It’s a fractured media world, and if we’re not listening to our audiences, we’re irrelevant, they’ll tune us out and look elsewhere for information.

Tied together, that was likely the most common thread throughout the second San Diego Social Media Symposium.  We need to spend time listening to what our audiences want from us, how and where they want it.  “You don’t control the direction of your company anymore – your customers and clients do,” keynote speaker Peter Shankman aptly pointed out.  “Your job is to create amazing customer experiences.”

Illustrating that point, Shankman noted how Amazon.com became what it is today by listening to its customers to grow beyond an online bookseller.  Similarly, there’s HARO, the e-mailed-based toolbox for journalists looking for sources he built at the behest of friends and associates nudging him for contacts. Delivered three times daily to 200,000 in-boxes, HARO has a ghastly 75 percent open rate.  “It’s e-mail heroin,” Shankman said.

“Small ideas are disruptor ideas, and they change things,” he said.

At the core of it all, Shankman said, is the thirst for information, which “wants to be free.”  We’re witnesses to that today with the unrest in Egypt, where oppressive forces are trying to limit the flow of information, including shutting down the Internet and cell phone lines, Shankman said.

Any organization’s “biggest threat is a 17-year-old kid with a camera who knows how to use Google,” he said, adding that “transparency rules the day” and the more people trust you, the less likely they are to run away from you when there is a problem.

Here are some more nuggets from the symposium.  They’re random and in no prioritized order; share yours and let’s keep the discussion flowing.

• Social media is bullshit.  It’s a faster way to screw up in front of a bunch of people – Shankman
• There are people who won’t agree with what you’re doing, and you’ll have to deal with it – Beth Avant, founder, San Diego MOMfia
• We all despise Steve Olsen at TaylorMade-adidas Golf for having the coolest job interview – ever; period
• Popchips are really good and don’t make you feel guilty – attendee Sharon Penny
• You can’t change someone’s opinion about a fact, but you can try to engage and be supportive – Joel Price, San Diego Chargers, which was the first NFL team on Twitter
• We’re dealing with an average attention span of 2.6 seconds – Shankman (immediately made me think of Doug in the movie “Up”)
• Social games average 15-20 minutes per session; at Pechanga Casino, the average is 40 minutes; Pechanga’s gas station wants a Facebook page
• The 35-54 age demographic is the fastest growing when it comes to texting
• If being tongue-in-cheek is part of your customer experience, go with it, as did Stone Brewing Co. when a manufacturer forgot to add brew to the licensed mustard line
• Mobile consumers want to know how they can save money, where a store is located and pricing information – Dan Flanegan at Brand Anywhere
• Be there. Be transparent. Be Authentic. Listen.  And your community will be more responsive and forgiving – moderator Nicole Vargas
• Bad writing is killing America, it will kill your company and your social media – Shankman

Check out #sdsms on Twitter for more wisdom from the show.

P.S. My original headline was relevant to the first bullet; so was the reason I deleted it.

From the best screw up in news media to how to double food production to feed the hungry, in case you missed it, here’s a sampling of information shared this week by the gang at NST:

Some believe there is an entire generation that has never dialed a 1-800 number. Where are these digital natives and other web-savvy consumers going to air their grievances? http://bit.ly/eOevmS

A website called Regret the Error, which follows corrections, clarifications, apologies, and trends in the world of journalism, has some fun each year by picking its annual “Error of the Year.” http://bit.ly/evL4kZ

Given the state of the U.S. economy, the recent news of the growing number of those losing their jobs and uncertainty in Congress about extending jobless benefits, we may be facing something bordering an epidemic of hungry, needy families. http://bit.ly/fpE0ds

To adorn the office of his new Brooklyn apartment, Saif Ahmed chose a truly one-of-a-kind piece of art. He bought a kit from online retailer DNA11.com to swab some of his cheek cells, and then mailed the sample to the company. http://on.wsj.com/ihisRi

With the launch of Places, Facebook began allowing businesses to merge their Page with a Place they’ve claimed. While there are some advantages for businesses focusing on generating foot traffic to a single physical location, merging has important disadvantages including lost functionality (at least for now). http://bit.ly/evygtK

To have success as a PR professional, as with all professions, it is essential to keep up with the latest news and techniques in the industry. http://bit.ly/ejS2hs

We’ve all been hearing about Facebook’s new promotions guidelines, and here they are http://on.fb.me/a0XuTZ.

We’re getting uncomfortably close to the day when there won’t be any surviving vets of Pearl Harbor or WWII.  The history books just don’t capture the heroism of hearing these stories from the mouths of grandfathers. http://bit.ly/ewtq91

Everybody loves viral videos. That’s why they’re “viral.” Ad agencies have been trying, in their own way, to replicate the success of viral videos to help their campaigns get exposure and new fans. http://on.mash.to/ggG72D

Some believe there is an entire generation that has never dialed a 1-800 number. Instead, they are taking their customer service-related issues to Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums. What are brands to do?

Read today’s Social Media Monday article in The San Diego Union-Tribune written by NST’s Director of Social Media Teresa Siles to learn how social media is becoming a powerful tool in customer service.

If you want to learn more about how various social media technologies continue to change the way business is done, join us for the San Diego Social Media Symposium, Friday, Jan. 28.

In a previous blog post we told you about Twitter’s promoted tweets and how participant companies would need to truly engage their followers in order to get a positive ROI.  For some companies, the promoted tweets have been hugely successful.  Coca-Cola reported a 6 percent engagement rate and companies are now spending upwards of $100,000 to advertise via Promoted Tweets.

Twitter's Promoted Accounts

Now Twitter has launched its latest advertising product: Promoted Accounts.  Per Twitter, Promoted Accounts will be suggested to Twitter users based on the list of people and organizations they currently follow.  When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter’s algorithm will look at that account’s followers and who they follow.  Twitter will then target Twitter users who follow similar accounts but who do not yet follow that advertiser’s Twitter account. Twitter explains, “… for example, a lot of people who follow several gaming-related accounts also follow @xbox.  If someone follows gaming-related accounts, but not @xbox, Twitter may recommend @xbox to that person.”

So will advertisers be excited about Promoted Accounts?  Most likely yes.  As of right now, Twitter is working with more than 40 advertisers and 80 percent of them have become repeat buyers. However, considering the cost of Promoted Tweets, using Promoted ad products might not be feasible for smaller businesses, especially since Twitter does not currently offer geographically focused ads.  Mashable.com pointed out that in order for these ad platforms to be useful to small businesses, the advertising platforms need to be targeted based on location.

So how could a company use Promoted Tweets or Promoted Accounts?  These Promoted advertising products would be perfect to use during a contest or sweepstakes to help encourage customer engagement and to get people excited about entering.  The ads could also be used around the announcement or debut of a new product or service – like Virgin Mobile did when they used Promoted Tweets to announce flights to a new city.  And finally, companies could use the Promoted products around large events – like Coca-Cola did with the World Cup, to get followers excited about and involved with the event.  While most companies might be wary of purchasing Promoted products, we should keep a close eye the success of these products as they allow not just for brand awareness, but for customer involvement and word-of-mouth buzz when Twitter users share the information with their followers.  And if that’s not exciting enough, The Wall Street Journal noted that “…on average 5% of Twitter users who saw a Promoted Tweet interacted with it, a rate that is ‘an order of magnitude greater’ than most online ad campaigns!”

A few weeks ago, Twitter announced it was redesigning the way we’d interact on its website, making it easier to use and allowing us to get “more out of Twitter in a lot less time.” (Check out Mashable’s play-by-play piece for more detail on the actual roll out).

Slowly, our staff has been granted access to the new format as it progressively rolls out to the more than 160 million Twitter users (I feel honored, Twitter, really, I do). Having had access to the redesigned look for a week or so now, I’ve found the new layout seems really familiar to some of the desktop and web-based applications that many of us in the office already use to monitor the social media space for our clients (CoTweet, HootSuite, TweetDeck, Seesmic, etc.). Side note rant: Can anyone tell me why these application developers are against having spaces in their application names? Yeesh, show the space bar some love!

Through the new design, which features a preview window on the right of the newsfeed, viewers can access additional information without leaving the current page (a huge bonus for those of us with a bit of a short attention span) among other functionality improvements. You can view more detailed information on a person’s profile, view a video or photo, or see a conversation between two users side by side.

Twitter's new preview pane allows users to see additional content without navigating away from Twitter.com

So, was this Twitter’s way of capturing back some of the audience that’s using been using these third-party applications? Absolutely (see San Diego’s own Jennifer VanGrove explore that theory in her Mashable post earlier this month)!

But the real kicker is the expanded content opportunities. Twitter has partnered with 18 separate content-providing sites – including Etsy, Flickr, Plixi, TwitPic, Twitvid,  Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube to name a few – that will allow this content to be viewed within the new preview pane without leaving Twitter.com, similar to the functions in most desktop and web-based interfaces.

Some of the best news? Unlike the recent Facebook overhaul, my initial exploration (post if you see differently) found the customized Twitter backgrounds we’ve created for our clients maintain their integrity within the new design.

While facilitating a crisis media training session for a relatively large national brand, one of the participants quipped, “But I don’t even care about social media. I’d rather just deal with real people.”

So would most of us.  I long for the day when people less than a half-dozen steps away would get off their arses and have a conversation versus send a stream of e-mail notes. But I digress, and I was one of those curmudgeon print reporters 20 years ago (albeit a cub) who thought hell would freeze over before people would opt for reading their news on a computer monitor.

Every organization should realize social media’s impact on dissemination and consumption of information, news and entertainment. Market power is shifting from organizations and brands, consumer and trade, to the consumer largely because of technology. Social media continues to grow as a consumer tool for decision-making, and it still seems many organizations and brands either struggle with, or refuse to accept, how or why they need to know how to engage in the Internet-connected, Tweeting, Facebooking, photo- and video-uploading stakeholder-engaged world. The seemingly few who are connected, Tweeting, Facebooking, et al. and inviting engagement from stakeholders recognize these connections are good for their organizations, brands and their business.  They “get it” that engagement is critical, whereas hordes of others in social media just see this as another platform to push out marketing messages a la Web 1.0

This consumer-driven engagement brings peer-to-peer endorsements and criticisms on organizations, brands, products, services and issues to an extraordinarily higher level than ever experienced. Word, not too long ago, spread gradually – days, weeks, maybe even months.  Today, with the Internet and all its social media outlets, we’re talking a matter of hours and even minutes, and not just with the families on your block.  Consumers can reach entire communities locally and globally.

That alone has a profound impact on how we manage crisis situations.  Social media is becoming the preferred platform on which an organization’s crisis unfolds and where control of the matter at hand is won or lost.  And that preference is coming from all corners except the organizations facing the crisis.

A prime example is the “United Breaks Guitars” fiasco.  The airline refused to take responsibility for breaking Dave Carroll’s guitar, and after nearly a year of getting nowhere, Carroll released his now famous video about United on the Internet, exposing the airline’s poor customer service. The video gained more than 500,000 views within a week, and mainstream media, including CNN, NPR, CBS, USA Today, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other traditional outlets globally, picked up the story, some citing “digital revenge.” Experts far and wide said United waited too long, finally proclaiming on Twitter, “This has struck a chord w/us and we’ve contacted him directly to make it right.” Too little too late? Many say, “absolutely.”

Ditto for Domino’s.  The pizza HQ waited 24 hours before posting a response on YouTube, where two workers – clearly anticipating their Culinary Institute of America acceptance letters – literally picked at some new ideas for ingredients.

There’s also Nestle, when consumers got a sweet tooth for revenge over the company’s interactions with consumers and Greenpeace supporters on Nestle’s Facebook page.  When you insult someone online, be prepared for the mob mentality – and to never win.

And there’s British Petroleum.  Where do we begin?  How about just looking at the hijacking of its brand on Twitter (see @BPGlobalPR).  Yes, it can happen to you and most know it’s a fake, but the lesson is realizing the risk of losing control of your brand.

This is all what digital trends expert Steve Rubel says clearly about what we’re facing: “An entire generation is growing up that will never dial a 1-800 number to reach customer care.”

We are dealing with real people, about 227.7 million of them in the U.S.; just not on the phone or in person – they’re on your desktop, laptop, mobile phone, iPad and soon to the next tech gadget coming down the pipeline, except for Kin.

Are you ready?

WD-40 Company has trusted Nuffer, Smith, Tucker as its PR agency for more than 15 years.  When the company said it wanted to further position itself as a socially responsible business, establish WD-40® as a staple in the automotive aftermarket, and educate automotive end-users about the product’s many uses, NST went to work right away to help build the WD-40/SEMA Cares Camaro.  Partnering with leaders in the automotive world to build a custom vehicle that could travel the West Coast, turn heads and be auctioned off for a good cause, NST also utilized the build partners as credible aftermarket experts to promote the ways they use WD-40 in their shops.

Live Tweeting

Along with traditional PR outreach, which led to articles about the vehicle on AutoBlog, CarandDriver.com, the Huffington Post and the Detroit Examiner, NST also created a special tab on WD-40’s Facebook page that highlighted the program, and live tweeted from the Barrett-Jackson Classic Car Show and Auction to keep fans up to speed.  NST also worked with Cie Studios to create a virtual version of the vehicle that could be raced in Nitto 1320 Legends, an online racing game and social network.

Got results?  The WD-40/SEMA Cares Camaro sold at auction for $75,000, with all proceeds benefiting Childhelp® and The Victory Junction Gang® Camp children’s charities.  Following are some more results from the program:

Facebook Tab

Online Media Reach: 35,067,183 impressions
Broadcast Media Reach: 1,000,000 viewers
Print Media Circulation: 560,830 readers

Total Event Reach: 1,310,000 in-person visitors
Nitto 1320 Legends: 1,000,000 members
Twitter Buzz: 1,000 tweets about the vehicle

Congratulations to Matt Tachdjian, the winning bidder, and to all who made this a successful program!

Twitter recently rolled out its new ad platform: promoted tweets.  Initially, promoted tweets will only show up in the search function on the Twitter website.  When Twitter users type their keywords into the Twitter search, a promoted tweet will appear at the top of the list of tweets with those keywords. Only one promoted tweet will appear at the top of each search.  The ad will look just like a regular tweet and can be replied to, retweeted and made a favorite.

Per Advertising Age, “initially, advertisers will bid on keywords on a cost-per-thousand basis…” but soon, the pricing will be based on “resonance.”  Resonance will be judged by Twitter as how often the promoted tweet is retweeted, made a favorite or receives a click-through from a link placed in the promoted tweet.  If an ad performs well, it will stay in the system, and if it doesn’t do well, Twitter will pull the ad.

By using resonance to judge the quality of a promoted tweet, value-added promoted tweets will be kept alive and spammy promoted tweets will be weeded out.  This is good for Twitter users who don’t want to be inundated with spammy tweets.  It will also force companies on Twitter to create value-driven tweets.

Social media is about communicating and sharing – but in order to do it well, companies must provide value.  Some companies, such as Starbucks, do a good job of creating conversations on Twitter.  Other brands still haven’t grasped that people don’t respond well to marketing messages that are shouted at them.  People want information they can use.  Companies need to create conversations in social media, and promoted tweets will require marketing teams to tweet information that is interesting enough to get people to click on their link, follow their brand and retweet the promoted tweet.  Otherwise, the company’s promoted tweet will be pulled from Twitter.

Virgin America is taking the engagement concept to heart with their promoted tweets.  Per Mashable, the company doesn’t “…see paid-for tweets as advertisements but as opportunities to enhance the communication that they are having with customers and followers.”  They are burying their promoted tweets in very specific search listings.  By using highly specific keywords, Virgin America is assuring that its promoted tweets will only be seen by Twitter users looking for something very specific.

Virgin America is great example of how brands should communicate with their customers on Twitter and on social media platforms in general.  They are creating tweets with value that will include Twitter promotions and discussions on Twitter with in-flight passengers.  Virgin America is targeting the market of individuals who want and will use the information.  Therefore, they are more likely to have their promoted Tweets shared and kept alive in the Twitter search.

If promoted tweets do well in Twitter search, they will be rolled out into Twitter streams (on both the Twitter website and third-party applications like TweetDeck and Seesmic) and will be seen by everyone, even if the individual doesn’t follow that brand on Twitter.  So, if brands want their ads to show up in Twitter feeds, they need to learn how to create promoted tweets that add value to the conversation.  After all, that’s what communicating in social media is all about.

Explore, Evaluate and Engage

We’ve already talked about first making sure social media is an appropriate tactic to support your marketing, communications and branding strategies.  Creating a Twitter or Facebook page because it makes you look young and cool is hardly a strategic decision.  As Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0 notes, “the single biggest mistake people make is that they either brand themselves just for the sake of doing it or that they fail to invest time in learning about what’s in their best interests.”  First, you’ll want to explore what people are saying about your brand in the social space, evaluate how open your company is to criticism and whether you have the resources to manage the page, then engage with people in a way that’s transparent and adds value to others.

Consistent Communication

Consistency is king in social media.  Everything from your “About” or “Bio” section to what messages you post should be consistent with other communication, and you should engage on a regular basis (without posting too often).  Multiple personalities from one source don’t work well in social media.  Creating a “social media voice” that provides consistency in style and tone will allow your brand to communicate consistently across various platforms.  It’s important to consult multiple departments of your business (not just marketing) to help create it, too.  The voice should be consistent with your corporate culture, within the legal guidelines of your company and the social media space, and appropriate for the audience you’re trying to reach.

Give a Little, Get a Lot

Don’t just allow fans, friends and followers to talk to you online.  Engage with them in two-way dialogue and allow them to help shape your brand.  If you’re going to be on multiple social media platforms, give people unique content on each.  Once you have a presence, you’ll want to decide how you’ll measure success.  How do you do that?  That we’ll save for another post …

The first two substantial Twitter updates of the year – the Local Trends feature and updated Suggested Users List – may help make your experience on Twitter a little more personal.  Let’s take a look…

The new Local Trends feature allows you to see what conversational trends are popular near you.  As of last week, however, there are currently 15 cities available for users to select.  Dallas, Houston, San Antonio… Three cities from Texas, but no San Diego?  I’m sure America’s Finest City will be one of the next cities added – they can’t ignore our TwitPower for long – but in the meantime, let’s move on to Twitter’s other big change.

Two weeks ago, the Suggested Users List on Twitter was overhauled to recommend tweeters based on categories of interest, instead of just their perceived popularity.  This is a departure from just having a standard list of people users are encouraged to follow, most of whom are talkative celebrities.  Those lucky few celebrities and others on the list got to appear on every new users screen, and most saw astronomical jumps in the number of users subscribing to their tweets (The Guardian went from having 4,000 followers to 66,000 followers in the one month after being put on the list, according to Twitter Counter.)  Needless to say, folks like Scobleizer and myself were surprised we were not on the list, and began to have feelings of jealousy, anger and self-loathing.  After all, Twitter was giving those tweeters an unfair advantage – free advertising – while we were working hard to build a solid base of followers.

For the most part, that’s changed now, although the feature still has room for improvement.  When I looked through the music category, for instance, I still saw an assortment of artists whom I have no interest in following.  Perhaps my eclectic taste in music messed with Twitter’s complex algorithms.  Perhaps I don’t follow enough people.  Either way, the change does make things more organized, which is good news – especially for new users.  Maybe coupling the two new features together, once they’re launched to everyone, will give me local artists, politicians and sports stars I’ll be interested in following.

For marketers, knowing where people are and what they’re interested in can be very helpful, so do these changes signify Twitter getting more marketing-friendly?  I’d say it’s two small steps for the Twitterverse, not a giant leap.