The new director of global news at BBC recently told the organization’s journalists that they either need to embrace social media channels or find jobs elsewhere (good luck with that, Luddites). In an in-house publication, Peter Horrocks said, “This isn’t just a kind of fad…I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary.” It may sound harsh (particularly if spoken with a British accent), but he must have sensed resistance and deemed a mandate necessary.

It’s not news that many journalists and publications are using social media channels to broaden their reach. We recently met with an executive from Meredith Publishing (Better Homes & Gardens and Ladies Home Journal are among their many titles) who told us their Twitter feeds are often the top drivers of traffic to their destination sites. I believe the line between “traditional” journalism and social media will continue to blur to the point of non-existence. There are a lot of hungry journalists out there and it seems those who understand the need to diversify the distribution of their content (not to mention better communicate with their sources, peers and audiences) will endure.

Of course, we still need to resolve how media outlets will make money going forward. Or there will be no journalists to fire.

Yesterday, I attended a Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) seminar titled, “Regulatory Scrutiny of Social Media.” The speakers were attorney Michael Lasky of Davis & Gilbert LLP and Tricia Geoghegan, who oversees several social media initiatives for Johnson & Johnson.

Lasky provided a quick overview of the recently enacted Federal Trade Commission guidelines on testimonials and endorsements. The harsh reality is that marketers (including their agencies) can now be held liable for a blogger’s unsubstantiated or misleading claims. A blogger can be defined as anyone posting information on a social media channel. Geoghegan noted that brands considering their social media strategies should factor in both the marketing opportunity and their responsibility to community. While this is particularly true for a consumer healthcare company, I think all businesses can benefit by thinking in those terms.

Lasky offered tips to the audience to avoid a run-in with the law. Here’s my condensed version:

1. Encourage bloggers to disclose any material connections (including the acceptance of free products!).
2. Monitor blogs to ensure statements about your products/services aren’t misleading.
3. If you’re posting about your own company (or your client’s), be transparent about your connection.
4. “Street team” members and celebrity endorsers should also make their relationship to the marketer clear.
5. Develop written policies and procedures for employees who participate in social media.
6. Add the subject of disclosure to your media training process.
7. Ask yourself if your social media practices are likely to deceive the average consumer.
8. Seek legal counsel on new initiatives (can’t blame the guy for including a plug!).

Considering a promotion to drive fan traffic on Facebook? Not so fast. Facebook recently updated its promotion guidelines and it’s not as straight-forward as you might think.

Thousands of brands, celebrities, sports teams, musicians and other entities have launched fan pages on Facebook. And Facebook is wisely doing everything it can to monetize fan page traffic (for example, last week it announced advertisers can target friends of their fans) and protect itself against any liabilities from the promotions fan pages are hosting.

Most of the guidelines are intuitive – like you can’t offer prizes to people who are under 18 or require a purchase to enter. Section 3/Administering a Promotion through the Facebook Platform, though, was more than a tad surprising. If you are planning a promotion through Facebook, you must receive written approval from Facebook to do so. And, you must administer the promotion through an application (i.e. not via status updates).

Facebook has been a boon for small and mid-size businesses looking for cost effective ways to engage their customers. I haven’t tried to reach a Facebook representative to get approval for a promotion yet. But something tells me these kinds of restrictions are going to make it difficult for the vast majority of organizations that don’t have endless resources to optimize their presence on Facebook.

Fortunately these rules don’t apply if you’re promoting a contest you’re administering outside of Facebook. When we hosted a Twitter scavenger hunt earlier this week for the Radio City Rockettes, we posted these rules on the company website and only used Facebook status updates to alert fans to the opportunity.

Stay tuned as the rules are likely to change again. In the words of Section 6/Facebook Rights, “We may modify these Promotion Guidelines at any time without notice to you. You will subject to the most current version of these Promotion Guidelines then in effect.”

Recently we were asked to include social media best practices in a proposal. To follow is our list. As Peter Shankman and Sarah Evans wrote on their blog post, very few people can call themselves social media experts. To that end and given the dynamic nature of the practice, any suggested changes, contributions are welcomed!

1. Social networking channels, such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, require a degree of authenticity and transparency not always evident in traditional forms of marketing
2. Organizations that create a presence on social media channels must be willing to engage in a two-way dialogue with their target audiences and recognize it’s about human-to-human contact
3. It is critical to determine the role(s) – customer service, informer, reputation management – an organization wants to play before setting up a social media account
4. An organization should only share information via social networks that is easy (and desirable!) for others to share
5. A mix of social media channels can optimize an organization’s ability to participate in social media, as each tends to offer its own unique attribute and/or audience
6. The real-time nature of social media combined with its virtually unregulated content makes it imperative to monitor — and respond where appropriate – on a very frequent basis
7. Organizations should develop and utilize social media guidelines for their employees that outline how individuals characterize their affiliation

As the Federal Trade Commission drafts new rules on bloggers’ disclosure of sponsored content, BlogHer, the community of thousands of influential female bloggers, is in the midst of its fifth annual convention in Chicago.

We attended BlogHer in 2006 on behalf of our client WeightWatchers.com. The debate about the precarious relationship between trusted information sources and marketers with dollars aimed at garnering positive product reviews was percolating then and it’s raging now. (Incidentally, WeightWatchers.com was paying to attend the conference and exhibit, but they weren’t paying bloggers for posts.)

Days before this year’s conference kicked off, Elissa Camahort Page, the community’s co-founder, told AdAge that disclosure alone is insufficient. Her network is advocating that bloggers create a separate section of their blogs for reviews based on freebies, perks or outright compensation.

We’re members of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and we’ve always been proponents of transparency. Camahort Page’s new proposal’s an interesting one. Ultimately though, which of the many proposals on the table is adopted doesn’t matter as much as continuing the lively dialogue. It’s important that there’s real forward movement on the establishment of best practices and policies – something both bloggers and marketers desperately need – especially since this world is evolving so quickly (next frontier: sponsored tweets).

Publishers, like mommy bloggers, have a right to monetize their work – how else will they survive and thrive? But they also need to retain their credibility and authenticity. We’re hopeful that as the industry moves towards consensus on these issues we’ll strike a satisfactory balance.

Does anyone remember back in the early to mid-90s when whether to launch a web site was still a decision? I was working for a firm then that did interactive design, in addition to traditional marketing communications. One of the big issues of the time was people registering domain names of companies that had not yet taken the plunge. So a big brand would go to register www.insertbrandnamehere.com only to find out it had been “hijacked” by some web developer seeking a huge bounty.

Now that recognized brands are setting up Twitter accounts, it seems like the same type of “brandjacking” is taking place. Just this week, I tried to look up two brands I wanted to follow on Twitter: BornFree and Method. When I know who I am looking for, my first step is often to enter www.twitter.com/theirhandle. But simply entering “bornfree” and “method” took me to unrelated accounts. While the users were not posing as the brands (or looking for a payout), the logical handles for the companies’ social media efforts were taken. Twitter, by the way, does have rules about people misleading followers with company names, logos and false information. My next step was a Twitter search that took me to relevant tweets about their brands, but not to their actual accounts. Ultimately, I found them via links posted on their corporate sites: www.twitter.com/newbornfree and www.twitter.com/methodtweet.

The motives of the handle-squatters may not be malicious, but you never want roadblocks between your brand and your customers. If a hijacker is seeking to harm your brand, Twitter will apparently suspend accounts where an overt trademark infringement is occurring within 48 hours. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for a rumor to turn into reality in the minds of consumers. Just ask Tommy Hilfiger.

Several months ago, we did an assessment of Twitter to determine its viability for a client of ours. We ultimately decided it was not the best use of the company’s limited resources. Their product is expensive, meant to last decades and doesn’t inspire the kind of two-way dialogue the channel affords. But we did take the time to register handles for other clients (with their permission) that should be considering Twitter. In fact, we’re starting to implement the social media strategy for one this week.

Bottom line: If you haven’t registered a Twitter handle for your company brand or name, do it now. Even if you never issue one tweet.

P.S. Our own Jennifer Leckstrom recently penned a piece on her local community’s use of Twitter, which ran on the cover on the paper!

What are you doing? A simple question that has started a micro-blogging revolution: Twitter.

At first, I was hesitant to join Twitter. I’d already stopped checking my neon-colored, disaster of a MySpace profile in favor of my clean, crisp Facebook page and wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to yet another social networking site. But after reading Clive Thompson’s “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” article in The New York Times, I was compelled to dive into the Twitter pool. Thompson wrote that Twitter’s design makes updates “skimmable, like newspaper headlines, maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some.” I figured I could manage.

Six months later, I’ve come to embrace Twitter. Though I do not tweet every day, I like knowing I have the option to when I have something worth sharing with my 250+ followers. I don’t understand how some of the people I follow are able to tweet 20 or more times a day, but I do enjoy perusing their posts and learning new things in the process.

As a public relations professional, here are my top five reasons for utilizing Twitter:

5. Enhancing relationships. Maybe it’s your colleague based in another office, or a former client, but connecting with people you rarely see in person via Twitter is a good way to keep your relationship intact. Tweets fill the gaps between in-person meetings.

4. Instant research. Google is great, but when I want insight from influencers, I turn to Twitter. Pose a question about any topic and you’re sure to get intuitive replies from a wide range of people. Plus, it’s a great conversation starter.

3. Meeting new people. I have no rules for following people on Twitter – I’m open to following just about anyone (get rich quick schemers not included). Through Twitter, I’ve met a feisty journalist based in South Africa, a stay-at-home mom who blogs about environmentalism and a gentleman from Atlanta with a strong interest in fractals and mental disorders.

2. Monitoring the conversation. It’s important to know what’s being said about your clients and their competition. Twitter’s search tool allows for real time monitoring of posts, and as such, complements a traditional media monitoring service.

1. @skydiver. Peter Shankman’s urgent HARO queries help connect journalists and sources in record time.

Follow me on Twitter: @jleckstrom

A recent tale of communication gone wrong caught our attention.

When Jason Roe, an Irish freelance web designer, found a glitch in Ryanair’s online flight booking system, he wrote a post about it on his blog. The flaw resulted in a $0.00 price quote on the flight he was booking (though the system didn’t actually allow him to obtain the free flight). Instead of acknowledging the problem, or attempting to correct it, a Ryanair staff member posted a response to Jason’s blog, which read, “jason! you’re an idiot and a liar!!” A pretty bizarre way to react, we think. A number of Ryanair staffers chimed in with equally tactless comments. The debate among the airline and blog visitors ran 400+ comments long. What’s worse though is an official Ryanair spokesperson later confirmed the comments came from staff members and reinforced the company’s low-road approach by saying, “It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.” Wow. Talk about counterproductive. It seems the entire Ryanair team needs a lesson in social media interaction as well as general customer communication.

What the exchange did get Ryanair though is attention – which may be what it’s seeking if we judge by the company’s strange threat just a few days earlier to charge passengers for bathroom usage on its planes. (That story grabbed headlines across the globe.) Is any PR is good PR? While we know there’s a place for controversy in PR, we don’t think so.

Interestingly, at our previous agency, we represented one of the top airlines in the country when a glitch on their web site allowed users to book a trip from Chicago to India for a small fraction of the actual price. This was the pre-blog era, but frequent flyer sites jumped on it and suggested people take advantage before it was fixed. More than 100 people did just that. Going against our counsel, they originally told customers they would not honor the low fares. When every major media outlet began to cover the story, they quickly reversed their position during an appearance on the TODAY show.

When companies make mistakes, they fare better (pun intended) by admitting it and doing the right thing for affected customers, thereby turning potentially negative exposure into good PR.

President-elect Barack Obama has started a social media movement among world leaders.  Among those tweeting are Great Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Vice President Al Gore and Israel’s former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Gore, who signed up for Twitter on November 6 already has nearly 20,000 followers.  Although Netanyahu only has 192 followers as of today, it’s pretty cool to see tweets in Hebrew, a language thousands of years old.  

President-elect Obama was named the Marketer of the Year by Advertising Age, in part for his effective use of social media tools to engage the voting public.  But he hasn’t tweeted since Election Night. 

Other world leaders who have recently joined Twitter seem to think the medium is beneficial after an election is won.  Even after a term of office is complete.

So, what are you doing, President-elect Obama?  Now that you’ve won, do you think there’s no appetite for what you’re up to?  Think again.

Businesses of all types are joining the Twitter craze as a way to communicate directly with their customers. We recently participated in a webinar offered by Bulldog Reporter and led by two social media gurus from Ogilvy. For those who chose not to pay the $300, here are some highlights:

Who’s using Twitter?

Twitter receives more than 3 million unique visitors per month and has grown 5 percent per day on average since September. Sixty percent of Twitter users are male.  Twitter’s largest age demographic is 35 to 44 who make up 25.9 percent of the total user base.

Twitter is being used by business for the following purposes:

1. Customer Relations (e.g. comcastcares w/ nearly 5K followers)
2. Crisis Management (e.g. JetBlue w/ about 6K followers)
3. Corporate Reputation Management (e.g. Zappos w/ about 20K followers)
4. Event Activation (e.g. twitter #votereport w/ 11,000 tweets)
5. Issue Advocacy (e.g. redcross w/ more than 2K followers)
6. Product Promotion and Sales (e.g. delloutlet w/ more than 2K followers and sales of $500K)
7. Internal Communications (via Yammer)

Public relations professionals are using Twitter to pitch the media using a technique called twitpitch, which was coined by social media impresario Stowe Boyd.

There was plenty of other information shared, such as the rules of engagement, the ins and outs of developing a handle and top Twitter tools. The bottom line is that using Twitter as an effective corporate communications tool requires a commitment. A company needs to understand the culture of the Twitter community, be transparent in its intentions and engage in a two-way dialogue. You can’t simply create a handle and broadcast your messages without participating in the conversation. Not for long anyway. Along those lines, a company needs to follow its followers. When I signed up to follow Barack Obama, I immediately received a note saying “he” was following me.

Talking directly to consumers through social media is changing the way public relations gets done. And Twitter continues to expand its reign of influence every day. By the way, my handle is rosecomm. See you on Twitter.