Heidi Sullivan shared information on new strategies for more targeted, results-driven social media engagement. The webinar provided general information on listening and engaging through social media and briefly touched on measurement techniques, but what really caught my attention was an audience question about whether companies need to develop corporate guidelines for social media use.

With so many companies at various levels of social media interaction, many employees may have questions about who should be posting, what should be posted, when should information be posted, etc. To keep all employees informed on best practices, some companies have taken the lead and developed a social media guidebook. Several well-known firms have developed their own guidebooks and posted them on the Web for public consumption, including Intel, IBM and The Coca-Cola Company.

The extent to which a company should implement social media guidelines will vary depending on the size of the company, the type of industry and company culture, but it is certainly a good idea for every company to develop a few guidelines. By preparing a list of social media guidelines, companies can take the guessing out of corporate social media use and ensure that all employees are on the same page.

What do you think about social media guidelines – important or totally unnecessary? Has your company implemented some sort of best practices? Let us know your comments below!

One more Steve Jobs post and we’ll be done for 2009.  Steve Jobs has a trademark way of making a big announcement.  First, he starts his presentation with some routine news, and after talking for a bit he pretends to be done before pausing for dramatic effect and then saying, “There is one more thing…”

The pretend afterthought is, of course, the BIG thing.  This is how he introduces some of Apple’s biggest new products – its most hyped products.  Or are they?  The iPhone could rank as the most publicized new product launch ever, but few critics will call it hyped.

Here's Gartner's definition of how hype plays out in the launch of new technology products.

Which begs the question: What is hype?  Industry analyst group Gartner has defined a “hype cycle” that measures a product’s visibility over time.  The firm says the cycle starts with the “Technology Trigger,” which causes visibility to skyrocket to the “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” from which it plummets into the “Trough of Disillusionment” only to gradually rebound through the “Slope of Enlightenment” before settling into the “Plateau of Productivity.”

Cloud computing, PDAs and VoIP all have passed through the hype cycle, but this isn’t the case with Apple’s products.  My theory is that Apple avoids the Trough of Disillusionment by generally matching its pre-launch build up with great product features.  Thus, extensive promotion doesn’t become over promotion.

Often times, the temptation for companies is to use hype as a way to get noticed, or to jumpstart its marketing for a new product. But this can be risky strategy long term because

hype can lead to dissatisfied customers as they find out that maybe the promised features don’t do as much as they had expected.

But if a new product’s publicity matches the impact it will have on the market, this can minimize any negative reaction and set customer expectations properly.  If the product meets market needs and is well designed, it will catch on with customers, meaning it can replace hype with customer enthusiasm—the best way to generate buzz in the media and social media.

CEO of the Decade

OK, so Fortune named Steve Jobs its CEO of the decade for 2010, which means the race is on for the title in 2020.  To win all you have to do is beat Jobs’ record of reinventing the music, computing, movie and wireless communications industries—all while growing sales in the face of the worst economic downturn of our collective memory.

That’s a tall order.  But whether your goal is to be memorialized on the cover of Fortune or just to get back on a growth track, the article highlights Jobs’ use of disciplined messaging and communications to build the image of Apple.

A key Jobs business tool is his mastery of the message.  He rehearses over and over every line he and others utter in public about Apple, which authorizes only a small number of executives to speak publicly on a given topic.  Key to the Jobs approach is careful consideration of what he and Apple say – and don’t say.

The lesson for most companies is to hone corporate and product messaging to be brief, meaningful and differentiated.  Apple showed off its mastery of its strategy during the iPhone launch, which garnered an estimated $400 million in publicity and exposure.  Most companies have the opposite problem.  When the time comes to make news, they have to fight and scrap to get the attention of their audience – and a well-defined message helps to make an impact.

The DJA approach to message development is to filter messages through a framework based on two elements – customer relevance and competitive differentiation.  We then take these messages and organize them into a message “house,” where the roof is a tightly defined key message or theme.  The upper story is composed of three supporting messages, and the foundation is the set of facts that back up each supporting message.

With this foundation, we’re able to build a message that is memorable and can be delivered effectively in either 60 seconds or 60 minutes.

Today’s journalists are changing the ways they gather information and how they interact with sources. In order to stay ahead of the competition, journalists are expected to produce more content faster than ever before. This means virtually no time for phone calls or rummaging through emails and many journalists are now actively engaged on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. With these changes in the journalism landscape, PR professionals need to be creative and focused in order to meaningfully connect and interact with editors.

To help PR professionals gauge what today’s editors are looking for, Marketwire and PRWeek recently held a webcast on “The New Rules of Media Relations.” Panel participants included Kevin McCormally, Editorial Director at Kiplinger, Chloe Albanesius, News Reporter at PCMag.com, Ivan Oransky, M.D., Executive Editor at Reuters, Jessica Strange, Executive Director at Marketwire and Rose Gordon, News Editor at PRWeek. Here are some tips from the panel on discussion on email, media kits, social media platforms and event travelling trends:

• Email: Use punchy subject lines that shows you read something the editor has covered or that you have a new idea that will interest the readers. The draft of your email should include straightforward facts, no need for flowery descriptions.

• Media Kits: Sending an editor that much information is unnecessary. However if you feel you must send a media kit, use a flash drive.

• Social Media: DO use Twitter to figure out what the editor is interested in by following, retweeting and asking questions. DON’T send random pitches, especially when it’s obvious that you’re sending this to everyone else.

• Travel: Most publications have reduced travel budgets, so editors try to attend as many audio conferences and webcasts as possible to cut costs.

While the means for reaching journalists is constantly evolving, it is up to the PR professional to actively engage with editors in order to establish meaningful relationships and conversations.

All you have to do is Google “Sidewiki” to see that there is a lot of emerging concern in the PR community for this new function of the Google toolbar.   In essence, Sidewiki allows anyone to comment on a Website – without the Website owner’s consent or direct ability to remove that comment.  That posted comment appears in a window to the side of the Website that only Sidewiki users can see. (Sidewiki users: see the note I’ve attached to this post.)

Some in the blogosphere worry about Sidewiki becoming a tool for spreading defaming graffiti on Websites.  Anyone with an axe to grind can click on the Sidewiki icon and write a scathing note.  The note resides in the Sidewiki program and thus accompanies the Website, but is not part of the Website.  Right now, Website owners can’t remove the note.  The best they can do is use a  “report abuse” button to report comments that violate Sidewiki program policies.

To use Sidewiki, you need to have a Gmail account, which means some details about the writer of a comment are available.  But it’s easy to get a Gmail account not in your own name, effectively allowing anonymous postings.  The program policies allow removal of comments if the poster “pretends to be someone else,” but makes no provision for anonymous posts.

All of the concern about Sidewiki appears, though, to be a bit premature.  A quick survey of DJA client sites turned up no comments yet.  Google claims hundreds of millions of Sidewiki downloads, but the number of comments on several popular sites turned up nothing controversial or defamatory.

From my limited survey, I think that an equally likely outcome of Sidewiki is that it becomes another way to promote. A Sidewiki poster is able to tie her comments to a Google profile or to a business Website and use the service to boost traffic.   This is the case with the Sidewiki posters at the Whitehouse Web site where a Web design company complimented the site’s new design.

It’s probably too early yet to know what the impact will be on SEO efforts of Sidewiki postings.  A quick search on the name of a Facebook Sidewiki poster came up with no results on the first three pages of Google results.

At one point, the informal corporate mantra at Google was “don’t be evil,” and it’s unclear yet if this latest capability will be used for evil as many are concerned about. What is clear, is that the marketing power of Google will ensure that Sidewiki is in the hands of millions of people and that all corporate Websites must be watched carefully by PR, reputation management and corporate marketing teams.

What do supporting underprivileged children in Mexico, giving up a year of one’s youth to serve the community, helping others battle through addiction and saving the arts in the face of education budget cuts and stiff competition have in common?

On one sunny Saturday in October, the answer was the Public Relations Society of America—specifically PRSA’s “Quality Time with PR Minds” event.

Corazón de Vida, City Year: Los Angeles, The CLARE Foundation and Theatre360 are the four groups that inspired me that day.

Quick background: “Quality Time,” as it is known casually, is a semi-annual PRSA event put on by chapters located in major metropolitan areas across the country.  The premise is to bring chapter members together to provide strategic PR guidance to local charitable, non-profit organizations.  Each non-profit has two 75-minute sessions with three randomly assigned PRSA members.

Corazón de Vida, based in Orange County,  provides financial assistance to orphanages in Baja California and organizes bus trips to visit the children and bring supplies.  Started by a former orphan who grew up in one such home south of the border and looked back fondly on her experiences there, CDV operates with the simple mission of putting children in safe housing.

City Year: Los Angeles is the local branch of Americorps’ City Year program in which young people dedicate a year of their lives to living on minimal stipends and serving underprivileged communities.  City Year: LA volunteers are involved in the “In School & On Track” program, serving as tutors and role models for children who might otherwise drop out of school.

The CLARE Foundation was established by a team of volunteers who wanted to do something about the large population of homeless and indigent alcohol and substance-dependent people in the Santa Monica-Venice area.  Today, the foundation features 11 community-based programs, each providing hands-on recovery services from a diverse array of volunteers.

Theatre360, which was formerly the Pasadena Junior Theatre, spreads the performing arts to the youth in its community—in the face of the education budget cuts throughout the state.  Even as the world-famous Pasadena Playhouse struggles to survive, Theatre360 continues to live out its mission of saving the arts.

While each of these entities was distinctly different, the very clear common denominator among them was the passion with which each team represented its organization.  While I imagine these non-profits felt a little like they were trying to drink from a fire hose with all the ideas being fired around, the reps never stopped asking questions and taking notes—so much so that the event coordinators had to chase us to our next groups.

Even when you love your job, it can be easy to get lost in the minutiae of the day to day grind.  It may not seem intuitive to think that volunteering to work for free on a weekend could help you avoid fatigue, but the passion and energy of the individuals working for these charities is truly inspiring.  And, while they probably thought I was the one providing help, they gave me something invaluable to my work as a PR professional—a fresh perspective.

If you would like more information on PRSA-LA, the Quality Time event or any of the charities mentioned in this post, please e-mail me at dale@davidjamesagency.com.

Welcome to the DJA blog.  Here we will bring you B2B technology PR and marketing communications insights ranging from PR to social marketing.

In our experience, blogging is just now starting to catch on for B2B technology companies.  To help those in the decision making process, we’ve just published a new whitepaper.  Take a look and let me know your thoughts.