The following posts were made in March 2008. You may subscribe to the RSS feed for this archive if you would like to take your time reading through our posts.

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My first and only twitter post, admittedly not that long ago, was "trying to figure out why I just created a twitter account." I would repeat Stepan's statement of "twitter me insane," regularly. I quickly concurred with a respected marketing director's recent opinion of how twitter was such a wasteful exercize in vanity.

Now I am EATING MY WORDS. A few posts ago I mentioned the research related to 42% of A-list bloggers postiviely responding to an outside pitch incentivizing them to write about something (i.e. a pitch from a public relations or social media agency).

That topic, in and of itself, is a white paper waiting to happen - but an obvious consideration is the method by which an agency might effectively reach out to an influential blogger. I'm happy to say my social media agency now knows from experience that when email isn't working to reach out to influential people, twitter can be (and the results have translated into valuable and relevant coverage for our clients).

And forgive me if I'm just cluing into the obvious - but it took me a while to re-accept that some people I know prefer to communicate with others via texting simply because vital information can quickly be communicated without the expectation of a lengthy email or phone conversation as the receipt. 

If I'm receiving tons of email because of my influential prowess online, seems obvious I would embrace twitter.

illustration credit: Deborah Goss

Going through the (infancy) growing pains of setting up a new blog here... dealing with directory submissions, Technorati Profile creation -- all the really fun stuff (so kidding) typically done for clients instead of ourselves.

I was asked yesterday if I knew of a benchmark for a unique visitor acquisition for social media programs. My response was as follows:

I don't think you'll find a meaningful number for this unless you are looking for a somewhat narrowly defined component of social media. Social media programs as we define them rely on a wide range of variables. A PR firm trying to reach out to top influential bloggers for example, may only be a single component to a program with several other tactics.

Although a cool new blogger and public relations study may tell me something like 42% of A-list bloggers who are pitched on something from a PR professional will actually write about it - I'm left guessing about fair traffic expectations (let alone conversions) generated from those blog sites.

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I met with the principals of an impressive interactive firm this morning to talk about how we might partner to help them with SEO and social media initiatives for their clients.

I was reflecting on the term "social media," and how it was much more prevelant on the the Room 214 website last year. We made a choice to remove it because it didn't appear to be generating a great deal of interest from a search and conversational perspective.

Yesterday, I spent time adding it back in. As the fellas I met with this morning suggested, there was a gap between the use of the term social media vs. the desire of the marketing practice. Now I'm finding more companies are not only using the term - but asking (demanding might be more accurate) what they should be doing to execute.