If you’ve been watching, well, pretty much anything that’s not basketball today, you’ve no doubt seen the debacle that’s unfolding over on the Nestlé Facebook page. If not, check out this AdAge article for an overview.

However, this could just have easily been a case study full of WIN instead of a case study ripe with FAIL that will no doubt be included in the “what not to do” section of decks for years to come.   At the core, the mistake wasn’t necessarily made on the Facebook page, but in the communication layer that exists between Nestlé and their agency (or possibly agencies).

To make sure this never happens to you, here are our five steps for creating PR and SMM WIN:

1. Have a Plan – Oftentimes the jump into social media is made with a sort of “well, everyone else is doing it, we might as well do it too” sort of thinking – bad idea. Have a plan for what you want to accomplish in the social media space. This will help you divide duties among your groups and agencies.
2. Divide and Conquer – Overlap isn’t your friend. When overlap in responsibilities occurs, that’s when things fall through the cracks. Give distinct responsibilities to your teams/agencies and hold them accountable.
3. Lay the Groundwork for Communication – Funnily enough, communications companies are notoriously bad at communicating. By creating a clear path for escalation of problems/questions, you can sidestep the bullets being slung at your brand and gracefully respond with the correct information.
4. There’s no I in TEAM – If your agencies decide to go all-out in competing for themselves alone, your brand will be the one that suffers. Create a sense of team within your larger group and emphasize that wins for the brand outweigh an individual’s wins— despite the compartmentalized nature of the work.
5. If You’re Not Early, You’re Late – The social media world moves at a breakneck pace. In order to be on time, you’ve got to be early in thinking about what the next issue you’ll be faced with will be. Then you can bring your agencies together and create a plan of attack.

*NOTE: The Nestle image above was not changed in any way.

We’re about to give you the chance to actually follow through on one of our favorite empty threats from childhood.   “I’m going to run away and join the circus” used to just be an unfulfilled promise you made to your parents when you didn’t want to eat your vegetables, but at the upcoming Twestival Seattle on March 25th, we’re giving you the chance to make it a reality.

Since Twestival Seattle is going down at Emerald City Trapeze this time around, Spring Creek Group decided to sponsor a little “Air Time,” where a few lucky attendees will get their chance to fly through the air with the greatest of ease (under the guidance of some trained trapeze professionals, of course).   If hurtling through the air at rapid speeds isn’t your bag, you can still get your trapeze fix as you check out a professional flying show later in the evening.   For all you former circus runaways, there are 60 flying spots available– so if you’re interested, be sure to drop a line to ShaunaCausey@gmail.com. 

One hundred percent of this edition of Twestival Seattle’s proceeds will go directly to Concern Worldwide, an international humanitarian organization that works to make education more accessible for some of the world’s poorest children.  

Bottom line:  Twestival Seattle is benefiting a great cause, and it’s always a good time with some good folks- so we hope to see you there!  For more details, and to register for the event, head here.

For a shop that focuses on three key areas (analytics, engagement and campaigns) dividing and conquering the massive list of available panels at SxSWi becomes a somewhat easier task.  However, even when you attack the festival with a team of eager attendees, you’re left with that nagging question:  “What if I missed the single most-important panel of SxSWi?”

On that note, here are just a few of the things that caught our attention at SxSWi so far:

The Future of Mobile

When you think about the Web, it’s easy to picture a laptop or even a desktop, but the fact of the matter is that more Web traffic comes from handheld mobile devices these days than from any other types of devices. In this talk, Nielsen presented their outlook for the mobile market and predicted that smartphones will dethrone feature phones as the dominating type of mobile device by Q3 2011. Nielsen also talked about the importance applications play in the fast-approaching world of mobile. According to their research it is the teen set that is driving the market for paid applications, but mysteriously, those purchases of applications suddenly drop once those teens reach college age . . . weird.  

From the looks of things, the revolution will not be televised, my friends.  Instead, the revolution, led by teens with their parents’ credit cards, will be live-streamed and simultaneously talked about on social networks – all from mobile devices.

Wall-E and Eve: A Story of Great Content Development

You’ve all heard the phrase “Content is King” more times than anyone would care to admit, but it’s not volume that creates lasting impressions and cohesive campaigns, it’s cautiously-executed content that tells a story. When author and CEO of Brain Traffic, Kristina Halvorson, started off with a story about Wall-E, you immediately knew the presentation following would be a great one.  What Halvorson did, rather eloquently, was equate the eternal search for great content to Wall-E’s daily grind of picking through the garbage left on Earth and sometimes, when he’s extremely lucky, finding a treasure that is so precious he takes it home and essentially catalogs it for later. Even more than that, once Eve comes along with her shiny, Apple-like design, Wall-E shares the treasures he’s picked out of the junk – that’s the great content, people. For more on Halvorson’s content strategy teachings, check out her book Content Strategy for the Web.

Digging Just Got Easier

As Saturday night fell on the anything-but-sleepy Austin, the two guys famous for sitting on a couch and talking about stories that other people brought to their attention took center stage at Stubb’s for a live version of Digg Nation. Besides Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose’s normal antics and banter, the show also introduced the new and improved Digg.com that will be launching soon. The site boasts an entirely new backend and tech that allows for one-click Digging as well as bringing back leaderboards. You can sign up for the new Digg here: http://digg.com/new.

The event was packed and although we never found two people we were looking for, I did manage to see iJustine and stood in Robert Scoble’s way as he was trying to get up the stairs.

As a bonus cherry on top of the sundae of awesome that actually turned out to be the Digg event, Leo Laporte showed up with his live-streaming backpack and camera rig and crowd-surfed the mob of Digg Nation onlookers.

Finally, as if the show needed anything else before The Walkmen took the stage, Alex brought out Robert Rodriguez to talk about his new film (one that he scripted and originally had turned down), Predators. The flick is a reboot of the original Predator franchise and takes place on the Predators’ home planet.

More to come from deep in the heart of Texas. . .

Sitting in a black leather chair in front of a packed house, Evan Williams, CEO and founder of Twitter didn’t waste any time before announcing the newest feature for Twitter users around the world – @Anywhere.

The tool, which actually lets users interact with Twitter users and organizations using Twitter on Web sites, truly embodies the name by allowing the clicker to follow or message a user directly from the hover-enabled Twitter menu that pops up. At launch the program will include sites like The New York Times, Bing, Yahoo! and others. Look for more information on this new tool soon. For more information about the new service, check out the Twitter blog.

In the interview-style keynote, Williams also talked a bit about the continued goals of Twitter. With such explosive growth, companies can sometimes lost their path, but Williams assured the audience that Twitter is still working toward their original goals. “We’re still focused on how we create the best experience for users and businesses,” said Williams.

More to come after the keynote.

Tonight’s the night for the Annual Seattle ADDY Awards bash! We are looking forward to spending quality time with our agency friends and partners. If you haven’t heard of the ADDY awards, and are curious check them out here.

We are especially excited to congratulate our friend Jim Copacino of Copacino + Fujikado for receiving this year’s lifetime achievement award. Lifetime achievement is a pretty good description of the effort, time and passion Jim has brought to the advertising industry and Seattle brands.  He started his career in New York more than 35 years ago and has been leading campaigns with his own agency for more than twelve.  If you are lucky enough to know Jim, he is also an incredibly generous guy. Congratulations!

Hope to see you tonight at the bash!

Voice recognition software has always gotten a bum rap from the beginning and no one has been able to get it quite right – though, not without a lack of trying.  Even though Google’s technology is some of the best we’ve seen, it can’t escape the inevitable mistakes that plague voice recognition services.  Engadget turned its critical eye on some of the more hilarious auto-captioning results:

Of course Google understands it’s not perfect and most users have come to expect a tolerable amount of error. YouTube offers the following caveats in their latest blog post:

• While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken.
• Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can’t be auto-captioned. President Obama’s speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions.
• Auto-captions aren’t perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they’re accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient — our speech recognition technology gets better every day.
• Auto-captions should be available to everyone who’s interested in using them. We’re also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you’re having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers.

For users and companies with a massive backlog of un-captioned video content, this tool is an invaluable head start in the race to make their content accessible to everyone.  It’s far from a turnkey solution and requires users to manually submit their video for captioning, then perform a secondary quality check that can sometimes be daunting, and finally do a manual language conversion for non-English captions.  However, given the alternative, YouTube has made everyone’s jobs a hell of a lot easier.  Spending the time updating your video’s captions now could pay huge dividends down the road as Google starts properly indexing video content.

Carroll’s presentation was not actually entitled, “How to Run a Social Media Campaign.”  But with 400,000 Twitter followers, he could probably run an entire event on the matter if he so wished.  He spoke about general leadership and business philosophies, but when you peel away the adjectives, they are also extremely sound strategies for a social media program as well.  In honor of the 12^th man, here are 12 philosophies I walked away with (and which will likely soon in up in one of our presentation decks).

(Quotes are paraphrases of Carroll’s speech, not necessarily direct quotes.)

1)      “I wasn’t ready to be a head coach when I ran the Jets.  So it was a mistake to get involved.  But when I finally figured it out and was ready for the next role, I knew exactly what I needed to do, and what it would take to put it together.” Social media translation – If you don’t know what you are doing, don’t rush in.  Figure out what you need to do, and what it will take to get there.  Write everything down, start your program and make refinements along the way.  But know what the goals are, and what pieces you need to make them happen.

2)      “Look forward to the challenges ahead of you, rather than worry about them.” – If you’ve built out a solid plan, you can anticipate where there may be hurdles. When you are prepared and ready to face difficulties, whether they are organizational, technical, or content centric, you are in the proper mindset to find the right solutions in an efficient manner.

3)      “We all win sometimes.  But if you want to win forever, you figure out why you are winning.” –It’s not just that anyone can get lucky, it’s that everyone will get lucky at some point.  If you rest on a few wins without figuring out what exactly got you that bump in traffic or spike in friends, you’ll only be successful until the next company (possibly a competitor) gets their stroke of luck.

4)      “Winners battle for a competitive edge in everything they do.  Find those who want to do things better than other people, and you all will achieve greater things. Fight, scratch and claw to find a better way.” –Don’t just pick an employee or agency because they are convenient or easy.  Pick those with drive and passion to be better than others, and your campaigns will reflect that more so than someone who just wants to get a check.  Simply doing something because, ‘it’s how we’re used to doing it’ is not acceptable for a social media or marketing program.  Do what it takes to make something special happen.

5)      “Accomplishment is one thing, but it’s more important to understand how someone feels about that accomplishment.” –A line on a resume or a completed project only gets you so far.  Understanding whether the person thinks they could have done better, and how they’d do it over, is a better predictor of who is going to execute a quality campaign for you, and how your campaign is going to evolve over time.

6)      “Find the folks that other people are listening to.  Make an impact on them first, then the rest is easier.” –Identify your influencers.  But don’t try to sell them garbage.  Carroll used the word “impact” which is key.  Be “impactful” to those who matter the most, and you’ll get their support.

7)      “3 or 4 people in a crowd out of 15,000 can change a community.” –Carroll’s program to fight gang violence had a monetary return.  It cost about $100k to support each of these 3 or 4 influencers.  Each gang-related death costs the city $1 Million in legal fees.  So for every death Carroll’s group prevents, the city avoids having to pay out $1 Million.  Social media may not lead to direct sales, but can you determine if it is preventing additional costs on expensive PR efforts later?

8)      “Do things better than anyone else has ever done before, in all the things you choose to do.” — You don’t have to do everything, but if you are going to do it, don’t just do it well, shoot to do it better than everyone else. Basically, “mediocrity” not “failure” is the enemy of “excellence.”

9)      “Know your philosophy.  If you can’t articulate your own philosophy in 25 words or less, how do you expect anyone who works for you or around you to explain it to others?” –Your social media program needs a vision and a voice, and it needs to be articulated to everyone in your company.

10)    “John Wooden had his own way of doing things that were unique.  He could draw on people from all walks of life, because they could all focus on his unique way.” –Your brand needs its own unique identity, philosophy and vision if you want people to be drawn to it.  If you do things out of a standardized process or playbook, you only cater to those people who agree with that playbook.  If you do your own thing, you can draw everyone who believes in the vision.

11)    “Empower yourself to do everything you can do, in the areas you control.  Don’t worry about the things you can’t.” –Don’t stress about whether people will say something negative.  You control the product you develop, the price you sell it for, and the way you promote it.  You control how you respond to your customers and how you cater to their needs.  Focus on that, and don’t waste energy on the other stuff.

12)   “Evaluate, Address areas of concern, and fill the holes.”  –This goes to the Spring Creek Group philosophy of 1) Analyze Data, 2) Develop a Strategic Plan, and 3) Engage the Community.  Take a good hard look at what you have, figure out the best course of action, and then be relentless in fulfilling those needs.

You can follow Carroll on Twitter at @PeteCarroll.  Also, a full-length video of his speech can be found on the Seahawks Web site.

While the talk of the town is still social media (even if it’s a day late and more than a dollar short for some), creating a seamless experience with brands is quickly becoming the focus of many an internal marketing team. In Andy Boyer’s last post he took a look at the tide of users logging into the Facebook environment on their mobile devices (HINT: It’s a big, big number). Here, I’m looking at the recent launch of location-based mobile marketing campaigns and seeing how they tie in to larger campaigns.

If you’re keeping up with the news, you’ve probably seen the story from location-based marketer Placecast (owned and developed by 1020 Inc.) which is working with the likes of Sonic, American Eagle Outfitters, and REI to integrate their ShopAlerts application into their wider marketing campaigns. The North Face Inc. also just launched a campaign to drive foot traffic to their brick and mortar stores in New York, Boston, San Francisco and here in Seattle.

As more and more companies are looking at social media and other new tech-propelled forms of reaching targets many are making the OR mistake and only putting one horse in the race. Where companies small and large are making a splash is in creating a seamless brand experience by using traditional, social, and mobile media to reach their brand loyalists where they are and in a way that resonates with them. Here’s a look at a couple brands doing this well:

American Eagle Outfitters

AE, a lifestyle clothing brand is aimed at college-age men and women, is always working to keep up with current marketing trends. Their presence in the social media world is anchored by a strong presence in Facebook and Twitter, but by adding a text-based element they are able to bring customers through the doors.

The North Face

As one of the leaders in advanced outdoor gear, The North Face operates at the higher-end of the retail spectrum and has a varying array of customers from advanced mountaineers to sporty urbanites. Their presence in social media plays well with their changing Web presence and reflects the current campaign pushes of the time. However, The North Face, along with Placecast, just launched a mobile location-based text campaign meant to draw already interested brand loyalists into their stores for even more gear.

In addition to their text campaign with Placecast, The North Face recently launched an iPhone application aimed at providing snow conditions for those headed to the mountains called The North Face Snow Report.

But, Where are the Numbers?

Oh, we’ve got numbers for you. Participants who opted into receiving updates from several major retailers including Sonic, American Eagle Outfitters and REI had this to say:

• 60% said that they found the lociation-triggered messages to be cool and innovative
• 79% said it increased their likelihood to visit a store
• 65% made a purchase as a result of a ShopAlerts message
• 73% said they would definitely or probably use the service in the future

From those numbers you can see the power of opt-in services that are delivering right-sized messaging at the correct targets. The users are already connected with the brands and are receiving information that they’ve already deemed “worthy.” It’s not like having a person stand on the corner handing out fliers for your store to every passersby – it’s targeted.

So, as we continue to move further into the world where marketing truly can reach anyone, anywhere (given, of course that the technological infrastructure is there), I think it’s important to realize that no new technology or tactic is the silver bullet. It’s not traditional advertising or social media. It’s not in-store or mobile – the list goes on. Speaking of that list of location-based services, looks like it’s about to get one name longer very soon.  It’s about creating the seamless experience for users from store to online store to community to mobile that builds brand loyalty and gives back in the end.

Spring Creek Group is looking to add a few Social Media Engagement Leads to our team.

Ideal candidates will have 1-3 years experience, with some functional experience in online marketing.  More importantly, you love Blogs, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and some social networks that most people have not heard of.  You are also fascinated by the business side of Social Media, quickly evaluate opportunities, converse fluently in the online world, and understand how this channel fits into a larger marketing campaign.

This job is perfect for people who have built large or small blogs and/or web sites and tried to get them a larger audience. You see potential in this industry, and want to get in early.  And, you are looking for a new job where you get to work with a team of like-minded, hungry, entrepreneurial types, to build large and small social media campaigns for major corporations and underfunded start-ups.

Salary Range: $32,000 – $36,000/year

Please send your resume, but also send along links where we can see your skills.  Please reply to jobs@springcreekgroup.com.

Pew Research released a report that claims 33 percent of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.  So we’ve finally figured out what the people who aren’t Facebooking or texting are doing with their phones – they’re reading the New York Times or Perez Hilton.

The Pew report discusses, “two significant technological trends that have influenced news consumption behavior: First, the advent of social media like social networking sites and blogs has helped the news become a social experience in fresh ways for consumers. People use their social networks and social networking technology to filter, assess and react to news. Second, the ascent of mobile connectivity via smart phones has turned news gathering and news awareness into an anytime, anywhere affair for a segment of avid news watchers.”

Younger cell phone owners are more likely to look for news on their phones than from Katie Couric. In fact, according to the report, about 43 percent of those under 50 said they are mobile news consumers.  And social media plays a big part, as more than 80 percent of respondents get or receive news via e-mailed links.  But as Breitbart points out in their analysis of the report, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  People’s #1 one concern is still the weather (72 percent), followed by current events (68 percent).

John Cook from Seattle’s own TechFlash found it worthwhile to mention that, “The authors of the study write that news has become omnipresent and people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized and participatory.”

I think John is right when he focuses on the fact that news (and other information) is omnipresent.  The “news cycle,” so to speak, is no longer valid.  The classic product launch is a thing of the past.  Making a big splash with a marketing or ad campaign is not effective unless there is credibility in the claim, and you can prove that the message is sustainable over time.  There’s an effect in which every marketing action has an equal and opposite reaction.  The more you promise, the more upset the crowd will be if you don’t deliver.

So how is this affecting the way news is being delivered?

“In one way it’s uplifting that over 60 percent of people using their phones for news are logging on to check current events. That goes against the passive news consumer we’ve heard about in TV for years,” says Cale Ramaker, an anchor at WOFL-TV in Orlando.  “On the other hand it means all news outlets, in any median, need to refocus on not only delivering the news in multi-formats – but do it with an emphasis for the right now consumer.”

Cale’s point is valid.  We now have more sources of information, more editors of the information, but also more opportunities to make critical decisions on whether the information is tainted.  And seventy two percent of the survey’s respondents said that “most news sources today are biased in their coverage.” If the “objective” sources are biased, then the marketing sources are unbelievably easy to see through.

So at the end of the day, information continues to flow, and people can find it whenever and wherever they are.  In fact, even if a marketing team lands an article with Kara Swisher, we may not read it there.  We may get it via a friend’s Facebook post or Tweet while waiting for the bus.