From the best collection of social media minds to a hilarious take on Verizon’s iPhone news, in case you missed it, here’s a sampling of information shared this week by the gang at NST:

There’s a study that says Twitter is ripe with accents.  Wonder what Texans are fixin’ to do in their Tweets? (Rebecca Howe)

Five reasons you really can’t miss the San Diego Social Media Symposium. (Teresa Siles)

Chick-Fil-A’s next ad campaign will be more about saving a reputation than a cow. (Yours Truly)

Jon Stewart’s take on the Verizon iPhone is hysterical. (Natalie Haack)

SDSU names Rocky Long new football coach to replace departing Brady Hoke. (Bill Trumpfheller)

Another reason to love Southwest Airlines is because its pilot holds up take off for the grandfather of murdered child. (Mary Correia-Moreno)

Anyone who has ever set up a Twitter or Facebook account knows setting it up is easy, but knowing what to do once its developed or whether you should even have such accounts to begin with is much harder.

In today’s Social Media Monday article in The San Diego Union-Tribune, NST’s Director of Social Media Teresa Siles explores ways to build a strategy before launching yourself or your brand into the social media space.

If you want to learn more about how to strategically think about your social media presence, join us for the San Diego Social Media Symposium, Friday, Jan. 28 at San Diego State University’s Parma Payne Goodall Alumni Center.

From PR pros wearing dunce caps to the top tweets of the year, in case you missed it, here’s a sampling of information shared this week by the gang at NST:

Here’s a list all PR professionals should avoid being on: http://bit.ly/e95rc8

Facebook’s Boy Wonder got Time magazine’s Person of the Year, but this little ditty says Twitter still has the marketing power: http://read.bi/gL7WJj

Maybe this is one of the reasons Zuckerberg’s college experiment can’t carry Twitter’s gym bag: http://bit.ly/eSPpQ9

This perspective on Wikileaks says it’s less about social media and more about encrypting information: http://bit.ly/ihj4y0

Peter Shankman, the keynote speaker of our second upcoming San Diego Social Media Symposium, shows us how to use fear to create awesomeness: http://bit.ly/fD2iIF

Today Show anchor Ann Curry’s plea on Twitter to let doctors land in Haiti heads the class of top 2010 tweets: http://on.today.com/eNIRv2

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.

In a recently released survey from the Worldcom Public Relations Group (NST is a long-time partner), public relations firms around the world predict a rise in social media and research, and a decline in media relations and advertising services over the next three years. More than 70 of Worldcom’s 104 partners from across the globe responded to the survey.

“The results of this survey clearly demonstrate that public relations has moved multichannel,” said Stefan Pollack, chair of the Worldcom Americas Region and president of The Pollack PR Marketing Group, a Los Angeles-based firm. “From a trend perspective, clients are looking for firms that can deliver immediate impact with sustainable value. These results provide insight to our partner firms about how to gear their client programming and to determine how best to continue to grow services and in what areas.”

According to the survey, the services respondents expect to see a decrease in include: media relations (19 percent), advertising (17 percent), and direct mail and marketing (11 percent). In general, the majority of firms are optimistic about business increasing in the next three to five years.

More than half of the respondents expected social media, interactive/web development and search engine optimization services to increase – 93 percent, 73 percent and 61 percent, respectively. Yet obstacles still remain for firms to determine how to increase revenue from these services; particularly search engine optimization – for example, no agency reported more than 10 percent of revenue from SEO.

In addition, one-third of the Worldcom Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region and Asia Pacific region firms expect the percentage of work from their home countries to decrease. This represents an opportunity for global firms to acquire clients from beyond their home countries. Additional key findings include investor relations and influencer/stakeholder relations as being other significant areas of revenue, and 37 percent of firms in the Americas targeting specific cultural demographics. The most commonly cited was Latino/Hispanic, with 10 percent.

Methodology

The online survey was sent to 104 Worldcom firms regarding services provided by their firms. Seventy-four firms responded, a response rate of 71 percent. Padilla Speer Beardsley’s research practice facilitated the survey.

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!

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.

A major fundraising milestone was set this past week, as the American Red Cross Mobile Giving Campaign for Haiti has raised more than $21 million in text-based donations in less than one week. A landmark campaign, not only because of its creative use of America’s growing obsession with text messaging, but also because the organization used its established presence on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to kick-off the fundraising effort, which quickly “went viral.”

To help the victims of Haiti's recent earthquake, you can make a $10 donation to the American Red Cross by texting the word “HAITI” to 90999.

As our hyper-connected society becomes more comfortable communicating through devices and social networks than via phone or face-to-face interactions, this social media/technology campaign makes it easy for consumers to become donors by breaking down common barriers to participation. It uses a format that Americans are closely familiar with, and requests a relatively reasonable donation (a comfortable $10 for those still feeling the effects of the recession) without having to pick-up the phone or find an Internet connection.

As NST’s Director of Social Media Teresa Siles mentioned in a News and Smart Talk blog post in July:

“Digital trends expert Steve Rubel has said, “An entire generation is growing up that will never dial a 1-800 number to reach customer care.”

And while Rubel’s comments focused on customer service, the same concept can be applied to picking up a phone, or logging on to a computer to make a donation.

Kudos to the American Red Cross, who despite being a nearly 130 year-old institution, has kept up with America’s changing habits to execute one of the most successful social media fundraising campaigns for a nonprofit organization in recent history. The Red Cross’ success has already spurred some imitators, and is sure to inspire nonprofit fundraisers throughout the country to start incorporating more technology and social media as fundraising tools.

Will it work for every nonprofit organization? No. But it’s a great testament to the power of blending social media and technology, and understanding the barriers to getting your key audiences to take action to help those in need.