For many people, social media is changing the way we interact with one another. To some degree, it’s more about communicating via one-to-many instead of one-to-one. It’s great to be able to find long lost friends from high schooland reminisce via Facebook or to find out what a pro athlete is thinking about during a game via Twitter. None of this is lost on the corporate world.

While the center of most people’s social media experiences are Facebook and Twitter, startups like Foursquare andGroupon show there’s still some new opportunities in the social media landscape for new services. And marketers – especially those building consumer brands – are starting to capitalize. Here are a few interesting examples of how companies have leveraged social media to engage their customers and build a community.

PepsiCo, Mashable and VC firm Highland Capital Partners have teamed up to launch PepsiCo10. It’s a new competition that looks to match startups in fields like social media and mobile marketing with industry mentors and brands within PepsiCo with which they can pilot their products.

Another interesting campaign is one concocted by The Gap who partnered with Foursquare and Groupon. For this campaign The Gap teamed up with popular group-buying site Groupon to offer a nation-wide deal: $50 worth of apparel for just $25. By the end of the day, 441,000 groupons were sold bringing in a little more than $11 million. You can also see what Toy Story 3, AOL and Starbucks have done.

Personally I like what Mountain Dew has done with their DEWocracy campaign. The company launched a campaign last year called DEWmocracy, which allowed Dew’s loyal fans to choose the next Mountain Dew flavor – they ended up choosing Voltage. The success of the last campaign though has spurred a new one where they’ve upped the ante with their Dew Labs Challenge, which utilizes 12seconds.tv, 50 boxes of Dew, and a lot of YouTube.

Not only are companies using social media to drive sales and build brand loyalty but they’re also getting input on products and helping to develop new offerings. Talk about hearing the voice of the customer!

By changing how they reach customers, companies are helping usher in a new era of communicating, branding and building loyalty. Do you relate better to a company if you’re engaged in one of their community programs? Does it bother you? Do you feel like Big Brother is watching when they send you coupons for a store that you’re walking by?

This past week I was reminded of the importance for brands to not only understand their target audience(s), but find ways to get personal with individuals. This was spurred by an email I received from Groupon with the subject line “New: Personalize Your Groupon Deals”.

Having suffered Groupon fatigue from the influx of irrelevant offers, I was quite excited to see their effort to personalize the experience. Unfortunately, when I went to the site to take the survey, they only asked for my gender, birth date and zip code. They missed an incredible opportunity to learn more about my interests and preferences and thereby create a strong, long-term relationship based on truly customized deals (not my zip code).

In today’s world, understanding your target demographic is not enough. People expect to have a personal relationship with brands, so companies must take an extra step to understand psychographics- any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles.  Netflix and Amazon do a stellar job of this through employing technology that learns about their subscriber’s preferences and then offering up relevant recommendations. There is something very powerful about feeling a company really knows you, and accomplishing this is nearly impossible if the engagement strategy is based off of broad sweeps of demographic profiles.

There’s an interesting parallel between brand engagement and media engagement. Good PR professionals know they must carefully research their target influentials. It’s essential to know what they’ve written about and what topics they care about before approaching them. I’ve seen many instances over the years of PR professionals get slammed for spamming reporters and bloggers with cookie cutter pitches, resulting in irritation, no coverage and deteriorated credibility. In many instances, the guilty “blanket pitcher” who didn’t take the time to get to know their target gets redirected to the junk folder (or worse, called out publicly in an article or blog post).

The lesson for brands: find ways to get to know your customers on a more intimate level or you too are likely to be overlooked.

What brands do you think do a good job of understanding their customers?

The power of video gaining viral legs can create incredible visibility for a brand. One of my personal favorites – the Evian roller babies – brought this brand back to life for me after moving it to the passé section of my mind sometime in the 90s. However, even though I loved the video, I still haven’t been motivated to pick up a bottle. I just smile when I see the logo and pay heed to the creative talent who developed the video.

Interestingly, Evian started running the ads on TV a few months ago. Apparently the sales pipeline thinned out from the online push and they’re trying another approach.

This week, SymphonyIRI released the latest sales data for Old Spice body wash, the product that has risen to the number one most viewed video spot thanks to the muscular Isaiah Mustafa sending messages from the shower.

Bad news Mustafa – sales are down. Apparently these past four weeks, the campaign has been running without a corresponding coupon, leaving consumers less motivated to purchase. Sales have dropped 30-33 percent since the buy one, get one free sales promotion ended, giving Mustafa quite a bit less muscle on his own.

This serves as an important reminder that motivating target audiences to take action requires more than an entertaining video. Today, capturing a consumer’s attention takes a minimum of 3-5 touch points from multiple sources. Companies must create 360 degree campaigns which reach their targets in all the places they are engaged — media, blogs, point of purchase, social networks, online video sites, events, etc.  And there has to be a compelling call to action and/or incentive. For the general consumer, coupons are particularly hot right now as the recession has conditioned us to look for ways to save.

Regardless of your target audience, the importance of having a multichannel marketing plan is imperative. A one legged stool just won’t stand up. Unless of course your only goal is to be the number one viewed video and have people smile at your water bottles. And let’s not forget – viral isn’t a given, so even this goal has no guarantee.

What brands do you think are the best success stories when it comes to multi-channel marketing? Failures?

The New York Times ran an interesting piece this past weekend (“In Case of Emergency: What Not to Do”) on what can be learned by crisis management mistakes made by such industry-leading companies as BP, Toyota and Goldman Sachs.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past several years about how crisis management has changed, particularly with social networks providing a much bigger stage for issues to catch instant fire. We saw this play out most recently with JetBlue, a topic my colleague Rob Goodman discussed earlier this week.

While the need for greater speed, broader engagement strategies and approach to the tone of messaging are a clear change (and in some cases such as JetBlue, what business decisions should be made), it struck me that many of the fundamentals of crisis management have and will always remain the same. And yet, companies still seem to fail at these basics:

1)      Put those who are impacted first. Having managed several crises in my career, I’ve seen the initial defensiveness and temptation to shift blame set right out of the gate.  All the while those who have been or could be impacted get lost. First things first- make sure you’ve expressed sincere concern, start taking immediate action and let the public know what they need to do. Unfolding how things happened and where fingers should be pointed can wait.

2)      Never blame the customer. The NYT piece provides some great examples of how this has backfired, particularly when Audi blamed customers for acceleration issues that led to hundreds of crashes in the 1980s. Even if true, better to explain how to avoid a crash than blatantly say it’s the customers fault.

3)      Know your full situation before making bold claims. In the case of Toyota, they clearly didn’t have a clear perspective on what was causing their acceleration issues, but still moved forward with offering explanations. The problem: turns out their explanations weren’t entirely true, and they were further exposed when the full story was revealed. Better to say you are still evaluating the issue than offer up or provide the wrong answer.

4)      Never lie. This one goes without explanation. One hundred percent guaranteed you’ll get caught. It amazes me that companies (and people) still think they’ll get away with it. Bill Clinton? Steroid users in baseball? Just a few examples.

5)      Have a crisis plan in place. For many companies, crisis is inevitable. Having at least the basics in place for when that time hits is imperative, and yet, so many are left in a scramble because they were in a state of denial. This is a guaranteed recipe for a double crisis- the one at hand, and the one with PR teams, executives and lawyers wasting precious hours trying to figure out what to do.

It amazes me that such established and sophisticated brands outlined in this article missed the boat on these fundamentals which have remained true for eons. I can see not understanding how to implement social media into the strategy, but making claims before you know the full truth? Ouch.

What other companies do you think botched the basics? Which companies do you think have handled a crisis situation wisely?

By now we’ve all heard about the JetBlue flight attendant, Steven Slater, who apparently had had enough of the rude passengers and bailed out on his plane by deploying the emergency slide on the runway to walk away from his job. Not to be caught empty-handed he even had the nerve to take a few beers with him. Kind of reminds me of the scene from the movie Network where actor Peter Finch opens up his office window and shouts “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Steven appears to be the classic anti-hero in this tale and his legend seems to have grown day-by-day. There’s even a Facebook page devoted to this story and it reportedly got over 20,000 Facebook fans in less than a week.

A quick check online came up with a wide variety of stories in such outlets as Forbes, Chief Marketer, TMZ, andABCnews.com. There are tons of other sites (business, general news, airlines, blogs, etc.) that have covered the news but what I find interesting is how JetBlue has handled the situation.

In today’s media-centric, 24×7 news cycle world, reputations and opinions can be severely tarnished if the wrong message gets out. For example BP made a number of mistakes with how they approached the fiasco of the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

JetBlue, a relative newcomer on the corporate scene in the world of aviation, could have taken a hard-line approach by reprimanding or firing Steven. While the airline would have been completely justified I’m sure public opinion would somehow be swayed to provide support to him. My feeling is that almost any company would have taken this approach. However, as soon as I heard how JetBlue was approaching the issue, one company came to mind: Southwest Airlines.

Southwest has always been known as a company that approaches customer service, at least during the in-flight service, as light-hearted. Pilots sharing humorous flight plan information over the intercom, flight attendants who sing, etc. It sets a tone for fun and makes flying, which isn’t the easiest of tasks, more enjoyable.

Following suit is JetBlue, an airline known to take a unique approach to managing an airline and providing amenities for customers who seem to remain quite loyal. In fact JetBlue was the highest ranked airlines in the 13the Annual Loyalty Leaders poll. JetBlue’s blog entry on August 11 poked fun at the situation, went out of its way to praise its entire in-flight crew members, and generally diffused the situation. For a potentially huge crisis situation, JetBlue’s self-effacing approach appears to have paid off.

What about you? How have you dealt with crisis management issues? How did you go about protecting your company’s brand image?

The recent debate over net neutrality is a heated one (to say the least). Since Google and Verizon’s talks made the news a few weeks ago, the media has been peppered with headlines discussing the issue. Big questions at the heart of the debate include who should get priority on the Web, how this will impact innovation and small business, whether the government can police this effectively, if this is just a play for big business to benefit, and the overall implications for consumers.

Given the tremendous amount of ink already given to these questions, I’ll save my opinions for another day when the dust settles a bit more. Instead, let’s take a look at the impact to Google’s brand: will net neutrality be the tipping point for trust in Google, transforming them from the company with the “don’t be evil” motto into a “corporate behemoth”?

Based on discussions brewing on the Web, it appears trust could be on the line. Consumers are noting they are moving to new search engines, that the company has lost its connection with its start-up roots and that they are moving away from their entrepreneurial positions to ones that benefit them as a large business. Even comedian Jon Stewart has joined the discussion, documenting the variance in Google’s message from 2006 to present (in his unique way of course).

Jon Stewart on Net Neutrality

The change in their position alone could have huge implications for the company and Google will have to carefully navigate how they reconcile their former “free Internet for everyone” stance with what is a very complicated issue. Consumers could see this as creating a hierarchy for Internet access, with big business looking to line their pockets at their expense. This story isn’t new, and the headlines could increasingly take a turn for the worse from Google’s perspective (insert “evil empire”).

The imperatives for Google: show how net neutrality still aligns to their original position and be clear on the benefits to consumers and small business. If it doesn’t line up, it will be interesting to see how Google is discussed going forward.  One thing for certain, the Google brand is rapidly moving from warm fuzzy search company, to tech titan.

I remember a conversation I had with a colleague about 15 years ago when the Web was starting to become a mainstream part of our daily business world, especially in the high tech market. The person said that the Web was simply another distribution channel and she somewhat downplayed the importance that the Web would have in our daily lives. Boy was she wrong.

Fast forward to today and you have a much different picture. The Web is critical to our daily business lives, both in the B2B and B2C worlds. But it cannot be done in a vacuum. As analyst firm AMR said in a recent report, “Two thirds of B2B marketers believe that online must be complemented by traditional marketing activities.”

I’ve read articles and heard from multiple companies that “we need a social media plan.” The reality is this cannot be done as a standalone effort – it must be part of a larger marketing strategy. With experts like Forrester Research predicting a doubling in B2B interactive marketing spending by 2014, forward-thinking B2B and B2C companies need to continue to strengthen their online and social media talent with a combination of in-house and external resources. Sadly, BizReport says that 60 percent of B2B firms have no staff dedicated to social media compared with 54 percent of B2C players. Why is B2B lagging here?

My feeling is that we live in a results-oriented business community, not to mention a results-oriented society, which means we need numbers and validation. Gut instinct is fine but it’s hard to argue for social media-savvy staff members to the C-level executives if you can’t justify the benefits. To date, it has proven challenging to directly link things like re-tweets or blog posts to increased sales, especially for big-tickets items like database software or bulldozers.

Social media can be a great tool to help companies connect with their customers, partners and industry influencers and has potential to drive revenue growth. Whether you use an outside agency or take it in-house, a successful social media strategy must be part of the overall marketing plan for your company backed with real metrics.

How do you see social media strategies changing as they become an integral part of your marketing plan?

The Nielsen Company issued a new research study this month with findings on how American’s spend their time online. Not surprising, social networking maintains the number one position with a 43% increase from last year’s study. American’s are spending a third of their time now engaged in social media at their computer- particularly social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs. It goes without saying that these channels are no longer a choice when it comes to marketing.  While the growth may taper, it’s still a force to be reckoned with.

What’s more interesting in the study is the data on email usage. Email has taken a 28% dip on the computer; however, is the number one activity on mobile devices. Apparently we like our email to go (I know I do).

I’d be very interested in seeing a deeper analysis of this particular data point. Are Americans getting tired of email and dealing with it while on the move? Or is it simply been reprioritized while sitting at the computer as we gain more from our time on social networks? I’d love to say we have less email, but if my inbox is any indication…

Email engagement trends will be interesting to watch in the coming years as we find new ways to communicate both personally and professionally.  Even GroupOn, which uses daily emails for its distribution, is expanding its reach through a targeted promotion with the Bravo Network according to a recent post by the Wall Street Journal. While smart to expand its brand visibility and reach, I have to wonder if email will become a less effective communication channel over time and they are anticipating this shift.

And to think email was once the “killer app”.

Pardon me if I’m a week behind the times but I was out last week. But even being away from my desk for a few days didn’t shield me from the fiasco that Apple has been enduring. For the situation to be referred to as a “Toyota-style PR crisis for Apple sure says a mouthful. By now everyone has heard about the little glitch that the iPhone 4 is suffering from. Even Consumer Reports jumped on the bandwagon and said it couldn’t recommend the iPhone 4 after giving it a positive rating initially.

Now let’s take a step back for a minute. Apple has one of the strongest brands in the world. Known for quality and innovative products, the company has always been more user-friendly than just about another other tech company. Yet somehow this killer new product has fallen on hard times (from a PR perspective, sales seem to be holding up for now) due to a technical error with the antenna. In reading the coverage it seems that more people are interested in the PR fiasco than the actual error, probably because Apple has handled the situation so poorly. As my noted colleague discussed, is the hype around the problem bigger than the problem itself? So what does this Fortune 500 company, with one of the strongest brands in the world, do to manage this crisis?

They tell customers to hold the phone differently.

What do users say? Use duct tape Not exactly rocket science here but you get the picture.

What’s most amazing to me, a PR professional that worked at Apple in the 1990′s, is how badly Apple has handled this crisis. Most of the PR experts who have weighed in on this one agree that there are some very basic principles you follow in a crisis situation like this one—acknowledge the problem, ensure consumer trust by saying the issue is being examined and addressed, craft your story and stick to it.

Many PR pros who focus on crisis management have weighed in on how poorly Apple has handled this one:

Instead of addressing the problem and offering to find a solution like Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol tampering in the early 1980s, Apple has come off more like Toyota and BP during their recent reputation-annihilating incidents. “The biggest mistake (Apple) made is they keep changing their story,” said Ira Kalb, professor of marketing at USC Marshall School of Business. CNET

After users reported problems with signal strength and dropped calls when they touched the lower-left portion of the phone, however, Apple suggested that consumers hold the phone differently or use one of many bumpers to insulate the antenna. It also said that all phones suffered from similar problems when they were cradled a certain way. These comments were widely laughed at in gadget blogs. New York Times

To say it isn’t good to be mentioned in the same breath as BP and Toyota would be an understatement.

So my question is…how could Apple have made such a big mistake in how they’ve handled this? And what impact will this have on the Apple brand? Granted, sometimes you can’t control the story the way you’d like to but Apple really blew this one. Apple has had product issues in the past yet as philosopher Edmund Burke said “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Guess Apple didn’t study its own history. Or is Apple getting a little too big and too arrogant for its own good?

So what communication crisis have you had to manage? Any tips for readers out there?

The Wall Street Journal today is reporting that the vast majority of Toyota accidents were the result of…driver error. Not sticky brake pedals:

The U.S. Department of Transportation has analyzed dozens of data recorders from Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles involved in accidents blamed on sudden acceleration and found that the throttles were wide open and the brakes weren’t engaged at the time of the crash, people familiar with the findings said.

The early results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyotas and Lexuses surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes.

What’s even more fascinating is how the grievance count suddenly shot up once people heard about the problem. Actually, we didn’t just hear about it, but were barraged by a non-stop, relentless news cycle involving electronic media, print and online media outlet and social media buzz.  Did the hype – not problems with Toyota – lead to the jump in complaints?  I’d say that looks like a pretty safe assumption.

A similar case of hype leading to mass hysteria is the latest (albeit flawed) Apple iPhone.  While it’s a nice device, there is very little that’s truly new or groundbreaking. If you already have an iPhone or an Android device, there’s not much reason to run right out and buy one.  The rational response would be to hold off until your natural upgrade cycle comes around.

The irrational response, fueled by months of breathless expectation by media and bloggers, along with Steve Jobs’ showmanship at launch, resulted in the thousands upon thousands of people waiting in line to drop down their hard-earned money on a device virtually the same as what they already have. Say what? My take, is the hype created a form of temporary insanity on a mass level, perhaps akin to the way mobs work.

Another example is designer handbags among teenage girls. Although somewhat tempered of late by the recession, my daughter went through a phase where she simply had to have expensive purses.  Working a minimum wage job, she would save pennies to get the latest Dooney & Bourke offering. I would see her purses and just couldn’t understand why she along with many other teenage girls would pay so much for what amounted to a fancy label. Hype and peer pressure are the only explanations.

As a PR person, I’m aware of the influence of hype and therefore largely resistant to its influence.  I counseled friends to buy Toyotas when the sales crashed earlier this year, and tend to avoid overhyped, overpriced Apple products.

But I am fascinated by the incredible power of hype to shape people’s behavior.

To no small degree, this is what marketing, advertising and PR people dream about and strategize endlessly to achieve. Get enough hype, and you have just hit the lottery.  So what’s the magic formula?  Still working on that one, but I’ll let you know once I figure it out.