Are you ready for some Football and helping hand of Social Media?

As a huge football fan, I always look forward to that time of the year when the Super Bowl is what everyone is talking about. But this year there is a new wrinkle, with social media such as Facebook and Twitter taking center stage.  These two social media powerhouses have an estimated 700 million users worldwide, and it’s no surprise that users have been tweeting and posting about the upcoming Super Bowl.

Advertisers, who have historically spent large sums of money on Super Bowl commercials, are trying to link their clever and comical Super Bowl ads with social media.  Estimates predict that 50 percent of ads shown during the Super Bowl will incorporate social media compared to just 25 percent of ads last year.  For example, Visa created “Go Inside the Super Bowl with Visa” (http://sbtwitter.nfl.com/) where one can gain direct access to tweets  by NFL players, executives and sports journalists.  Visa even has a “tweet off” between the Steelers and Packers fans.  Using a graphic of a hundred-yard field colored with the two teams’ colors, Visa is measuring the number of twitter mentions of #Packers and #Steelers at http://sbtwitter.nfl.com/matchup/.  As of February 3, 2011, the Packers fans lead the Steelers fans 57 percent to 43 percent.

Mercedes-Benz is also having a promotion called “Tweet Race” where four teams driving modified 2012 C-Class coupes will compete against each other in making it to the Super Bowl.  However, Mercedes-Benz added a twist by basing the teams’ fuel supplies on their own tweets and tweets from people following them.  Each car will have a celebrity coach who will also help them by tweeting up their followers.  Mercedes-Benz is calling it “The World’s First Twitter-Fueled Race”.  VW took advantage of social media last year when it launched the “Punch Dub” commercial which drew 50,000 Facebook fans  and more than one million views online.

Not to be outdone, Audi will be introducing some social media firsts this Super Bowl Sunday as well.  Audi will be the first brand to display a twitter hashtag in its Super Bowl ad.  The #ProgressIs hashtag will be displayed prominently during its ad.

Fans and players are also using social media by sending tweets on Super Bowl parties. Dallas Cowboy Miles Austin invited over 90,000 fans to join him for pre-Super Bowl party and a chance to win Super Bowl tickets. Other players nationwide are planning similar events closer to Super Bowl kickoff.  It’s a great opportunity for fans to meet their favorite football player.  I’m still holding to my dream that Darrell Green will hold a Super Bowl party at the local Green Turtle.

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Extending The Life Of Media Coverage Through Social

A couple weeks back, a colleague of mine on the account side came to me with a question:

“We just scored this amazing media placement for one of our clients in [Tier-One Publication]. Do you have any ideas for how we can get some additional traction for the article?”

Harkening back to my days as a lowly Assistant Account Executive, presenting my SVP with a similar piece of media coverage that I no doubt, spent countless hours pursuing and securing, I remembered his response: “That’s great. But did you get the Journal yet?!!”

Subduing my urge to respond in a similar fashion and saving my colleague the dejection that I had felt, I provided a more constructive response.

The fact is, media column inches have been shrinking at an exponential rate. Newspapers are shutting their doors with a few viable ones moving their operations online. To compound the issue, marketing budgets are decreasing as companies look for efficiencies in generating awareness for their brands. What does this all mean? It means that that piece of coverage you secured in Wired or in Crain’s New York Business is ten times more valuable today than it was, say, five years ago.

So then how can we extend the life of that press coverage? Here are some tried-and-true methods, as well as some new thinking:

• Company Web site Newsroom: While this method has been used for years, its importance and value cannot be denied. Posting your article placement on your Web site’s newsroom will not only aid in search engine optimization (SEO), but customers, investors, and prospects like to know that their vendor/partner is getting quoted-positively-in the news. Additionally, other reporters who are doing research for a related story, may stumble upon the article, your insightful quote, and could follow up with another interview request.

• Social Media Newsroom: Many companies are starting to develop social media newsrooms as part of their content marketing strategies. But aside from posting links and PDFs of your media coverage and press releases, the social media newsroom should have images, video and other social links to really drive value. Some of the most successful social newsrooms link back to the company’s social media channels (Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) as well as RSS feeds, links to subscribe by e-mail, eNewsletters, and event calendars.

• Share it!: I used to represent a number of law firms and I always loved walking into a partner’s office to find the walls COVERED with framed news clippings. Although I never had the gall to crop and frame the few media clippings I’ve been quoted in over the years, I would immediately rush out and buy up every copy of the newspaper or magazine to share with my family and friends-my mom has all the copies. The idea here is that we should be sharing this coverage with our networks, both offline and online. Brands should be sharing the coverage in monthly/quarterly corporate newsletters, tweeting out links to the coverage, including marketing collateral for your salesforce, posting content in the discussion section of your LinkedIn group, and sharing a link to the article with your Facebook fans. While the channels and methods have changed, the underlying idea is the same.

• Write About it: A lesson that I learned early on in my career in public relations is that an hour-long interview with a reporter MIGHT turn into a one sentence quote in an article. And a lot of times, that quote may not match what you actually said. For companies or individuals that have blogs, an excellent way to extend the life of the coverage would be to write about the article. And I don’t mean simply regurgitating the content of the article, but expanding on the main points of the piece, providing additional insights that the reporter may have missed and inviting readers to provide their thoughts and extend the conversation.

• Post it: Aside from the usual social suspects (Facebook and Twitter), there are a number of content aggregators where you can posts links to news, byline articles, white papers, etc… Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange, is a personal favorite of mine. The site hosts hundreds of topic categories from Social Media Marketing to Leadership to Global Business. There are hundreds of people active in each of the topic “communities,” regularly sharing content. Additionally, BusinessWeek is consistently one of the highest ranked domains in search, bringing your quote in Poultry Times into the first three pages of Google results. Posting on other content aggregator sites such as Digg and Reddit is also a must.

• Create a Video: No, I don’t mean getting your CEO to sit in front of a camera and having them read the full article-unless they are reading a particularly compelling op-ed they wrote. Similar to the idea of drafting a blog post, have the subject matter expert quoted in the article discuss the topic of the piece in a short video that can be posted in your social media newsroom and on your company’s YouTube channel. We are all aware of the explosion of online video and its benefits for search. Creating a short video related to the article, developing a Q&A, or even having a sales rep. provide a demo of your product can be much more engaging than handing a prospect a product data sheet.

• Monitor: A critical step that we often forget as we are busy making clips decks and getting poster-size reprints of our placements is to monitor the article after it has run. There may be comments posted by readers on the media outlet’s site that can be responded to. Readers may have tweeted a link to the coverage or shared a link to the article on their Facebook page. In a number of instances, there may be misinformation in the comments that need to be addressed, or quite simply, readers to thank for sharing your positive coverage with their networks.

So how have you extended the life of a media placement you’ve secured? Let me know your thoughts while I go post a link to this blog post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Business Exchange….oh, and e-mail it to my mom…

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What If the Customer’s Wrong?

I went to sign in to my personal e-mail this morning and what did I find but a lovely tattooed lady, the portrait of independence and personal style. In this vivid imagery, Yahoo! is telling me they’re where it’s at for a customized experience of the Web in all its social, informational and visually engaging glory.

Because isn’t that what users want? A platform that fits the way they use the Web? It’s the goal of a business to fill a consumer’s need, and it’s the marketer’s job to define that need and explain why said business is the right solution.

Technology companies have been leading the pack, even getting the credit for lifting the country’s struggling stock market, because they offer new, cutting-edge solutions, often times to needs consumers never even had before the Information Age changed the game forever.

But I can’t help but wonder. Have businesses shifted their service strategies too far into the realm of pandering to be truly productive. After all, what if the customer is wrong?

Admission: It’s a bit of a stretch to go from Yahoo!’s perfectly reasonable offering of a personalized home page to a larger criticism of companies that let their customers call the shots. But you follow me, right?

Okay, fair enough. Here’s a better example. Would you ever let your life be dictated by the Twitter mob? One guy’s doing it as an experiment dreamed up by his advertising firm. On Monday, David Perez will be at Twitter’s disposal for a week-long exercise in black-belt-degree submission. Just send a Twitter message to @davidondemand and he’ll do what you tell him to (within the law, of course). Supposedly, this isn’t just another scheme to get attention. Rather, it’s meant to demonstrate how advertising is becoming more personal thanks to technology.

So I’m supposed to view @davidondemand as some kind of progressive art installation? What exactly are we supposed to understand from this marketing mess? That the ad agency responsible will bend over backwards based on a customer’s whims? It may seem like the customer wins in that situation, but if suddenly that same theory became a trendy new school of parenting, there’d by thousands of angry, spoiled, fat toddlers running around demanding you hand over another puppy-cupcake duo.

Turns out, people are pretty awful at predicting what makes them happy. Furthermore, the more options you offer to meet any individual consumer’s desires, the unhappier that individual becomes. And of course, by letting the consumer dictate the offering, a business has no room for innovation. A business shouldn’t spend all day chasing the whims of customers who aren’t the experts in your field, who can’t visualize the full trajectory of the industry and who would be doing what you do if they did know it all.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s certainly a place for identifying business opportunities as they pop up. And this strategy can result in wins all around. The Hide Google Options plugin we developed recently was a fast response to a brand new problem and it quickly became one of the most popular ways to turn off Google’s three-column user interface and a link magnet that got us visibility and pats on the back from a relevant audience.

On the other hand, look at Google’s response to the user interface backlash. They’re not budging. They expect that users will adjust and are sticking to their guns. If I were a betting woman, I’d take one look at Google’s track record of success and side with them on this one. Sorry, Susan. [I freely admit that I just don't like change. —Susan]

For the final word, I’ll turn to another formidable force in the tech world: Apple. It’s fairly well known that Steve Jobs doesn’t do market research. And yet his company continues to set the bar for whoda-thunk tech devices that quickly become any American’s fifth limb. Rather than asking people what they want, they ask themselves what a great product would be and then strike out toward that goal.

Have you ever had an experience where trying to make a customer happy ended up backfiring? Have you ever found success by ignoring what a customer requested? Or do you think I’ve gone off the deep end completely? Share your thoughts in the comments. I promise to listen — even if we don’t agree.

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