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We often hear the question: What corporate social media sites use Wordpress?
After all- It is free open source software. It is often followed with questions like: Who would use free software to run a significant corporate site? Lets take a look at a few…

Big Media Sites

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• CNN

Companies you may have heard of:

• General Motors
• Ford
• Reuters

Some governmental sites:

• Library of Congress
• NASA
• United States Post Office

The list goes on and on.

As a media platform Wordpress has revolutionized the way information can be rapidly syndicated across the internet. This transformation is due to several main reasons:

1. Wordpress is a widely popular blogging platform- In 2007 it had 3,816,965 downloads.
2. It is user friendly (and becoming friendlier) - For business usage, Wordpress has the ability to become more intensive or scaled back for user education. The visual interface for administrators can be customized for any user level, and the visual design for visitors can be altered to serve any brand need. A pivotal feature of the admin side of Wordpress is its “Office-like” user interface that allows anyone who can muster sending e-mails or editing a Word document the ability to make a site change.
3. It is scalable- Wordpress can be hosted through Wordpress.com for free or downloaded and installed on nearly any web server. Small business users can run popular sites off virtual hosting services, while full 100k+ user sites can easily be managed on dedicated servers. In addition to Wordpress single user, there is also Wordpress MU (multi user) that allows thousands of blog platforms to interact or form a community.
4. It has an almost unlimited support group of developers. As of 8/30/08, they have contributed 2,809 plugins that have been downloaded over 11 million times. Each plugin represents anything from a single new feature (such as extra e-mail functionality) or robust applications that manage intensive functionality. The cost in labor-hours for the development expertise that is freely given by community developers often exceeds thousands of dollars.
   
5. It has unequaled customization and design options. There are thousands of free visual templates that allow Wordpress to fit nearly any business need, as well as hundred of premium templates that include extra functionality and visual appeal. Under the Wordpress platform, a site can maintain an unlimited number of static pages or use the systems dynamic properties to manage information.
6. It doesn’t tie companies to excessive licensing restrictions. Per Wordpress- “Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee.”
7. It offers data security. Wordpress is based on a fairly simple database design that is governed by multiple levels of user permissions (i.e. you can define what different people can see) and dozens of plugins allow for monitoring how users interact with the data, where they came from, where they go, and how they can control other users on the platform.
8. Wordpress is based on the social web. This is an important point. Wordpress is constantly being enhanced and modified by thousands of different individuals and businesses every day. Those interactions constantly develop niche application that integrate with other web platforms and applications like YouTube, Twitter, Google, Flickr, Linkedin, Digg, Stumbleupon, OpenSocial, etc. This mutual development from other platform users creates unique mash-up functionalities.

123 Social Media is based off the Wordpress platform and we fully endorse it as a business tool for many of our own projects. We run into many projects that utilize complex proprietary content management systems that have less than half the features and present more technical hurdles than they do solutions. If you have questions about the capabilities of Wordpress, add some commentary below or contact us.

I found a Forrester slideshow that detailed some results from several blogs they own: including Web Strategist, the Interactive Marketing blog, and Groundswell.

While not a “white paper”, page 11 is an interesting metric that I haven’t seen elsewhere- roughly 70% of the readers subscribe through RSS. This is a very high percentage that I have seen near identical results on our own RSS count vs. web visitors (123  floats around 60-65%)

I also found that the professional categories of the readers were interesting. The two largest groups @ 22% each were Marketing and 10% Interactive Marketing. The third largest was @ 8% - “Independent Consultant”

Apparently the “movers and shakers” are the marketing and consulting folk who have bottom line responsibility and need to prove return on investment. In any case, here is the slideshare with the rest of the information (worth browsing through):

A new study from the Society for New Communications Research focuses on how social media is taking on a primary channel for brands and products. Focusing on “social media power users” (aka influencers), the report includes case studies and information from organizations such as the American Red Cross, Mayo Clinic, Blendtec, and Quicken.

“social media power users,” i.e., communications professionals with a deep knowledge and heavy usage pattern of social media tools including blogs, podcasts, online video, social
networks, and other new and emerging communications tools and technologies.”

Unfortunately the report indicates that public relations and corporate communication experts are evolving into the new media space, but I have to disagree in the fact that most communication professionals are falling behind the curve, instead of in front of it.

Overall the study is fairly well done (42 pages) and highlights some excellent data points. You can download the report for free here.

Of those organizations surveyed, 78% use blogs, 63% use online video, 56% use social networks and 49% use podcasts in their organization’s communications initiatives. The total sample size for the survey portion of the study was 297 communications professionals: 37% of whom were public relations / marketing communications professionals working within an agency, 35% of whom were in-house public relations and corporate communications professionals; 22% were public relations and marketing communications consultants; 4% worked for media companies and 2% were advertising and/or brand marketing professionals.

The research team at SNCR included:

• Joseph Carrabis- CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution
• John Cass- Online Community Manager for Forrester Research
• Paul Gillin- Author of the social media column for Business 2.0 magazine, and The New Influencers
• Richard Nacht- He is the founder and CEO of Blogging Systems
• Greg Peverill-Conti- Vice President at Weber Shandwick Public Relations

If you know of any additional social media white paper resources, please let us know about them!

Social Media Measurement is a key business criteria for on-going success. While the following slideshow is not a whitepaper, it is a very good beginner presentation surrounding the core fundamentals of monitoring a campaign.

This information may be entirely new to you or tried and tested, but an important part working within the social media space is communicating some of these bullet points and opening a conversation around them.

As a resource to our readers, I have decided to create a new category here covering social media whitepapers. I will be adding a good number of resources over the next month, so keep an eye out for more.

Nicholas Reville and Holmes Wilson, co-founders of the Participatory Culture Foundation, wrote the whitepaper Sustainable Public Media Infrastructure. The basic description is best said in the introduction of the paper “A new type of non-profit organization is emerging, one that has never been possible in an offline world. These new organizations are creating permanent, sustainable public knowledge and communications infrastructure that is designed for public benefit.”

It has some excellent bullet points about participatory media on Mozilla/Firefox and Wikipedia:

Mozilla Key Takeaways

• Online, a small amount of resources can serve millions of people.
• Web-based organizations can become self-sustaining in a way that has never been possible offline. When creating a website or building software, costs do not rise linearly with the number of people served.
• Successful social tech projects can quickly transition from being grant recipients to granting organizations.

Wikipedia Key Takeaways

• Non-profit projects online can build vibrant collaborative communities of volunteers and evangelists that would have been extremely difficult and very expensive to organize offline.
• Tiny amounts of money can let smart projects reach enormous audiences.
• Avoiding some types of revenue can help protect the credibility and therefore success of certain non-profit tech projects. Revenue requirements relative to people served may be so small that perpetual grant support is the best long-term strategy.

As a resource to our readers, I have decided to create a new category here covering social media whitepapers. I will be adding a good number of resources over the next month, so keep an eye out for more. The first paper covers enterprise reputation management, a paper by Toby Bell from Gartner Research.

Toby does a good job laying out some of the fundamental ideas that organizations should be bringing to the table. As we move further and further into the information age, we will see more cases of companies using online reputation and brand control covered in the Gartner paper.

Two important bullet points:

• Time scales on the internet are more compressed and the implications of a negative event can be far-reaching. In many PR and communication issues, there are days, weeks, or months to analyze and create a strategy. Social media often leaves minutes, hours, or at best days to respond.
• Social media is an unfamiliar territory for enterprises, with very different rules for engagement. From our perspective, communication professionals and web savvy marketers need to plan for the change between business to consumer, small and medium business, and enterprise communication. Companies are treated differently in the social media environment- often leaving influencers within an industry to determine the fate of how media interaction occurs.

If you are in the media space and don’t read Gartner’s papers- you should consider checking them out “Policies and Procedures to Manage Enterprise Internet Reputation“.

A lot of CEO and executive members do not pro-actively protect online brand and reputation, but in the case of Willard Marriott, CEO of Marriott International, he has rolled up his sleeves and done the one thing that many executives are not willing to do: be personal and have a conversation with his customers.

Marriott started his online blogging efforts in January of 2007. A year and a half later, he has found success with online conversations: a dialogue that has earned his company four million dollars, and helped his company earn the #1 Best Reputation in the Service Industry. It has also earned his company multiple pieces of news coverage (see MSN video on right sidebar, or here)

Marriott Honored With The Best Reputation In The Services Industry Award. “BETHESDA,MD. - August 12, 2008 - In a recent survey of consumers conducted by the Reputation Institute, Marriott International, Inc. (NYSE:MAR) earned a #1 ranking among all companies in the services category in the United States. Marriott was the only lodging company listed in the top 30 of the “75 most reputable companies in the U.S.”

When the blog was originally launched, the Washington Post covered the news and made the comment:

“Marriott’s entry into the blogosphere is another in a series of steps he has taken to keep his Bethesda company — and himself — relevant in the fast-changing hotel industry, which is adapting to a more urbane breed of traveler who communicates via the Internet and demands a sophisticated lodging experience.”

That statement has been carried through by Bill Marriott. As CEO, he routinely places his personal brand in the proving grounds as the company brand. Consumers are demanding this more and more, as the marketplace tends to connect the qualities of the leader with the qualities of the business being led by them.

From my perspective: This type of reputation starts at the top of an organization. Executives at any organization must lead by example. They must inspire, motivate, educate - while earning a reputation for true leadership and exemplary professional qualities.

On a strategic level: Marriott is not a small brand, the massive hotel chain includes roughly three thousand locations and receives roughly five million unique visitors a month online. That type of audience means that Marriott’s clients are engaging his massive empire each day, and they are talking both offline and online (whether or not anyone talks back.)

Doing an investigation of the Marriott brand on terms such as “Marriott Review”, consumer sites like TripAdvisor have over 1000+ reviews of Marriott. In this case, Bill fortunately has a very rightful reason to receive the “best reputation” in the industry- as negative reviews are few and far between.

Unlike many other CEO blogs, Bill manages to keep a good mix of both personal and business ideas. His blog includes a recent article about the new online language training they offer employees with Rosetta Stone, or his review of the new lobby design being rolled out to 200 branches.

The fact that he (and the company) are present in the online world gives them an understanding of the conversation surrounding them, can benefit from the positive things people say about them, and in a worse case scenario have a faster response to something negative.

Do you know any CEO blogs out there that are producing good results for the company or just happen to have a personal favorite?

In our “100 Days of Social Media” post, several readers wanted to know a few top reasons our site was pulling in an audience. The most basic reason: we cast a very wide net. Sites are made up of many pages beside the homepage and in the social media world, a site becomes more defined as a larger “web brand”.

In the real world, a brand can exist in conversation, on shoes, cars, napkins, and t-shirts (look at NIKE.) In the social media world, multiple points of interaction have created a huge effect on how brands are communicated. One issue is understanding how linking from outside of your site to sub-pages within it and around it (that are relevant), and to the people you are trying to reach.

One of the key reasons social media is relevant: search traffic from Google. Regardless of how many links point at any one page, eventually it will become neutral in relevancy to the keywords that drive traffic. The main 123SocialMedia.com site has roughly twenty keywords that score high results, followed by 200+ article pages that have been optimized and promoted for various search terms that attract traffic. (You can read our article on social media keyword tools to help identify some useful phrases.)

Simply put: When setting up a proper linking for search engine results, an effective strategy is to link to interior pages of the site AND outside sites that carry your brand message.

If you are initially doing this on a new site, the whole idea is to create a pyramid that builds upon the foundation you have. After a page scores for a term, it can push several weaker ones, and lend strength to a few stronger ones as well. It also means that once a visitor is on your site, that they are provided with more options for staying on your site.

Imagine this basic structure:

In the eyes of Google, you need so many relevant pages linking to any specific page in order to push it to the next level. The basic concept would be best visualized by the graphic on the left- a pagerank 2 item is surrounded by seven pagerank 1 pages. From a very generic idea: the higher the pagerank, the more likely specific terms on the page will rank for keywords in search results.

While 25 pagerank 1 pages may have enough power to create a pagerank 3 item, it is generally easier to create a well-thought structure lower ranking pages that have the ability to promote several important ones.

These basic page structure does not always align or connect with other pages, which is where relevance and freshness of the content become involved. If any one page becomes old by not having enough interesting content before earning some links from the world wide web, the content in the eyes of Google becomes stale and slowly disappears from the search results.

The complicated part of visualizing this whole concept is to realize that pagerank ranges from 1 to 10. When you understand that pagerank needs to have support from different directions to have healthy search engine result for a keyword (commonly referred to as SERPs), then the whole thing begins to resemble a complicated mess of building something out of LEGO blocks that have been pre-assembled by five year olds.

A unique problem to this project building is degradation. Old content pages may disappear from Google’s indexing, creating a foundation for your project that IS relying on a foundation that is slowly falling apart over time. Imagine the diagram on the left with ratings from 1 to 10 (and having a few disappearing sections!)

So how do you fix that?

Reason Two: Social Media Profiles and Anchor Text

The big problem is that most sites do not have too many pages that can be ranked for too many keywords, and some of those disappear over time. A standard brochure site may only have 5 to 15 pages. That means roughly 5 to 50 terms can be placed against those pages based upon the amount of textual information (relevance) on them. Once the basic pages of your site are written to be maximized for a term, you need to have X number of pages pushing them along and supporting them in the “pyramid of power.” If you need to build one of those fancy projects with high ranking in the search engines you need to make sure you have plenty of pieces to build with.

This is where ANCHOR TEXT and SOCIAL MEDIA SITES become important. Anchor text is the word that a search engine relates to a link. If I link to my site and use the words “visit my site“, then the search engine relates 123SocialMedia.com as being relevant to a search for “visit my site”

If I link to my site and use the words “social media training“, the search engines lend some of that relevance to the page I am pointing at. If I had a page that had specific relevance (aka articles or blog post) I could be more specific and get additional relevance. For instance, this post on social media training - things you should read today.

Now imagine there are a thousand social media sites out there that you can build profiles on: these could be Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon, Jobster, Squidoo, Newsvine, or hundreds of others.

Each of these social media sites has several main benefits to your traffic strategy.

1. It can serve as a branding point for your information. Every single profile creates a possibility for brand exposure. While an active profile and community presence is more significant, having a profile merely for owning your brand presence on that site can be very helpful to prevent identity theft of your brand, to explore features and conversations on the site, and establish “secondary brand points” in search results.
2. Secondary brand points. One of the largest pitfalls of most companies and professional brands is that they rely on one point of contact- the company site (to maintain a corporate image.) In the world of the social media web, search engines and audience members may be exposed with five to ten additional sites of like-minded content. If someone Googles your brand, they may see your information and nine additional sites. If someone is on a social network- they may see various “people who liked this, also liked A, B, and C.” options. In either case, having secondary brand points allows you to dominate certain keywords and search criteria around your brand.
3. Search Engine Links. A lot of your organic search traffic comes from knowing how linking affects keywords and anchor text. Depending on the social media site (profile, community, or article) there are anywhere between 1 to 10 links that can be established on one page. Some of these links can be pointed at a target site, some of the links can be pointed at other secondary brand points, and all of them can be leveraged to push several sites.

With a grasp of how this organized chaos should be structured, imagine how your new social media world looks in a diagram:

If you take anything away from this article, take these two points:

1. DO NOT GO AROUND SPAMMING THE WEB! Provide useful information about your company and profession. If the community doesn’t make sense for you to participate in… find another community (trust me, there are plenty that are completely relevant.)
2. PERSISTENCE AND A CREATIVE MIND ARE YOUR BEST TOOLS. There are thousands of different ways that social media strategies can be implemented for business. There are no ironclad right or wrong ways of doing things, yet trying to do nothing is a guaranteed way of getting no where.
   

If you have any questions about this idea, please leave a comment. If you have a good promotional technique for using social media let us know about it.

Professional brands have always been subject to attack in the media, but until recently there have not been too many options for creating your own news channel to use as platform for staging complaints. A few days ago Robert Mark from JetWhine.com covered “United Pilots give Tilton a Kick” based on United Airline pilots launching a blog asking for the termination of the company’s CEO Glenn Tilton.

United Airline Pilots - “We’ve started this web site because we’re tired of seeing the Tilton organization play the blame game”

Robert does an excellent job of defining some critical elements of the pilots site:

“Although the anti-site is not new, this well-organized site is quite a clever tactic. It’s easy for anyone to choose a juicy topic from the menu like Tilton’s “Operational Failures,” strategic blunders, financial or even employee and customer service screw ups like, “Only 38% of United employees are proud to work for the airline.” Ouch.

Something Tilton is just going to love is the convenient message form tied to Mr. Tilton’s e-mail so anyone can send him a comment. My guess is that mailbox is going to fill up pretty quickly.”

Looking away from the GlennTilton.com site, this is a coordinated effort to destroy a professional reputation (and I must add, it is a pretty well-thought effort too.)

If you search Google for - Glenn Tilton, there are 113,000 documents.

The first result is a Wikipedia entry that has already been edited to mention the GlennTilton site launched four days ago:

“The Air Line Pilots Association has long been a critic of Tilton’s management style and airline experience. On August 11, 2008, ALPA launched a website calling for Tilton’s resignation at www.GlennTilton.com.

Tilton has also been a vocal proponent of mergers in the airline industry, dating back to United’s bankruptcy days. Tilton attracted much scorn for his views on mergers, until recently with talk about consolidation among US network carriers.

Upon exiting bankruptcy, Tilton received compensation valued at $39,700,000, mostly in stock options that vest over several years, and this caused unrest among the airlines labor unions.”

The second result is an article form the Chicago Sun-Times, “United Pilots want CEO Glenn Tilton to resign.” which clearly covers a statement made by the Union “the United chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association said United needs new leadership. It launched a Web site to draw attention to what it says have been Tilton’s failures since he took over as CEO in September 2002.”

“‘‘This is not a personal attack on Glenn Tilton,’’ Wallach said. ‘‘These dismal numbers speak for themselves. They are a reflection of his inability to lead, his incompetence as a manager and his failure in virtually every category that can be measured. We have tried every conceivable way to convince him to invest in, and maximize the goodwill of, his employees. He has failed miserably.’’

Aside from Glenn Tilton, the bigger picture for online reputation problems extends to the overall United brand as well. On a search for United Airlines, one first page result is a wonderful article from Airsafe.com titled “Fatal Events Since 1970 for United Airlines“ (if that isn’t a bad brand line, I don’t know what is.)

The second negative result is a site playing on the same letters as United: Untied.com. The brutal items to assemble information against United are well assembled into brand problems that would rock the most hardened company:  The worst airline — ever, Legal Action Time, Form Letter Time, Mishandled Minors, Joining Lawsuits are all examples of categories of information there.

According to Compete.com, Untied receives roughly 11,000 unique visitors a month who read that information. Assuming that an average ticket is $300 to $400, how many of the 11,000 unique visitors a month to Untied.com are either prospective United customers or current ones? Even if only 5% are (500 monthly unique visitors) the monthly brand damage by this one site can be estimated at $150k to $200k in lost revenue. Unfortunately I would estimate that the actual percentage of possible/current airline clients is in the 25% or higher range ($750k to $1 million monthly brand impact.)

If you are aware of other brand issues online and would like us to cover some of the ramifications or solutions to the situation, please drop me a line at barry.hurd@123socialmedia.com. Our team is always looking at these issues and examing how they are affecting business. FYI- we like hearing about positive social media brand impacts as well!

The team at 123 Social Media wants to reach out and say “Thanks!” for a warm welcome. In one-hundred days since our launch we have grown to July being at almost 10,000 unique visitors thanks to our readers from around the world and a lot of effort on our team.

As we have grown, a good portion of our business readers ask a dominant question:
“What makes 123 Social Media different than an search engine optimization company?”

A lot of things make us different, but the main difference is quality information and an expert perspective. Unlike a lot of “SEO firms” with ugly landing pages and bad sales pitches that scare you away… our site’s roughly 10,000 visitors in July were here for an average of five minutes and forty-three seconds. That equates to roughly 57,000 hours of readership in July.

Needless to say, that helped our brand just a little bit.

We aim at giving quality content revolving around the very important topic of business social media. We try to let you peek inside our brains and share the information as we receive it (or sometimes even create it!) That often means looking at strategic ideas and asking the big questions, from ethical media consulting to social media fundamentals, to tactical analysis of corporate social media and social media training.

Some highlights that happened to us in our launch period was receiving honorable mention from two different social media groups:

The Biglist is maintained by TopRank’s Lee Odden. It is a list of 400 blogs that cover search engine optimization, social media, public relations, and online promotion (Thankfully we are all 4!) Two fundamental requirements of being on the BigList: Your blog must cover search marketing and it must post weekly at a bare minimum. Other considerations include, blog design, usability, writing style and quality. Thanks to Lee for putting us on the list. We promise to keep things interesting.

We also made it into the Top 20 of Alltop for the Social Media category. “You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that Alltop is trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed.

The one strange evolution of this site and our readers is a slightly interesting one- our business readers like to pick up the phone, send us a regular e-mail, or shake our hands at real world networking events… and our online marketing peers have conversations with us all over the net.

That makes a few articles here that missed some great conversation, so we hope that you join in and begin chatting with us a little more. For our less savvy users, we are encouraging you to take a look at joining our MyBlogLog community (join here) and signing up for a Gravatar account (see the images near our comments and the sidebar, that could be you!)

One of our biggest goals here at 123 Social Media is helping business decision makers understand that you do not need to use every Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, or Yelp out there… you just need to have a strategic understanding of how those services interact with different business needs and how you can tactically use them to reach your goals.

If you just like keeping “all those fancy things” out of your head, you can also subscribe to our RSS feed that currently has about 400 readers in it.

We do we go from here?

We have some hefty goals to produce more quality content, participate in the conversation affecting millions of professionals and thousands of industries, and to grow as a resource for businesses looking to understand social media.

Our navigation will be influenced by a great shifting tide occurring around us, however we promise to keep a positive outlook, ethical professionalism, and our problem solving mindset finely tuned.