First, we tracked the red carpet ceremony to see which celebrities and fashions were generating the most talk. Three glorious hours of finding out who was wearing what and then judging them. As soon as the red carpet ceremonies ended we took a look at the Twitter conversations that happened around it and put together the following infographic. In those three hours we found 403,862 tweets about the red carpet (this is not including tweets that only mentioned the Oscars and not the red carpet). From those tweets we were able to determine that the public at large thought that Jennifer Lawrence in her Dior Haute Couture and Bradley Cooper in Tom Ford were the best dressed woman and man, respectively, of the night. We also found that viewers at home weren’t huge fans of what Anne Hathaway decided to wear. You’ll also find some social media savvy bands, the top hashtags used around the red carpet and that women out tweeted men 69% to 31% when talking about the red carpet.

But we didn’t stop there.

Our amazing Marketwire Reports team put together a full report around the 6.4 million tweets about the actual Academy Awards show. Inside this report you’ll find an analysis of almost everything that people were talking about during the Oscars. In this report you’ll find what people were talking positively and negatively about around the show. You’ll also find out that the highlight moment of the evening was when Michelle Obama presented the Best Picture award, which generated over 85,000 tweets per second. We’ll show you the talk around the #BestDressed hashtag. As well, we looked at the amount of conversation and sentiment around the Best Picture nominees leading up to Oscar night. Take a flip through the report below to see even more info from social media around the Oscars.

Does any of this information surprise you? We want to hear your thoughts in the comments.

What’s this, you ask? Well, Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD) was created back in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang to celebrate the tireless efforts of community managers around the world. Community managers spend their day acting as a bridge between their company or brand and the world at large. At any given time you can find a community manager acting as the PR, marketing, sales, customer service and voice of a brand all at the same time. Today is the day we give them thanks.

Does your company have a community manager? Have you had a great experience from a brand thanks to their community manager? Today’s their day, so thank them for the wonderful job that they’re doing. Presents aren’t required (although I’m sure they also wouldn’t be turned away), but your thanks and appreciation is welcome.

Now, when I said that presents aren’t required, I meant it, but we have two for all the community managers out there anyways.

First, we have the ebook “A Collection Of Community Management Advice.” We teamed up with TheCommunityManager.com and issued an open survey of seven questions to community managers around the world. We got some great responses and put them together for anyone that’s interested in learning what it takes to be a successful community manager. Inside, you can find advice from community managers from EventBrite, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Syracuse University, Edelman, The Community Roundtable, The U.S. Department of State and more.

You can click here to download and keep A Collection Of Community Management Advice.

Our second present is also packed with useful advice for community managers, but comes in the form of a video. We had a few friends at New Media Expo a few weeks ago answer a couple of community management questions. We asked some social media professionals “What makes a great community manager?” and who some of their favourite community managers were. Check out their answers:

So to all those community managers out there making their companies better 24/7, we say thank you!

Here we are again. Another November full of moustaches. Of course I’m talking about MOvember, the month where men all around the world rent out the space on their upper lip in support of charity. MOvember has become the month synonymous with raising awareness of prostate cancer, and the number of participants and the money they raise for research continues to grow every year. Of course,  the Marketwire and Sysomos family will be participating again as well.

I did a little digging using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, on the social media lead-up to the start of MOvember. Over the month of October I found 261,570 mentions of MOvember. It was mentioned in 2,027 blog posts, 1,807 online news articles, 3,442 forum posts, and 254,294 tweets.

When I looked at those mentions over time, we can see that people have been getting ready by talking about MOember all month, but the biggest push has come in the last few days.

I also found that MOvember is being talked about the most by the countries that raised the most amount of money last year. We can see a lot of MOvember chatter coming from the USA (31.8%), the UK (26.1), and Canada (16.6%).

The best thing that I found in my little search though was the sentiment around MOvember. From all the talk I looked at over the past month, an astounding 44% of it was positive. Only 10% was negative, but most of that was from people’s fear of moustaches.

Last year the Marketwire family raised over $11,000 on behalf of the MOvember charity. This year we intend to do even better. If you’d like to help us raise some money for this noble charity we would greatly appreciate your donations. You can find our Marketwire MOvember network here and then donate to our American or Canadian teams as whole, or find your favourite Marketwire or Sysomos employee and donate towards their moustache. Thanks so much in advance!!

And, for anyone who wants a little more information on how MOvember started, how it helps and the role that social media plays, check out this video with MOvember’s founder and CEO Adam Garone I made last year:

Movember from Marketwire on Vimeo.

Wondering what this is? This is a sketch of a panel recently held by Marketwire. Marketwire held the event in Chicago as part of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) World Conference on the topic of building businesses with thought leadership.  It was presented by Marketwire’s senior vice president Tim Lambertus and consultant and journalist Mark Evans.

The main question was: how do you develop thought leadership, especially in a crowded market? Through creating original, interesting content, of course. Your content, whether it’s articles, infographs or webinars, will help you establish credibility, empower your brands and help you develop relationships.

We could bore you with an itemized list of learnings from the session but the sketch says it all and in a much prettier fashion. The top right corner is very important. So is the left side. Actually, all of it is important so why not print it out and keep it?

You know one of the ways to get your company noticed is to get a mention in the press. You send releases to the media all the time but never get a nibble. Journalists are busy, they get hundreds of releases a day and honestly, a lot of them are ignored. So how do you get exposure for your business?

Learn how to build effective media relationships and improve the return on your PR investment. In other words, stop calling journalists. Get them to call you!

Who: PR expert Lisa Elia, publicist, media trainer, founder and CEO of Lisa Elia Public Relations. Lisa is a 20-year PR veteran and secures placements for her clients with the Oprah Winfrey Show, Time Magazine, CNN, NPR, E! Entertainment and Redbook to name a few outlets.

Date: June 28 , 2012

Time: 3:00 p.m. ET/2:00 p.m. CT/12:00 p.m. PT

URL: www.marketwire.com/register

To do this we are launching our new Marketwire Resonate platform in the next few weeks.  Our platform will align the business intelligence extracted from the social web with the ability for our audiences to connect with all their audiences.

At Marketwire we have worked hard over the past 29 years to build a reputation for our company, to stand for all the good things we want our clients, prospects, partners and employees to think of when they hear the name “Marketwire.”   They know that Marketwire is recognized for the innovative offerings and tremendous client service that we have delivered over the years, but as with all markets, technology is changing how we communicate. The world of social media is transforming the way people access, consume and interact with information and each other.

So today we are introducing our new brand identity. This new identity represents a refreshing of our brand.  We want to ensure our brand is identified with social media communications, and speaks to a marketing communications audience as well as our traditional public relations and investor relations customers.   Our service is Beyond Words in every respect and we will be working to develop our brand presence that matches our movement beyond traditional communications, beyond just social media communications and is actually recognized as the leading authority in bridging these two worlds of communication.

We would like you to join us on this journey.

Here’s all you need to know.

Date:   Thursday, August 18, 2011, 10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT

Who: Brian Solis (@briansolis), principal, Altimeter Group and author of Engage! and co-host Nygel Weishar (@nweishar), Sysomos’ social media & community relations specialist

Registration:  This is a free event, but space is limited.  Sign up here:  https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/405238536   

When it comes to social media marketing and digital communications, few people are as insightful and inspirational as Brian Solis.  For years, he’s helped organizations understand the social web and shown why the most successful companies are those that embrace social media as a way to connect to their customers. 

Follow the conversation at #blsm, and be sure to download the Sysomos white paper, “Building a Business Case for Social Media. A Guidebook to the Benefits of Social Media and How to Sell it to the C-Suite.”

See you on Thursday – don’t miss it!

So, what makes a good conference session? The right mix of people, content, and timing can go a long way. Keep it relevant and leave the personal pom-poms at home.

Coming from the perspective of a panelist, I definitely agree there is a fine line between explaining a concept and explaining the tool or service that drives that concept — an art, I would say, I’m still trying to perfect.

Recently, the International Data Corporation (IDC) conference hosted a session that speaks to those “good conference session” qualities:  people, content and timing. IDG’s Nigel Wallis (@nigelwallis) put together a social media session in which I joined as a panelist.  Nigel’s moderation skills really brought everything together, and as anyone who has ever sat through a panel session will readily agree, a moderator can make or break a discussion.

I joined two other panelists; gentlemen I had never spoken to before the event. In fact, I only met Phil McBride, of Procter & Gamble (@philmcbride_pg), about 10 minutes before our session. Even with this lack of familiarity amongst the three of us, Nigel was able to keep content flowing and relevant for the entire session, making it one of the better conference sessions that I have been a part of, which I hope transferred to the audience.

What’s more, the content Nigel chose for our session was spot on, and because it was so relevant to each of us, and we were able to speak to the topic at hand, it kept us away from walking down that line of pitching our tools and services. Phil, David Bradfield (@dbradfield of SapientNitro) and myself all had so much to say on the session topics, and that made for a much more substantive discussion.

The best part for me was that I learned a lot just by participating. Each of us had different perspectives to offer for each question asked — Phil, coming from the corporate/product world, David coming from the PR/marketing world and me, from the social media monitoring/statistical side. I think that’s a reflection of IDC’s ability to create a strong conversational atmosphere.

The synergy between the panelists, moderator and crowd; an engaging topic; and the flow of content made for a great panel discussion – elements that all conference panel sessions should encompass.

Thanks again to David Bradfield, Phil McBride, Nigel Wallis and IDC!

Related articles:

• How to get down to business at trade shows
• Tips on trade show etiquette and how to be the coolest booth on the block

During his tenure, he has interviewed more than 100 CEOs, who he cleverly referred to as “Chief Education Officers,” and shared insight into the minds of some of our most prominent corporate leaders.  

What makes a great leader?

Creating strategies is only a small part of the CEO’s role — it’s more about managing, leading, and fostering teams that co-exist within the corporate culture, which is the new “X Factor” of successful corporations.

How does a CEO hire his or her team?

There are five qualities of people who will move up the corporate ladder:

1. Unbridled passion and curiosity
2. Battle-hardened confidence
3. Team smarts: Knows how people interact as a group and engages with them
4. Simple mindset: Ability to look at an ocean of data and boil it down to the three most important elements
5. Fearlessness: A bias to action and to taking calculated risks

 How does one become a better leader?

Leaders need to lead from their desks.  Once they have their message down, they have to repeat it over and over again to make things stick in the minds of the employees. And the No. 1 recommendation? Head to the golf course. Based on correlating golf handicaps to stock performance, “the green” is where deals are sometimes made.

Relatled articles:

• When CEOs Speak: IABC conversation offers insight into leadership and the importance of communication
• Chicks Rule: Women Transforming Internet leads discussion at the Econsultancy Peer Summit

This week, I attended Social Media Results – From Engagement to ROI, in London. There was a distinguished line-up of speakers and a high-calibre audience all keen to learn how to drive ROI from social media. Notably, whilst there wasn’t the ultimate golden ticket for showing the equation of net revenue gains everyone is striving to prove ROI to business-owners, there are elements of discussion which are starting to get closer.

My two key takeaways from the Social Media Results Conference were:

1. Brand advocates will help you increase incremental revenues. To increase the number of advocates, you need to look outside your “owned” media and reach out into the relevant sections of the social web.
2. Social media, like any other marketing channel, requires structured thought and planning. How can you measure what you have not planned?

Many companies are still focused on their “owned” media: Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels and the strategies/ tactics which are used predominantly to “entertain” their already won audience. This serves to maintain current advocacy levels and customer retention, but where is the incremental revenue in this model? After Twitter’s crash last Christmas, it is also debateable how safe this approach is. As Fergus Boyd from Virgin Atlantic pointed out, these third-party “owned” media channels are complimentary rather than operational services. What happens if you are totally reliant on Twitter and it is suddenly out of service?

Jeremy Waite from Phones4U spoke of his small team spending 10% of their time producing content and the other 90% engaging in blogs and forums, ultimately to drive people back to their owned properties. Tom Hall, head of communication for Lonely Planet, also alluded to the fact there are three levels to their community. Staff and authors on the first level; members of their forum, Thorn Tree, on the second. But the third level, being the external communities which frequently discuss travel, are not necessarily directly linked with Lonely Plant.

The next logical step for the many companies is reaching out into the social web to drive people to their owned properties. The focus is on incremental revenues to improve business performance rather than farming an existing customer base.

The Phones4U method of spending 90% of their time engaging on “owned” and “not owned” properties is clearly time-consuming and resource-intensive. Efficiencies need to be driven into this practice to identify the media where potential new customers spend their time and those that, as a result of their inherent high influence, can spread a positive brand message. Social media monitoring tools, like Sysomos MAP, is a great solution toward that end.

At the conference, “advocacy” was a word constantly mentioned by speakers and delegates in the breakout sessions. Contacting existing brand influencers as well as market influencers all serves the purpose of building brand advocacy. The end goal is the same for online marketing, customer service and PR activities (i.e., to drive higher levels of advocacy whilst limiting detractors). The more these efforts are aligned as a common goal throughout an organisation, the greater incremental revenues should be.