So I’ve approached my wedding vendors in the same manner that I approach third-parties that I manage on behalf of my clients, and the entire experience has been a reminder in the importance of good vendor management and the extreme (yes, extreme) importance of following up.

Here are a few tips that I’ve picked up along the way:

1. Set clear expectations up front: Your vendor can’t execute your vision if you don’t tell them what you want. Come in with a plan, details and examples so that you are able to clearly communicate your expectations prior to signing any contracts. If you want to be happy with a vendor then you need to arm them with everything that they need to be successful. Remember to ask questions and give your vendor the opportunity to provide feedback. As I learned in my mandatory pre-wedding counseling sessions (lol), good relationships always start with clear communication.
2. Talk budget early and often: If you’ve decided on a budget, it’s critical that you share that information with your vendor up front. You won’t have to negotiate down a totally out-of-the-ballpark price quote if you provided a range at the onset of the relationship. It’s also important to check in with vendors frequently to make sure that your project continues to fall within the agreed upon budget, and that additional time and charges will or will not be needed.
3. Let the experts do their job: I am not a florist. Nor am I a baker, DJ or a professional seamstress. In fact, I hired a florist, a baker and a DJ because I NEED them to do what they do best. Once you’ve described your vision, budget and scope sit back and give your vendor the room that they need to do their jobs.  Remember, if you can do it better – then you shouldn’t have hired anyone in the first place.
4. Get it in writing: This is a no brainer – in our world, nothing is guaranteed unless it’s in writing. When you and a vendor agree to something, even if it’s something very simple, a verbal agreement isn’t enough. Send a recap email of the conversation, ask for a revised contract or tell your vendor to add an addendum to your original scope of work.
5. Set deadlines and stay on top of them: There is no way to stay organized and on top of things without deadlines. Once you’ve signed a contract with a vendor, sit down with them and map out the relationship with a project timeline. Set deadlines, milestones and pre-scheduled meetings and then stick with the plan. If things shift (as they often do), revise the timeline and make sure that all parties agree to new timing.

The final, and most important tip is to set the expectation with all vendors that you need follow up on any deliverable or open item – this will avoid situations where you’re left wondering about status (and will cut down on overall stress for both you and your vendor).  And of course, to ensure a positive relationship it’s important to be a good client – deliver things on time, be communicative and always say thank you for a job well-done. In other words, no one likes a Bridezilla.

Agencies, what are your top vendor management tips? Vendors, do you have ideas to add to this list?

Even if you have no desire to create a profile for yourself or your business, you have to admit that Facebook is a powerful platform.  Sure, it has its functionality problems from time to time and there are also those pesky privacy issues – but when you think about the cultural impact of Facebook, it’s hard not to stand in wonder.  Facebook started as an idea, a simple concept that had no basis in reality.  Mark Zuckerberg had the drive to turn his idea into reality, the passion to see it through and the brains to create something that people would find personally and professionally valuable.  On an almost daily basis I upload personal photos to my Facebook page, talk to family members and friends, run advertising and promote contests for my clients and network with colleagues…all from one profile on one platform.  Facebook is valuable to me.  In fact, I walked out of The Social Network both inspired and reminded that my job as a marketing and social media professional is to create value for my clients through my work every day.

Lately I’m seeing more and more agencies and brands excelling at building and creating while neglecting to add value.  I’m seeing so many conversations that are one-sided and messaging and content that’s sole purpose is to make noise.  At its core, social media is about creation – the creation of content, the creation of conversation and the creation of relationships.  None of those things will sustain without value.  Think about it, if Facebook wasn’t built thoughtfully, didn’t work properly and wasn’t serving a purpose would you be using it today?  I think we all know the answer.

I invite brands engaging on social media to think of themselves as creators.  We have the power to make social media a place where consumers turn to fulfill a need.  To do this, we need to plan before we communicate, think before we create and be passionate when we execute.

Social media ‘creators’ should ask themselves the following questions:

1. What ‘need’ can I fill for users on social media platforms (are you a thought leader? do users need your services? can you help to answer questions or provide new ideas?)
2. Am I providing value to the users that I am engaging with?
3. Is my content thoughtful or is it selfish?
4. Do my online interactions have a value-based purpose?
5. Am I representing my brand in the most authentic possible way?
6. Am I representing my brand in the most creative possible way?

You don’t have to be the next Mark Zuckerberg to create an online community where conversation is king.  It’s challenging to build an online reputation that is based on value, but in the long run it’s more than worth it.

But the past few years have hardened me, my friends.  I guess you can say that I’ve developed an official love/hate relationship with social media.  So this post is a bit of a rant mixed with a little bit of love.

Why I Love Social Media:

• It allows me to be endlessly creative. Social media has allowed me to brainstorm and execute creative ideas for my clients regardless of their company size or budget.  Creativity is the reason why I work in this profession, and social media keeps me on my toes.
• I build incredible relationships for myself and my clients. I have met so many amazing contacts and resources on various social media platforms.  I love being able to share ideas with other like-minded individuals.  It’s so incredible to be able to brainstorm and have conversations in real-time, with people I may have never met in my offline life.  I’ve also helped my clients to locate their brand ambassadors, by finding and activating a community that they may not have even known existed.
• I demonstrate (and measure) its value for businesses.  By helping my clients to engage on social media, I’ve been able to demonstrate its power.  We’ve helped clients to manage the reputation of their brand, allowed them to provide enhanced services to their customers, and generate leads that drive sales.  I’ve also created measurement and tracking reports based on web analytics that measure and demonstrate the effect of social media efforts on my clients’ bottom line.
• It brings products to life. Social media breathes life into a product or service.  It gives businesses a distinct voice and the opportunity to put a face on their brand.
• It gives everyone a megaphone. No matter how big or small a company is – everyone now has the opportunity to succeed and be heard through social media.  The playing field has officially been leveled and the little guys can now go head to head with the big guys.

Why I Hate Social Media:

• Too many eggs are in the social media basket. Too many companies are putting 100% of their marketing efforts into social media.  What happens when Twitter pulls the plug? (and they might, we don’t pay – so they don’t owe us anything).  All of your efforts will be lost.  It’s so critical for companies to remember that traditional public relations and marketing always need a place in your communication strategy.  I also think that as communication professionals, we need to understand both traditional and new media – I see way too many recent college grads pigeon-holing themselves by becoming social media one-trick ponies.
• Some of us are getting lazy. I worry that some of us are capitalizing on the fact that not everyone understands how social media works.  If your clients don’t understand social media, teach them.  That’s why they are paying you for your services.
• Too many buzzwords, not enough action.  I’ve decided to create a social media drinking game.  Take a shot every time you hear the words “engagement,” “community,” “social graph,” and “micro-blogging.”  Yes, these are all important terms and it’s important to understand what they mean.  But the bottom line is that social media is about taking action.  Let’s cut out the buzzwords and create an actionable plan: find the right platform, find your audience, talk to them and talk with them, and then measure your results.  Optimize, measure and repeat.
• Let’s face it – we’re not all “gurus.” Social media is still young, and what I really love about it is the fact that the landscape is constantly evolving.  I don’t think any of us are really “gurus,” (although I do believe that there are people out there that truly rock at it).  Rather than gurus, let’s start calling ourselves social media advocates.  As social media advocates, we will work to help others to understand the value of social media.  We will work to learn more, listen harder and turn to each other when we need new ideas.

So, my fellow social media advocates – help me to build this list.  What do you love about social media?  What do you hate?  And if you’d like to brainstorm and learn together leave me a comment or follow me on Twitter @ksafrey.

Now for the big news – I’m excited to say that Affect won a Big Apple in the Integrated Communications: Business-to-Business category!  We won the award for the lead generation campaign that we executed with Regus in Q4 2009.  The campaign was a public relations, marketing and social media campaign designed to raise awareness and drive demand for Regus’ business-ready solutions in Manhattan.  You can see the full list of Big Apple winners here.  Congratulations to all!

And finally, on a personal note, I want to say how proud I am to be a part of the Affect Strategies team.  I’m continuously inspired by the creativity, dedication and passion of my colleagues.  Congrats, guys!

Although social media is often categorized as a marketing function, it’s important to communicate the differences between social media and traditional paid advertising to your clients before engaging in order to properly set the standard for measurement.

When I am explaining the benefits of social media to my clients, I try to help them understand how they need think beyond traditional measurement (“free your mind, and the rest will follow” – En Vogue), so I often provide a side by side comparison of social media versus advertising.

Here’s how they differ:

Engagement vs. Impressions
Social media is measured by engagement rather than by number of impressions. Engagement with users allows an organization to speak directly to their target audience about their products and services. The benefit of engaging in real-time is the ability to address concerns and questions individually, by customizing the message. This allows for the kind of targeted marketing that may not be possible via paid advertising.

Quality vs. Quantity
Social media should not be considered mass marketing (in fact, it is quite the opposite). The quality of social media followers is far more beneficial than the number of followers. All followers and users followed on social media platforms need to be relevant to an organization’s industry or interests.

Constant vs. Sporadic
Social media enables companies to have ongoing communication with target audience members. Consistent messaging over time will position an organization as a go-to resource when audience members are ready to make a decision about a specific product or service.

Earned vs. Paid Media
Rather than paying for placements and outgoing messaging, social media empowers a voice that is both authentic and credible for companies. Social media allows you to become an influencer among a select group of target users.

Reputation Management
Social media allows businesses to comment and engage in online conversations that are taking place about theirs services and products. Through social media, a business is able to monitor for company mentions, address customer concerns and directly manage overall online reputation.

I have to note that words like “engagement” and “conversation” do not get you off the hook for providing real numbers to your clients. Ideally, you’re using tracking links and are providing your client with click-rates from their web analytics, but if that’s not available use a free URL shortener (like bit.ly) to get an idea of the average click-rate over time. You can also monitor trends (like what types of links get the highest number of clicks) and forecast how much traffic you’ll be able to drive month-over-month. It’s critical to customize social media measurement on a client by client basis, that way you are creating a program that is specifically addressing varying needs and marketing programs.

How do you measure social media? (Hint: don’t say, “it’s not about measurement, it’s about engagement” – we’ve heard that one before, and we all know engagement is awesome but it’s only one piece of the social media puzzle).

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, and don’t forget to check out our Social Media Six-Pack.

What have you learned so far during Social Media Week? Our next social media-themed blog post comes from Jonathan Mathias, senior account executive at Johnson King. Johnson King, our partner, is a European technology PR agency headquartered in London.

The Advancement of Twitter
By Jonathan Mathias

Since signing up to Twitter two years ago, I’m now following over 400 different accounts – something which recently led to an alarming crisis of confidence and a subsequent overhaul of how I use it.

It’s always been clear to me that Twitter would be a powerful tool, but given its ever-changing nature, the question of what you can do with it is much harder to answer. This makes it difficult to create a comprehensive Twitter strategy and has doubtlessly prevented many from investing the time needed to fully get to grips with it.

Any Google search will find you a million Twitter tips, most of which can be summed up in one sentence: “post regularly, with useful, relevant, interesting or personable content and always interact with your audience” – common sense, no?  Conversely, you’ll also find a multitude of blog entries debating why anyone would use it in the first place or whether there’s any real business value in using it (which rather misses the point – whether you like it or not, millions of people are using it to communicate every second of the day).

But, aside from what to do and why, with more and more businesses and their audiences clocking-on and signing up, how to manage Twitter has become far from straight forward.

At a very basic level, you can log on to the Twitter website, see what’s going on, search, post your updates, send private messages, etc..  Depending on how often the people you’re following post updates, this will probably work just fine up to about 100 people.  As you go past this figure – 200, 300, 400+ – it becomes very, very chaotic.

By logging into my account from the Twitter webpage at any one time, I’ll only see updates from the past five minutes or so.  If I want to see anything that happened before five minutes ago, I’ll have to go onto page two and beyond.  What about the vitally relevant tweet that was posted an hour ago?  In all likelihood, I’ve missed that chance.

Yes, you can search Twitter with relevant keywords in the hope of finding conversations you may have missed – but, if it’s anything, Twitter is immediate – and not very many people can afford to sit there on it all day doing that anyway.

A way to tackle this issue is to employ a Twitter client that specifically helps you to cope with large numbers of updates – like TweetDeck or Seesmic.

I’d dabbled with these in the past but until recently they seemed a little like overkill and over complicated – and, to the casual user, they are.  But, if you want to develop a worthwhile presence on Twitter, you’re going to want a manageable insight into what a lot of people are saying – something which is very difficult to do from the Twitter website alone.

I’ve just gone through a very long process to configure and learn how to interact with Twitter via a popular client.  This is not to say that applications are badly designed – they’re very necessarily complex, as they’re very powerful tools.

I’ve grouped the people I’m following into lists/columns (and handily added in LinkedIn and Facebook feeds), making it much easier to digest or catch-up on what’s going on at a glance.

Although most brands will have, at the very least, registered a Twitter account by now, many will be cautious users, content to wait and see just how big, useful and profitable it will be.  But some brands are already electing to use more advanced tools to manage Twitter.  And, given my experience, they are wise to do so.

Basically, to get the most out of Twitter, you need to be following a lot of people (and hopefully have a lot of followers) and you’re at an advantage if you use a client to manage the flow of information this generates.  Twitter’s user-base growth and the incorporation of it into day-to-day business seem to be pointing towards a future where Twitter could one day become a truly ubiquitous method of communication.

What’s certain is that Twitter has evolved massively in a short time, with new features and innovative ways of using it coming to light on a daily basis.  Will Twitter ever be a lean, mean, worthwhile business machine? Perhaps, but what’s sure is that if you want to be there when it does, you’ll need to put in some legwork now.

How are you celebrating  Social Media Week? We are bringing you fresh social media week-themed posts all week from our partner, Johnson King, a European technology PR agency headquartered in London.

Today’s installment is a collaboration between Johnson King’s Tom Kirkham, account manager, and Jonathan Mathias, senior account executive. Keep an eye out for more updates from our friends in the UK later this week!

Can Twitter save lives? Danielle Modzelewski, assistant account executive at Affect, offers an interesting perspective on the usefulness of Twitter after attending last night’s Social Media Week event titled “Social Media and the Disaster in Haiti.” Read the full post on
the Johnson King blog!

I’m back from CES and no my hangover isn’t due to Vegas over-indulgences. I’ve never seen anything like CES (and I’ve worked at my fair share of tradeshows). It’s the largest, craziest, coolest tradeshow I’ve ever been too, and I must say it was one of my best professional experiences (do you think I’m crazy yet?).

I have so much to say about the show that it’s been difficult to write this post. I’m sure you’ve read plenty of technology recaps, so I figured I’ll do what I do best and provide a public relations and social media recap (based on my personal experience at the show).

So let’s talk about my pre-show goals:

1. Demonstrate the value of social media at a large-scale tradeshow. I can’t even begin to tell you how critical social media is at a show like CES. Before I left, I linked my client’s Twitter account to my Blackberry through OpenBeak, and hooked that up to their Twitpic account. That’s all I needed to provide on-the-ground coverage of my client’s booth and participation in the show. I found that pictures say more than words, and noticed a direct uptick in Twitter followers every time I posted a picture. Next year, I’d consider running a simple contest on Twitter, using a hashtag encouraging people to interact with us.

2. Meet journalists — make connections. Talking to journalists in-person was an invaluable experience. CES enabled me to have conversations with mainstream media that would ordinarily be challenging to get face time with. My tip for PR people attending large tradeshows: get out of the booth. I walked the floor and stopped to talk to journalists that I knew would be interested in covering my client. When it came to larger “if-I-book-this-it-would-be-a-dream-come-true” media and networks, I stopped by their booths everyday to say hi and inquire about their schedule for the day. By the end of the show, they recognized my face and were willing to come speak with my client on Saturday (as things were slowing down).

3. Get as many interviews and write-ups for my client as possible. Obviously. Once I made friends with a few reporters, it was easier to secure coverage. Our PR team had booked some appointments in advance of the show, but as I said before, walking the floor really took things to the next level. My tip to get tons of interviews and write-ups: follow up immediately. Every night when I got back to my hotel room, I emailed the reporters that were hot leads and thanked them for coming to the booth and asked them if they had the information that they needed for a write-up. I found that by staying on top of the reporter’s mind, I was able to motivate them to cover my client.

4. Stay away from the blackjack table. This wasn’t a problem, I didn’t have the time. Good for me (and good for my wallet).

I think the most important thing I learned at CES is the value of being a friendly, outgoing and knowledgeable PR person. Don’t pitch reporters that don’t cover your space. Know your pitch like the back of your hand, know your client and understand the value that they bring to a journalist in their space and you’ll be set up for success. Having a good attitude helps too. Everyone is exhausted, and a friendly and understanding demeanor definitely gives you a leg up.

I’d love to hear about your PR experiences at CES. Leave a comment below or shoot me an email. Hope to see you on the floor next year!

I’m leaving for CES tonight and I’m not gonna lie….I can’t wait. I’ve never been, and so far I’ve heard some mixed reviews ranging from, “That’s AWESOME” (from a co-worker) to “OH GOD that’s torture,” (from a vendor coordinating media opportunities at the show). I have to admit that I love tradeshows, and I’d rather be an exhibitor than an attendee any day. I’ll also be accompanying a client and working with them to secure media opportunities on-site — all good things if you ask me.

So, in the spirit of my excitement, I’ve set some goals for the next few days:

1. Demonstrate the value of social media at a large-scale tradeshow. I’ll be tweeting on behalf of my client from the show, and I’m hoping to use Twitter to meet  bloggers and journalists. I’ll also be in attendance at Thursday night’s tweet-up at the Hilton. I want to show my client how valuable social media can be to make connections, network and generate media coverage.

2. Meet journalists – make connections. Yes, I’ve set social media high on the priority list, but I do believe in the value of shaking hands and talking in-person. I’m excited to meet journalists and bloggers in the tech space, learn from them and expand my network.

3. Get as many interviews and write-ups for my client as possible. Obviously.

4. Stay away from the blackjack table. Well, that may be a personal goal.

I’ll be doing my best to tweet in real-time from the show (follow @ksafrey to keep up with me) and I’ll try and post some blog updates and pictures while I’m there.

Oh, and if you want to help me achieve goal #4, shoot me an email.