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Just days before the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day, Procter & Gamble was poised to create awareness for its 30-year long support of bird rescue groups by launching a new addition to the “Dawn Saves Wildlife” campaign that began last July and featured $1 donations to wildlife for the purchase of specialty-marked bottles. This campaign was supported by a dedicated website and by social media marketing.

But then, a few days short of Earth Day, the Deep Water Horizon oil rig exploded. Had this campaign been hijacked by bad timing?

Procter & Gamble’s brand managers now found themselves making a tough decision, quickly. Do they continue to run the new Dawn campaign additions and run the risk of being publically accused of taking advantage of the timing of this disaster in the gulf? Or do they pull the campaign all together, which could also imply guilt?

Procter & Gamble took neither route, and instead they decided to shift the current campaigns emphasis from an inert support of wildlife to a specific opportunity for concerned consumers to assist in the cleanup of the gulf disaster with their purchase of a specially marked bottle of Dawn ($1 donation).

How they did it: Procter & Gamble quickly added a TV spot tag to the Dawn “Washed Away” TV spot to encourage consumers to support the gulf effort by directing people to the Dawn Facebook page for more information on how they could help.

Perhaps Procter & Gamble’s biggest achievement in rerouting this campaign was the emphasis of their new efforts on the Dawn Facebook, twitter and YouTube pages. Here they have focused on posting updates on the spill, detailing the numbers of birds washed and released, sharing of gulf oiled wildlife rescue stories and videos we well as information on how fans can get involved.

By sticking to their guns and with the use of social media, Procter & Gamble prevented its campaign from being “washed away” and instead helped connect consumers to Dawn’s ongoing effort to aid in wildlife rescue in the gulf.

Is this the message you wanted online?

Every marketer, PR agency and company knows that in order to be successful, you need to stay relevant. But nowadays, in the world of Facebook and Twitter, where news travels faster than Brangelina has babies, it’s easy enough for your brand message to get lost in the shuffle, let alone be in control of the content.

Google, while mostly known as the leading search engine, is a great tool to see what people are looking for in relation to your brand. Just start typing your search term and boom — up pops five of the most popular searches related to what you are looking for. You can’t get better raw statistics anywhere. But what happens when your brand is listed in conjunction with something completely unrelated?

We’ve all heard the horror stories — how one scathing review or editorial can ruin your entire quarter, launch or year, and unfortunately, the world of social media is no kinder. Instead of one magazine or one critic, you have millions of them. And although each one alone may not seem significant, the impact of the collective can be unstoppable.

For example, let’s take a look at food. There’s no denying that food is a hot topic. Between the TV shows, magazines and a plethora of food-focused blogs, it’s clear America’s appetite for everything culinary is only getting bigger. This growing fascination with food, restaurants and reality TV, has taken the chef out of the kitchen and into the spotlight. Nowadays, people are more likely to recognize Tom Collichio than Dick Cheney.

Is this Top Chef known for his sauce...or his saucy encounter?

Because of this love of food, BRAVO’s “Top Chef” is one of the most watched shows on television, turning home-town bakers into red carpet A-listers overnight. But once the show is over, and a new season returns, those old-time favorites fade into the background, with the exception of a key few. And what is it that keeps them on top? Their knife-wielding skills? Their delicate sauces? Their penchant for everything bacon? Sadly, no. For Top Chefs like Hosea Rosenberg (Season 5 Winner), his appearances on everything from TMZ to Page Six has little to do with his kitchen prowess and more to do with his extracurricular activities — namely, a romance with a fellow “Top Chef” contestant, Leah Cohen.

If you begin to type “Hosea Rosenberg” into Google, you expect to see the automatic suggested search term be something related to food or “Top Chef,” and you do see it (in the third, fourth and fifth result). But the number one search after Hosea’s own name? “Hosea Rosenberg Leah Cohen.”

For someone like Hosea, this sort of media attention — although not focused on his cooking capabilities — still benefits his business by attracting customers to his restaurants. But in most cases, it’s this type of random association that can dilute a brand or a product without the company even knowing it.

Therefore, it’s imperative to get your online messages straight. When everyone is a critic, it can be difficult to streamline a message. But here are three simple rules to get you started:

1. Support your concept: If you are going to label yourself as something and expect to be identified as such, you need to scream it from the rooftops (and everywhere else for that matter). So if you are a chef looking to be recognized as a chef –not a reality show star or a bachelor — you better make that clear.

2. Sync up: Whether you have a blog here, a Twitter account there and a Facebook page somewhere in between, everything should have the same look and feel and be linked together. Although Hosea (I’m sorry to say) lacks sufficient social media presence (his Facebook page is merely a holding place), there are plenty of YouTube clips, but they are not synched to any other pages. YouTube should be mentioned on Facebook , Facebook should be driving Twitter followers, and Twitter should be sending people to the blog.

3. Self-promote constantly through a diversified social media portfolio: Similar to point #2, if you are going to produce content (which Hosea has a lot of), it needs to be disseminated through all of the channels. If you only update on certain social media networks every so often, your brand message will lose steam and opens up the possibility for it to be diluted by outside sources.

Maybe if Hosea was a bit more active in his social media channels, he would be known more for his Chile-Citrus Shrimp with Coconut Rice, Gingered Peas and Red Curry Vinaigrette, than his smooch with a saucy single.

Photo by KAT / Meet The Famous via Newscom

“Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead,” a new marketing-meets-music book by co-authors David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan, has hit the shelves. The book details how the Grateful Dead fell into a business model that turned out to be nearly as noteworthy as its music. Throughout the years, The Dead broke almost every rule in the music industry book and profited as a result. The marketing lessons—and the effect the band had on the music industry and their fans—apply to businesses of all kinds.

We were able to sit down with David Meerman Scott to discuss his outlook on businesses and social media. Here are his thoughts and some great tips on how to navigate the social media world.

CerconeBrown & Co. (CBC): Why should businesses even engage in social media?

David Meerman Scott (DMS): The whole concept of social media is kind of misunderstood, and I think social media itself is a bit of a buzz word. I like to suggest that every organization on the planet be publishing content on the Web. All organizations should think of themselves as publishers of information, and most organizations don’t think that way. They think, ‘I’m an automaker, I make ski boats, I’m in the wine business.’ To reach people online, the right way is to think like a publisher of content and create really interesting information.

Now, social media is just one aspect of that, and my, sort of loose, definition of social media is that it’s content that people can add to in some form or fashion. So, a blog post with comments becomes social media; a video on YouTube with comments becomes social media. Facebook and Twitter are, of course, social networking services, which is a sub-set of social media as well. But, I think that when people think about social media, they tend to say that social media is only things like Twitter and Facebook. I think that’s a very wrong, and almost even dangerous, way of thinking about how organizations can use Web content to help drive people to their businesses.

David Meerman Scott

CBC:  What is the biggest challenge a business encounters when adapting to social media?

DMS: There’s no question in my mind that the biggest challenge is that businesses find it very, very difficult not to talk about themselves. Most of marketing, advertising and public relations is egotistical, and it’s companies talking about their products and services. If you look at any advertising, it tends to be focused on the products, but, in the social media world, nobody cares about products. They care about themselves, and they care about interactions. They care about meeting people; they care about solving problems. And none of those things are specifically related to products and services. So, the biggest challenge companies face with social media is how can they avoid and resist talking about their products and services. There are a lot of blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages out there that are dying because no one cares about them, and the reason nobody cares about them is because they’re focused on the company’s products and services.

CBC: What is one piece of advice that you would give a business that is trying to expand its social media presence?

DMS: Most think the right thing to do is to think about who are the people you are trying to reach, who are, I call them “buyer personas.” Instead, think about who are the people that your organization wants to engage and what problems do those people have that you might be able to help them to learn about, or help them to solve. So that means that if you’re going to create a video, it shouldn’t be about your products — it should be addressing an issue that the people you want to reach have and somehow engaging them too, in the form of educating them or providing advice or whatever it might be. The biggest thing organizations can do to be successful is understand very, very deeply the people that you’re trying to reach, so that you can create the sort of content that will be valuable for them.

CBC: Do you think that social media a good alternative to marketing based on budget concerns?

DMS: I mean, yeah, it’s free to do a blog post, it’s free to do an e-book, it’s free to do a YouTube video — so certainly. These things don’t cost money in terms of media; however they do take time. Blog posts don’t write themselves, and videos don’t film themselves, so people have to figure out how they’re going to budget for the time required to create some of this stuff. What I’m recommending to a lot of organizations is if they do have a budget in place, or if there are resources that can be reallocated, that one of the best people to hire are journalists. I call it “brand journalism” when an organization creates content in the same “story-telling” mentality as a journalist creates content. So if there is budget, it means how can we allocate it away from just simply buying ads to creating some interesting information? And if there’s not a budget, how can we allocate time to create this stuff because the actual media is free?

CBC: What constitutes a social media expert? Do they even exist?

Scott's award winning book, "The New Rules of Marketing & PR"

DMS: I don’t know what that means. I’ve been doing social media for 25 years; I’ve been writing about social media now for about 10 years. I have, arguably, the most popular book in the world about social media marketing that’s published in 26 languages. I don’t consider myself a social media expert.

You’re right — there are thousands of people that consider themselves social media experts. I think what organizations need are people who are experts in telling stories, people who have a journalistic background, who are able to create things that are interesting for the people they are trying to reach. If I don’t know how to use twitter, or I don’t know how to create a YouTube video, that’s really easy to learn. So maybe you can ask a “social media expert” how to figure out how to get a twitter profile up, but I don’t think that’s valuable in terms of creating content, because those people — although there are a lot of exceptions — generally are not experts in telling stories; they’re experts in the tools themselves.

CBC: What is social media’s “big thing” so far in 2010?

DMS: I think the biggest thing in 2010 is that it’s become mainstream. I’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time, and I was a lone voice in the woods a long time ago, and now it seems like the whole world is talking about it, so it’s very, very interesting to me that I used to be a heretic and people wouldn’t listen to me — they would scoff at what I said. I think it’s fascinating now that there is so much interest in all of this stuff, so I’m almost amazed that the sorts of things I’ve been thinking and talking about now have become so popular.

The other thing are mobile applications with GPS components with them, like Foursquare and Layer — iPhone apps and other mobile device applications that the device knows where you physically are based on the GPS grid. That becomes fascinating because all of a sudden, using this from a marketing perspective, people know where you are, and it’s interesting on a lot of levels and I think we’re only scratching the service in the direction that might go.

CBC: Anything else you’d like to add?

DMS: Yeah, just one thing. This can be fun. I don’t know that people who have done marketing for 25 years like I have have always thought their job was really fun, but I think that these ways of communicating are really, really fun and I think it’s really heartening that our jobs now can be a lot more fun and interesting and exciting than they were in the past. I just want to make sure that people don’t think of this as work; it’s not work, it’s fun, and in my case, I can’t believe I’ve made a living having fun. It’s really exciting.

“Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead”  is currently available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, among others.

Learn more about the new book at David Meerman Scott’s blog, Web Ink Now, and join the authors on their “Follow the Band” Book Tour (hashtag #GDbook), which will be updated at the “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead” Facebook page.

Photos: Wiley, David Meerman Scott

With over two billion videos viewed per day, advertising on YouTube can help your brand reach over 455 million viewers.

Blog Headline Writing Tips

Would you click on a blog headline that read “Some Reasons for Twitter’s Success in the World of Public Relations”? Me neither. This blog headline is dull, vague and wordy, giving a reader little reason to think that the blog post will be any more engaging. These days, bloggers face heavy competition when it comes to winning readership, meaning that a hum-drum blog headline just won’t cut it. Bloggers must utilize the power of a clever headline to captivate and persuade readers to read their blog posts over the host of other blogs, right?

A former Dayton Daily News (OH) journalist reminds bloggers that “your headline isn’t just a descriptor of what’s inside your story, it’s a call to action. It’s a flag that tells the reader something important lies inside, and they’d be remiss if they didn’t check it out.”

When trying to come up with that perfect blog headline that really pops, keep in mind that a blog headline has two main objectives: to grab a reader’s attention and to attract search engine traffic. The following are some ingredients for blog headlines that pop:

1.) Use Compelling Verbiage. Choose powerful, active words in the present tense. Replace lackluster words with words that have some punch. Remember, in situations like this, a thesaurus can be your best friend.  It can help bring your headline to life.

Example: Create an Audience of Raving Fans

2.) Accentuate the controversial. Try and highlight the gray area of your topic, as it leaves some room for free thought and dares the reader to learn more about the topic. Controversy tends to pique a reader’s interest, but remember that you must be willing to back up a controversial title with strong and persuasive content.

Example: Facebook Can Sabotage Your Business Plan

3.) Ask a question. People like to be right; therefore when you pose a question to a reader, they’re going to immediately answer it in their mind and then want to read your post to discover how you answered the question.  If the reader feels they were correct, it validates their own knowledge, or, if their viewpoint differed from yours, it prompts them to comment on why they believe you are wrong.

Example: Are You Building a Compelling Brand?

Include a list to draw readers in to your blog post.

4.) Include a list.  Lists are a popular blogging tactic because they work. Readers know that they can expect a comprehensive, systematic and easy-to-read piece of writing that is appealing. In addition, search engines are typically more drawn to index titles that contain numbers.

Example: 5 Ways to Make Blog Headlines Pop, Not Flop (After all, it hooked you, didn’t it?)

5.) Keep it short. The ideal length for a headline is four to five words, which is detailed enough to convey the purpose of your blog post, but still concise enough to allow your reader to process the title quickly. Most search engines give high relevance to the first eight words of your title; therefore, keeping your title short also ensures maximum coverage.

Example: Maximizing Your Company’s Online Presence

Some further examples of headlines that pop:

Flops: Blogger Accepts Advertising Job

Pops: Ad Blogger Jumps the Fence

Flops: Google’s Privacy Standards

Pops: Google is Scarier Than Facebook on Privacy

Flops: Improving Customer Service

Pops: Are You Delivering Happiness?

Photos: Extra headline - Nicolas Raymond

Take a sneak peak into the jargon-laden world of social media. Whether you’re new to social media marketing, want to brush up on innovative terminology, or are just interested in what these foreign words mean, you’re in luck!

This week in Cercone Brown & Co.’s social media glossary, explore important terms that go on behind your blog, like “dashboard,” “atom” and “syndication”. Learn about  Twitter — better yet, get it as a widget!

Atom- I swear it has nothing to do with chemistry! Rather, Atom is a popular type of feed format that is used for syndicating content. It is an alternative to RSS. 

Dashboard- A dashboard can mean many things when it comes to software, but in the case of a blog, it refers to the administration interface area of your blog that allows you to post, upload files, and manage your posts.

Syndication- Much like the syndication of a television show, like my personal fave Friends, the syndication of your blog allows summaries of your content to be distributed freely on the Web (usually through an RSS feed or Atom).

Twitter- I’m sure at one point or another you’ve heard about Twitter. The social networking site uses short messages, or “tweets,” allowing you to update followers about whatever you consider the latest and greatest going on in your life. You too can follow other members, and receive messages up to 140 characters long.

Widget- In social media terms, a widget is a highly targeted — often niche — application that can be embedded into sites like a webpage or blog by any user who has authorship rights. This could range from a widget that shows you the weather to a widget displaying the latest posts from your blogging buddies. See the image above depicting a slew of available widgets.

SWIX is an online social media analytics tool that tracks and measures activity on company-managed pages on sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

‘Bros Icing ‘Bros website creates viral marketing phenomenon for drink brand Smirnoff Ice.

Boston PR agency Cercone Brown & Co. takes you through terms like URL and short code in this week’s edition of the Social Media Glossary.

Digg.com is a website for people to share and discover any type of news or content on the Web. From pictures and videos of obscure things to top news stories, Digg is a place to find all sorts of news, educational content and entertaining stories that are trending around the Web.