Over the years, printed newsletters have been popular vehicles for communicating company news and information directly with customers and employees. Today, many clients ask us if newsletters are still relevant in an increasingly digital world.

In short, the answer is “yes.” They’re not dead, and here’s why: company newsletters have been redefined, and can be leveraged across new platforms to expand their reach and cross-communicate in various channels. That’s a big payoff and great ROI on content that otherwise would have been sequestered in a printed piece. If you plan strategically, today you can get more bang for your buck out of newsletters than you ever could before.

Here are five tips to keep in mind to set your company up for newsletter success:

Content is king. No matter what form a newsletter takes–printed or email–content is still the most important element. Develop stories that help, encourage, and inform the audience with timely information. Expand the content out beyond just you and your company to include industry trends, case studies, and tips that readers can benefit from. The best content is brief enough to engage those with short attention spans and not too self-serving. As the news media shrinks, this approach is an opportunity to tell your story directly to customers.

Plan, plan, plan. Organizing a successful newsletter takes planning. The first step is setting a purpose for your newsletter. Ask yourself what you want to accomplish for all the effort and expense. Next, establish deadline and publish dates to keep everyone on schedule, and evaluate timing to coincide distribution with trade shows, product launches, or other timely opportunities that can support the brand message. This has proven to work for both printed and email newsletters.

Leverage social media. Newsletter content makes great fodder for a company’s social media channels. For example, post newsletter stories on your website and distribute links via a Twitter account to your audience. Or post on Facebook and ask customers to comment. By doing so, you reinforce your message and get more mileage out of your efforts. Social media is also a rich environment for gathering content. For instance, we use one client’s Twitter account to conduct quick survey polls using SurveyBob on industry topics and run the results in the company’s quarterly newsletter.

Appoint an in-house publisher. CMD works on newsletters for several clients and the most successful ones are those that have a single, internal contact who acts as publisher. Our experience shows that bringing too many people into the newsletter process is like inviting too many chefs into the kitchen. Everyone has an opinion and the end result usually isn’t that good. Plus it never goes out on time.

Survey says. Have you asked your customers recently what they want to read about, or do you just think of story ideas that sound interesting? Remove the guesswork and survey your audience about stories, frequency, distribution method, etc. You can’t give them what they want if you don’t know what it is. This step could save you time, money, and improve your odds of positively connecting with customers.

Social media can be a dream tool when the digital seas are calm and customers are singing praise far and wide across Twitter streams and Facebook walls. But what about when a crisis hits and the once-beloved social media channels turn from a lovefest to a battleground for disgruntled customers and fans? Recently, my alma mater Texas Tech University faced this very situation.

When news spread that the university had fired Mike Leach, the beloved, eccentric head coach of the Red Raider football team, Texas Tech fans, students and alumni stormed the university’s social media accounts to find answers, voice their opinions and vent their frustrations. What fans and high-paying students and alumni found, however, was that the university’s athletic department had locked its Facebook wall, was deleting fan-generated notes and comments, and had suddenly abandoned its regularly active Twitter stream.

Eventually, every company or organization will face a crisis or issue that plays out in the social media world. How you respond says a lot about you and your brand, and how committed you are to social media success. CMD counsels many of its clients on crisis preparation, and here are five tips that can help your organization face a predicament in the age of social media (Red Raider Athletic Department: Are you listening, yet?):

• Prepare
  • Do you have a social media crisis communication plan? Start by revisiting your existing crisis plans—do they include the use of your social media accounts? Spend time to develop messaging for each of your crisis scenarios and draft Facebook posts and Tweets so that your first communication during a crisis occurs within minutes, instead of hours or days. Are there prominent bloggers or Twitter users that can disseminate important information to target audiences during a crisis? Include them in your crisis plan. Also, assign a team member(s) to monitor and administer your social media accounts. In the case of Texas Tech, new Tweets and Facebook wall comments were coming in by the hundreds each hour—there needs to be a person dedicated to monitoring these conversations.
• Listen
  • An essential aspect of social media is listening—especially when a customer or fan is expressing a concern. What are the key issues your audiences are focusing on? What type of action are they calling for? Take this opportunity to let your customers and fans know that you not only hear their concerns, but you are taking them into consideration when planning your next course of action. The insights you gain from listening will help shape additional communications during a crisis as well as improve your communication plans in the future.
• Contain the conversation
  • People can be downright rotten at times, and unfortunately, the worst often comes out in the midst of a crisis or dispute. While you might not enjoy the name calling or what’s being said about your organization, it’s important for those conversations to occur in the appropriate space and that they don’t extend the reach of the crisis to unrelated digital properties. Don’t lock your Facebook wall or blog comments section, because detractors will simply find another place to voice their criticisms and these actions can add significant fuel to the fire. In the case of Texas Tech, the athletic department’s decision to lock its Facebook wall spread the flame war to the university’s general fan page, which is moderated by a separate office on campus and opted to remain open. Like Texas Tech’s general fan page, foster a place for open, two-way communication on a space that you control and are able to track. Also, keep in mind that your social media accounts should maintain the right to delete vulgar content; but don’t delete a comment because it states a point of view that you don’t agree with—after all, disagreements are simply human nature.
• Respond
  • Social media—especially Twitter—is all about what’s happening now. Your social media accounts will soon be, if they’re not already, the first places people visit when a crisis breaks. Become the main source of news by offering valuable information, such as insights from key executives on how they are taking steps to solve the issue. At the onset of a crisis, a post as simple as this could suffice while your team listens to the conversations and develops a forthcoming plan of action, “Hi all, we understand your concerns and we are here listening. We are taking everything you have to say into consideration and you will be the first to know when we plan our next steps.” Other actions include adding more robust content in the form of videos, additional information, updates, etc. to help balance the ongoing dialogue and achieve search benefits for your side of the story. For particularly influential detractors, determine whether it’s possible to take the conversation offline by offering to talk through their concerns or misgivings directly—person to person.
• Research
  • Research is essential to effective public relations. In the days and weeks following a crisis, track the conversations across your social media channels. Where did most of the conversations take place? What was the key issue that users focused on? Use this information to see what messaging was effective or what key events triggered a shift in your audience’s tone. This is also invaluable when modifying your current crisis communication plan to fit the behaviors of your target audience.

The year 2009 will undoubtedly go down as the year that Twitter exploded onto the communications scene. With so much attention and interest, Twitter gave us a new and interesting way to engage in two-way conversations with people, clients and customers, as well as take advantage of a plethora of off-shoot companies built to service the microblogging site. Also, due to Twitter, breaking news that was usually delivered 45 minutes or more after an event is now delivered in a mere 45 seconds.

To help our clients keep up-to-date on Twitter best practices, the CMD Earned Media team has presented numerous Twitter how-to seminars over the past year, guiding and showing how to use the channel strategically and addressing the basics of getting started. (See our earlier blog post on our Twitter 101 session for local Portland media.) We recently held a seminar for our CMD colleagues to offer insight and best practices to those who wanted to learn more and get started. The session was spirited and full of interesting questions, including these five:

Q: I’ve set up a Twitter account, but really, why should I be on it?
A: We all use social media to communicate in various ways. Some people use it to keep in touch with family and friends. For business-savvy users, you can listen to what is being said about your clients, research your competition, find recent news pertaining to an industry and connect with media and people who share common interests. If you’re interested in what others are interested in, then Twitter is for you.

Q: What type of information should I list in my profile?
A: It’s important to note that all information on your Twitter profile is searchable, which means that what you tweet will show up in real-time search results based on keywords that you use. Make it easy for people to find you by listing the company you work for, your current location, occupation and interests. Now that Twitter search results show up on Google and general Web search, it’s more important than ever to ensure that what you’re twittering is relevant and interesting, and not just a space-filler, i.e. “I’m eating lunch.”

Q: How do I develop followers or find people to follow?
A: There are many ways to develop followers. For example: using Twitter’s search bar, doing a Google search, or using one of our favorite free tools, www.twellow.com. Twellow is like the Yellow Pages of Twitter – with over 12.5 million profiles listed, you can harness your following/followers by looking up your favorite hobby, the industry you work in, location and more.

Q: What if I accidently share something on Twitter that I did not want to?
A: As we like to remind our clients, once you send a tweet, it technically lives forever in the “twittersphere.” Sure, Twitter offers the ability to delete a tweet (when you hover over your update when viewing your home or profile page, you’ll see a trash can at the end of the update), but there is no way to prevent it from ever not turning up in search results. When in doubt, re-read what you’re about to tweet to make sure you’re comfortable with the message.

Q: Can I update multiple social media channels at once?
A: Yes. We are busy people, and managing different social media profiles takes time. If you are interested in integrating both your Facebook and Twitter profiles simultaneously, visit: http://www.ping.fm/ (another favorite tool of ours). Also, LinkedIn has recently been enabled for Twitter updates, so your tweets can appear in your network updates section.

Questions? Tweet us @CMDPortland. We’re here to help.

The halls were alive with tweets at CMD recently as the agency’s PR group hosted a Twitter 101 session for members of the local media. We welcomed users new and seasoned alike in an effort to help Portland-area journalists build a strong Twitter presence for their work and personal use.

Our attendees hailed from newspaper, magazine, radio and TV outlets. Despite diverse reporting methods, everyone in attendance agreed that they were curious about how Twitter could bring attention to their work. Some attendees were toe dippers—they had set up accounts, tweeted a few times, then lost interest and left their Twitter pages as virtual ghost towns; some were semi-enthusiasts—participating frequently in two-way communication on Twitter; some were holdouts—skeptical about how useful Twitter really can be: who cares “what you’re doing”; but the majority of the group were spectators, aka consumers —using Twitter as a stream of news.

Our audience was well aware that Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that now boasts over 21 million users, and that staying relevant means knowing something about it. At the same time, most of them didn’t know the intricacies of being a successful member of the Twitter community. I overheard one frustrated user say, “I’m tweeting out into space, but I don’t know who’s seeing my tweets. I would like to figure out who to follow and how to get followers.” At that point, we introduced tools that could help this editor track URL clicks and measure the value of his tweets for his audience.

The PR team also educated the group on everything from creating a strong profile to the ins and outs of gaining influential followers. Every pen in the room was active as we gave overviews of the Twitter tools that we find most valuable. In the end, we hoped to instill that openness is the key to being a respected member of the Twitter community. As one of our attendees expressed, “Twitter gives viewers a chance to get to know journalists on a more personal level, and that will lead to exclusive content from loyal followers.”

Here are some other tips we shared during the seminar:

1. Secure your username now. Protect it like you would a domain name.

2. Make your profile count. Add a picture, bio and relevant links. Have a personality.

3. If multiple users are tweeting on behalf of your company or publication, set up a sidebar with bios for each contributor.

4. Be selective about who you follow. Choose only those who provide value to you.

Overall, it was a great event and we were thrilled at the turnout from our journalist audience and hope to do more of these special sessions in the future.

Social Media Monitoring for Your Company’s Online “Health”

What’s worse than no online chatter about you or your company? That’s easy: when the chatter is all about your competitors. Ultimately, both are bad. The former means you might be irrelevant. The latter means your competitors are eating your lunch.

Whatever your situation, you need to start monitoring social media, and you need to do it now. I’ll walk you through the why, the when, and a few tools to consider.

Monitoring social media informs strategy

Social media monitoring is a “listening” practice that gives you insight into what is being said online about you, your competitors, or your industry. This practice is becoming increasingly important because the talkers out there are shaping the readers’ opinions. If they’re talking about topics you care about, it’s very likely that these groups are your customers, and the pressure is mounting to keep up with their needs. Regular monitoring gives you the information to respond and interact with these influencers in a timely manner. Once you have a handle on what is being said, you can develop a highly targeted social media strategy that takes you directly to the places your customers are gathering online.

Nightmare scenario

Picture this: You’re a VP of sales. One of your top distributors has called to say her customer saw a discussion that positioned your company as cruel and uncaring. That customer is threatening to stop doing business with your distributor. It is at that moment when knowing what is being said about you online spells the difference between losing income and protecting it. If your competitors aren’t already out there trying to chat up your customers, they soon will be. Online, you can be right there pacing them blow for blow.

Proactive response

When you employ social media monitoring, you become aware of where conversations are happening and what is being said. With this knowledge, you are able to develop and implement relevant responses, direct the responses toward the most impactful channels, and evaluate the results of your efforts. For one of our clients who undertakes daily monitoring, our team regularly identifies something as small as a tweet that deserves a response from the company. In the next day’s monitoring, we see exactly how a 140-character post can cause a ripple effect through Twitter, blogs and other channels frequented by the targeted audience.

I strongly encourage you to plan how you’ll measure the results of your actions before you execute on them – how else can you tell if you’ve succeeded? Measurement might be as simple as questions asked and answers given, or growing numbers of followers for your Twitter account or Facebook fan page.

Okay, but no one is talking about me. What now?

The fact that no one is talking about you is an opportunity to act just waiting in the wings, and social media monitoring can help. But before you jump into the deep end and start tweeting, commenting, making videos, or performing some other activity, it’s important to know who is saying what. Social media monitoring can help you identify who the influencers are and where they are conversing. So equipped, you can determine how best to proceed with a proper social media plan that might include a simple tactic such as commenting on external blogs of interest.

What tools can I use for social media monitoring?

Good news: There are plenty of free and paid tools to choose from. They all net similar results, but the paid tools will save you a tremendous amount of time.

Some examples of free search tools are Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com), forum search tool OMGili (www.omgili.com), and Twitter Search (www.search.twitter.com). Depending on the size of your organization, industry, and online audience, using free tools to compile a comprehensive social media monitoring report requires running them all and harvesting their results in a single session that can take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. Even after you’ve harvested the results, you’ll have to compile and evaluate them using metrics tools in order to determine how influential a blog or Twitter user is.

The paid tools trawl all of the sources (and some additional sites) of the free services, and give the results to you in one place. Each paid tool is different, and the companies behind these tools are constantly updating and tweaking their programs.

I have yet to find the perfect paid tool, but each one can benefit a company in its own way. CMD has chosen to use Radian6 as the backbone behind our social media monitoring program. Radian6 has great reach, and the interface is intuitive and easy to use. We have tested many paid tools, but none seem to come as close to the total package as Radian6. There are tools that use an algorithm to determine whether a blog post is positive, negative or neutral, but these automated programs still seem to have kinks and can’t quite pick up on linguistic nuances, such as sarcasm.

In the end, regardless of the tools you choose, your results will only be as good as your strategies, which will in turn only be as good as your information.

As I sit here at Gate E2 at PDX enjoying glorious free WiFi, I hearken back 15 years ago to the days when being “mobile” was much more of a big deal. I remember one particular East Coast business trip in ‘97, when because I had to be reached remotely, my cellular phone involved a backpack-sized device and a handset the size of a smallish terrier. Fast forward to now and I’m more concerned about which new, cool application to download to my iPhone.

So, we all agree that social web is on the cusp of becoming something even bigger and more valuable to large organizations and global brands. What’s more important is how it affects each of us. Everyone is writing about the stages of social media adoption, conversations, relationships, and metrics and I can’t discount any of it – as a digital strategist it’s what I live and breathe every day. As an example, just a couple weeks ago, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester posted his take on The Future of Social Networks.

The thing I’ve noticed the most is how everyone tends to agree with what social is becoming, but nobody wants to have opinions on what’s holding back the proverbial floodgates. If I had to point at one single thing holding us back right now, I’d say it’s mobile infrastructure. Last summer, I had the chance to briefly entertain a group of Japanese ambassadors. We talked about the current state of technology in the U.S. and Japan, specifically mobile. What became glaringly apparent is the sheer proliferation of Internet usage via handheld device in Japan. It’s not only happening in Japan, but also in Western Europe. With advancing improvements like 3G and Intel’s WiMAX 4G network, devices, operating systems, and applications will also get smarter.

When we can shoot, edit, and publish video quickly from one device; when we can sync up, beam out, capture, and create other forms of media; and, with that same device we can transact, do business, entertain ourselves with downloadable and streaming media, and most importantly, do the stuff we’ve been doing already, called “social media,” then truly the social web just becomes an extension of us. A daily accessory we automatically carry like the shoes we put on every morning. In this framework social media is the interim vehicle to continue relationships and conversations when we can’t be face-to-face. It’s something more creative, more emotional and therefore exponentially more appealing than an email or text message. Consequently, in the future we’re all going to look back on Twitter (and SMS) like a scene where Indiana Jones brushes the dust off the etchings of the Ark.

Again, in this construct there will be no excuse to be AWOL from your clients, friends and family for multiple days just because you can’t get back to your hardware. That is, of course, unless you’re leaving the grid on purpose.

So don’t worry too much about whether or not you should do something because @Oprah or @Pepsi is doing it. Worry about whether WiMax is coming to your major metropolitan area and keep abreast of the latest handheld devices coming up by grabbing RSS from Techcrunch, Wired, mobile blogs, etc.

In the meantime, I’ll be firing up Tweetie (my favorite iPhone application) and getting into the conversation; that crazy social web just might lead me to a handshake (offline).