Social Networks

Sarah Palin again left us scratching our PR noggins this week. Fan or not, she's crushing it in terms "Going Rogue". So why did her people outright kill her sizable AKGovSarahPalin Twitter account and open SarahPalinUSA to promote the book? Are they people who run the 7-figure Facebook Fan page? The new feed has been languishing all week at between 24,000 to 25,000 followers. You can maintain a following with a simple Tweet announcement after simply changing one's screenname.

We thought it had something to do with public offices or PACs needing to migrate to a personal brand for legal reasons. We checked in with Nicco Mele, founder of poli-digital consultancy EchoDitto in Washington who is nearly as confused:

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How much of a role did social media play in powering Barack Obama to the presidency? The topic is still being debated. Regardless, Republicans have upped their efforts in the social space, hiring new media managers and building social networks.

The GOP has also formed a "New Media Caucus." Ryan Walker, chief of staff for Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), a founding member of the New Media Caucus, told The Hill, "[Latta] saw a void in our own offices communication after the Obama campaign ...and we've been running with it ever since...It's been easier than I thought to get people on board."

Of course, like many learning the ropes in social media, the GOP hasn't been without their stumbles - one of which being party Chairman's Michael Steele's "much ridiculed" blog, "What Up."

The FDA held public hearings just last week to discuss establishing guidelines for pharmaceutical marketers operating in the new world of social media. Already some are complaining that the process is taking too long.

"Does the FDA get it?" If it did, "they wouldn't be having this meeting now, many, many months after it was already apparent how quickly Web communications is changing," Mark Senak, author of the blog Eye on FDA and a senior vice-president at Fleishman-Hillard told BusinessWeek.

John Bell, President of the Board of Word of Mouth Marketing Association and Managing Director, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide agreed that things will take a while. "We're spending time today in initial discussions that is as much about how the process should unfold as it is what should be the precise guidelines," he told PRNewser last week.

Two weeks ago I weighed in on what Twitter's new Lists function means for the PR business. Since then, I have been curating our own lists for your reference and ours. We'll continue to edit and add new lists, and will look at ways to use a one to follow more immediate issues and see how the industry is getting involved.

Connect with @PRNewser and help us find interesting and useful feeds. So far our lists are:

[Editor's note: Clicking these links while you're logged on to Twitter will display the latest Tweets from feeds included in the Lists. To follow a List, visit the @PRNewser]

Agency feeds--PR firm feeds including divisions of conglomerate agencies

Agency heads--CEOs and principals of firms

Internal PR--Including people on PR or social media teams within companies and organizations, as well as their department feeds

PR & marketing beat--Trades, blogs, and people covering PR and adjacent news

Social gurus--PR people who are deeply involved in social media for their clients or the company they work for. Yes, we expect a lot of debate.

Vendors--Newswires, database and list services, journalist-to-source matching, monitoring companies, and more

Also have a look at @Mediabistro's Lists for niche media, J-schools and profs, multimedia journalists and more.

Four out of five CMOs (84%) said less than ten percent of their budgets go to "experimenting through social media and non-traditional communications channels," according to a study by The CMO Club and Hill & Knowlton released this week.

Our guess as to the reason why the number may be so high? No CMO would want to admit to "experimenting" at a time when budgets are being cut and every dollar is being watched. The survey covered a variety of other topic areas as well.

John Bell, President of the Board of Word of Mouth Marketing Association and Managing Director, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, was one of the last presenters today at the FDA's public hearings on "Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools." We caught up with Bell late yesterday to get his take on the proceedings.

Asked about how much of the hearings pertained to advertising and how much pertained to PR, Bell said, "Today's stated focus is about what guidelines should be developed for social media, which is this netherworld in between paid and earned media. Unfortunately it covers all grounds."

Part of the problem, Bell said, is that health-care marketers, "can't jam all the crap you put into a print ad into a tweet." So, what is end game with all of this? "We're spending time today in initial discussions that is as much about how the process should unfold as it is what should be the precise guidelines." PRNewser's takeaway: this is going to take a while.

Bell and WOMMA were heavily involved in the recently issued FTC guidelines around disclosure in social media. Drafts for those guidelines were posted for comment late last year, he said, and the final draft came out in October. "I think what will happen with the FDA, is basically to kind of follow the same process," he said.

Hundreds of advertising, marketing and public relations executives have gathered in Washington, D.C. today for FDA public hearings on "Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools." The hearings are just one step in the FDA's process to develop policy and guidelines for pharmaceutical companies looking to use social media to promote their products.

"What's happening is these new media are emerging at an increasingly rapid rate, and are being regulated by an agency that moves very slowly...In essence, you have a regulatory communication crisis developing," attorney Mark Senak, who advises drug companies as a consultant for Fleishman-Hillard, told the Associated Press.

PR executives speaking at the hearings include Peter J. Pitts, Partner/Director, Global Healthcare, Porter Novelli, Peter Nalen, President, Compass Healthcare Communications, Rick Wion, Vice President of Social Media, GolinHarris, Rohit Bhargava, Senior Vice President, Digital, Strategy & Planning Group, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and John Bell, President of the Board of Word of Mouth Marketing Association and Managing Director, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.

A full list of speakers is available via the FDA's website, in addition to a live video stream of the hearings. Naturally, there is also a Twitter hash-tag, #fdaSM.

Have you always wanted to sync up your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts? Well, now you can, thanks to a deal announced late yesterday by the two social networks. The deal makes it easy to send LinkedIn status updates to Twitter, and "Tweets" to your LinkedIn profile. You also have the option of only syncing certain content from each profile. The LinkedIn deal comes on the heals of deals with both Bing and Google, both announced several weeks ago.

In a video announcing the deal, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said, "The general idea of putting a little Twitter in everything, is being able to inject into LinkedIn a little bit more of this fresh, kind of here's what's going on with these other things, but with a little bit of curated sense in terms of your professional life...You want the widest possible distribution."

ProBlogger, the popular blog that teaches one how to make a living off blogging, published an interesting guest post from a former beauty/fashion blogger. In the post, the blogger talks about how she was so excited to do "product reviews" and get all sorts of free stuff sent to her by companies.

She even signed an $8,000 deal with, "a large pharmaceutical company to write six posts for them to try educating readers on the benefits of their product...the only thing I had to do was to get the copy reviewed by the pharmaceutical company to ensure that I wasn't using any medical words in the wrong way."

But then the economy took a turn for the worse and the blogger's freebie parade slowed down. What did she learn? People were actually asking her questions like how many unique visitors her site had and to send links of recent, relevant coverage before sending products. That didn't work out, so the blogger got into another niche, "healthy eating and healthy lifestyles," which she said worked out much better.

"One company (which manufactures supplements) that contacted me to send products for review also wanted to know how much it would cost to sponsor spots on my site. They actually wanted to pay to have banners on my site and not only receive a free review!" she said.

Um, free review? Companies aren't supposed to pay publications for product reviews, or to influence them. Although it does happen. This post, in essence, sums up the difference between how media has traditionally worked: build audience/content, sell advertising against said audience/content - versus how it is unfortunately working for some bloggers: the content is the advertising.

Twitter's new Lists functionality rolled out last week to a certain amount of fanfare in the blogosphere, and in media circles. It's designed to help users track groups of people, topics or trends without further clogging up one's main feed. Some might see this as a virtual school lunchroom, where the cool kids get even better tables and nerds become literally listless. Social media consultant and immensely popular blogger Chris Brogan is concerned about the exclusionary aspects of stuffing people into little boxes. He has a point that drier things like travel, airline and workaday newsfeeds work well in Lists when you need a quick look at a niche universe.

Adding to Brogan's take, Twitter in my opinion was a messy but fun replacement for RSS for some users. Now Twitter Lists can replace them altogether if one chooses. For example, with a few clicks you can create a List of news sources covering China, or a List to track the best deals on electronics with nary a complaint from the personally branded.

Poynter believes Lists could change the way Twitter is used altogether, by adding new elements of customization, discovery and curation (the buzzword for the fall), making Lists "something for every journalist, editor and news organization to keep a keen eye on."

What about for the public relations business?

Our quick take is that Lists will create a new layer of lobbying for clients and PR people themselves as they ask to be included on the more prominent ones. Clever PR people will also use the function to track their clients and competitors, and to keep an eye on issues bubbling up that may require a response. More paranoid users and aspiring astroturfers now only need one account as you also have the option to create closed lists.

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