After General Motors, who’s next?

That is, which brand is going to follow suit and either cut back or completely kill their Facebook ad campaigns just as GM has done, to much fanfare?  That is the question that marketers and investors everywhere are asking themselves just a few days before Facebook’s watershed $100 billion IPO this Friday.

GM caused a few tremors this week across the social strata when it announced it was pulling its $10 million Facebook ad campaign due to …. stop me if you have heard this before …. a lack of measureable results with the medium relative to the investment made.

The $10 million figure is actually less significant than it sounds, if that is at all possible.  It is just a fraction of GM’s total 2011 U.S. ad spending of $1.8 billion, according to this WSJ piece.  It is also a proverbial “drop in the bucket” of Facebook’s total 2011 revenue of $3.7 billion, most of which was advertising sales.

So what is the story behind the story here? Maybe more questions than answers…..

Was this an orchestrated attempt by GM’s communications team at news jacking on Mr. Zuckerberg’s week-long IPO party? GM’s timing has been questioned by many bloggers and investment types as curious at best and at worst, a downright orchestrated and opportunistic move by the auto giant to grab some headlines of its own. Most press reports note that GM expressed doubts over the ROI of its Facebook ads for several months, so it certainly does beg the question, why now?

Do any of us really buy cars or anything remotely as substantial, complicated or expensive based on Facebook ads? My sample size might be pretty small and less than scientific, but my answer is a resounding NO!  The same goes for insurance, mortgages or other financial services products, but there still 900 million (and inevitably a billion) reasons for brands to continue evaluating, testing and deploying ad campaigns given the breadth and depth of audience reach and the relative affordability of Facebook ads.

And, it’s the fundamental reason why Facebook – post IPO – has its mighty guns trained on Google so it can dominate social search.  Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret that is his Holy Grail, not, God forbid, advertising.

Will Kia, Honda, Ford, fill in the blank of your favorite auto maker brand collude with GM and pull their ads? Don’t count on it. Kia, for its part, is actually increasing its ad spend, WSJ reports.

Does Zuckerberg care? Does it really matter to mighty Facebook? As any marketer knows, paid ads constitute only one part of what can be done to build brand awareness, buzz and engagement on Facebook. There’s so much more that brands and their agencies can collectively do here that doesn’t require cutting a check. These include Sponsored Stories and the recently announced Reach Generator solution and of course, Brand Pages. After all, GM hasn’t cut back on those activities. In fact its’ investment here is three times its former ad spend, or for the mathematically impaired $30 million per year.

So expect the dollars to continue to flow to Facebook’s coffers and the debate about social media effectiveness to continue raging.

Death and taxes, you have company.

During an interview, one of the inquiries you can always count on hearing no matter what the position or company is “So, tell me a little more about yourself.” Seems simple enough compared to some of the others questions you may have just fielded, right? Talk about your background, some of your hobbies, what brought you into your field, etc. However, many times employers are left feeling like they haven’t gotten the full picture, that they haven’t really gotten to know you well enough yet. To help fill in the blanks, many companies are now turning to a familiar source: Facebook. More so than that, some interviewers are even asking for Facebook passwords on the spot to look at your profile.

Whether or not you agree with this (it is legal as of now), it could eventually become part of the regular job interview process. In today’s social media driven world, nothing is really kept private and those of us in communication fields like public relations need to pay special attention to what we say at all times. Now while we don’t have to all run and delete our pages, below are some helpful tips to keeping your Facebook personal enough, but most importantly professional.

Maintain Privacy Settings
Whether you are interviewing for a position or you’re currently employed, at some point a company will look up your Facebook profile. Make sure if you haven’t separated your personal and professional posts, you do so as soon as possible by adjusting privacy settings, and even consider making an entirely separate professional account.

If you Have to Question it, Don’t Post it
While social media can be a great outlet for personal expression, not every post is appropriate for your colleagues to see. If you wouldn’t want your Mom to see pictures from this weekend, you certainly don’t want your boss to. This goes for posts too, as while everyone is entitled to their opinion you wouldn’t want to risk possibly offending someone, especially a client.

Don’t Be Afraid to Use Facebook to Your Advantage
Facebook can be a great tool for public relations professionals and their clients. Be sure to “like” your favorite writer, become a “fan” of your favorite publication, or share an interesting article you read. You can help connect to consumers in your clients industries by running contests or fielding questions on their pages. The site was made to help connect us all, so take advantage!

While we’ve certainly all had the phrase “be careful what you put on Facebook” engrained into our brains, let’s remember that it can also be an essential tool for today’s public relations professional! Would you add any tips for keeping Facebook professional? What do you think about employers asking for your password?

Before the internet was infiltrated with social media networks, celebrities were “untouchable”. They were put on pedestals above us common folk and our ideas about them were conceived purely by what they portrayed on television. Today, thanks to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, we’ve been exposed to a whole other side to celebrities and quite frankly, I don’t like it.

Here’s why. Following some of my favorite celebrities, namely my favorite musician, has tainted my overall impression of him. Not only do his Tweets have zero substance to them, but he’s among the many that often times just RT urging fans who demand shout outs and birthday wishes. As a diehard fan of this individual (who shall remain nameless simply out of respect), and a PR professional, it makes me feel icky.

So it begs the questions, should celebrities run their own Twitter accounts? On one side, how great is it to know that what is being posted really is coming straight from the source; a glimpse into their “real” world if you will. On the other hand, if what they are posting doesn’t represent them in the best possible light, entrusting in a dedicated social media team to post on their behalf could be the smarter choice.

Don’t get me wrong, not all celebrities need a lesson in social media. A large majority takes to Twitter to interact with their fans in ways that are both creative and commendable (see Ellen DeGeneres and Lady Gaga). But the same cannot be said for many others. And it’s to those individuals that I make this plea: think before you Tweet. Spare yourself preventable embarrassment, or worse, a loss of a fan that once held you in such high regard.

Have a tale to tell about the good, the bad and the ugly of your favorite celebrity on Twitter? Comment on who you love (or hate) to follow.

As most of you in the PR world know, Facebook’s f8 developer conference was last week. With so many changes taking place to the platform we use both personally and for the brand pages we manage daily, I thought I would offer my take on the biggest news from the event.

Let me just mention that I am a very hands-on learner; the new functions and features don’t make a whole lot of sense to me until I can actually play with them and figure them out myself. But I’ll share what I’ve learned so far.

The first change is ‘timelines’ which is just another name for your profile. Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation was that people take pride in the content they share on their pages but that content is quickly forgotten. “It’s how you can tell the whole story of your life on a single page.”

The timeline feature will make your profile more visual and give you greater control over it by choosing what is important. Good content will be more important now than ever before. This will also allow users to make their profile much more personal, which was one of the big complaints when people were choosing whether to stay on Myspace or move over to Facebook. Timeline will be available to everyone in the next few weeks but if you want it now, check out this article from TechCrunch.

Open Graph was designed as a new group of applications that let you interact with your friends on a new level. You aren’t just seeing that they ‘like’ a song and ‘liking’ it too – you can join them on Spotify and listen to it with them.

The ‘ticker’ is part of the Open Graph feature. All of your updates on activity, such as games you play and what you are doing, will go into a real-time feed. Here is where the new verbs and nouns will appear like, Joe read a book, or Mary watched a movie, rather than into your friends’ feeds. Only the most important events will appear in the news feed.

One other change is that the applications will no longer have to ask for permission to post content to Facebook. A prompt will appear the first time you allow an application access, detailing what will be shared. It will only appear once, so permission is automatically granted for other applications you use.

Love it or hate it, Facebook changes regularly and affects the way we interact not only with the technology, but with each other. I hope this gives you a good idea of what’s to come on Facebook. Below are a couple links to some further reading if you are interested in learning more. It will be very interesting to see how both personal and brand pages change as these new features are rolled out. What do you think the future of Facebook will bring?

Facebook F8 – Here’s everything you need to know

Facebook’s 2011 f8 event: what impressed me the most

My college roommate, Monya, had two particularly enviable traits: an indelible eye for whatever nightlife spots/new designers/under-the-radar bands/dining options were cool and the ability to talk to – and become  fast friends with – anyone. Even in an otherwise anonymous, large university, Monya couldn’t strut two steps without running into someone she knew by name, complete with colorful back story on how or why they met. People constantly sought her out for recommendations on everything from what parties to attend that weekend to which professor to avoid when filling out classes schedules. In short, she was a natural born social influencer. I’d post a back-in-the-day photo of us here, but that would A.) mean finding a scanner (pre-Facebook) and B.) reveal an unfortunate, late 90′s proclivity to long hair.

While I’d agree that you can improve your own social skills by learning how to make better small-to-medium talk and putting yourself into varied settings for practice, you can’t teach someone to be a social influencer. People like Monya are born that way - possessing a rare combination of charisma and genuine interest in the people around them – and they have tremendous power to sway their social circles.

Tastemakers with large networks don’t just walk our college campuses, they’re everywhere – especially online. Bloggers, Twitterati superstars and Facebook fiends (and those who are all of the above) affect consumer preferences whether it be on the most reliable diaper or the best cloud service for SMBs.

At Matter, we’ve recognized how the “Monyas” have gone digital and are wielding their influence throughout the social space. To harness the power of these individuals, we’ve created what we call a TIP (Targeted Influencer Program) offering for our clients. TIP is a formalized way to strengthen relationships with those key people who shape buying decisions of their readers, followers and friends. Of course, these programs are customized to each client and depend on a thorough research and measurement process to identify the players in our clients’ spaces and quantify the impact of their social sway both before and during a TIP campaign.

We’ve seen great success for consumer and technology clients already, from positive shifts in overall conversation about their brands across social platforms to changing perceptions of individual influencers, and, if I can use another college reference/term, we’re psyched to help more brands do the same.

It’s nearly impossible to execute a PR or marketing campaign without getting involved with social media at some level.

The benefits of exuding your brand’s personality on Facebook and Twitter, and interacting with consumers in a fun, pithy manner far outweigh the drawbacks of opening yourself up to public criticism. The problem is that social media can take on a life of its own and accounts can grow to require a lot of time and attention. In some cases, if resources are scarce, brands are forced to reevaluate their audiences and focus their time and energy on one channel over another.

That’s why, when I read fellow social media junkie and industry insider Zeny Huang’s recent opinion piece, “4 Reasons Google+ Brand Pages Will Be Better Than Facebook’s” on Mashable earlier this month, I paused to think, “Could it be?”

Though there’s much we still need to learn about Google+, Huang highlights two potential areas where I do believe this newcomer may have a leg up in this race: search and analytics. As Huang notes, Google has long been a leader in both of those fields. It’s still a guessing game at this point, but it will definitely be interesting to see how brands begin to use Google+ for their marketing and PR efforts, and if they’re able to effectively break into your “circle.”

What do you think? Based on what you’ve seen and read, does Google+ hold a candle to Facebook and Twitter when it comes to helping brands interact with consumers?

Last week, my adorable seven-year-old son Owen came bursting up out of the playroom, leaving his best friend with a paused game of Wii Mario Kart so that he could use the bathroom. He sprinted to the bathroom, did his business, and came back through kitchen in a blur, then paused at the top of the stairs before heading back down. He looked thoughtfully at me as he adjusted the twisted waistband on his shorts and asked: “Mom, why haven’t they invented pants with a toilet in them?” I laughed and said that he should invent them, but that plumbing was likely to be a big design challenge. He smiled with his big brown eyes and without another word, dashed away, back to playing.

This seemed a moment made for Facebook sharing, so I posted it, where it was met with a few Likes and some cynical (and funny) commentary such as “that’s called a diaper” or “because it would be hard to walk around!”

I posted it because it made me laugh out loud, and I wanted to share that. But the adult responses (including my own) made clear the massive gap in imagination between 7 year olds and grown-ups. And it made me wonder when it is that we lose the limitless optimism that underlies a child’s assumption that any invention is possible.

It reminded me of an article I read a couple months ago in Fast Company that highlighted a study by Latitude research about children predicting the future of computing. Here’s the part that’s thought-provoking. Only 4% of the children’s wishes were unattainable right now (teleportation and time travel) given what engineers are currently capable of. In fact, one of the children wished for the ability to search with an image, rather than text. Incredibly, Google announced Google Image Search the day the study was released.

Leading me to the conclusion that while wild imaginations might lead to crazy nightmares and very strange storytelling among the ten and under set, we adults could use a dose more of it in our everyday lives. Just imagine the things we could accomplish and invent if we suspended our inclination to say “because it would be hard” and instead, thought really creatively about solving problems, and then tried with boundless energy to make something amazing happen.

In our PR jobs, we get bound up by what’s practical: “the client might not want to hear this idea” or “they’ll never do it anyway” or “my manager will think I’m crazy for suggesting a different way” or “this reporter probably won’t take this meeting.” What a waste of energy and time. For my part, I’m using this pants-toilet incident as an object lesson in the benefits of being more childlike, and a little less practical. I expect that in addition to doing better work, I’ll be having a lot more fun.

Oh, and I fully expect that when Owen gets his prototype off the ground, we’ll all be more productive during the day, since we won’t have those pesky bathroom breaks to slow us down.

Sourced from The New York Times online, "The Elusive Big Idea," by Neal Gabler

Last week I read an article in The New York Times called, “The Elusive Big Idea.”

It scared the crap out of me.

We’re living in a time when information is fast, efficient, neatly-packaged & delivered— suspended in a magical (and convenient!) web of ether just waiting to be accessed.

…But how much of it are we actually processing?

As a new PR professional, I’ve noticed a change in my way of thinking. While I was in school, I took home books or articles, read them at a steady pace, underlined, revisited— and mulled, if you will. Most of the time, I would then sit down and start writing in order to develop and lengthen these study-lounge musings.

I find there to be much less time these days to study and mull. I’m submerged in the deep end of the information pool where quick facts, stats, industry news headlines, blurbs, and witty one-liners leave me drenched. Keeping the best interest of my clients’ business in mind, I pay attention to a much different, and much wider range of topics now than before. Relevant information is quickly bouncing back and forth between status updates, twitter handles, and blog posts. Web addresses aren’t even written in full anymore— our short messages are shortened further by bit.ly’s and tinyURL’s, even embedded behind # and @ signs.  It’s enough to make my head spin. I’ve learned, though, that scanning alone does not produce the best results.

As Gabler writes in his NYT piece,

“In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world, but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.”

Does this new trend of “apprehension” truly make us more informed? Smarter? I’m inclined to say no, that it only gives us the ability to move more quickly —finish the lap— call out a message first in order to win the recognition of passing the baton. We can certainly find the answer to just about any question online, but we need to remember to reflect on what we know first. The relevancy, context, and reliability of what we find must then be considered, as well as how we plan to use our new information sensibly.

Getting a bit more philosophical, can you say that you’ve thought through your own worldview, end to end, amidst the blur of contradicting information that’s available to us? If there was a line drawn across a particular ideal you’ve lived by, would you be able to confidently stand on one side armed with sturdy reasoning, or are you positioned a bit more shakily (and perhaps more safely) in the gray middle area? Have you thought through any one thing so thoroughly that you could ignite a fiery debate, and still stand unburned on your own turf?

As intellectual people with such amazing innate potential, I hope we can all say yes.

“We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.”

Isn’t it strange to consider that this overload of information, be it significant or trivial, has actually occupied space in our minds meant for new ideas?

For the maintenance of my own sanity, I need to set aside some time to step away, process, think, and comprehend. This is the key to generating innovative ideas! There comes a point when in order to be a good PR pro (or person of real substance, for that matter), we may need to disconnect in order to reconnect to our own thought process.