AT&T Park, San Francisco

The return of baseball season is an exciting time at Nuffer, Smith, Tucker– it’s something to follow, discuss and tease each other about.  It represents hope (although Kerry has expressed “limited optimism” in the Padres management this year) and a renewed excitement in our downtown office, where we have a great view down the third-base line at Petco Park.

If you’ve walked by my desk, it’s not hard to tell I’m a San Francisco Giants fan (hint: you may’ve noticed the “Beard Yourself Like Brian Wilson” poster behind my computer or the Barry Bonds bobblehead on the file cabinet), but above all else, I’m a baseball fan.  I can watch a 0-0 tie going into the 9^th inning of any game and be perfectly happy.  I’m intrigued by matchups, left-handed pitching vs. right-handed hitting, fielders playing close against certain hitters, late inning switches… It’s all fascinating and predicated on the idea of playing to one’s strengths.  Sure, you can put a lineup out there and hope for the best, but good managers are active – they know their competition inside and out, they know who hits better against certain relievers, and they’re thinking several steps ahead for the good of the team.

Public relations done right is a lot like baseball.  It involves analyzing trends, assessing your competition, identifying your strengths and key differentiators, and putting together a solid game plan for success.  We’d be happy to help you think through some of those things for your business and how to best utilize that information to reach your strategic business goals through branding, media relations, online marketing, social media and/or graphic design.  And, if you want to talk baseball, we’d like that too.

“Hitting is fifty percent ‘above the shoulders.’” – Ted Williams  

At NST, setting goals is in the fabric of our company. We believe in strategy and in moving toward an objective that has clear benefits for our clients and their stakeholders. Sometimes setting and making goals comes easily. Sometimes you need a little extra motivation to get you to the finish line. Stickie notes serve as my motivation.

I was recently tasked with setting goals to grow a client’s social media following and website visits over the course of three months. Unfortunately, the “if you build it, they will come” saying doesn’t always ring true in the digital world. We had to do a little extra work to make sure that not only were the right eyeballs getting on our social media pages, but they were also clicking “like” and “follow,” ingesting our content and ultimately clicking through to our website. No small feat.

We identified monthly goals and outlined tactics that would lead us in the right direction. Then I grabbed a Sharpie and some Post-it notes, and made sure those objectives were staring me in the face every day. Ultimately, with a combination of Facebook advertising, special offers, engaging posts and blogger outreach, we not only met our goals, we exceeded them. The number of Facebook fans rose by 456 percent. Twitter impressions were up 410 percent. We created valuable conversations about our client online and increased website visits by 45 percent.

Yes, it’s quite possible we would have reached those goals without the adornment of stickie notes to my cubicle. But, for me, they served as a reminder to constantly be focused on the end results of our plan and push myself to guarantee we surpassed our client’s expectations. They helped motivate me every day. What do you use to motivate yourself?

Besides the Timeline’s obvious two-column feature that pulls in content chronologically from the left and then the right, there are a few new features to be aware of in regards to where a brand’s content now lives on Facebook’s revamped pages. Emphasis is now placed on communication within the Timeline wall. However, there are a few ways brands can highlight important posts. It is widely believed that Facebook made these changes in an attempt to keep brands’ communication with individual users as organic as possible.

Here are a few of the features:

• Static profile information. Upon scrolling down the page and leaving the cover photo and “above the fold” features, you’ll see a new profile bar pop up on the top of the screen. This bar will stay static and allow your page users to access different page content without having to scroll back up to the top of the page.

• Post box. The first box on the left column will feature the traditional features needed to post or comment on the page. This feature looks and acts the same as the old layout.

• Friends box. The first box on the right column will feature pictures of the users friends who also like the brand page. Although the friends box will stay static across the platform, its content will be personalized for each user.

• Recent posts by friends and others. The box immediately under the friends box on the right side of the page will feature posts concerning the brand made by the visitor’s friends. Immediately following will be a box showcasing the most recent posts regarding the brand by other users. Brands can choose to eliminate the “recent posts by others” box in the Timeline if they wish.

• Featured content vs. pinned posts. Brands now have the ability to identify posts that hold significant meaning and make them appear more prominent on the Timeline. By hovering over the top right corner of a post, an edit box appears. You can now “highlight” a post to stretch it to the full length of the Timeline, covering both the left and right columns. This post will be larger in size, but stay in chronological posting order. Or, “pin” a post to the top of the Timeline and the selected content will be moved to the top of the Timeline where it will be listed first and stay for seven days before returning to its place in chronological order.

• Direct messaging. Users can now send direct messages to brand page admins allowing organizations to handle customer service issues or other sensitive matters in private. Note that pages are not able to initiate private messages with fans or any other user – users must initiate the direct message. However, the page admin can suggest a fan contact them through direct messaging to take a conversation offline and provide further support.

Not sure what type of content your brand should highlight or pin? We’re happy to talk strategy with you to make sure your optimizing Facebook’s Timeline features, or even a larger social media strategy, in a way that makes sense for your brand.

This blog post is the second in a three-part series. The first blog looks at Facebook Timeline cover photos and above the fold features.

It’s the announcement that everyone in marketing has been on the edge of their seat waiting for – Facebook Timeline for brands. Recently, a few NSTers were able to sit in on some webinars about the new features.  We had so many notes on the new features that we’ve broken them out into a three-part blog series, starting below with “above the fold” features.

Although the changes affecting brand pages will require us to make a few tweaks to our clients’ pages, overall, we’re excited!  Some of the features are downright cool, like the new cover photo.  Here are a few of the new elements you should be aware of:

• Default landing pages are no more.  Visitors will automatically go to a brand’s wall, or Timeline.  This, along with some of Facebook’s other changes, highlights the importance of posting and engaging with fans regularly.
• Brand cover photo.  Brands now have an 851 x 315-pixel area at the top of the page for a cover photo, which will be public to everyone.  This can be a fun or artsy photo or design, but cannot include:

• Smaller profile pictures.  At 180 x 180 pixels, the profile photo overlaps with the cover photo.  There are some creative ways to have this work with your cover photo, as these brands show, but the profile picture is still a prominent feature when interacting with a brand, so it’s important to have it work by itself too.
• Application changes.  The applications that were previously listed as tabs on the left sidebar will now appear as boxes below the cover photo (see Coca-Cola’s four applications above: Photos, Likes, Home, Your Stories).  However, there are only four spots immediately visible and one will be taken up by photos, which is a static feature.  Therefore, you should design custom icons (110 x 74 pixels) for at least three other tabs that will be visible “above the fold” without clicking to see more.
• Once visitors click on those application boxes, the tabs they see will now also have a larger area (810 pixels wide).  Current tabs (at 520 pixels) will be centered, but you should consider filling the extra space.

What are your thoughts on losing the welcome page option and gaining the cover photo?  Leave us a comment with your thoughts and stay tuned for Part 2 in our 3-part series on the subject.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I don’t want to be on Twitter. I don’t care what you ate for lunch or that you’re brushing your teeth.” Countless, right? While most marketing professionals understand the impact social media can have on a business or issue, the general layman may not.

This week’s “Kony 2012” campaign, created by San Diego group Invisible Children, may change that perception. The nonprofit organization produced a video highlighting the travesties committed by Joseph Kony, the leader of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, who has led the organization as it has kidnapped tens of thousands of children and forced them to commit heinous crimes in African countries.

As we witnessed with Libya and other uprisings in the Middle East, social media has become more than a platform for communicating with friends, but a tool for social change. These technologies have the ability to break down geographic barriers and help us create human connections.

A lot more interesting than what I had for lunch, huh?

Read More:

U-T San Diego

Los Angeles Times

Each year, I’m excited when the San Diego Social Media Symposium (SDSMS) comes around. It’s a great time to get together with my peers and learn about the ever-changing world of social media.

While listening to the dialog on compelling brand content, online reputation management or word-of-mouth marketing, there was an overriding theme throughout the day. A brand/company needs to be authentic and strategic in their online efforts and even ask if having a social media presence is necessary. At NST, helping our clients strategically think through their own situation is at the core of our firm’s being, so it was wonderful to hear others share our philosophy.

The day kicked off with an insightful presentation from @JasonFalls who discussed the seven business drivers of social media marketing and ways to measure your social media ROI. He presented excellent case studies that reinforced how focusing on those business drivers will allow brands to ultimately drive sales and how to attribute those sales to social media efforts.

Other insights from @JasonFalls:

• Never measure brand awareness in dollars. Measure in interest (i.e. conversations, engagement).
• Social media allows brands to protect reputation by speaking directly to consumers and brand ambassadors.
• Social media marketing is an extension of public relations and belongs with that scope of work.
• Build communities around the topic and not the product or business.
• You can perform customer service for free by using social media—spend time not money with your customers.
• Build a following and then market research is almost free using social media.
• Social media marketing can allow small business to engage in research and development at a low or no cost.
• Goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and execution are needed to implement social media marketing efforts.
• What does social mean? You need to be at the table and a member of the community.
• Don’t tell me you are on Facebook or Twitter, tell me why I should follow you.
• People buy from people they know, like and trust. If you provide good value, people will like you and over time will trust you.

Other takeaways from the panelists:

• Create a handshake with consumers and drive them to other products/brand/content. Laura Naviaux, @Sonyonline
• Be unique to your brand and don’t go with off the shelf solutions. Seth Silver, @wecontrol
• Social media is a marathon and not a sprint. Laura Naviaux, Sony
• It all starts with strategy. It’s the same process to make a site sticky. Map out the entire user experience and test it. Seth Silver, Social Control
• Recognize that crisis communication issues are going to end up on social media. Don’t ignore it; redirect it to internally monitored sites. Laura Naviaux, Sony
• Only follow personal, unique interactions and not automated tweets. @EdwardLewisASR
• We are about to enter a new era based on the Internet and mobile and it’s going to be big. Follow the change and don’t panic. @GaryKim
• Trust is an important word in everything we do now. Gary Kim, Mobile Marketing & Technology
• A major pitfall is to have a cookie cutter response for positive and negative feedback. Lack of authenticity is the first red flag for your customers. @GQCarpenter @HiltonBayfront
• From the smallest company to the largest, everyone should have a crisis communications plan in place. @AprilBolduc @sdge
• Offline relationships can lead to online success. The key is relationships and having something to share. @realtordotcom @movetrends
• Before engaging in social media, listen and decide which conversations to engage. Then prepare procedures and policies on how to respond. Paige Perdue @originalWD40
• Voice is important. You should know who we are by reading the information and not having to see our logo. @Bcupham @FijiWater

For more on SDSMS, download the tweets at http://www.hashtracking.com/fast-report/?hashtag=sdsms

Managing your company’s community, blog or social networking page can be a daunting task.  As a community manager, you’re often responsible for balancing the needs of your members or subscribers with those of your organization, providing a consistent user experience, monitoring news and trends, posting engaging content, moderating content from others, measuring progress… The list goes on and on.  Here are a few tips, with thought-provoking questions below them, that should help you think through your community management strategy:

Define Roles and Responsibilities

• How does having a community, blog or social networking page fit within or help advance your company’s strategic business goals?
• Do you have the time, talent and resources to manage your community well?
• What behaviors do you want members or subscribers to exhibit, and what can you do to help them get there?
• How are you measuring success?

Be Consistent, but Add Value

• Does your community offer a similar user experience with your website, collateral and other materials?
• Is the tone and voice in your messages consistent?
• What are you doing to add value and encourage a two-way dialogue instead of just posting one-way marketing messages?

Identify and Leverage Community Leaders

• How often do you just say “thank you” to your members or subscribers?
• What’s the best way to incentivize increased engagement?
• How are you positioning your community as a resource?

Nuffer, Smith, Tucker has been managing communities for more than a decade, before the term “social media” was coined.  While we may not have all the answers to these questions without getting to know your organization and its key stakeholders first, we’d be happy to share our insights and ideas and work with you to make your community the best it can be.

Our team has been talking with potential panelists for a few months now, and each conversation gets us more pumped for the diversity and dialogue we’re going to have at the San Diego Social Media Symposium.

We’ve talked to so many inspiring and knowledgeable individuals, that we’re announcing a fourth panel “Best Practices: Social Media Case Studies.” The addition will give attendees even more first-hand stories, experiences and learning moments from the folks with their boots on the ground.

In addition to adding a fourth panel (don’t worry, we’ll still wrap things up by 4:30 p.m.), we’ve secured panelists from companies such as Cisco Systems, FIJI Water, JustFab.com, Social Control and Realtor.com. We’ll be hearing their perspectives in addition to our keynote speaker Jason Falls and lunch speaker Gary Kim.

Checkout the full agenda and panelist line up, and start formulating your questions for our social media specialists.

Register online at www.sandiegosocialmediasymposium.com.

What do Karl Strauss Brewing Company, San Diego Gas & Electric, San Diego Hilton Bayfront and Sony Online Entertainment have in common? Representatives from these companies will be panelists at the upcoming San Diego Social Media Symposium on March 1, 2012 – and that’s not all.  Gary Kim – who was just named #2 in Forbes list of the top 10 power influencers in mobile – will join the line-up with an hour-long discussion on trends in mobile marketing.

We are also announcing this year’s panel topics: Creating Compelling Brand Content; Online Reputation Management; and Online and Offline Word of Mouth: The Perfect Combination.

Keynote speaker, Jason Falls, author of “No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing”, will help answer the burning question: what about ROI?

The detailed line up and additional panelists will be announced soon, but meanwhile, don’t forget to purchase your tickets before the early bird registration date closes one week from today – January 27, 2012. Visit the website to learn more about the event.

How much is too much sharing when it comes to social media? We all have “friends” on our feeds that post incessantly throughout the day, divulging intimate details of their lives that no one truly wants to know. These over-sharers have been around a long time, and they’re probably not going to stop sharing personal information any time soon. Recently, the No. 1 search engine took personalization and online searches to a new level when Google launched Google Search, plus Your World.

The new functionality incorporates the content of Google+ users into the search results of anyone connected to that user. This means, if I run a Google search looking for good wine bars in the Gaslamp area, it’s quite possible that photos posted by my friends who attended San Diego Wine Wednesday at Proper Gastro Pub would populate in my results, along with the standard search results for that particular term. This new search system has some benefits, but also has some people longing to return to how things used to be.

There are two levels on which people seem to be upset about Google Search, plus Your World: concern over privacy, and annoyance at irrelevant results cluttering up searches for breaking news. Those concerned with not finding pertinent results should consider hiding Google+ results or switching to a new search engine altogether. By giving preference to Google+ content, Google Search, plus Your World pushes more informative results, like company websites, Wikipedia pages or news sites, to the bottom of the page. For those worried about privacy, this change serves as yet another reminder that anything made public on a social media profile is out there for the world to see.

This change provides both an opportunity and a challenge for brands. We already know developing content for a Google+ profile is important for a brand because Google admitted having a brand page on their social network would yield higher results in Google searches. Now we know that a brand’s Google+ content is even more likely to be seen by people who have placed the brand in their circles. However, it also means your company’s actual website and other non-Google+ content will be harder to find when a customer searches your name.

It’s important to note the added exposure to your brand’s social media content is limited to Google+ pages. Don’t expect your company’s Facebook page or Twitter account to be getting equal real estate any time soon. This change in search results is clearly pointed at giving exposure to Google’s burgeoning social network, not all social networks in general, and it’s made at least one other social network unhappy.

As more than 62 million Google+ users navigate the murky waters of their new search results, we wonder if Google will acknowledge the public’s dissatisfaction with its recent move. What’s your opinion on these changes? Have they given you a reason to favor Google over other search engines or look for a replacement? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.