Recent The C-Tweet Posts

Should Coke Execs Be More Hip to Online Porn References?

Bernhard Warner — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:36:15 +0000

In the growing list of social media marketing #fails, Coca-Cola's Dr Pepper Facebook campaign debacle marks a new twist on an old marketing axiom: Never underestimate your most influential market—moms. Mommy-bloggers trump all in influence. That much we know. The recently pulled campaign also proves that they even understand raunchy porn references that get giggles from the "creative" agency guys, but go over the heads of the starched shirts in marketing. Can you say: Busted!

It's been a week now since the U.K. press caught on to the fuss being kicked up on Mumsnet over what's been dubbed Coca-Cola's "Facebook porn campaign." What happened? Let's start from the beginning. In trying to add a bit of edginess to the Dr Pepper brand, Coca-Cola, which currently owns the trademark and distribution rights to the Dr Pepper brand in the UK and much of Europe, hired London-based agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine to create a social-media marketing campaign whereby fans willingly gave up the controls to their Facebook status to the good doctor (aka the agency LMFM), all for the chance to win a grand. Self-deprecating status updates then appeared on participants' Facebook pages including lines like,"Lost my special blankie. How will I go sleepies?" and this doozy, "I watched 2 girls one cup and felt hungry afterwards."

One parent, wise to the "Two Girls, One Cup" reference, objected to seeing it as her darling child's Facebook reference. Why? As most any Howard Stern fan could tell you, "Two Girls, One Cup" is the name given to a video trailer that hit the Web a few years back for a scat-fetish porn flick called Hungry Bitches. We'll spare you a description of this wretchedly foul video, but it's safe to say no brand would want to be associated with the gag. As the mom herself writes:

My 14 yo dd participated and I was HORRIFIED to log into FB and see that her status read - 'I watched 2 girls one cup and felt hungry afterwards'. For anyone who doesn't know what this means, please stay ignorant, for those who do, you can imagine how I felt. This was compounded later on when a quick search through dds internet history revealed she had tried to find out what it was for herself. Thankfully, our ISP has a wonderful child filter!!

I, too, would caution that ignorance is best when it comes to this video, but I do need to point out that "Two Girls, One Cup" does hold a significant place in net lore: It may just be the first truly viral video sensation. About three years ago, YouTubers started posting scores of homemade videos depicting a viewer's close-up facial reactions as he/she watched the action unfold off screen. There are now thousands of such reaction videos and they've been viewed tens of millions of times. There are even celebrity reactions (actual and fictional mash-ups) featuring the likes of Ron Jeremy ("unbelievably disgusting," he says), Jack Bauer (tears), and Chuck Norris (speechless).

You can cut the Coca-Cola marketing team some slack for not being hip to scat porn references. (A red-faced Coca-Cola PR later copped to its ignorance.) But it did commit the cardinal sin here in not bothering to vet the comments first, instead relying on the cleverness of a presumably younger, hipper, more digitally savvy outside firm known for its edge. As eConsultancy points out, LMFM's big attention-grabber prior to this Facebook campaign was to punk ChatRoulette users on April Fool's Day, leading the publication to wonder, "it wasn't clear what the brand got out of it, other than first mover status." Now Coca-Cola says it's reviewing its ties with Lean Mean Fighting Machine. At the launch of the campaign, the agency tweeted what now reads like prophetic words for itself and its client:

Stitched up, indeed. Coca-Cola looks at best clueless and at worst negligent after this incident. You have to wonder: Nobody at Coke could speak up and ask, "What does this 'Two Girls, One Cup' reference mean?" A simple Google search would have clued them in. Instead, they get angry mommy-bloggers to explain it. As of today, there are 1,320 heated responses to the Facebook Dr Pepper discussion thread on Mumsnet.com. Not surprisingly, they take Coca-Cola, not the clever twentysomethings at Lean Mean Fighting Machine, to task. Coca-Cola has responded by apologizing for the offensive material and the social media account with LMFM is officially under review, a not-so-subtle finger-pointing at who Coke believes to be the real culprit here. And that's probably not entirely fair for the agency. Yes, it took recklessly irresponsible liberties with the brand, an absolute no-no in the agency world. But it did deliver for its client something big: a lot of buzz for a pretty flat cola brand. According to Famecount, the Dr Pepper Facebook fan page has gained about 1 million new fans since mid-June, giving it 2.6 million followers as of today, in what seems to be its fastest fan gain yet.

But the question is: Who exactly are these people? Dr Pepper fans, or are they into something a bit racier?

When word got out that Coca-Cola was pulling the Dr Pepper campaign, there were, as the Guardian reported, angry fans who "bemoaned the abrupt ending of the competition." Maybe so. There is no sign of that today. Instead, the Dr Pepper Facebook Wall features fans posting dodgy links that promise get-rich-quick-schemes or free iPads or the chance to see naked teens. Sure, it's tamer fare than scat porn, but the Facebook page leaves a distinct impression: It's been overrun by a lot of shady characters like these two young women who post:

"Jennifer Johnson" is not alone. Just click on the fan-photo section.

If Coca-Cola was looking for a little edginess it's certainly found it.

Facebook's Top Tombstones for Marketing Ideas

Bernhard Warner — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:59:11 +0000

Earlier this month when Microsoft pulled the plug on Kin, its new smart phone for the Facebook generation, we figured that would be all for the short-lived social networking gadget. But it's not so easy to eradicate a consumer product these days, apparently. Microsoft Kin's heart continues to beat slowly on its Facebook page, where 179 die-hard fans and some bitter users still reside. The odd condolence and swipe continue to appear on the Wall, turning a once-vibrant community into a type of virtual mausoleum.

The dead Kin is not alone. Long abandoned marketing campaigns and defunct products are still visible across much of Facebook, turning the social network into an eerie graveyard of yesterday's brilliant marketing ideas gone stale.

Here are some other notable tombstones we've come across:

The Snickers "Get Some Nuts, Grow a Mo" Campaign
This campaign was pure genius in its day. Was. Last autumn, Snickers dared enter the realm of glorious taboo: mustaches and Mr. T with the instructions to candy-bar-chomping fans: "Get some nuts, grow a Mo." The snack food brand hosted a video contest, amply plugged through the campaign's Facebook page, that asked Snickers lovers to show off their "Movember" (hint: think sometime between October and November) mustaches; the best "Mo" earned a prize. At the end of the 4Q, after the contest stashes had been shaved off and prizes sent to the manliest of participants, Snickers bailed from the group, leaving behind a campaign frozen in time.

To recap: the Snickers campaign had an impressive TV commercial that amassed about 10,000 YouTube fans, so we know the campaign must have been worth more than an abandoned Facebook page. Clever marketers will note, too: The campaign had a glaring limitation as the following comment shows:

The MTV/Honda "Hero Honda Roadies" Reality Show

This campaign partnership is still ongoing, and due to the show's popularity in India, chances are it will be road-worthy for a while longer. So why does this qualify for our list of abandoned Facebook campaigns? For every new season of the show, MTV/Honda creates a new Facebook page to show it off. There are currently four separate fan pages for this one campaign, each corresponding to a single season and each with fewer members than the one it preceded: Season 5, for example, had 88,000 fans (last post: May, 2008) and Season 7 only had just 1,140. At this rate, Season 8 will come in solidly in the three-figure fandom range. Wonder if the programming director notices, or even cares?

The Burger King "Whopper Sacrifice" Campaign

Remember this one? This marketing campaign challenged the very existentialism of Facebook by offering free Whopper sandwiches to anyone who un-friended 10 of their Facebook friends. As part of the execution, Burger King created a sacrifice-your-buds Facebook app, setting out to prove that "Americans love the Whopper more than they love their friends."

The social media campaign generated a ton of buzz. The New York Times even used the promotion to put a price on the head of each Facebook friend: a whole 37 cents. Burger King though "shut off the grill" on the campaign after Facebook intervened with a game's over software tweak. Why such a killjoy? Facebook felt the King's jokey "you've been defriended for a burger" notifications infringed on users' right to privacy, the Times reported a week later. How quaint.

To recap: 233,906 friendships were lost for a free Whopper when it was all said and done. What traces are left of Whopper Sacrifice on Facebook today? A desolate app page of 2,000 fans with left-over image source code and a Take that! "about" section that reads:

Facebook® has disabled WHOPPER® Sacrifice after your love for the WHOPPER® Sandwich proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.

And, finally ...

What will happen to the countless other not-quite-dead marketing campaigns still immortalized on Facebook? Better yet, do marketers have a responsibility to purge from Facebook stand-alone campaign pages that have long passed their expiration date?

The culprit here is unenlightened marketing executives who continue to think in terms of quarter-spanning campaigns and who mistakenly believe that consumers view the world just like them. There is a movement under way at some of the more progressive companies like Sony and Coca-Cola where social media marketing initiatives are viewed as part of an ongoing discussion, not a series of 10-week contests. There is help on the way, apparently. Just last month Coca-Cola in the United Kingdom sent an unambiguous message to the digital marketing community: that centralizing all fan chatter to a central hub rather than a series of campaign-themed destinations is the future of brand marketing online. Sony also speaks of the need to move "beyond campaigns" when using social media to communicate to the public.

We can only hope this means marketers go back and clean up some of the obsolete stuff they leave behind on social networks. Please, do so before the next season of MTV Hero Honda Roadies.

How Budweiser Can Woo Europe

Bernhard Warner — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:44:20 +0000

In 2006, as a guest of Deutsche Telekom, I saw an early round World Cup match pitting those two soccer powers: Togo against South Korea. In the last World Cup, held in Germany, Togo was the side with the longest odds, this year’s North Korea. The big exception was that Team Togo, seeking to exploit a rare moment of negotiating leverage, decided to use the power of the most followed sports event on the planet to threaten a match boycott in the name of recouping unpaid wages, something even Kim Jong Il’s boys wouldn’t dare try.

Togo lost 2-1 that day, but they eventually got paid.

The other memorable thing about that game was the heat. With the midday sun blazing and temps in the mid-90s, my gracious Teutonic hosts abandoned any attempt to show me the geeky stuff–i.e., how they wired up the stadium. The sacrifice was not lost on me; if it’s one thing techy Germans like to show off, it's their engineering prowess. Instead, we went looking for cold beers and shade. We found the latter inside the stadium. There was a problem with the beer though, my apologetic hosts informed me; all they sell on match day at the stadium is Budweiser, the World Cup beer sponsor. If there's one thing Germans are more proud of than their engineering prowess, it’s their local “bier.” We drank our cold Buds, longingly discussing the “bier” brands we wish we were drinking instead and plotting which bar to hit in town once the match ended.

Four years on and the Germans (among others) still haven’t forgotten the indignity of being forced to drink Budweiser at a football match. “When Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006, the country was awash in fuzzy feel-good patriotism. Only one thing threatened to ruin the party—crappy American beer,” The Local, a German English-language news site recalls. Readers of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, meanwhile, refer to Bud as “Blatter beer.”

The distasteful cracks don’t end there. Budweiser has also been the victim of the biggest ambush marketing stunt so far at this year’s World Cup when the Dutch brewer, Bavaria, paid a group of cute blondes to take in the Netherlands-Denmark match decked out in bright orange mini skirts. The sight of babes in tight dresses doing "the wave" was of course caught on camera. Several times. Some of the masterminds were arrested for breaking Fifa rules; that is, jeopardizing the $1.2 billion the organizers pull in from the likes of Budweiser to sponsor the World Cup. Cue: outraged European newspaper columnists.

With all this ill-will swirling around an “American” beer brand sponsoring a very non-American game, you might be tempted to nod in wonder why Anheuser-Busch InBev, despite its new Belgian owners, would bother with the massive investment. Sure, it’s trying to make in-roads in the overseas market, but is all the grief worth it?

I think it is. Here’s why: at Social Media Influence, we’ve been following how the World Cup sponsors are exploiting this massive investment to boost brand visibility and to build a more meaningful social media following, one that will stick around long after a new winner is crowned. To be sure, it’s not the perfect ROI measuring stick, but it’s one worth exploring as it sheds light on an old marketing question: can big-ticket sports sponsorships create more lasting brand loyalty?

In the first week of the 2010 World Cup, the big winner was Coca-Cola, gaining an impressive 169,000 followers, thanks to the popularity of its YouTube-inspired “Longest Celebration” contest. Coke tried to goose these numbers further with a Twitter ad buy, but not so. The big winner this past week was, gulp, Budweiser. Its “Bud United” campaign has proven to be a major social media hit, good enough to net an impressive 608,000 followers in the last week.

In terms of new footy followers, Budweiser is even beating out Adidas, a proud German brand, during this World Cup. The full rankings can be found here.

We’ll update it again before the winner is crowned.

Twitter Is for More Than Ranting, People

Bernhard Warner — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:27:26 +0000

Earlier this week, AT&T (ATT) faced an ugly mob mobilizing online. Its inability to handle a massive wave of iPhone 4 pre-orders made it the second-most villainous company (no brand is going to replace BP as Public Enemy No. 1) on the Net. Admirably, AT&T went into fire-fighting mode on Twitter, answering individual gripes round-the-clock. Surprisingly, it chose to leave its other social-media channels out of the fracas, opting to fight the battle without some of its most effective weapons. AT&T’s approach reveals a lot about how companies view social media: Each social media channel has its own purpose, its own team, and its own protocol for customer response. It’s a strategy that’s bound to backfire.

When you arrive on the AT&T Facebook page (population: 611,000), you’re greeted with a comforting message: “Being a fan of AT&T has its benefits!” Those benefits are hard to identify at the moment, as the Facebook wall has been completely overtaken this week by fans airing their iPhone pre-order complaints, questions, and rants. At one point, on Wednesday evening, AT&T did issue a lone update on its wall that seemed more self-congratulatory than illuminating. It said what we'd already suspected: that AT&T, faced with unprecedented demand, was forced to shut down the online pre-ordering system.

Given the unprecedented demand for iPhone 4, as of today we are …suspending pre-ordering to fulfill the orders that we’ve already received. We will keep you all posted on when pre-orders will resume. Keep in mind, as long as you received a confirmation number at the end of your order, you’re all set.

No link. No thanks-for-your-patience remark and certainly no make-good for the inconvenience. Meanwhile, the AT&T Customer Care YouTube channel (146 subscribers) is even less helpful. The last video it posted was a two-minute meet-the-team snoozer in April. You’d have to be pretty desperate to leave a help message there.

Contrast those channels with AT&T’s customer care Twitter feed, which manically responds to individual complaints during the day. (Actually, AT&T has a team of individual tweeters who field all types of direct queries from customers.) The tweets are courteous, responsive, and helpful. Something about the words, “Can I help? I’m following,” seems to have a calming effect on even the most irate. Still, the team cannot get to everyone, and so it appears to be responding to principally to the easy ones like this:

That's not to say they're cherry-picking. The team does field the occasional thorny ones too, like this exchange:

In a sea of negative sentiment, Twitter has been the one channel where you actually see some grateful recognition from AT&T customers and would-be customers. As @andrewdumont later remarked to @ATTCustomerCare, “Thanks for the prompt response, I’m sure you all are getting hammered today.”

AT&T's scattershot approach to the iPhone 4 #fail is the same philosophy adopted throughout much of the corporate world. It can be summed up in one flawed belief: There are two distinct types of social-media channels, the "angry" and the "cheery."

On the former, you can find your everyday trolls, your grouses, and your squeaky wheels. (Hint: It rhymes with "bitter.") And on the latter, you have your sycophants, your fans, and your brand boosters. (Right, Facebook.) The logic then is that somehow acknowledging bad news, even the ubiquitous in-your-face stuff, on the happy marketing channel will be upsetting to the community, and so it's best to stick with the cheery posts there as if all’s right with the world.

If the bad news is to even be addressed on the brand’s public discussion forum (and yes, there are plenty of companies who decide even that’s too tricky; see McDonald’s Facebook page during the Shrek glasses recall controversy), then it’s dumped onto the brand’s "bad news" channel, or Twitter, where customer service can handle it. The all-too-familiar practice of hiving off within an organization these channels to specific teams has created this ghetto effect.

It’s a completely counterintuitive approach, of course. The public is just as likely to go to Facebook as it is to Twitter to get details on a product launch or, in this case, a launch meltdown. And, of course, if there’s such a thing as an AT&T-branded YouTube Customer Care channel, then you’d think that that, too, would be a place to find answers. Hardly.

It's not all bad news. There are a few lonely examples of companies using multiple social media channels to address customers’ problems.

Take Microsoft’s customer-service Facebook page as an example. It actively responds to customers' problems, and offers tips on how to get the most out of Microsoft software. But even here there are breakdowns. The customer service Facebook page rarely directly addresses the problems posted on the wall, but rather recommends the poster go to the Microsoft customer-service Web site or, you guessed it, that they tweet the problem to the Micorsoft customer service Twitter account as this example shows:

Gee, thanks.

Vodafone U.K. is a bit more proactive, using all three of its social-media channels to actually help customers. Its Facebook page seems to be the most active and specific, with customer service representatives responding with helpful tips and even answers, as the Vodafone U.K. Facebook shows:

Vodafone evidently feels customer service is inherent in its central brand message. Its social-media customer service activity occurs directly on the branded Vodafone Facebook and Twitter channels. Its YouTube channel, called VodafoneUKHelpCenter, is the only one of the three channels that carry the "customer service" handle. But even this is slightly disingenuous, as the YouTube videos are dedicated to new handset models, and the questions and comments, few as they are, are mainly about specs and features.

These scattered approaches underscore just how much difficulty big brands are having in implementing a coherent social-media customer service strategy. Perhaps the iPhone #fail incident will clarify their thinking.

The State of Social Media Jobs 2010

Matthew Yeomans — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 20:08:01 +0000

A career in social media may be seen as one of the trendiest new jobs to have, and the importance of social media certainly is resonating through many big companies. However, as we reveal in a our new special report: The State of Social Media Jobs 2010, many of the world’s top companies still do not have dedicated social media positions in-house.

Just 59 of Fortune Global 100 firms have invested in recruiting staff specifically assigned to core social media duties that include customer outreach, PR and marketing support and internal communications. And, while our research shows that demand for social media positions has increased more than five-fold in the last five years social media salaries lag behind the equivalent positions in the traditional fields of PR, marketing and publishing.

Here are some of the key findings of the report:

•   The social media “laggard” sectors include: financial services & insurance; petroleum & energy and utilities.
•   The social media “active” sectors include: healthcare, telecommunications, retail and automotive.
•   The number of social media job postings has increased by more than 600 percent to over 21,000 in the past five years.
•   On average, social media salaries come in $5,000-10,000 lower than their traditional counterparts.
•   Social media salaries are on the rise and could close the gap within the next year.

The report looked at four main areas on interest:

1, How the Fortune Global 100 are staffing their social media needs.
2, Which type of social media specific job position is being advertised.
3, The skills employers are looking for in recruiting social media specialists.
4, How well (or not) social media positions are paid.

To understand this new career landscape we analysed more than 21,000 social media job listings across all industry sectors.

The special report can be downloaded at: http://socialmediainfluence.com/downloads/

How the BP Long-Tail PR Crisis Packs a Sting

Matthew Yeomans — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:47:13 +0000

In this age of Twitter storms and blog swarms, crisis communications experts are being forced to rethink how to defuse what we like to call the “long tail” effect of nasty buzz. BP is experiencing an online and offline reputation disaster, but in social media it has fallen prey to what we call the “sting in the long tail effect,” where the daily bad-mouthing in social-media channels has an amplifying effect capable of devastating a brand.

In a new piece of downloadable research, Social Media Influence took an in-depth look at the biggest online reputation-management crisis of the Twitter age, the BP oil spill. With all the talk of boycotting BP on Twitter, Facebook, and the blogs (an outcry that has caught the attention of the mainstream press), we decided to dig a little deeper to see what lessons all PR professionals and reputation-management experts could learn from this debacle. Here’s a sneak peak of the BP fallout.

To download the BP social-media white paper simply fill out Social Media Influence's registration form.

The BP Hijacker Speaks: Let's Rebrand the Bastards!

Bernhard Warner — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:09:33 +0000

He speaks.

In an open letter to the media, "Leroy Stick," the nom de tweet allegedly behind the viciously satirical BP Twitter feed, finally lets us in on the big gag, explaining why he hijacked the oil giant's brand in recent weeks.* Why? Because he could.

I started @BPGlobalPR, because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements. No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing. That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them. I started off just making jokes at their expense with a few friends, but now it has turned into something of a movement. As I write this, we have 100,000 followers and counting. People are sharing billboards, music, graphic art, videos and most importantly information.

But while he clues us in on his motivation, we still don't know much about who he is, robbing us of the full unmasking that the tech media has been craving in recent days. From the tone of the letter, "Leroy Stick" sounds more like an unemployed MBA than a hippie eco-warrior. The point of the whole brand-jacking masquerade, he tells us, was to punish BP for being so inauthentic and clumsy in its crisis PR response. Huh? Where is the concern for the dead pelicans, the devastation to the livelihood of the local fishermen, the ruination of Memorial Day weekend at the beach? More curiously, he concludes with the kind of call-to-arms you might hear at an Association of National Advertisers conference: He wants us to rebrand BP.

"Re-branding," he reminds us, "doesn’t work if we don’t let it, so let’s hold BP’s feet to the fire. Let’s make them own up to and fix their mistakes NOW and most importantly, let’s make sure we don’t let them do this again."

"Right now," he continues, "PR is all about brand protection. All I’m suggesting is that we use that energy to work on human progression. Until then, I guess we’ve still got jokes."

Am I the only one who wished he just stuck with the jokes? The "Leroy Stick" manifesto has Ad Age readers doing a bit of soul-searching, but I was hoping for something, I don't know, bigger, something that goes beyond a message of branding, rebranding, and the proper crisis-management response. This will end up being the most devastating ecological catastrophe of our lifetime, after all. (Yes, I realize, I'm being a bit hypocritical here; many of my C-Tweet columns chide companies for their poor response to the public).

There is one very positive thing that "Leroy Stick" (if it really is "Leroy Stick" behind this BP parody) has done for us. Earlier this week I got a good chuckle over the latest @BPGlobalPR copycats: the savage @IsraelGlobalPR and @HamasGlobalPR feeds, both launched in the hours after Monday's aid flotilla attack somewhere off the coast of Gaza. Both feeds are at times obnoxious and offensive. But they work (in the humor category) because the surprising frankness of the delivery is so refreshing. It's what we'd like to see more of from our elected officials, or from company execs for that matter. (OK, maybe not tweets like this one from the fictitious Hamas team: "Stupid israel, do u actually think we want turkish goods (& worse turks)? the italian ship, different story #gaza #flotilla," but you get the idea.)

I've said before that Twitter works so well as a communications medium because it's so hard to insert PR fluff into a 140-character message. Twitter demands clarity and sincerity, the kind of qualities we'd like to see in all corporate and government communiques. There's another thing Twitter offers: The ability to lampoon those who too frequently ignore those qualities. For them, to paraphrase a great marketing mind, "we've still got jokes."

(*CORRECTION: This article originally referred to the hijacker as "Leroy Spikes." That was incorrect.)

Presented By:

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:09:33 +0000

Putting the Ball in the Net

Matthew Yeomans — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:14:01 +0000

If there were ever any doubt that social media had come of age, the upcoming World Cup in South Africa is banishing those doubts once and for all. All of the official World Cup sponsors (and a host of nonofficial ones as well) have been busy working on their killer apps and fine-tuning their viral connect-the-world features. Most are also looking to push the boundaries of Facebook’s design and functionality to connect with the global social-media audience.

So, how are they faring? In theory, applying social-media marketing to the World Cup should be like tapping in from five yards out while the goalie has his shirt pulled over his head. After all, we know that social-media audiences crave both information and entertainment online. Yet social media is a fickle medium, and there’s just as much chance that some of these massive campaigns will score its own goal.

Here, then, is the Social Media Influence guide to the World Cup official sponsors’ social media campaigns and how we think each might fare if there were a trophy for social-media success.

McDonald’s

World Cup Pedigree: A relative late-comer to the beautiful game, McDonald’s (MCD) has been a sponsor ever since the 1994 tournament was hosted by the United States.

The Strategy: McD’s seems to be employing a social media catenaccio, a soccer maneuver that is as defensive as it is creative. McDonald’s is keeping its innovation—in the form of an online fantasy tournament—locked behind the chained fence of FIFA’s own site.

Team Balance: They’ve packed the defensive, yet, still, huge holes appear. Fantasy football (the Euro kind) is about sharing and comparing. But then why no Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter shareability?

Star Striker: Does FIFA president Sepp Blatter count?

How It’ll Do: Could be the New Zealand of South Africa 2010. Won’t make it to the knockout stages.

Powerade

World Cup Pedigree: First appearance at the world’s biggest sporting event but can draw on managerial experience of its parent company Coca-Cola (KO). The slogan: “Chosen by FIFA to hydrate 2010 World Cup players.”

The Strategy: Relying on science and tactics, Powerade has produced 16 mini-videos within a greater YouTube video that illustrate, well, we’re not sure really. But you can be sure some creative team is loving it.

Team Balance: They’re depending on the playmaking strengths of the YouTube channel with support from Facebook, viral videos, and banners.

Star Power: The man to beat is the creative director who got this commissioned.

How It’ll Do: The Scotland of social media. Lacking big-match temperament.

Visa: “Go World”

World Cup Pedigree: Visa (V) has been at a World Cup before, but this is the first time it has unveiled a social-media match-planner. Luckily, it had some previous success at the Olympics and has been trialing its Go Fans network in Latin America since 2009.

The Strategy: Look for a tightly controlled game-plan executed through Facebook’s fan base. If Visa’s game planner—complete with ability to share with friends and leave match-related comments—scores in terms of fun and functionality, then following major team competitions may never be the same.

Team Balance: “Go” fans will be supported by TV and print promotions, but there’s no doubt that Visa most needs Facebook to deliver.

Star Striker: You, the fans.

How It’ll Do: Cool idea, but will fans embrace it coming from a corporation? Set for a shocking second-round departure.

Continental Tire

World Cup Pedigree: This is the second trip to the finals for the German tire-maker.

The Strategy: Easy on the eye but perhaps lacking the squad depth of Adidas and Coca-Cola. Continental’s social-media play is a creative and fun Facebook football-kicking game called ContiTireKick that you can share with friends. Beat the rest of the world and earn a trip to the World Cup Final.

Team Balance: Facebook-only campaigns are appealing for their prospective global reach, but marketers should be careful about relying so heavily on only one network. So far, the ContiTireKick page has just 5,700 fans, and there are some mutterings on the page that cheating is taking place.

Star Striker: Office workers with a lot of time on their hands. Hey, if Google Pacman can do it …

How It’ll Do: England-like potential. A quarterfinal spot. But nothing more.

Adidas: “Fast vs. Fast”

World Cup Pedigree: Adidas is the Germany of sponsors (other than being German, of course), Adidas has been a dominating presence at World Cups since 1954.

The Strategy: A traditional, no-nonsense tactical approach. Adidas is relying on a big-budget TV ad titled “Fast vs. Fast” to sell the new F50 adizero cleat and spark social-media conversation.

Social Media Balance: The big TV play belies a conservative approach, but Adidas also demonstrates some social-media skill by launching the ad on Facebook and YouTube and by adding a series of online-only Q&As with the top players like Kaka and Michael Ballack.

Star Striker: Messi, Villa, and Zidane make for a speedy and powerful attack in this ad.

How It’ll Do: Never write off the Germans! (Even if they’re not German.) Surefire semifinalists.

Coca-Cola

World Cup Pedigree: A mainstay at El Mundial ever since 1974.

The Strategy: With expressive flair. Coca-Cola has taken inspiration from Roger Milla’s 1990 corner flag-dance to exhort the world to upload its own unique celebrations on to YouTube. Part competition, part Funniest Home Movies, the winner of the longest celebration heads to the World Cup. Wonder if Robbie Fowler—always good for a talked-about celebration—will be entering?

Team Balance: Boasting one of the most balanced social-media starting lineups, Coca-Cola can call on the support of a huge Facebook following (5.5 million) and a well-drilled Twitter feed.

Star Striker: The aforementioned Roger Milla of course.

How It’ll Do: Who’d bet against a global competition where people upload silly videos of themselves celebrating? Finalist.

Budweiser: “The Bud House/Bud United”

World Cup Pedigree: First sponsored at Mexico in 1986.

The Strategy: Taking social-media creativity to a new level, Budweiser, as part of its Bud United movement, first held a global audition via YouTube to find 32 fans from respective World Cup countries to live together in South Africa, a la The Real World, during the tournament. Once the Cup kicks off, Bud will create a YouTube reality show documenting the fans as they play out their rivalries for all to see. Every time a team is eliminated, the corresponding house member will be kicked out. The two final fans will go to the World Cup final and the winner will present the Budweiser man-of-the-match trophy to the best player.

Team Balance: All-out attack: Budweiser is looking to leverage the broadcast potential of YouTube in a way not seen before. Bud will be looking to Facebook to play a supporting role.

Star Striker: Just a hunch, but buxom, blonde houseguest Beate from Germany looks like she’ll do well.

How It’ll Do: Could go all the way.

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As Protest Grows Louder, BP Faces Its "#iranelection" Moment

Bernhard Warner — Fri, 28 May 2010 14:06:59 +0000

Hours after news broke of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion, the first of the “boycott BP!” pleas could be found on Twitter, on random weekend-eco-warrior blogs, and here and there on Facebook. Now the movement has snowballed into a social-media cause célèbre, replete with Twitter flash protests, celebrity backing, damning homemade documentaries, and satirical updates from an official-seeming company mouthpiece, the fastest growing account on Twitter. Where have we seen this all before? Yep, BP is facing its “Tehran moment,” with the anger of millions threatening to do irreparable damage. Can BP clean up the mess before it’s too late?

Let’s take a look at the multifront reputation-wrecking assault BP faces at the moment from various social-media channels.

Facebook: As of this morning, the primary (there are 293 of them) Boycott BP Facebook page had a following of more than 172,000, a gain of 54,000 since CNN reported its existence two days ago. The primary page has become a massive community Wiki tallying the number of dead turtles and pelicans. It’s also a place for cathartic venting. One of the more reserved charges reads: "Disgusting death mongers! BP’s CEOs should be forced to get out there and clean up the oil with their bare hands!! :<"

Twitter: #BP has been a trending topic on Twitter for weeks now. But the tone is growing nastier, shifting from OMG!-the-spill-is-out-of-control tweets to plans for street-level activism, such as flash protests at BP filling stations around the United States. Here’s an indication of what BP is facing:

This chart above tallying “BP protest” tweets shows a type of “snowball effect” growing in recent days, the result of a recent spate of news stories that detail the Boycott BP campaigns occurring on Twitter, on Facebook, and on blogs. The news articles are then retweeted, reposted to Facebook status updates, and published on still more blogs, creating an amplification effect that will be hard to counter from a PR standpoint. Journalists can now dip into this story whenever they want, using fresh numbers and fresh outrage to put a new slant on an old story.

YouTube: Over 6,000 videos have been posted to YouTube in the last month detailing the extent of the environmental damage by the Deepwater spill, reaching millions of viewers. The videos run the gamut from crude satire to the conspiratorial to community outrage.

Any hope for BP? BP’s PR crisis-management task force should note: There is precedent here. Last June, a global community of outraged voices took to the Internet to demand change in the form of the infamous #iranelection protests. For two weeks, protesters, aided by a globe-spanning social media support group, defied President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s armed goons, circumvented government censors and communications blackouts, to voice their opposition to a dodgy election. Then, one day, the momentum behind the Iranian protest lost steam and fell out of the public consciousness, replaced by an even bigger story.

What event could have been so big as to distract us from the potential toppling of a despotic regime? It was the death of Michael Jackson, considered at the time the single most-tweeted news event ever. This is the nature of online protests: They come out of nowhere and have the potential to captivate and sway the masses, only to fade from view just as quickly when the next big thing comes along. BP’s crack PR team understands this full well, but that’s little comfort. The King of Pop is dead, and so, too, are a lot of sea turtles and pelicans.

BP Tweeted What About Jesus Walking on Water?!

Bernhard Warner — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:09:48 +0000

The Web’s eco-warriors and carbon crusaders have really been sticking it to BP ever since the Deepwater Horizon spill began leaking barrels and barrels of raw crude into the Gulf of Mexico last month. Last week, Greenpeace invited the public to trash redesign the BP logo as part of its latest social-media-inspired pressure campaign. Now, there’s another source of embarrassment for the Big Oil heavy, a Twitter-led crusader to sink BP’s crisis outreach efforts one tweet at a time.

As the Wall Street Journal reports today, the Twitter feed @BPGlobalPR, which masquerades—in name only—as that of an official BP public-relations mouthpiece, is blasting out messages that are really getting under people’s skins. One reads: “If we had a dollar for every complaint about this oil spill, it wouldn’t compare to our current fortune. Oil is a lucrative industry!”

The problem for the embattled oil giant is that many people believe the satirically arrogant tweets are coming from BP itself. You might forgive the duped, as the feed describes itself thus:“This page exists to get BP’s message and mission statement out into the twitterverse!”

The other major problem is that the fake BP Twitter account now has more than 18,000 followers (the WSJ reported 11,400, as its story went to press overnight), not bad for an account that was launched on May 19. *Meanwhile, BP's official Twitter feed – @BP_America – and a second to coordinate clean-up news – @Oil_Spill_2010 (Could they have possibly come up with a more unnerving handle? Will there be an @Oil_Spill_2011 next year?)—which are meant to counteract all the bad publicity and deliver timely updates on the clean-up, have about half the number of followers and are quickly getting buried by the satirical account, as the chart here shows:

The appeal of the fake BP Twitter feed is easy to see. It taps into the public’s outrage by conjuring up a BP brand persona that is arrogant and uncaring—a stark difference, mind you, from the image BP is trying to put across on its official Twitter feed. Case in point: While BP is tweeting that volunteers are pitching in to protect the coastline, we see these incongruous tweets from "Bad BP," the last messages you’d expect to see from a firm in the middle of a lengthy PR crisis:

What is really hard to understand is why BP, with its well-paid crisis PR team working round-the-clock, is allowing someone to completely hijack its message so thoroughly. What could it have done better? Well, for starters, it could have had its Twitter accounts “verified” so the public would know at least that its own tweets are legit and that others are not to be trusted. And BP has done nothing that we can see to distance itself from the fake tweeter. Not a single alert to say don’t trust the person behind the @BPGlobalPR curtain.

Maybe BP really doesn’t care.

*(CORRECTION May 25 : This article originally stated that the @Oil_Spill_2010 Twitter feed is an official BP feed. That is incorrect.

How To Succeed on Facebook: Bribery

Bernhard Warner — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:04:08 +0000

It's getting so that Facebook users need never buy a meal again. The latest fast-food brand to dangle a free lunch to fulsome Facebook fans is Burger King (BKC), way up in Norway. For every 10 "Likes" you pepper on the Burger King Norge Facebook page, you get a free Hot Salsa burger. (No, we don't want to know what they put in the Norwegian salsa.) The King follows Domino's Pizza, which earlier this month created a pizza giveaway contest to convince hold-outs to try its new pizza recipe. And in February, Carl's Jr. and Hardee's sought to attract "young, hungry guys" to its new comfort food menu with, you guessed it, a Facebook campaign that involved free comfort food.

But it's not just the fast-food industry that's trying to boost its fan base with freebies and discounted goodies. The astute Facebook user this week could score himself a retro 35mm camera, dirt-cheap last-minute airfare, and free Glee concert tickets, the latter if he were to stop by Entertainment Weekly's Facebook page and deliver the "best original Sue Sylvester-inspired put-down." The instructions, hint, hint continue: "Make sure to 'Like' us while you’re there!"

In the short life-span of social-media marketing, we've learned one thing: Free shit rules. If you want to pad your Facebook fan base or Twitter follower ranks, the quickest way to do it is the good old freebie. According to Vanksen, a digital agency that did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on the BK Norway promo, Burger King (BKC) is buying loyalty (and approval, you might add) on the cheap. Each BK "Like," it reckons, is valued at $0.29; presumably a Salsa burger costs $2.90. While we're at it, another agency, Vitrue, calculates the value of a social media fan at a lowly $3.60, a value that it says takes into account just how much "earned media" a brand can expect from the average fan on a social network or blog.

To be sure, all this talk of free comes with a cost, and it's no doubt why our social media personae, whether you agree with Vitrue's calculation, are worth just pennies on the dollar. Advertisers are not cultivating a new generation of brand ambassadors through these promotions, they are turning consumers into mercenaries, dangling freebies in exchange for a kind word, a nod of approval, or recruiting a buddy to join up, too.

This gimme-gimme-gimme approach could easily backfire. Case in point: A Dell (DELL) customer recently took to the computer-maker's IdeaStorm forum, a place where knowledgeable customers suggest product enhancements, to berate the company for its stinginess. "It's nice knowing about all the deals via Facebook but I'd love to see some Facebook only giveaways," the customer writes. "Nothing big like a computer (although I certainly wouldn't complain) but even something like a thumb drive or sunglasses or whatever, just more incentive to check in on Dell's Facebook page and actually participate in dialouges and discussions."

The freebie approach, of course, is a mainstay of the marketer's playbook. Procter & Gamble (PG) and Unilever, to name just two, have used couponing and sampling to great effect to get customers to try new products or to switch from a rival. The somewhat recent invention of the Groupon aside, couponing is a private affair between the marketer and the consumer, communicated discreetly in mailers or newspaper/magazine supplements. The aim is to get the consumer to try the product, believing that once you do, you'll be convinced it's the one for you. The intent of the typical Facebook giveaway, it seems, is to produce as much noise as possible about a new campaign or a new product. Everyone is welcome to comment and grade, even the kind of people whose opinion you'd never seek out. The knowledgeable, trusted brand-advocate among us, meanwhile, is drowned out by a cacophony of "I like that!", "I like that!" If it's legitimate feedback you seek, you certainly won't find it among such a sycophantic crowd.

Meanwhile, the big, fat freebies continue, enticing us to say something, anything. Today, Cherry Grrl, an online publication dedicated to lesbian issues, announced a new campaign aimed at increasing reader feedback and generating commentary on its site. "Each week, the website will award one lucky reader who has commented on an article or post (or submitted a question to the Dating/Advice columnist, Dr. Oh at AskDrOh@cherrygrrl.com) with a special prize pack," the press release reads.

Huggies Taps Mothers for Social Media Invention

Matthew Yeomans — Fri, 14 May 2010 13:39:59 +0000

Amid the recent rash of Pampers diapers social-media stories, a new conversational project by rival brand Huggies has gotten somewhat lost in the mix. Which is a shame, because Pampers has demonstrated the need to listen and adapt to customer conversations in response to a crisis. But Huggies is embracing social-media research, community building, and collaboration in a manner that shows social media's positive potential rather than its liability.

Here's what you may have missed: Huggies recently launched the MomInspired Grant Program that will fund entrepreneurial mothers across the United States to help get their child-care business ideas off the ground. Kimberly Clark, Huggies' parent company, is offering a total of $250,000 in grant money, with up to $15,000 for each individual idea. In order to be considered for a grant, mothers must submit an application online by June 9, outlining "a unique baby or child care product idea that addresses an unmet parenting need," according to the company's press release. The program is explained through a dedicated microsite, and community word is being spread through Facebook and Twitter.

Now, at first blush, this might seem a somewhat strange campaign for a diaper brand. After all, based on the traditional history of baby-product marketing, you'd more likely expect Huggies to be running some sort of "send us your cutest baby photos" Facebook competition. What's Huggies thinking by omitting cute babies and focusing on overworked, stressed-out moms? Even Evian knows that babies sell product.

The answer, says Steve Paljieg, senior director of growth and innovation at Kimberly Clark, is that Huggies has been doing a lot of talking with their target audience—the moms who buy their products. The particular reason? Kimberly Clark is on a mission to innovate its product line. "We do a five year business cycle and we've identified innovation that takes us beyond the core—diapers and wipes—into something new that defines us a baby care brand," says Paljieg. Part of the research involved talking to online mommy influencers, one of whom just happened to be Maria Bailey, a former Fortune 100 executive, founder of BlueSuitMom.com and a mother of four. "Maria is at the hub of a social media environment where moms are innovating with their own businesses," says Paljieg. That insight, combined with an interest in the way the Silicon Valley venture-capital market sourced innovation, convinced him that Huggies could both inspire its target market and foster its own innovation by working to enable entrepreneurial moms across the country.

The more research Paljieg and his team did, the more they learned about the challenges that this small but influential sector of moms faced. He cites research conducted by Babson College showing that even though women in the United States are credited with starting businesses at nearly twice the rate of men, only about 3 percent of these female businesses get VC funding. Building on that research, Huggies then commissioned its own study of moms and found that the toughest challenge faced by those who wanted to start their own business was access to capital and financial resources. These moms didn't need VC-level funding. Most said what they really needed was small seed/start-up money, along with mentorship.

And so the MomInspired project was born. Moms can submit "innovative and viable business and product ideas for prenatal care up to 6 years of age, designed to help make life easier for parents so they can better enjoy everyday moments with their little ones," and Kimberly Clark will choose the ideas it thinks are most commercially viable and provide the seed money to get them going. This isn't a one-off commitment, insists Paljieg. "We want to form a relationship with these moms and watch their businesses grow. This is the VC model that we try and stay around as the ideas develop. We're doing it to make their dreams come true, but also to benefit."

What the combined scientific and engineering brains in Kimberly Clark's R&D division make of this customer open-sourcing is anyone's guess, but Paljieg insists that a good idea won't be looked down on, whereever it comes from. He points out that the company's chief marketing officer, Tony Palmer, has responsibility for the company's innovation, and so the silo mentality that often restricts social-media insights to the marketing or PR team won't damage the MomInspired project. He notes that there is an "incredible amount of openness in R&D and our innovation."

Still, realistically, what is the chance that any of the ideas Kimberly Clark funds will succeed? Anyone involved in small business understands the risk of failure are high and the chances of successfully bringing a new product/invention to market notoriously slim—isn't that why companies like Kimberly Clark spend millions upon millions on research and development?

Yet even if just a fraction of Huggies' target community actually engages with this initiative, and even if the entrepreneurial chance of success seems improbable, the project probably will be considered a success. That's because (as its name suggests) this campaign has as much to do with demonstrating Huggies' commitment to working moms as it does funding the next cool baby-care product. "I hope [all the moms out there] experience the recognition that they themselves are inventive so that they think 'Maybe I can't participate, but isn't this cool what Huggies is doing," say Paljieg.

For Huggies, it seems, social media, rather than necessity, may prove to be the mother of invention.

Google's Social Media SOS

Bernhard Warner — Tue, 11 May 2010 10:29:14 +0000

Wanted: Mighty business power losing ground to upstart competitors seeks whiz to jumpstart its social-media operation. A fluency in enterprise software plus consumer-facing tools/applications a must. The ideal candidate is a persuasive communicator able to convince upper management that a Twitter feed and YouTube channel doesn't mean you're a social company. Interested applicants please apply to Google.

OK, we haven't yet seen the classified ad for Google's new head of social, but we're imagining it might read something like that. It is GigaOm that comes closest to spelling out what Google is searching for in a new social-media heavy, having obtained a letter from the recruitment firm tasked with finding it the next Zuckerberg. The letter reads:

This is a new and very strategic position, as Google knows it is late on this front and is appropriately humble about it. In Google’s view, conceptually, there are two ways to tackle social, each impacting who may be successful in this senior post: 1) building an innovative offering specifically in this area; or 2) developing the capability and integrating social into Google’s existing portfolio.

The tech press, of course, is having some fun with Google's (GOOG) humble admission that, so far, when it comes to social media, we've blown it. Orkut, anyone? They could just as easily point to more recent missteps: the Google Buzz bomb and the cacophonous Nexus One phone launch. These launches were classic Google—sophisticated pieces of engineering that would earn kudos from fellow geeks, but would be greeted with indifference by the general public or, worse, a backlash. Google Buzz, for one, proved that when it comes to social media, Google truly has a tin ear.

Oddly, Google now finds itself in the same position as so many mega-consumer brands outside the tech sector. It has to scramble to beef up its social-media expertise quickly before it falls too far behind competitors and risks growing further detached from consumers. But where to turn?

It could pull a page from one of the most successful brand-marketers ever, McDonald's (MCD). The fast-food giant last month hired Rick Wion, a PR veteran from Golin Harris in Chicago to serve as its first-ever director of social media, with responsibilities ranging from conducting targeted outreach efforts with influential food bloggers to managing customer problems. I have my doubts that any PR specialist can successfully defuse the wave of customer-service complaints that arise each day, but the hire shows ambition and a strong sense of what the social-media specialists within an organization will have to deal with in the future. In short, it involves every part of the business that intersects with the customer. If that sounds like every part of the business, full-stop, you're right. Even traditional media companies like Britain's ITV see the social-media director as someone more than a glorified digital marketing guy.

Google's head of social media may yet be the toughest gig to crack. There isn't a part of Google's business that couldn't use a social overhaul. Case in point: YouTube. For all its vastness, it would be a much more vibrant forum with even more community input. Sometimes, we want the human touch, not an algorithm that spits out the most popular each day.

Google made its billions on the back of genius coding. That was the easy part. Its future success will be determined by winning over a much more complex machine: us.

What If Facebook Isn't Around Forever?

Matthew Yeomans — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:03:20 +0000

It was halfway through a conference presentation this week by Facebook that it dawned on me just how powerful the social network had become, just how big its own plans are, and just how much it now has to lose.

Sure, the rat-a-tat-tat artillery of stats sounded impressive: more than 400 million users worldwide; one-third of the U.K. population active on Facebook each month, with 50 percent of those returning each day; 100 million mobile users, and, yes, 85 of the top 100 U.S. brands active on the network. But it wasn’t the numbers that made me sit up and pay attention, it was the confidence with which Facebook’s U.K. commercial director, Stephen Haines, noted that major brands are starting to ditch their campaign microsites and make a home for ongoing customer engagement on Facebook because, to paraphrase, while microsites come and go, Facebook is here to stay.

Now, the promise of longevity is a bold one coming from any Internet company. Facebook, of course, would seem to have plenty of reasons to be confident (its new moves to make the power of its social graph indispensable for the greater Web, merely underscoring its upbeat outlook) but social networking is a fickle business to say the least—just ask News Corp. (NWS) and AOL, purchasers of the formerly high-flying MySpace and Bebo, respectively.

In fact, the greater technology sector is rife with hubris. In 2000, AOL itself was primed to take over the online world after recording year-on-year membership growth just as fantastic as Facebook. Back in the late 1990s traditional media powerhouse Disney (DIS) thought it had a smart portal play with in Go.com until Yahoo showed it what a new media company was really about. And, of course, Yahoo (YHOO) itself was considered unassailable in search until Google (GOOG) and that algorithm took over.

I have no doubt that Facebook will doubt turn out to be more Google than Go.com, but if recent history tells us anything, it’s that there is no guaranteed long-term success in the Internet economy. (Even Google knows this.) This is especially true for Facebook, which prides itself in shaping business strategy based on the user habits of its members. For this reason alone, major brands should think carefully before downing a jug of Facebook Kool-Aid.

The current trend in social-media business thinking is to invest more in the social places that people frequent (Facebook being a No. 1 choice) rather than develop a brand-specific social-media platform or site that you then have to persuade the public to visit. When you see the interest Facebookers have in brand pages (Starbucks, for example, has 7million FB fans/likers), it’s not hard to see why major brand-holders such as Unilever and Coca-Cola would prefer to interact with customers through Facebook and other social sites like YouTube rather than a campaign microsite with a limited shelf-life and even more limited consumer appeal.

This willingness to embrace change and to release control suggests a fundamental shift in the way brands view social media. It tells us that what six months ago was seen as purely experimental has now become cemented as a fundamental part of customer engagement. Facebook, more than any social property, should pat itself on the back for making companies understand the power of customer clout. And yet, if it wants to be the go-to social destination for the next 10 years Facebook should also view the fickle power of customer choice (one it has harnessed so far) as a direct threat.

Facebook’s development announcements last week suggest the company understands that threat. By attempting to expand users’ Facebook experience outside of the network through its social plugins and open graph protocol, the company is being blatant in its push to make a Facebook dominant part of everyone’s online life.

If it fails, then you can be sure another new social network with news features will arise to woo the Facebook faithful. And when that happens the big brands will quickly flee to where their customers lead them. In the end, even Facebook friendship has its limits.

What Every CEO Could Learn From a Tweeting Hugo Chávez

Bernhard Warner — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:55:00 +0000

El presidente himself, Hugo Chávez, has this week joined the people's movement, Twitter. Brandishing the very presidential handle @chavezcandanga, Chávez has amassed an impressive 85,900 followers after a single "victorious" tweet. Translated, it reads: "Hey how's it going? I appeared like I said I would: at midnight. I'm off to Brazil. And very happy to work for Venezuela. We will be victorious!!"

When His Holiness the Dalai Lama joined Twitter two months ago, I suggested a few pointers for the new guy, a kind of welcome-to-Twitter gesture that I humbly thought it might serve big brands, too, as they consider whether to join the micro-blogging platform. I don't want to let the occasion of Chávez's triumphant arrival to Twitter pass without a similar welcome, so here are a few tips that he or any CEO or jefe ought to consider once they make the plunge.

1) Don't rely solely on Twitter to make your point. Chávez informed his party faithful of his imminent Twitter debut during his weekend variety show Aló Presidente. Sure, it helps if you have a monopoly on the local airwaves. But Chávez shows real social-media savvy here by going cross-platform with his message. And there's a Chávez blog, too, in the works. The Venezuelan president's choice of "candanga" in his Twitter handle shows flair as well. The word is a local expression to describe a person with an "explosive" personality. Expect some fireworks, Twitterverse.

2) It bears repeating: be insightful, but keep it brief. Yes, the 140-character limit even applies to you, too, dear leader. "The loquacious leader [is] known for speeches that last hours," the New York Times points out, questioning whether he can be disciplined enough to stay within the limits of Twitter verbosity.

3) Don't be complacent. Congratulations, you've recruited more than 85,000 followers in the first day. (The Dalai Lama scored just 44,000 on day one, I recall.) But it's been a full 24 hours since your first tweet and your "Chavista" followers are anxious to hear more. Meanwhile, rivals, using the #freeVenezuela hashtag, have gone on the attack; as Venezuelan tweeter Arturo Hidalgo broadcasts, "power outages show saturation of #Venezuelan electricity grid."

4) Do you have a crisis-response strategy in place? Now that you're on Twitter, critics will be leveling charges directly at you when you make a misstep. Are you ready for this? Ignore them at your peril, lest you trigger an angry Twitterstorm. Here are a few tips on how to deal with the hashtag-crisis that could sink your reputation. Hint: Don't pull a Toyota.

5) Don't get distracted by your escalating follower numbers. What's more valuable to you is what the public is saying about you. Scan Twitter to see where you're performing well in the public's eye, and what areas still need improving. Maybe the creaking electric grid is a good place to start.

6) How do you measure your influence in a forum that boasts some pretty influential people? Again, not by counting your follower numbers, but by watching the number of people who retweet your missives. After day one, you're not doing so well, Mr. Presidente. We found only a few retweets, including this one from a Twitter used based in "Hell."

7) Be generous. This is the same advice I gave the Dalai Lama in this column. You are not going to agree with everyone on Twitter, but do make a point to retweet the genuinely brilliant, witty, and provocative posts you come across. Twitter is a conversation, after all. Yes, listening is required.

Buenos tweeting, Mr. Presidente.