What is it that makes Twitter so appealing to millions of users around the globe? The ability to share snippets of information in real-time? The interconnected networks that span across countries? Well, I guess it is all these characteristics, and more, that make Twitter so successful. But how can businesses harness the power of Twitter?

Some companies use Twitter as a channel to direct more traffic to their company website. They tweet links to press releases and their latest products; a very self-serving, one-way approach to using Twitter. But is that all there is to Tweeting? In fact, many Tweeterrers do not take kindly to being flooded with self-serving tweet spam, and the messages are usually ignored. Many prefer a more personal approach, where you feel that you are interacting with another human being instead of an inorganic bot that acts like an RSS feed.

Another way companies use Twitter is for event management. Although it is time consuming, giving customers and prospects real-time updates from an event is a service that can be achieved through tweeting. People who may not get the chance to attend the event can still get up to-the-minute updates on what is going on. Not only that, but you can also get immediate, direct feedback from your customers. There are many other ways that businesses can leverage on the platform, but is Twitter as beneficial as all the hype it is getting?

In the middle of last year, Twitter’s growth slowed from 7.8 million new users a month to 6.2 million, according to a recent study from RJ Metrics. The report also found that only 17 percent of Twitter users updated their accounts in December, an all-time low.

In an article on Enterprise Innovation – Social Media Presence does not Translate to sales, the editors cite a study sponsored by digital marketing consultancy, ECHOVME, which found that social media has no significant impact on direct sales. But there is a strong relationship between a company’s social media activity and consumers’ perception on its brand equity.

“According to the research, social media is not an effective direct marketing tool because it is mostly ignored and considered as spam.  However, it is important for networking and engaging customers online.  The survey respondents consider social media tools helpful in sharing information, such as company and industry insights, project wins and recruitment processes.” Today, we see a move away from direct marketing strategies towards creating thought leadership articles, and providing readers with a knowledge hub where they can learn more about the industry and gain valuable insights that will help them in their own daily activities.

There are also success stories on how business, like Ford Motor Company and UCC, use Twitter in managing a crisis. Afterall, social media is like an extension of our real life personas and can be adapted to cater to individual requirements; it is a matter of how you utilise the medium to meet your needs. I’m excited to see what the future holds for the evolution of social media and how it can transform into an even more adaptable, dynamic and organic platform for consumers and businesses alike.

If you’re caught up in the social media hype and need a guide to navigate the maze, feel free to drop us a note at pr@eastwestpr.com

Here at EASTWEST PR, we are constantly looking for new ways to get our clients noticed using both traditional and new media strategies. As we expand our focus towards the little understood and often unexploited area of new media, we have observed the interesting phenomena that we call the “Multiplier Effect of Influencers”, which, simply put, means that there are certain people using social media that are highly influential and are capable of

delivering your message to large numbers of people across multiple networks. They could be citizen journalists or someone with a large number of followers on Twitter. They may have a blog and they may use multiple social networking platforms and services. These influencers are the “journalists of new media”. Unlike traditional journalists, there is no number to call or email address to send a press release. The main vehicle to communicating to these influencers is through content. By placing content online in relevant online groups and pages, these influencers will use this content and carry your message across their networks. The key is to make sure that the content is relevant and compelling enough to get the interest and attention of influencers.

To the left is a diagram that we use to demonstrate how the Multiplier Effect works. At the center, you or a consultant working on your campaign uses content as the main tool to communicate to the identified influencers. It is important to note that not everyone will be influencers; some will be followers. Content is then shared with the identified influencers or followers. These identified influencers will then share this content across their networks to the unidentified influencers and followers, who, in turn, carry on the message. Your message is “multiplied” throughout online new media platforms.

New media platforms, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, offer enormous audiences of people that are often underexploited. The advantages of creating content, be it videos or blog posts, and sharing it with the online community, is that you will reach this huge, largely untapped audience of people. The key to reaching this audience is to identify a handful of influencers who will then carry on your message across their networks. The content could be as simple as a Youtube video of a spokesperson interview or an industry insight write-up. With the media landscape changing, these influencers are becoming the new journalists. Can you afford to ignore them?

To find out more about identifying influencers and leveraging content across multiple networks, contact EASTWEST at pr@eastwestpr.com.

Marketing is still about telling the story, telling it well and often.

There are no secrets to telling a good story. Imagination, creativity, entertainment play a big part but most of all it’s about the need it fulfills. We relate to stories because they fill a need we might know we have but more often than not, a need we didn’t even know we had. The tone, the rhythm, the colour, the speed, are all techniques to tell your story, the fundamental difference between a traditional story (such as in a book or movie) and marketing is that in the latter, repetition, consistency and reach play as important a role as the emotional or rational feel of the story. In marketing, PR and sales, the story can be as simple 15 seconds elevator spiel all the way to a well written sales presentation and SEO optimized website, and the story must be the same.

The story is not about you and how great you are, how superior your technology is, it’s about what your target cares for (or should care for). It’s about what the customer will get out of buying from you. Remember, there are no sales cycles, only buying cycles.

To craft a good story, look at your past, identify your present and create your future. It’s an exercise in both imagination and reality (a good reality check starts with talking with customers as they often understand your story in a different way than you do.)

Always start with your audience. The more you know about them, the better off you are. Not just their preferences or needs but also how they consume information and their understanding of their own buying cycle. Then forget that knowledge, mash it up in your own mind and define its essence (be careful of statistics, they’ll lead you astray.) Then define who you are and what you want to be as a company. Forget the wishy-washy vision and mission statements drawn by a committee. Focus on your desire to change the world and how your product of solution can help you do that. Mix it with how your customer desire to change their world and mash it up even more with your newly fund knowledge about yourself. It’s alchemy at its best.

Whether you’re the CEO of a conglomerate of the local representative of a product, telling your story should be mixed with your own local experience and reinforced by consistently telling it to your public. Be careful, you’ll often get sick of hearing your story ages before many of your target market would have even heard about it. Resist changing your story too often. Adapt it, localize it if you must, but keep its essence.

And if your sales team tells the story better, learn from them.

For help getting your story out to the public, and noticed, contact EASTWEST at pr@eastwestpr.com

Recently, a prominent Japanese company experienced a case of social media marketing gone awry.

UCC Ueshima Coffee Ltd (UCC) had an established, eleven-year long marketing campaign called, “Good Smile Coffee.” This campaign made use of traditional PR activities utilizing traditional media vehicles, such as magazines and newspapers. This year, UCC wanted to get ahead of their competition and deploy social media techniques for the Good Smile campaign. Like other companies employing these methods, UCC decided to use Twitter, expecting they could reach different targets, generate a large impact via the Internet, and foster a viral word-of-mouth marketing campaign.

UCC kicked off their Twitter-centric approach at 10:00am on February 5^th, with eleven Twitter BOTs that automatically generated and sent Good Smile Coffee messages that keyed off approximately 30 related searchable words including, “coffee,” “prize,” and “UCC.”

Almost immediately, twitter users started feeling they were being spammed, causing UCC to halt the campaign in just under two hours. Observing the flurry of criticism that followed the ill-timed, ill-directed spam tweet, many people have harshly pointed to UCC’s lack of understanding of what makes Twitter successful. What isn’t often pointed out is how deftly UCC handled the ensuing situation. In what could have been a tremendous failure of marketing, instead ended up being a successful resolution that potentially strengthened consumer loyalty.

As soon as the mistake was identified, UCC expeditiously took action to resolve the issue. At 11:30am, 90 minutes after the Twitter BOTs were first activated, Twitter users started to complain about being the targets of spam messaging. At 11:50am, UCC decided to immediately suspend their Twitter BOT engines. Four hours later, UCC management issued an official apology on their website. This was followed up two days later with a progress report on the situation through their official Twitter account, “@ueshimacoffee.” On February 9, four days after the initial event, UCC held a press briefing (to mostly online media) and explained how the incident happened and what actions have been taken to prevent a recurrence. UCC’s quick and decisive action was able to defuse a pressured situation both quickly and calmly.

In terms of “crisis communications,” the actions UCC took were effective, efficient, and able to rectify the initial error both quickly and decisively. By communicating directly and deliberately with their annoyed twitterers, some users applauded UCC for their prompt reaction and sincere attitude. As Twitter and other social media methods are adopted, PR activities like this one will become “must-have” functions for all PR professionals as strategies, not as spontaneous reactions.

As part of their plan to prevent similar issues, UCC arranged an internal workshop on the “do’s and don’ts” for the marketing and promotional use of social media delivery mechanisms, sharing the experiences learned from their recent episode.

PR firms have received many inquiries from their clients on how to best leverage twitter for promotions, campaigns, and other PR activities. While many opportunities exist in this realm, and many success stories exist that can be useful models, learning from the mistakes of others is one of the most important lessons available. The Japanese are paying close attention on how UCC’s workshop will turn out and how UCC will improve its image through this scenario.

In Japan, like any other place in the world, emerging social media channels have impacted how messages are delivered and how communications are performed. Responding to this transformation, the traditional Japanese method of PR-driven crisis communication tends to be slow, quiet, and under-effective. Japanese companies, like those of the rest of the world, will need to become quicker, more agile, and even more open with their communications than ever before.

Miki Ito is the Director of TrainTracks, a full service public relations firm based in Tokyo, Japan. TrainTracks is a partner agency of EASTWEST Public Relations. To find out more about TrainTracks, click here.

The hyper-interconnectivity of social media networks means that information is being shared among online users at viral speed. When a crisis hits, it no longer takes days for the media to pick it up and distribute it in print. We are now looking at hour by hour escalation of a crisis and how it can potentially become detrimental to a brand within a short span of 24-hours.

Within the first 8 hours of the information leakage, we expect to see micromedia sites such as twitter starting to post one-liner statements about it. Bloggers will also begin to post short articles and some mainstream media may have picked it up. Following that you will see viral-like spreading of the information. People will be retwitting and sharing the information with their followers, videos and photos will be shared on forums, and Facebook users will be updating their walls and sharing the information with their friends. Within 16 hours, you can already expect a huge community of online users to have heard about the crisis, and reacted to it by posting some form of an opinion. Next you will begin to see editorialising of the material. Influential bloggers would have harvested opinions from various sources and compiled a ‘case-study’ article on it. Search engines like google would have also picked up on the vast amount activity surrounding keyword searches.

Jumping in and responding immediately to a crisis or choosing not to react impulsively and waiting to see how it develops is an important decision that your crisis communication team has to make. A decision that should be made promptly and with the support from company leadership. Considering that you already have a crisis communications strategy plan in place, your best weapon in your fight against time would be to leverage on social media tools – setting up a simple web portal for updates, replying to tweets and encouraging people to retweet the response, and updating your followers on what steps the company is taking. However, this is assuming that you have already been diligently cultivating an active group of loyal followers and supporters through social media networking. Trying to garner support when you have not taken the time and effort to build up an online presence will not yield any positive results.

How did FoMoCo (Ford Motor Company) do it?

The Ranger Station is a popular website set up by Jim Oaks, for Ford Ranger vehicle enthusiasts. On 9 December 2008, he received a letter from Ford Motor Company demanding that he close down his website and reimburse the company with US$5000. At 6:00pm that day, Jim Oaks made an entry in the TRS forums and also sent an email to the website’s member list urging fellow enthusiasts for cooperative support. That was when the crisis broke out and spread like wildfire overnight.

In an effort to contain the communications nightmare that was happening, Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford, leverage his 5,600 twitter followers for help and although only 19 of his followers retweet-ed his message, it reach a total of 13,400 people. After discussion with Ford’s legal department, Scott Monty clarified to the public that they are not seizing TRS’s website but simply encourage TRS and other fan sites bearing Ford’s logo and trade marks “to contact Ford to request a license to continue using the domain name”. Once again, Scott Monty disseminated Ford’s official statement on twitter and reached over 21,000 users through retweet-ing. The crisis was thus effectively squelched in a matter of 22 hours.

Had Ford taken the traditional route of orgainising a committee and setting up a press conference, this crisis would probably have developed into the following day’s news headline, which would have made things a lot more difficult to handle.

What can we learn from this?

The importance of developing a good crisis communications strategy, and setting aside a dedicated team to handle a crisis, should not be taken lightly. With new media, it takes time and effort to build up support and a group of followers, and without the relevant support, social media tools will not produce any effective results. Unlike traditional paradigms where control is governed by only a few exclusive influencers who have the ability to publish, today anyone can become a publisher and have significant influence through their social media networks.

In order to effectively manage a crisis, you will need to consider the impact of social media in your crisis communications strategy plan and shift your focus from a linear rigid pipeline, to a more dynamic web-like network of influencers.

The relationship between sales, marketing and PR has changed forever.

We’re longer marketing to prospects but developing relationships where both parties are engaged in a mutually beneficial discussion. To achieve such a state, we need to revamp the relationship between sales, marketing and PR.

Sales people aren’t going to change. There will always be good and bad ones. Genuine helpers and scammers. The smart ones will adapt, others will change profession forever. Same for Marketing. Same for PR.

What has changed however, is the sales process. Thanks to the internet, and the development of content, each of its steps has evolved. Yet we still see it as linear, funnel like, even though it is now more like an exponential web with influencers coming out of the woodworks changing, reshaping, stopping and re-starting the sales process in ways that most sales people, and even customers, are not used to. What is fascinating is that almost each and every of its steps are a sales process in itself, not just steps on a ladder, and not all necessarily coming in the sequence we are use to.

Until a few years ago, you could still rely on a straightforward approach to selling where you’d start identifying potential customers, define the right message, engage in a conversation at multiple levels and bring them by the hand to completion. The first impact of the internet was to change the way the sales cycle begins. Before you hear about them, prospects would have hunted you down and are armed with more information about your product or services than your brochures contains. They would have even talked with other customers or read their posting online before talking with you. Some customers might even have jumped right to the end of the cycle and buy without having seen a single sales person.

If we keep on thinking in a linear mode, we’ll all go the way of the dinosaurs, regardless of our best efforts.

To solve this problem, keep in mind that at the heart of this non-linear sales cycle is content and interaction.

Content is king is almost as old a cliche as the one stating that only half of our advertising works. Yet in today’s ever expanding content rich world, developing traditional content such as websites, brochures, articles or even white papers, is no longer enough. You need to be one step ahead by constantly creating new ideas, opinions and thoughts. Not to change the world, this is business, not philosophy, but by answering complaints or commenting on ideas posted in often non-related sites. In a way, content is about ideas, not descriptions.

As for interaction, you need to constantly search for the opportunity and act on it in a non-sellsy nor defensive manner. This will give you the opportunity to reach and connect with customers and prospects in ways that goes beyond your sales cycle and closer to their buying cycle.

You’re no longer marketing or selling to prospects but developing public relations to its finest, where both parties are learning about each other and engaged in a mutually beneficial discussion.