Quick what was your first thought?  Did you think about the last group of people you were with face-to-face, a mental list of co-workers, a fond memory of a very close friend, or how many people you have listed as “friends” on Facebook?

I have to say when I first joined Facebook, I was a bit leery;  I thought that if I truly had a connection with someone, then why would I have lost touch.   How would an online medium, seemingly so impersonal be the right avenue to reach out after all these years?   But everyone was doing it, so with trepidation, I developed an account and decided my strategy would be to wait and see who wanted to be my friend. 

My first “new friends” were people I worked with or who lived here in Greensboro;  I interacted with them on a regular basis.  No “reconnection” there, just confirmation that I was on their meter.  The next wave were close out of town friends, but again, I spoke to them frequently enough to be in the know of what was happening in their lives. 

Ah, then there was that first “blast from the past”.  Yay, a chance to reconnect, catch-up on what had happened since the last school reunion or chance meeting when I was home visiting my parents.  After “confirming” that we were indeed friends, I was ready!  I had this lofty idea that we would engage in some sort of conversation, something on a personally level and hopefully something with content. 

Well, I can’t say that my expectations were met with the one-on-one connection.  But I have readjusted my expectations and will admit I have enjoyed gaining a glimpse into people’s comings and goings.  I’ve even been surprised at request from people who I barely knew, and in some cases don’t even know.  This begs the question – When do you “confirm” or when do you “ignore”?  

And how do you define a “friend”?  Does “friend” mean the same thing as it did ten years ago or has it slid more to the definition of “acquaintance” with the evolution of social media?

As a long-time practitioner of PR, I often fondly recall the days when a well-crafted message was enough to get attention. Nowadays, the plethora of communication channels–not to mention a growing social media presence–makes the job much more difficult. So, how do we break through the clutter, filter out the noise, deliver the message and drive behavior?

At its heart, PR has always been about exchanging information, a sort of conversation, that builds links to an organization’s stakeholders. I believe, too, that PR is the most effective communication discipline for managing how a brand is received and perceived. PR plays in a brand’s “environmental” space; at best, evoking emotion that builds trust and drives behavior.

Instead of longing for the good old days when a mass message delivered via a few channels did the trick, we need to meet stakeholders where they live with messages crafted for their particular interest. And in the case of social media, simply standing up and waving the brand flag doesn’t get the job done. Yes, we must still deliver information. But now as never before we have communication channels that allow engagement, real conversation, influence. Once upon a time, PR hung its hat on the credibility of news media as a disinterested third-party influencer. Scary to hand over a brand to consumers, but few opinions are more credible than those from whom we consider peers and influencers among our peer group.

Unmassed media–especially social media–present an opportunity for the closest thing to face-to-face communication and conversation with all those who hold a brand’s life in their hands. Does that make our job easier? Definitely not. Does it require more thought, strategy and management? Certainly. Does it require more of an investment than a simple news release, a compelling press kit, hours of pitch calls or an attention-getting event? Most definitely. But the potential return on that investment far outstrips any from papering the universe with nothing but mass messages and hoping that some stick.

I know, summer’s winding down, so how could you start such a lengthy reading list now! Hopefully, you’ll be able to cross off the ones you’ve already read. And you can claim that no marketing book published before Fall of 2008 is still relevant. That’ll shorten the list. But at the very least, I hope you can find one or two of these that sound worthwhile. Better yet, you can post your suggestions in the comments area.

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So little of advertising is still advertising. But fortunately ideas are still ideas. I’ve collected a few examples here that show off some creative ways that ambient and social media have been used. These are brands that have gone beyond the standard Facebook product page or the CEO Twitter account to bring some creativity back to marketing.

Coffee Company PowerPoint Slide

This coffee company in the Netherlands offered a free cup of coffee to students who slipped a Coffee Company slide into their PowerPoint presentations. Pretty cool to have a word from your sponsor in the middle of your slideshow.

Terminator Salvation Twitter game

This nicely executed movie promotion enticed Twitter users to watch for tweets from @resistance2018 which contained fill-in-the-blank puzzles, word jumbles, and trivia. Players could rack up points by “decoding these transmissions” in a reply tweet.

Papa John’s Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is one of the most notable new media tricks around. It’s a way of getting a users webcam to trigger a 3-D animation on screen. It really gives you the illusion of a hologram. (Is that redundant?) Papa John’s, GE, and Mini are some of the brands who are already making use of it.

Green Works Reverse Graffiti

This eco-friendly mural was created for the launch of Green Works, a 99% plant-based cleaner. San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel was the filthy backdrop for the artwork of indigenous plant life, which was cleaned with the product. Pretty amazing product demo.

Milky Way Movie Theater Line Barrier

Although it’s questionable whether or not this was produced, it’s still a really fun idea—a great example of why it pays to think about where your target spends time.

Flea Spray Mall Floor Graphic

This giant floor decal lets the foot traffic on the ground floor of an Indonesian mall become the fleas on the dog. I do wish they had rotated the dog image 180 degrees so he wouldn’t look like a pork chop. And the line could be better. But still-great idea.

Iams Frisbee

While we’re on the topic of dogs, take a look at this cool giveaway from Iams dog food. To promote the healthy and strong dogs message, they created these plastic frisbees to look like 10kg weights to be distributed at dog parks.

STA Travel Facebook Page

Few brands with Facebook pages support their fanbase the way this student-focused travel agency does. They give their page a human voice with lots of interaction, contests, giveaways, etc. Plus, they constantly create incentives for users to become fans, which, when they do, ripples through the networks of Facebook friends.

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There’s still so much discussion around marketing through social media and making the most of limited media budgets. We will have to not only master these media options, but continually find new touchpoints as well.

Let’s remember to send a postcard to our old friends Print and Television—let them know we’ll still visit from time to time.

On having a comment regarding Twitter.

I joined, I followed, I’m on the fence.

On the fence as it relates to my chosen profession versus my preferred means of personal interaction. As a marketer, what an amazing time to be in the business!!  The explosion of social media brings new ways to communicate with your audience.  Gone are the days of the cookie cutter approach and three month lead times.  Think of the most outlandish idea and it can be implemented within days (or at least most clients think so)!!!

Yet, when I think about “tweeting” on an individual level, I don’t get it. Talk about random!    And half the time I just don’t get it.  Posts just seem to be the minutiae of day to day life.  Do I really need to know what you are having for dinner?  But then again we have become a society of voyeurs where reality TV, the latest celebrity gossip and horrific tragedies captures our attention.

Now I’m sure there is a niche who loves to communicate activities minute by minute, in broken sentences and a shorthand language.  I for one am not convinced that on a personal level “tweeting” will have the following and staying power some other forms of social media do, i.e. Facebook.

So is Twitter to become a lasting component in the marketing tool box or a just fad catapulted to greater fame by Oprah joining the fray?  And is it really a viable communication outlet for individuals or the next big wave in promoting all types of brands?

Twitter has blown up on the social media front, so no wonder every brand and their grandmother is joining!  Nielsen reported it broke 7 million monthly unique visitors in February, and Google News reported on March 13 that 40,920 news stories citing the microblog were published within 1 hour.  However, there are some guidelines that should be set when using it as a marketing tool and not a “social updater.”  This is not a tool used for a quick sell.  It’s used to build and cultivate relationships.

In your bio, be completely transparent about who your company is and who will be posting; even what you hope to get out of the experience.

Find relevant people to follow…most likely they will follow you back.  This will help conversations.

At first, you should relax and sit back.  Read conversations going on around you.  Slowly engage in these conversations and then as you become more confident you may start conversations on your own related to your business.

Be responsive!  And, always give back more than you were asked.

Don’t be overly enthusiastic…too many companies are trying to sell stuff right out of the gate.

If you’re part of an agency representing a brand, let the brand’s employees do the tweeting.  They are the ones closest to it.

In my short life on Twitter (@joshfahey) I’ve had the unfortunate displeasure of following several extremely annoying people and I stereotyped them accordingly. You may or may not have experienced people like these, but believe me they are out there. Some are based on the content they post and others on how they use Twitter. You may be one of them. You may be a mix of two or more. Either way I hope reading this makes you appropriately self conscious when Tweeting in the future.

The Reteewter

You rarely start a tweet without an RT because you rarely have anything original to say. You simply scan your followers tweets and regurgitate what you think is interesting for your own followers. RTs are fine. Just not for every post. If I wanted to see what all of you the people you were following were saying all of the time, I’d just follow them myself.

The Never Tweeter

Oh Never Tweeter, you build up my hopes for interesting and entertaining tweets only to let me down. You may be a celebrity (@TinaFey) or the President of the free world that has built up several thousand followers and led us on with hilarious and informative tweets only to stop and never update your account! Or you may just be a new user who heard they should be on Twitter. You signed up said something like “I don’t get this Twitter thing.” Your friends were hopeful you eventually would, because they like you and are interested in what you have to say, but every time you think about it you think, “maybe later” or “I don’t have time for that” or even worse “Facebook is better.”

The Over Tweeter

If only the world could have more of you. That’s what you must think. Perhaps you get paid by the tweet or just can’t stand the 140 character limitations, but whatever the reason you’re always blowing up my Twitter feed. Important messages, things I actually care about and good friends are quickly pushed down the page. Replaced by pictures of your face, or you dogs face, or an annoying animated gif that repeats every two seconds, next to the electronic drivel that logs the minute details of your life. Details that I’m convinced you must believe will one day be preserved in your own presidential library.

The @ Tweeter

You light up my Twitter feed like an AOL chat room from the late 90′s. You either don’t know about the DM feature or ignore it with reckless abandon. You’ve got something to say about everything other people are saying and you want everyone to see it.  You would gladly substitute 9 Twitter posts for a 30 second phone conversation. While the @reply is great for the occasional comment, rebuttal and even a little back and forth conversation, your blind comments like “@somedude That was sick, yo!!!” really makes me want to stop following you.

The Link Tweeter

No one can read the news or do a Google search like you can, that’s why the world needs you to find these articles, videos and pictures and put the links in your tweets. Why have your own thoughts or ideas when presenting me with someone else’s is so much easier? If only someone could hire you to scour the web for these hidden gems of knowledge you so easily find.

The Promo Tweeter

You’ve got a new blog post, ooh. You’re at a book signing, cool. You’re on TV tonight, wow. You’re having a sale, oh boy! You’re giving the keynote at the All About Me Conference….I don’t care. I followed you because I thought you might be interesting, but when realized your sole purpose in life was to be a constant shameless self promoter I quickly stopped following you. Maybe if I was a 12 year old girl and you were @mileycyrus or the @ OfficialJoBros I might be interested,but after a while, nomatter who you are, most people just don’t care.

The Fanboy Tweeter

Of all the people in the world, no one likes _______ as much as you. I know because that’s all you ever tweet about.  Day in and day out: the rumors, the concept drawings, the trailers, the conventions, the countdown, the opening day, the midnight sale, the reviews, the rebuttals, the comparisons, the rants about the inferiority of competitors, the rave about the superiority of your obsession, the dissection, the fixes, the patches, the upgrades, the mods, the new uses, the alternate uses, the toys, and on and on.  I used to like ________, but if it turns people into you I can do without it.

I’m one of these fools, what do I do?

If you find that more often that not you are one of these people then you should do us all a favor and click here. Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to: be a fan, retweet, self promote, link to an interesting article, have a conversation and get excited and have several tweets at a time, but when one of those things defines your twitterness expect to be unfollowed, because you’re really annoying. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to post 3 consecutive tweets with a link to this blog post that I wrote.

I’m young enough to have been a part of social media for a long time now. When I signed up for Facebook you still had to have a .edu email address. Since then I’ve signed up for Linked-In, Digg and Twitter and others. And Big Brotherness aside, I like what they do for me. I stay connected with friends, family and colleagues and get a constant stream of news and information. Being so connected, you might think I’m a huge proponent of social media as a way of shaping brands and pushing products. Well, I wasn’t and I’m still skeptical but something happened recently that may be changing my mind.

I started following @IndyTalk on Twitter. @IndyTalk is the official Twitter account of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  I’m really into racing, and especially the Indy 500. I’ve been to 14 of the last 15 Indy 500′s.  So I thought, why not?

It’s the 100^th anniversary of the speedway this year, so I’ve been getting tweets with links to old pictures and articles about the speedway as well as plans for the race this year and even stuff about NASCAR races at other tracks. All stuff a racing geek like me is interested in. I don’t click on everything, but about a quarter of the time I do.

All cool, but nothing too special so far right? But then a few Monday’s ago a coworker who’s been going to Indy twice as long as I have came into my office and handed me a flip-book.  It was from the speedway, and when you flipped it you saw the footage of a car crossing the finish line in the first Indy 500. He won it, along with some other schwag because he was the first to answer a trivia question on Twitter. Apparently @IndyTalk asks one trivia question every Monday at 4:00PM and the first to answer wins some Indy related prize. I’ve been glued to twitter every Monday from 3:55 to 4:05 since.

I’m such a fan of Indy Car racing and the speedway itself, that I didn’t notice what was happening for a few days. A brand was making a connection with me through social media. You might think, so what, but it’s really pretty significant, and it made me realize a few things:

1) Social Media can work.

I’ve seriously been considering not going to the race this year, with the economy like it is, it’s an extra expense that’s easy to justify cutting. But the continued connection to the brand has me thinking about it more often. And the more I think about it, the more I want to go.

2) When it’s done right it doesn’t seem like marketing.

I like the brand. I want to know what’s going on. When you’re engaged it doesn’t feel like they’re trying to sell me something.

3) Social Media is big but it’s quiet

I figured out the reason we may not be hearing the huge success stories out of social media is because they’re stories like mine. It’s not like a TV campaign or a billboard that everyone sees. It’s these little connections between brands and brand fanatics that are doing the heavy lifting in social media.

So yes, for the first time that I know of a social media campaign (or ongoing engagement) targeted toward me was a success. But I think this points out how difficult it can be to reach someone who isn’t fanatical about your brand through social media. I’ve been engaged in social media for years and finally someone figured out how to get through to me, and only because I wanted to make that connection.  I’m still skeptical about what social media can really achieve, but I’m convinced that most every brand has a following and if you’re not providing an outlet for engagement for your biggest fans you could be missing out.

Or so says Connie Reece. I agree with her.

That’s right, all you crackberry addicts and other smartphone users. You’re officially old, especially if you’re using it primarily for email. And you probably are using it primarily for email unless you’re an iPhone user who’s downloaded the Facebook app and the Twitter app. (And let’s be honest: anyone with a smartphone who believes they haven’t been conditioned like a Pavlovian dog into grabbing the phone every time the device twitters, buzzes, beeps or rings is lying to themselves.)

Here’s why you’re old (if you fall into the aforementioned group): 92% of adults (those older than 22) rely on email for communication; 16% of teenagers and undergraduates rely on email for communication. In fact, a peer of mine who works at the High Point University School of Communications recently told me that he apologized to his students for emailing them. “I just can’t text all of you,” he said.

While adults have embraced the communication that came of age while we were younger, younger generations will continue to do the same. Given that those younger constituents of our world are communicating through text, IM, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and a host of other social networks, it’s no wonder that there are often disconnects in communication between the generations. If you extrapolate that idea just a bit more, it’s also no wonder that those disconnects appear in marketing discussions between brands and consumers as well.

Knowing your audience–from understanding insight, not just instinct–will help you Unmass the Message, allowing you to communicate effectively and efficiently with your brand’s targets.

For me, that means learning about and participating in social media because, well, I’m old.

The Twittersphere is abuzz this morning!

Everyone is talking about what J.R. Cohen, Operations Manager for CoffeeGroundz (@coffeegroundz) Cafe in Houston, TX has done. He’s doubled the clientele to his store. How, you ask? By starting to take drink orders via direct message from Twitter users.

A coffee shop (that also doubles as a lounge at night by serving beer and wine), is the perfect type of business to take advantage of this new medium of communication. The store has free WiFi which makes it convenient for people to linger. WiFi also means that people will have their internet enabled devices there, making it easy for them to simply message the guy at the counter for a drink!

This is a powerful example about how businesses can use new media and social networking to reach with their customers on a different level. They’re not marketing towards them. They’re connecting with customers and creating a relationship, which we all knows leads to brand loyalty.

How are other companies using Twitter to connect with their customers?

• @SouthwestAir – Southwest Airlines offers deals and promotions to Twitter followers.
• @BofA_help – Bank of America is using Twitter to respond and actually solve customer complaints.
• @zappos – Zapos CEO Tony Hsieh uses Twitter to offer coupon codes (that expire quickly so you have to follow him to get the deals) and to stay connected with customers that want to be actively engaged with his brand.

Using new social media platforms to connect with your customers is the wave of the future.

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Previously:  What is all the Twitter hype about?