It’s no secret public relations professionals aim to create content that elicits an action, especially through social media channels. It’s called “social media” for a reason – we want people talking about, engaging with and sharing our client’s content and messages.

Nuffer, Smith, Tucker co-hosted the “Content Marketing Insider Secrets” webinar last Tuesday with Social Fresh, a social media education company, that discussed content creation in-depth. The webinar gave attendees a glimpse of the dialogue that will take place at the Social Fresh WEST conference in San Diego on September 27-28, and featured conference presenters Anna Lingeris of Hershey’s and Zena Weist of Expion along with NST President Bill Trumpfheller.

The lively discussion focused on the importance of knowing your brand’s voice, prepping your content with appropriate research, and being an engaging participant and curator. Here’s a recap of some key points:

• Content shouldn’t repeat your traditional ad copy. Figure out what voice will resonate with your target audiences and tailor it accordingly per social media platform.
• Identifying a focused brand voice helps all employees within your company understand social media goals and activity. It also makes it easier for people to participate.
• Listen and respond to the needs of your audience.
• Create content, but also let others’ (your audience) voices and opinions come through.
• Metrics and data are available – use statistics and data to create a plan, and see what’s resonating with your audience.
• Cross-pollenating content per platform can increase the shelf life of your campaign.
• You want people to trust your brand – engagement helps build trust.
• Listen first; talk later.
• Create content that your audience can easily share on and offline.
• Engaging content must have a personal relevance. Find out what matters to your audience and create content that sparks a discussion around those topics.
• The top three types of engaging content are: personal questions, loyalty questions and call-to-actions with photos or links.
• Figure out how to make a local tie to your audience for increased interaction.
• Content marketing research is critically important and should be a large part of the resource pie.
• What experience are you trying to deliver? Use this to drive content creation, but realize in the end it, your content may not be all brand focused.
• Don’t succumb to “shiny object syndrome” each time a new platform emerges. Do your research before diving in.

Did you join “Content Marketing Insider Secrets?” What were your takeaways?

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!

The Tiger Woods brand consistently delivered on its expectations — integrity, dignity, determination, competitive fire and loyalty — on and off the golf course.  The brand experience was highly attractive to be repeated by fans, endorsers, news media and even his competitive foes, all telling of great stories and experiences with anything Tiger.

For Toyota, quality was the axis of its brand. The automaker entered the U.S. market decades ago amid a storm of skepticism on reliability, and Toyota quickly and has since silenced the naysayers, albeit until recently.

In produce, character is often reflected in the quality of products delivered to customers and consumers alike — freshness, taste and appearance — and in environmental stewardship, labor relations and food safety standards.

Read more thoughts in The Packer on what leaders in produce, and any other industry, can learn from Tiger and Toyota.

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 …

Toyota is curiously sitting at no. 7 in Millward Brown’s top-10 list of most trusted brands as Congress spent the better half of the week giving Toyota a tongue-lashing for its handling and mishandling of the automaker’s quality control crisis.

The study’s authors readily point out that the data was collected over the course of 2009 and doesn’t reflect Toyota’s current dilemma as it unfurled at the beginning of this year.  The authors also note the automaker could learn from Tylenol, which in 1982 recalled 31 million bottles of pills after seven people were killed in the tampering scare.  That brand, which was forced to recall children’s liquid medicine last year, sits at no. 6 in the study.

Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson has a history of effectively managing crisis situations, though the FDA earlier this year ridiculed the company for being slow to respond in its most recent crisis.  What this goes to show you, however, is a history of doing the right thing and acting aggressively in a crisis situation can maintain and build trust among stakeholders, consumers in particular.  Trust is fragile, and how you respond in a crisis situation can build and maintain trust, the authors state.

Toyota started off this week with public apologies before Congress.  How it fixes its problems, communicates with stakeholders and develops systems to prevent further lapses will determine if the automaker regains or builds trust, and where it will stand in next year’s report.

Yours truly sans suit, The Donald and my client, John Sawyer

So, more than a year ago, we sat in the lobby of the W hotel in Manhattan, surrounded by lawyers and producers for the 2009 season of Celebrity Apprentice.  Less than 72 hours prior, they had recruited Chicken of the Sea to be on the show – for that matter, a two-hour episode directly leading up to the finale.

A number of ideas swirled about with regard to what the marketing challenge would be and how to tie the brand and its products in the show.  For the record, the lawyers and producers were some of the coolest folks.  They had their minds set on some ideas, but fortunately open and respectful that we (all two of us – yours truly and my client – out-numbered 3 to 1) were passionate about the brand and the story it had to tell.

For two years leading up to that fateful call from Celebrity Apprentice, Chicken of the Sea had been engaging consumers in conversations about health, nutrition and convenience through online and offline mediums.  We learned there is a powerful story to tell not just about the brand and its products, but also in how consumers view and use Chicken of the Sea – what it means to them.  We saw an opportunity to replicate that with the likes of Clint Black, Joan “Cluck Cluck Splash” Rivers et al on Celebrity Apprentice.

With agreement from the lawyers and producers, we laid out a challenge for the celebrities to tell the Chicken of the Sea story in the form of a jingle and a 30-second radio spot.  Moreover, it wasn’t as simple as that.  The celebs and their respective teams needed to invest the time in learning about Chicken of the Sea and its loyal consumers.  They weren’t going to be judged solely on how catchy their tunes would be, but more on telling the story about the consumers behind the brand.

What that led to, in addition to the drama and debate of creating a jingle and radio spot, is two hours worth of unscripted conversations about Chicken of the Sea – precisely what we were shooting for and attempting to replicate, and there was hardly any discussion about getting video footage of the products in the celebs’ hands or on a table near where they sat.  Sacrilege to some, but again it was about the conversations.

So when The New York Times published the iTVX data on the most effective product placement in television for 2009, most would think the initial reaction of Chicken of the Sea being at the top was met with excitement.  But it told us much more.  Real conversations are powerful, more powerful than arranging to have your product sit statically in front of a celebrity, and product integration must reflect the character of the brand.  Alongside that is being a champion for your client, its brand and what it represents.

I just wish I were smart enough to wear a better suit on the show, and, for what it’s worth, my mother hasn’t forgiven me for contributing to Clint’s firing.

Driving any highway or back road, you can barely miss a Toyota.  The brand is an automaker’s version of the six degrees of separation.  Wherever you turn, you see one, or you know someone who has one or know someone who knows someone who drives a Toyota.  Quality was the axis of its brand.  I had a Camry a few years ago; loved it and wish I got another after wrapping my front end around the rear of an F-150 (even the best-made car won’t hold up to a monster truck).

Expectations were high when word got out that Toyota had a problem. Surely, a company that built a brand and a massive following of consumers into the world-leading automaker would do the right thing: Aggressively address the issue head-on, right its wrong, profess mea culpa and produce a solution.

And that’s precisely what Toyota did this week.  Problem is, Toyota’s crisis began to unfold last fall, and when the automaker unfurled its media-mix campaign this week, including plopping U.S. honcho Jim Lentz in network studios, critics attacked – and rightly so.

Toyota succumbed to the growing media and governmental pressure too late.  The automaker, and this isn’t backseat driving, knew well enough and long ago it had a problem that would only get worse.  Instead of being proactive, Toyota chose to stick its head in the sand.  That right there can tarnish any brand.

The very premise of issue and crisis management is prevention – not just stopping the headlines or social media storm, but anticipating internal and external threats or vulnerabilities and shoring up those gaps at the operational level.  It’s spending painstaking hours in the C-level suite agonizing over what gives the CEO insomnia and working with the senior management team on systems and protocols, and collaborating with industry, academia, vendors, suppliers and any other party in the supply chain.  It’s putting procedures in place to minimize the likelihood of disruption in business.

The automaker had to have had a crisis plan in someone’s filing cabinet.  Instead, millions of Toyotas are sitting idle in sales lots; even more consumers are now questioning the company’s mettle.

The annual Edelman Trust Barometer shows modest gains among three-quarters of the industries monitored, and findings point to these institutions doing the right thing and a level of increased transparency amidst a perilous global economy.  What’s more interesting, however, is an expectation that governments and companies will revert back to old habits.  That only tells us these gains are fragile and there’s a likelihood for future Barometer reports to highlight declining trust and expectations.

What better time is there to further build relationships and credibility than when trust is climbing?  Smart institutions will invest emotionally and intellectually by working with their stakeholders in identifying what stakes in the ground their trust is rooted in, tap into those beliefs and build upon them.  Doing so, these institutions could emerge from this recession not only stronger, but also with a competitive advantage – stakeholders in their camps.

The report also lays out a suggested path in building trust – a mosaic.  In short, it’s actively involving and engaging a network of stakeholders, including NGOs, to affect change within your organization and industry.  The concept isn’t so new.  Conceptually, it’s much like the coalition building model many of us toy with, yet primarily in issue and crisis management situations.  What the report is suggesting, and it makes perfect sense, is deploying this model as an everyday, long-term business principal, not for short-term objectives and means.

The report also seems to paint a picture of traditional media being left out of the loop in this mosaic.  Traditional media, unsurprisingly, continues to witness declines in trust, giving organizations more reason to question traditional media’s necessity.  Smart traditional media companies, however, would be wise to heed to the report’s call to get closer to stakeholders.  Even smarter ones will make drastic changes in their business model – and that’s not figuring whether a paywall for online content makes sense.  It’s about delivering upon expectations.  Right now, according to the report, that isn’t much.

Next up in the Tiger Woods pandemonium is the privacy debate.  Did a man in the public eye get stripped of his privacy by being forced to reveal his “transgressions?”

Let others take chip shots at that.  Instead, Tiger Woods the brand lost any privacy when he carved an image that personified high family and moral values.  Since his junior golf days, he, his family and his handlers meticulously crafted a brand of integrity, dignity, determination, competitive fire and loyalty.  His charitable endeavors and commercial endorsements further exemplified the Tiger Woods brand.

Successful brands reflect character – who you are and what you stand for, and clarifying that character is paramount.  It’s the centerpiece of an authentic and transparent brand proposition.  The Tiger Woods brand consistently delivered on its expectations on and off the golf course.  The brand experience was highly attractive to be repeated by fans, endorsers, news media and even his competitive foes, all telling of great stories and experiences with anything Tiger Woods.  Like any great brand, it’s more about what people say after you’ve left the room than what you say about yourself, and the Tiger Woods brand was molded perfectly to suit that.

But then the mold began to crack around Thanksgiving. It happens.  No brand will last without error, especially one that is human.  The smart brands, or at least those with smart handlers, realize that and are equipped to address any fissure in the brand – quickly. That’s where the crack in the Tiger Woods brand began to widen.  Rather than address any issues head on – the late, great golf teacher Harvey Penick always extolled “take dead aim” – the Tiger Woods brand went into bunker mode.  Control of the brand was lost – others filled the void while the brand was mum – and it was exacerbated by a refusal to talk with cops on three different occasions and apparent denials about extra-marital affairs.

And then the skeletons started coming out of the closet.  Instead of a New York City nightclub promoter, and we may hear more on that down the road, we’re hearing about hook-ups with a reality TV star and a Las Vegas nightclub marketing manager.

A brand is also your every action and deed, including inaction in a crisis situation.  The Tiger Woods brand ceded control; it can be regained, but it will be the longest tee shot in the man’s career.