An increasing number of businesses are harnessing the power of Social Media to drive sales, open doors and position themselves as experts.

If your clients and prospects are engaging with their audiences through tools such as blogs, LinkedIn and Twitter and you’re not – your ‘Social Media savvy’ competitors will steal a march.

As more of Quest’s delivery centres on consulting on Social Media strategy, managing blogs and training companies how to present, film and edit videos for their websites and blogs, we always advise our clients to listen before launching.

Use tools such as Google alerts to find out who is saying what about your brand, your industry and your competitors. This intelligence gathering will steer you to the right tools.

Then decide who to engage with, establishing different messages for different audiences. As ‘Content is King’, produce ‘killer content’ to achieve stand out.

To launch a B2B Social Media campaign that accelerates your traditional PR programme, follow this 12-step plan for maximum impact:

1. Intelligence gather via Google alerts and tools
2. Establish content plan for blog
3. Establish blogging team and arrange training in making blog videos
4. Set up LinkedIn profile, contacts and testimonials
5. Launch twitter and build followers
6. Launch blog with six posts and two videos (Google loves video)
7. Feed blog content to journalists
8. Use blog content to drive LinkedIn discussions
9. Use Twitter to ‘Tweet’ blog content
10. Use blog content for marketing activities (e-shots etc)
11. Measure ROI via SEO/Social Media platforms
12. Sustain the killer content and momentum

As more journalists seek out interviewees from company blogs and Linkedin profiles, Social Media – when executed properly – will turbo charge your marketing campaign. See www.questblog.com on how it is boosting companies’ bottom lines.

CONTACT
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E  Sharon@quest-pr.com
www.quest-pr.com, www.questprblog.com, follow us on LinkedIn (Sharon Cain) or @SharonCain and @QuestPR on Twitter.

In my previous post I described how Celtic Castles had created ‘The Castle Man’ brand on our website to promote expert knowledge.  We then launched ‘The Castle Man’ on Twitter following the great website response.

We created a Twitter background to compliment our branding, followed a few people we knew – and we waited to see if anyone followed us.

We found a company selling similar luxury properties (not specifically castles) who had 750 followers. We thought, if we had 750 people following us and we tweeted a special offer which sold all the rooms, how cool would that be!

Our Twitter journey gained momentum. We worked on ‘quality not quantity’, and after 6 months and over 400 tweets The Castle Man had 180 followers.

The Christmas fairytale snow was perfect for us and further boosted sales thanks to Twitter!

In 2009 we generated over £47,000 in sales for castle accommodation through Twitter which also brought us new revenue streams. In another exciting development through a contact gained through Twitter, Celtic Castles has branched out as an estate agent which is featuring and selling 30 chateaux in France.

So to summarise the benefits:

1. We have 185+ Twitter followers who may not have otherwise have found our website.
2. We receive several hundred site visits each month from Twitter links that boosts traffic and opportunities to present our castle experiences. In February this figure generated 423 page views.
3. Our website receives free brand exposure on Twitter by our followers who retweet our special offers.
4. I have met loads of interesting people, some of whom I have connected with personally face to face, so this has also become a networking tool.
5. We have become a castle Estate Agent!

Twitter won’t be productive for every business. However, ignoring it as a B2C tool when your competitors are using it, could result in your website missing out on some of the benefits of branding and selling via Twitter that we’ve enjoyed. Even as a B2B tool, it has worked for us as well and we expect even more revenue and journeys via this media. We have even more exciting plans for Twitter for the future which we’ll share in another post!

Celtic Castles has been online since 1998 and now features over 90 hand picked castles throughout the UK, Ireland and France. Contact Roger on Twitter at @The_Castle_Man or visit http://www.celticcastles.com

As the debate over the hard line benefits of investing in social media continues to rage, the Quest blog is launching a series of case studies to highlight the wealth of powerful success stories from businesses who are harnessing the power of social media.

The first of our guest posts is from Roger Masterson @The_Castle_Man whose online business is a the leading provider of castle accommodation. Thanks to Twitter the business boosted sales by almost £50k in less than 6 months.

We had heard of Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin and of course this was all bundled as Social Media. We didn’t have time for this, we didn’t understand it and I thought that it was for younger people! I also questioned when would we find time to learn all this new STUFF! Let alone using it for the business.

Deep down I was hoping that this will be a fad, something else will come along to replace it. I did not even own a mobile phone, and we operate the biggest online booking service for castle experiences. I thought we could let this one go over our heads.

How wrong I was! Twitter has brought the Internet alive for me again, generated revenue, creating new revenue streams and a new aspect to our business.

The Fumbled Beginning:

Celtic Castles had created a brand within a brand to promote expertise knowledge, ‘The Castle Man’ in March 2009. This would give our customers direct contact with an expert on castles, and we linked this via a webform. We would collect the customer details and their query. SIMPLE. In the first 4 weeks this generated £34, 320 and we were happy.

We set up ‘The Castle Man’ on Twitter because we were getting such a good response through our website. Having researched competitors we thought ‘we can do better than that’ and having the tweets on our home page was an additional tool to link in new information and promote key aspects of castle experiences.

On the 8th July 2009 the first tweet was:

Golf fans, stay at Culzean Castle for the British Open, just 4 miles from Turnberry! Rooms from £250 per night http://bit.ly/166ycp

We thought that if we could build an audience with an interest in staying in castles, we can share our knowledge for free. If this audience reads the articles, some of them may book a stay, and in turn we may start to generate another revenue stream. More in our next post on how we got started and how successful we were.

Celtic Castles has been online since 1998 and now features over 90 hand picked castles throughout the UK, Ireland and France. Contact Roger on Twitter at @The_Castle_Man or visit http://www.celticcastles.com

Back when I was doing my degree one of my first (and most basic) journalism seminars covered the subject of the ‘five Ws’. It was hardly rocket science, but it is still a fundamental part of journalism and PR and one that is just as applicable to social media.

Until recently social media has been focusing on four of these Ws:

Who – Whether it’s using @tags on Twitter or simply referencing someone on Facebook.

What – The key to most tweets, updates and blog posts.

When – Whether you pay close attention to trending topics or not, nearly all posts are time stamped.

Why – Often the question is ‘why would you post that?’ But it doesn’t take long to find social media avenues jammed with people asking for advice and opinion or in a lot of cases offering it, whether asked for or not.

As 2010 gets in to full swing the social media focus is going to move from the four Ws above and on to the fifth, ‘where’.

Two of the biggest buzz names in social media right now are Foursquare and Gowalla. More than anything they want to know where you are and both look to enter the mainstream as the year moves on.

The idea behind both services is that users (through GPS) earn rewards for being in certain places, offering advice based on where they are or have been. Say you arrive in Japan and want to find a nearby restaurant; services like these will be able to tell you if your friends have been there already and what they thought of them. This is just one example, but as with most social media, the true application of the services are decided by those that use them.

It’s not all about recommendation engines. There is also the fun and addictive (according to some) element of being rewarded with medals and items for visiting certain places. This part of the service is what will gain it mass appeal, where as recommendations could prove the most useful element.

It isn’t just a new wave of applications that is driving the ‘where’ question. Established social media application Tweetdeck recently added geo-tagging to its mobile application, allowing tweets to be mapped. If we go back to ‘snowmaggedon’ in early January the UKsnow hashtag dominated Twitter as the country tweeted about levels of snow and affixed postcodes to them.

As the latest incarnation of the iPhone starts to sell more units, the inbuilt compass should drive applications to use augmented reality, like Wikitude did last year and not only make where you are important, but what direction you’re facing too.

How quickly these services are adopted as marketing tools depends not only on the marketers and PROS but also their uptake by the public. While Gowalla, Foursquare and others are proving hot topics in media circles they will need the same kind of exposure that was lavished on Twitter in 2009 before they can become relevant.  In the meantime, it’s always good to stay ahead of the pack, so why not download some of the most popular now, before BBC Breakfast News starts talking about them.

Gowalla

Foursquare

Yelp

Wikihood

Wikitude

Tweetdeck

How storming that an increasing number of our long-standing and new clients are harnessing the social media toolkit to define the best tools to drive their business goals and vision.

Before dipping your big toe into the more popular sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, or blogging, begin with the end in mind and establish their relevance in enabling you to engage with those who will boost your bottom line.

Remember, in this brave new business world it’s all about return on engagement as opposed to return on investment – and the more niche, customer-focused, and ethical you are , the more successful you are likely to be in weathering the economic storm.   

The ability to monitor your online reputation and find out who is saying what about your brand, can be accelerated by a number of listening tools as highlighted below. The trick is to listen and follow conversations about issues, news, people and organisations in your sector before making your social media debut. Enjoy he journey and the Quest team looks forward to blogging and tweeting with you!   

• whostalkin.com – A tool allowing you to search for conversations in social media on any topic or brand.
• socialmention.com – Searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news and video etc.
• google.com/alerts – Allows you to get email updates of the latest relevant google results on a name or topic.
• blogsearch.google.com – Follow what is being said about a specific person or topic in blogs.
• howsociable.com – Monitor mentions of your brand online.
• moreover.com – Keep up to date with all your industry news.
• digg.com – Track news about your business and the most popular news relating to your business.
• reddit.com – Like dig, allows you to track news about your business and the most popular news.
• technorati.com – Track what is being said about you on social media sites.
• blogpulse.com/conversation – Allows you to track who’s linking to a blog post about your company.   
• blogpulse.com/trends – Allows you to track the buzz on particular keywords. Useful for example, to monitor a competitor’s new product launch.
• delicious.com – Makes it easy to track whenever someone bookmarks a web page that includes mention of your company.
• video.google.com – Keep track of videos about you or your company.
• keotag.com – Track if someone tags a page using your company or product name.
• boardtracker.com – Keeps track if you are mentioned on popular forums and message boards.
• google.com/trends – Gives you an idea of which keywords are most searched.
• searchanalytics.compete.com – Allows you to enter a keyword and see which web sites are getting traffic for that keyword. Alternatively enter any domain name and see which keywords are driving traffic to that site.
• backtype.com – Monitor blog comments.
• 123people.com – Search for information on people.
• addictomatic.com – Provides a search interface that runs keyword queries against a load of important social, search and blog services.

On the way home from work one evening this week, I enjoyed the distraction of the dulcet tones of Michael Burke on Radio Four’s ‘the Moral Maze’ programme. The topic up for debate on that evening’s offering was the influence of Twitter, and the ‘fine line between popular and spontaneous debate, and mob rule’. Mob rule by the users of Twitter?  It sounded slightly far fetched to me, but who am I to judge? Has Twitter really reached the stage where it can claim to have control over events outside cyberspace?

Admittedly, in the last few weeks the users of Twitter have scored pretty big points against some fairly powerful opponents, in the world of press and beyond. Most of you will certainly be aware of the furore that was caused by some rather choice comments in Jan Moir’s column in the Daily Mail. The day that she decided to attack the late Stephen Gateley with an unpleasant and inflammatory rant about his lifestyle, was one which she will surely live to regret. The furious Twitter campaign which ensued snowballed to such an extent that the Press Complaints Commission received the most objections to a single article in its 18 year history, exceeding 21,000 in all.

There have been other occasions where the so-called ‘Twitterati’ have caused a media storm over seeming insignificant occurrences covered (or not covered – I’ll come to this shortly) in national newspapers. AA Gill, the food critic for the Sunday Times, recently admitted to shooting a baboon, apparently for the sheer fun of it. He confessed, he was tempted by wanting to get ‘a sense of what it might be like to kill someone’. A fairly disturbing sentiment to be sure, but it’s not as if he was cavorting about killing Siberian snow leopards to sport as a fetching coat to all the Christmas parties he has lined up. The particular species that he shot is not endangered, and they are viewed as pests in many of the countries where they thrive. However, after thousands of enraged Tweets from animal lovers and activists alike, widely read nationals like the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Independent and even the Daily Mail picked up the story and reported on it in outraged tones.

So, what have we learnt? That Twitter can be used to get the most respected of columnists in serious hot water. Impressive yes, but is it going to change the world? On this evidence, perhaps not. 

However, in recent weeks the users of Twitter have also scored a victory over a major industrial company. Furious Tweeting made public an injunction by a British oil company, preventing the Guardian from reporting on a question tabled in parliament by the Labour MP Paul Farrelly. The gagging order related to the MP’s concerns about press freedom implications after a ban was obtained stopping the Guardian and other media from publishing the findings of a report related to the toxic oil waste dumped in West Africa in 2006. An incident which led to 1000s of people falling ill in the Ivory Coast.

Now, everyone knows that oil companies possess an immense amount of power, and whether we like it or not, I am sure these sorts of abhorrent incidents are covered up on a regular basis. That the users of Twitter were able to make this episode and the existence of the following damning report public, is impressive to say the least. Oil companies are notoriously dominant; many an opponent has capitulated in the face of fierce opposition from a legal team whose bill is probably bigger than most SMEs’ annual turnover. The fact that Twitter won this particular battle has got to have unscrupulous organisations everywhere quaking in their boots.

You don’t have to like Twitter, you don’t have to use it, you don’t even have to understand it.  But the time has come to accept that it is a powerful force to be reckoned with. Long gone are the days when it was simply a way to find out what Stephen Fry had for breakfast.

Remember that old joke about laying all the economists in the world end-to-end and them still not reaching a conclusion? I often think you could say the same about too many PR practitioners, especially when it comes to defining, and keeping in mind, what exactly our roles are supposed to achieve.

For the record, about the best succinct definition I ever heard is that PR is reputation management for competitive advantage, which encapsulates an assortment of truths HJ Heinz, with its mere 57 varieties, could only dream about.

I’m concerned that this all-too-familiar lack of clarity is manifesting itself again in many organisations’ approach to the numerous and exciting opportunities offered by digital media. It seems to me that too many companies – quite possibly because they’re not being advised well enough by their PR people – are launching themselves into the world of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook without a clear idea of what their presence there is supposed to accomplish.

You see, people in rival organisations now tweeting like there’s no tomorrow isn’t reason in itself for you to emulate them. Nor is it right to take the plunge merely because being able to tell the guys at the golf club that you’re now in the blogosphere does wonders for your ego and makes them feel awestruck.

The truth is that having a presence in digital media is fundamentally no different from any other branch of PR, which is itself essentially akin to any other management discipline. In other words, before you dive in, you need a clear idea where you’re starting from, what objectives you want to achieve, what strategy you’ll employ to accomplish them, what this means in terms of tactical execution, who’ll be responsible and accountable for what, how you’ll evaluate your results and what success will look like, among other key considerations.                

If you don’t employ this kind of disciplined thinking in advance, the result could well be the missing of golden opportunities to enhance dramatically the scope and effectiveness of your PR mix. Take the example of a certain law firm (not one of Quest’s I hasten to add) whose website I was perusing. There, you’ll find a blog, very obviously written by solicitors, which not only lacks an obvious purpose but is couched in the kind of fluent legalese that most people whose names can’t be followed by “LLB” find largely incomprehensible.

So, by all means think seriously about entering this new world, if you aren’t there already – indeed, it may be essential for your business that you do so. But think it through first, as you would any other business venture, and if your PR advisers don’t work with you to establish the desired outcomes …well, it may be time to find new ones.

Nielsen Ratings responded to the claim by Morgan Stanley that ‘teenagers do not use Twitter’ with their own survey. Despite having a much wider sample than 15 year-old intern they came up with some pretty similar results.

My problem with the initial claim was down to the financial services giant taking the word of a lone teenager – his findings were fine and in my opinion were pretty obvious. What got my back up was the media being surprised by this and once again considering Twitter and Facebook as similar social media tools – when the reality is far different.

Nielsen’s claim was based on the statistic that in June 2009, only 16 per cent of Twitter.com users were under the age of 25. In the same month, Twitter reportedly reached 10.7 per cent of all active internet users. So, while Facebook was being driven by the teenage market, with over 50 per cent of its users being under 25, Twitter was pushing forward with a predominantly 25 to 54 demographic. Sure, the two sit under the social media umbrella but they are very different beasts with wildly different applications.

Take a look at some of most followed celebrities on Twitter. Up there with the best of them are the likes of Ellen DeGeneres, Lance Armstrong and Al Gore – hardly the kind of poster people you would expect to find on the bedroom wall of a teenager. I know Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and tech-celeb Ashton Kutcher are high up as well, but red-carpet fodder is still pretty light and a good reflection on the sites users.

While I’m aware that Twitter isn’t about celebrity, I’m also adamant that it isn’t about the other staple diet of teenagers, friends, at least not as much as Facebook is. Twitter plays an important role in the spread of news and current affairs, two areas where teenagers are traditionally uninterested. Try telling a 16 year old that that Twitter doesn’t allow them to create photo albums but they can follow, in real-time, the issues surrounding the Iran elections. I know I’m making sweeping generalisations, but I’m sure their response will be far from enthusiastic.

Facebook should be compared to any social media platform, it has more in common with Yahoo owned photo and video site Flickr. Both support friend lists, profiles and the sharing of images and movies that can be tagged after uploading. More recently Flickr has incorporated a ‘photostream’ section to user’s homepages – very similar to Facebook’s feed.

Of course, Flickr goes after its own market and by doing so is full of amazing photography rather than pictures of drunken people at house parties. In time Twitter will garner a greater youth following as the viral affect results in users signing up because their mates are on Twitter and they don’t want to be left out.

For now, both applications can be useful tools for PR and the marketing mix, but only when seen for what they are – and whom they relate to.

Follow Quest PR on Twitter.

On March 21st 2006 Jack Dorsey typed ‘just setting up my twttr’ in to his computer –back then the Twitter prototype was only an internal messaging service for employees of odeo.com. However, from small acorns a mighty oak has grown and while it may polarise opinion there is no escaping the fact that Twitter is a tool we should all be aware of, both for generating positive PR and avoiding the negative.

So in the spirit of learning from mistakes, here are my three favourite Twitter nightmares:

The Ironic

James Andrews had just landed in Memphis and was about to make his way to the head offices of FedEx to do a presentation on the subject of digital marketing. Finding a spare moment he decided it would be wise to tweet the following: “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say ‘I would die if I had to live here!”

A FedEx employee who also happened to be passionate about his home city saw this tweet and proceeded to send it on the management of FedEx and James Andrews’ employers.

Lesson learned: Don’t publically post anything you wouldn’t be happy for everyone to see.

The Distasteful

Earlier this year Habitat decided to spam all the popular hashtag groups by sending a tweet asking members to join their database. While this is a digital marketing faux pas on its own, the online onslaught was worsened when, along with spamming hashtags including the likes of ‘apple’ and ‘iphone’ they also hit tags relating to the unrest in Iran.

To cap it all they then blamed it on an ‘overenthusiastic intern’, letting the world know that Habitat holds its digital marketing strategy with such high regard that they are happy to farm the work off to a temp.

Lesson learned: Spamming is bad, especially when you capitalise on tragic events. Also, your tweets are part of your identity, be careful who you trust with them.

The Poorly Edited

Daniel O’Brien is a journalist for cracked.com, a comedy website with a leaning towards geek culture. In his March blog he had to admit that even he had fallen foul of Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Instead of typing, as he wanted to: “I know it’s weird because it’s been out of theatres for a while, but I’ve got nothing better to do, so I’m sitting around watching that Liv Tyler movie, The Strangers, because I haven’t seen it, and I’m eating popcorn, because I’m hungry.”

He hurriedly knocked it down to 140 characters and posted this instead: “I know it’s weird, but I’ve got nothing better to do, so I’m watching Strangers. I’m hungry.”

Lesson learned: A glaring reminder to us all when cutting our tweets – they may only be 140 characters long but re-read them just as you would a press release or anything else to be published.

Has anyone got any better examples than these?

Guest post by budding journalist Hannah Baker who has been on a work experience placement with the team at Quest.

As our capital and the largest metropolitan area in the EU, London tends to lead the way in most trends to hit the UK. And, according to a report by the Social Media Library, it is also leading the UK’s new media charge.

The report highlights that although the city only has around 10 per cent of the UK’s population, those residents produce one third of “influential” blogs.

In fact the south of England accounts for more than half of blogs written in the UK, with a mere seven per cent coming from Scotland, just five per cent from Yorkshire and the Humber and two per cent from the North East. North West stats are slightly more “healthy” at 13 per cent due to its vibrant music scene.

But it’s with micro-blogging site Twitter that things get interesting. This social networking phenomenon where the likes of Stephen Fry and Britney Spears tweet to their heart’s content has caught on just about everywhere, not just in London. Site traffic increased by more than 1,000 per cent last year – with reports of a TV spin off in the pipeline.

The capital accounts for 11 per cent of Twitter users, followed by Cambridge with 8 per cent and Manchester with 7 per cent. However, intriguingly the areas where users have an average the highest tally of followers – and therefore potentially influence – are Coventry and Leicester, which top the table with an average of just under 600 “avid” followers each, followed by Bristol and Manchester.

Despite having the highest share of people posting on the site, London ranks towards the bottom of pile with 256 followers.

Appealing to our nosiness and love of intrigue, Twitter provides the perfect platform to spy on what others are up to – perhaps the key to its success across the whole of the UK.