When you are in peak you get great laurels and corporates are willing to shell out huge dollars and rupees to tie up with brand ambassadors. But what happens when the barometer drops for various reasons. Few years back it was got to do with the performance of the Indian cricket team in the world cup in the Caribbean where we got knocked out in the preliminary rounds and brands like Pepsi were so livid that they terminated the contract of some of the players. They were not keen at all to use them as brand ambassadors as it may damage the equity of the brand. This is also common with bollywood celebrities for years.

Recently one of our clients mentioned a recommendation by an online marketing agency on how they can hire 4-5 people who will start blogs and comment among one another to strike up a positive conversation in the blogosphere (different than having a ghost writer to write for you).

The idea is tempting and you might just even get sold on it, if you are a newbie on social media marketing. You control the message. The bloggers are yours. Yet to the outside world, the effort is going to be seen as passionate fans of your brands/ organisation writing positive about your brand or organisation.

We have talked about using Twitter to enhance your media relations practice in the past. We talked about how many journalists are using Twitter today and some of us are now directly pitching to them using the 140 characters miracle. Our media friends love it too – it’s fast, crisp, and devoid of any fat adjectives.

What would an effective social media marketing campaign entail? According to me, there are 4 key quadrants that we especially need to take care of.

1. Monitoring mechanism: Have a listening capability and understanding what the various stakeholders are talking about our brands and organizations is critical. Without this, we would be just another me too and shooting in the dark. How do we build an effective monitoring mechanism in place. We can use blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search to monitor the blogosphere, subscription on email and RSS on influential blogs around your industry/ subject, setting news alerts, and monitoring social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, and social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, etc. There are host of tools to monitor micro blogging platforms, read Twitter. For blog comments and monitoring the social media space in real time, we have free tools like Social Mention. What about the citizen journalism sites and consumer review sites. Lastly but not the least, not forgetting to monitor the search engines.

I’ve often compared a PR career to living-on-the-edge – a calling best suited to people who can work really hard and smart; and bring to life ideas that lead to change.

PR requires a special kind of person who thrives on action, on ‘doing’ everyday. PR is a series of short sprints that look quite like a marathon, in retrospect.

I attended a social media workshop by Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo and author of Social Media Marketing, An Hour a Day, earlier this week at Delhi organised by 2020 Media, and I loved the way he talked the new marketing cycle with the emergence of the social media. Dave also talked about how organisations need to identify various touchpoints that define their products, brands, or service and analyse the performance of each touchpoint in the social media space, how important is each touchpoint , how consistent is their delivery, and how talk-worthy are each. I wanted to have a chat with him at the venue but given the number of people waiting to talked to him, I quickly exchanged cards with him, and requested his inputs on few questions I would later send. I sent Dave eight tricky questions frequently asked by clients. His answers are below.