Here are 10 great ideas on social media measurement and monitoring from Third Tuesday:

1. Ideas can move through social media, leaving a trail of digital breadcrumbs behind.
2. Transparency is a necessity.
3. Through monitoring and listening, treat social media like a customer service line,  engage customers when they are discussing your Organization/Brand.
4. Customer to customer conversations are more important than influencer to customer conversations or business to customer conversations.
5. Listen to types and tonality of conversations and change your behaviour accordingly. Indentify what people dislike and what are your mistakes, then stop doing those things.
6. Your Brand is the sum of conversations.
7. Sometimes it takes a “pain” event to bring companies to social media measurement/engagement, rather than an “opportunity.”
8. Listen at the point of need to generate sales leads. If conversations are about a need that your service provides, it’s a great opportunity to engage with that person.
9. Use the same measurement scale from the very beginning, benchmark over time.
10. Listen to not only conversations about your Organization, but also your competitors.

All of these ideas were from K.D. Paine and Marcel Lebrun. I knew K.D. Paine would be brilliant, but I was most impressed by Lebrun. Marcel Lebrun is CEO of Radian 6, and before Third Tuesday and Mesh I knew very little about him. He definitely knows his stuff when it comes to measurement and monitoring. If you have the chance to hear him speak on the topic, I definitely recommend it.

So there’s a quick look at some great ideas from Third Tuesday. I plan on writing about many of them in the future, in greater detail with my own thoughts on these ideas, plus some more great ideas from Mesh. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

I’ve got a new domain, a new web host, and some fancy new widgets in the sidebar.

My last post on the old blog mentioned how good the Hostpapa service has been. I don’t have any other web host experiences to reference it to, but their control panel and help videos made it pretty easy to get this thing going. I’ve learned a great deal already!

Along with the domain move I’ve been updating the different elements of the site, including the Blogroll. If you would like your link added to the side, or can suggest a good link, please let me know in the comments.

On to the next project. A new picture in the header, perhaps?

Thanks for reading!

In reality, I’m sure PR budgets would be cut a bit, or remain the same, hiring would slow down, all the usual impacts a recession has. But let’s take a look at some key practice areas of PR, and how I think they can play a pivotal role in a tight economy.

MarComm: I figured I would start here since this is such a common area of PR. If times are tight, I would advocate using public relations over marketing. You can accomplish a lot with a very small PR budget, through publicity, creativity and good relationships with your community. Traditional marketing can get costly, ad space doesn’t come cheap.

Investor Relations: If your stock is falling, or your business isn’t getting the returns it used to, the investors are going to want some serious reassurance. Investor relations should be a crucial facet of any business in a recession. If your ROI is coming back red, and your company remains silent, investors will be dropping out faster than Rudy Giuliani. If you employ some excellent IR, you can maintain their trust and hopefully keep them on board.

Internal Communications: I personally consider this to be the most important function of any company. Productivity and profit are directly linked to how engaged, enabled and happy the employees are. Nothing puts more strain on employee relations than a recession. Potential layoffs, salary increases and bonuses getting the axe, terms like “restructuring” being tossed around, it’s a time of high anxiety for everyone. A good internal communications plan can diffuse the tension, reassure doubts, or at the very least, keep people in the loop about what’s happening.

So there are three key areas PR can really aid a company when the chips are down. This is just my opinion, during the last recession of the early 90s I had a paper route, so I’m not speaking from experience. What do you think? If you have worked in PR through a recession, or just want to share your opinion, leave your two cents in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

So here’s a cheesy topic to blog about: New Year’s Resolutions. I usually don’t make them, if I plan on doing or achieving something I find the best time to start is always right away. But this year I have a blog to take care of! So here are my 2008 blogging resolutions:

1. To blog more frequently, and regularly -  I hope to post a few times a week, and to maintain regular features such as Link Love Fridays, and maybe Top Ten Tuesdays. I just came up with that last one, but it sounds like a good idea.
2. To attend a PR event, and blog about it – I haven’t done this yet, and I always appreciate when others do. It’s a great read for people who couldn’t make the event but wanted to, and for people that attended and would like to discuss it.
3. To upgrade the design and features of PR for the People – Right now this blog is looking pretty much the same as it did when I signed up. I’m trying to find a nice pic to put on the top bar, possibly related to the topic and/or theme of the blog. I would also like to add some fun widgets, but currently this is a free webpage, and java is disabled. I definitely need to upgrade to a pay server, one that I can use the wordpress engine on. If you have any suggestions, or recommendations, please let me know!

So those are my resolutions for 2008 here on PR for the People. They’re published now, so I’ve got to keep them. What are yours? Feel free to post in the comments, or link to your own blog with your ideas. Thanks for reading in 2007, hope to see you again in 2008!

Let me elaborate. Let’s say your best friend is really into movies. You could walk into any Rogers video store and purchase a year’s subscription to The Movie Network for your friend, pay it all up front, get a cute gift card from the store, and Rogers would then credit it to your friend’s account for the year. Same thing for Bell ExpressVu, walk into any Bell Store, buy your hockey buddy a year’s worth of Leafs TV. The HD craze is big right now; why not gift an HD box for the year, to go with Tiny Tim’s new flatscreen plasma? They already have the capabilities to credit accounts and enable new stations instantly, and the databases of customer accounts are already available to every store. All a potential gift giver would need is the intended recipient’s full name, knowledge of which provider they use (easier to find out than it sounds,) and some cashola.

I think it would make an excellent gift. A lot of people don’t want to pay the $15 a month for TMN (for example,) but $180 is a pretty fair price for a good Christmas gift. A lot of other channels are much cheaper, and with such a ridiculous variety of niche TV networks, there’s something for everyone.

It doesn’t just have to be TV, why not make it available to gift internet and cell phone services as well? Upgrade someone’s internet connection from Light to High Speed for a year, give the gift of unlimited text messaging or extra anytime minutes. I’ll admit, these make less interesting gifts than TV stations, but I still believe they could be thoughtful gifts.

If it caught on, it could really bring in some dividends for the media giants. It would allow them to bring in sales and revenue, potentially on an annual basis, from people that aren’t even their own customers. People currently under contract to a company’s competitors would be paying for services for an entire year. Sounds like Rogers’ and Bell’s Christmas dream come true.

It would also work the same way the “free preview” stunts do. If you’ve received a gift station, and enjoyed it all year, there’s a half decent chance you’ll start paying for it once the year runs out.

Gifting stations would also add another useful function for all the brick-and-mortar stores that Bell and Rogers are paying rent for. Getting people in the store is priority #1 at Christmas time for every retailer. It’s all about secondary purchases, people.

Think it’s a good idea? Stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? Let me know in the comments section! It’s a bit late for the holiday season this year; maybe we’ll see this in 2008!

When I arrived at the cbc.ca/docs website, it took a little bit of searching, but I was nicely surprised by the amount of online content the CBC is delivering. If you click on the discussion tab to the left, it will bring up all the recent documentaries and allow you to comment on them. There’s also an extensive list of RSS feeds available for subscription, and a podcast section taken from CBC Radio.

I was especially impressed with the mobile/pda offerings. They’ve obviously put some effort into making themselves available for mobile news headlines, and they even offer a CBC widget for Blackberries.

They also offer online video clips of their shows, which is really should be mandatory for TV networks these days.

The show Dragon’s Den really steps it up. It allows people to vote on content, allowing the inventors to potentially receive some cash from the CBC, and contains a blog, forum, full season video and a newsletter to sign up to.

I only have a few complaints that are worth noting. When browsing the website segments related to TV shows, there aren’t any technorati links or easy ways to share via facebook, myspace, etc. There are tecnorati links on the news section of the website, even a most blogged section, why not translate this to the TV section? I’d also like to see an easy way to embed some of the video content.

I’m a big fan of the CBC, if that wasn’t already obvious, and it always pains me to see it lose ground against some of the more “Americanized,” big-budget Canadian networks. Social media, the internet and good PR is definitely a way the CBC can gain ground on the big boys. Ideally the network is supposed to be for the Canadian people and to reflect the Canadian experience, and what better way to do that than to get some community involvement online?

I like what they’re doing so far, and I would really like to see this aspect of their website have a much more prominent place in the future. What do you think? Take a look at cbc.ca, and leave some comments here on your thoughts.

So meet the three mascots, Sumi, Quatchi and Miga. There’s also a quick questionnaire to find out which mascot you’re most like. Apparently I’m most like Quatchi, which suits me just fine. Miga looks like a bootleg Bad Badtz Maru, and I don’t know what the hell is going on with Sumi.

If the VANOC are smart, they should get some social media going on their site invloving their mascots. There’s still plenty of time until 2010, which could really get a community going. Not too much social media freedom though, this one is for the kids. I would suggest something similar to what Coca Cola did with Coke Music, but instead of making fresh beats while being buried in Coke ads, the users could compete in olympic themed games. Throw a leaderboard in there, add some facebook groups (or even develop it as a facebook app,) and you’ve got a nice little community quickly falling in love with the mascots and getting psyched for the 2010 Olympics.

I would also like to point out a potential political disaster in the making. The main theme for 2010 seems to be environmentalism, and Canada’s connection with nature. This is a great message to promote, but our government has failed to meet Kyoto demands, and Harper is already taking criticism for his lack of environmental initiatives. I hope we make some serious improvements in environmental policy before the Olympics come to Vancouver, or Miga won’t be the only one with red cheeks.