A ranking of the City’s most social savvy firms was released this morning and the results may very well surprise you. (They certainly surprised us.) Carnival, the embattled cruise ship line, Burberry, BP, Marks & Spencer and ARM Holdings scored in the top five of the FTSE 100 Social Media Index.

The ranking comes courtesy of digital corporate comms agency The Group who looked at the FTSE 100 Index and scored companies based on their commitment to social media communications. Primarily, they looked at the companies’ presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and with blogging.

The two brands that may surprise you the most are BP and Carnival. In the case of the former, the energy giant has really ramped up its social media investment in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon crisis. The report acknowledges BP’s heavy use of YouTube and Facebook and gives it kudos for consistent design across the channels. Carnival is a controversial choice as well. As we noted last month, Carnival is an extremely social savvy marketer, but it has handled poorly the Costa Concordia tragedy with a disjointed crisis outreach effort that is heavy on social, but confusing and inconsistent elsewhere.

Here are some of the interesting insights that come out of the ranking:

• Twitter has become the leading channel for digital corporate communications with more than 1 million people following corporate Twitter accounts, an increase of 418,395 (71%) since June 2011.
• The number of people using Facebook has also risen significantly; up by 4.7 million (25%) over the previous six months to June 2011, to more than 14 million fans overall. However demand for information from Facebook could be outstripping supply, with only 39 FTSE100 companies running an account (up just 2.5% since June).
• There are now 53 FTSE100 companies with an active YouTube channel, up 10% since June and these attracted 34.7 million video views, an increase of 11.6 million.
• The number of FTSE100 blog posts rose by 26% over the period. Although, across the sites hosted by The Group, blogs have proven to be the most engaging social media channel, just 16 FTSE100 companies run an active corporate blog.

Here’s the top ten league table (click to enlarge):

If the recent Costa Concordia tragedy or McDonald’s #McFail hijacking have taught us anything, it’s that even savvy digital marketers can still get swamped by the social media-fueled crisis. That’s why we’ve produced another helpful tool to help you and your social media team adroitly navigate the lurking corporate crisis.

Proper reputation management and crisis control begins with joined-up internal processes. You might have the fanciest monitoring software in place, but what good is it if the results aren’t shared or communicated to the proper people within an organization? And in a timely fashion. There’s just one problem: your team is picking up a lot of noise. How do you know what to prioritize, what to focus on, what to respond to? What to do? Read on.

In October, we published the Social Media Crisis Communications Decision Tree, a kind of corporate schematic to help you and your team think through and respond (or not!) to potentially reputation-damaging posts made by the public. Now we’re publishing  the Social Media Crisis Response Plan, a handy guide to help you better organize your internal processes and thinking to keep your brand from being the next big #Fail. Big thanks to crisis comms veteran Neil Chapman for his unique insights on this. (Click the image below to enlarge)

To download a PDF of the infographic click: Social Media Crisis Response Plan

Editor’s Note: we’re pleased to be bringing back our popular instructional workshop: Social Media Crisis Communications to be held in London on February 29. Again, we will be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP. He has some amazing stories and lessons to share from his experience with the Deepwater Horizon spill. It will be an interesting day dedicated to reputation management and crisis communications. Come join us!

New York Times media reporter David Carr has a brilliant piece this morning about Rupert Murdoch, the embattled media baron, political kingmaker, and grumpy Twitter newby. In this age of super-controlled messaging and non-newsy corporate announcements, Murdoch’s emergence on Twitter gives us a rare glimpse into the mind of the man in charge. Is this a trailblazing moment in corporate comms or a one-man, one-act show about to get the hook?

First, a little perspective. Murdoch’s December, 2011 debut on Twitter comes about 9 months after that of the ultimate #winner Charlie Sheen and close to two years after Hugo Chavez. Late to the game? Nah, the likes of Jeff Bezos and GE’s Jeffrey Immelt are still on the sidelines. (With GE shares down 50% in the last decade, it’s unlikely the latter will start Tweeting to the masses any day soon).So, Murdoch’s neither late, nor early, (nor perfectly timed), but his Twittering style does serve us up an interesting lesson in proper Tweeting from the C-Suite.

As Carr states:

The rules of effective tweeting for business leaders are no different from the ones for us mere mortals who want to both express ourselves and remain employed: Don’t be boring, don’t curse, and for heaven’s sake, don’t always be shouting about how some junior executive is really knocking it dead. Being interesting is the key to going viral, and on that score, I’d give Mr. Murdoch decent marks.

Here too. We’ve twice featured his Tweets in our “Tweets of the Week” section. I don’t agree with his politics, his take on online piracy, but I’m a big fan of his candor, particularly in this age of bland corporate obfuscation that serves for corporate communications.

In 2010 when Chavez started Tweeting I put together a list together of golden rules for Tweeting bosses, not all of whom are sociopaths of course. I was hopeful at the time that we would be seeing more captains of industry, heads of state and local officials embrace the Tweet. I was wrong there, but the rules are still worth reviewing. Here they are again:

1) Don’t rely soley on Twitter to make your point. Chávez informed his party faithful of his imminent Twitter debut during his weekend variety show Aló Presidente. Sure, it helps if you have a monopoly on the local airwaves. But Chávez shows real social media savvy here by going cross-platform with his message. And there’s a Chávez blog too in the works. The Venezuelan president’s choice of “candanga” in his Twitter handle shows flair too. The word is a local expression to describe a person with an “explosive” personality. Expect some fireworks, twitterverse.

2) It bears repeating: be insightful, but keep it brief. Yes, the 140-character limit even applies to you too, dear leader. “The loquacious leader [is] known for speeches that last hours,” The New York Times points out, questioning whether he can be disciplined enough to stay within the limits of Twitter verbosity.

3) Don’t be complacent. Congratulations, you’ve recruited more than 85,000 followers in the first day. (The Dalai Lama scored just 44,000 in day one, I recall). But it’s been a full 24 hours since your first Tweet and your “Chavista” followers are anxious to hear more. Meanwhile, rivals, using the #freeVenezuela hashtag, have gone on the attack as Venezuelan Tweeter Arturo Hidalgo broadcasts, “power outages show saturation of #Venezuelan electricity grid.”

4) Do you have a crisis response strategy in place? Now that you’re on Twitter, critics will be leveling charges directly at you when you make a misstep. Are you ready for this? Ignore them at your peril, lest you trigger an angry Twitterstorm. Here are a few tips on how to deal with the hashtag-crisis that could sink your reputation. Hint: don’t pull a Toyota.

5) Don’t get distracted by your escalating follower numbers. What’s more valuable to you is what the public is saying about you. Scan Twitter to see where you’re performing well in the public’s eye, and what areas still need improving. Maybe the creaking electric grid is a good place to start.

6) How do you measure your influence in a forum that boasts some pretty influential people? Again, not by counting your follower numbers, but by watching the number of people who re-tweet your missives. After day one, you’re not doing so well, Mr. Presidente. We found only a few re-tweets, including this one from a Twitter used based in “Hell.”

7) Be generous. This is the same advice I gave the Dalai Lama in this column. You are not going to agree with everyone on Twitter, but do make a point to re-tweet the genuinely brilliant, witty and provocative posts you come across. Twitter is a conversation, after all. Yes, listening is required.

One year ago, we published the inaugural Social Media Sustainability Index, a trawl through 287 major companies in North America and Europe to identify who was using social media tools and thinking to communicate sustainability. At the time we found just 60 companies that were devoting any real time or dedicated resources to that mission.

Fast-forward to the end of 2011 and a new landscape of social media sustainability has emerged. In researching our new report, The SMI-Wizness Social Media Sustainability Index, we identified at least 250 major corporates that are engaged in some form of social media sustainability comms and more than 100 have a blog, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter channel dedicated to talking about sustainability.  Those dedicated 100 form the basis of our new Index.

Even as the volume of social media sustainability content has increased the standout leaders of our Index – GE, IBM, Ford, PepsiCo, BBVA and Allianz – are the same as last year. This we believe is a testament to good social media practice in that none of these leaders consider social media sustainability through the prism of a campaign mentality. Indeed the top companies in our Index all have built upon the editorial platforms and community engagement they had established in 2010.

It also shows demonstrates that companies who are committed to making their business more sustainable – be it through improved energy efficiency, lowering emissions, policing their supply chains, pioneering ethical sourcing and promoting equitable working environments – have a distinct advantage in social media communications. That’s because they have a good and believable story to tell and, good storytelling remains the most valuable currency in social media.

Here are some of the ways the smartest companies are using social media, not just to communicate their sustainability stance, but also to involve the public in building a better world:

• Homage to compelling reportage: Hiring experienced filmmakers, writers and reporters to tell a complicated story well like IBM and Allianz
• Crowdsourcing: Tapping the public for big innovative ideas like General Electric
• Crowdfunding: Enabling collaborative fundraising and donations like BBVA and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank
• Bold alliances: Teaming with established NGOs, charities and conserva- tion watchdogs to support common goals and raise awareness like Levi’s
• Leveraging community: Tasking your massive online following to build a better future through campaigns, contests like PepsiCo
• Platforms not campaigns: Building an ongoing social media sustain- ability communications vehicle like Danone
• Making technology accessible and digestible: Creating content that shows how sustainability technology and initiatives matter to the general public like Philips and Sony
• The wisdom of your crowd: Collaborating with fans to break taboos and challenge the status quo like Kimberly-Clark

These stand out leaders in this year’s Social Media Sustainability Index all have a few things in common. They fully embrace their newfound power to publish and provide useful, regular, transparent and creative content for their social media communities.

It just so happens that we think those qualities are exactly what companies need if they are to succeed in social media communications. And so they form the bedrock of how we have ranked and rated the 100 companies that make the Index.

You can download the entire Index at: http://socialmediainfluence.com/SMI-report/

In 2012, corporate communicators will continue to grapple with the impact of social media – especially in the realm of crisis communications. How can they tailor and adapt plans to take into account a rapidly changing world that expects them to provide information almost instantly? Neil Chapman tells us how.

The profound role of social media in our lives was brought home to me dramatically a year ago. As the parent of a student caught up in the Japanese earthquakes and tsunami last March, I was reminded  just how vital good information is for those impacted by such terrible events, not only those caught up directly, but also for those with a direct (or perceived) interest – the ‘stakeholders’ in PR-speak.

Having myself responded to attention-grabbing events over a 25-year communications career, after Friday March 11, 2011 I found myself on the outside desperately seeking information. My reactions reinforced some thoughts I was still reflecting on. I was thrust back in time to the day I responded on-site in New Orleans to deal with the highly complex BP oil spill.

Fast-forward now to last year… During 2011 I shared crisis communications lessons learned about the spill with many corporate communicators trying to understand how to address the changing demands from both new and old media as well as other stakeholders, who appear to have insatiable information appetites in light of new technologies. However, corporate communicators are all too aware of the limited resources they have to hand in a crisis.

Here are some of the questions they asked me. I thought I’d share them with you here:

Should corporate communicators rethink their role in a crisis?

Yes. Time was, protecting reputation meant dampening or trying to soften headlines as much as possible. That might keep the CEO happy in the past. But with the capability to communicate directly to people in a way they want to receive information, communicators have to coach their organisations to adopt a more appropriate reputation philosophy – more on the lines of ensuring accurate information reaches people who need it most as quickly as possible. Media may be an important audience, but probably not THE most important in this scenario. Keeping faith with key audiences during a dramatic event can enhance an organisation’s reputation in the long-term, even when something bad happens. Cost-effective technologies exist to do just that – Ushahidi, PIER Systems, YouTube, Twitter, email etc. – yet too many are choosing not to use them. Crisis communicators today should be familiar with and know the value of different information channels and plan for the two-way flow of information rather than just one-way broadcasting.

How ‘demanding’ are different audiences in a crisis?

Very – and they won’t wait for you to get your act together. Dealing with hundreds if not thousands of emails, tweets, on-line comments/day with phones ringing off the hook is not the time to plan what to do. Meanwhile web traffic will test an organisation’s IT infrastructure, sometimes to collapse. Just one (of a number) of the websites launched to provide information on the BP oil spill received 150 million hits alone. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) now offers good web information about its Fukushima nuclear power station. For weeks after the tsunami it didn’t. I turned to Ushahidi  – an open source software that collects and displays information on inter-active maps – and other sources for the information I sought to help my son decide whether it was safe to continue his studies in light of the Fukushima nuclear fall out. Any organisation needs to plan and prepare for the digital information demand onslaught; otherwise audiences will drift away, along with their trust.

Is your staff prepared to handle a fast-moving social media crisis? Join us on Feb. 29th for SMI’s instructional Social Media Crisis Communications and Reputation Management workshop in London. We’ll again be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief at BP. His stories and lessons from the Deepwater Horizon tragedy will fascinate you!

How do we monitor what people are saying about us and what should we do?

Not easy. It takes a lot of monitoring because no single system – whether Google alerts or Hootsuite – can do it all. Besides, monitoring should be part of an overall reputational tracking strategy. It’s better to ask: ‘How should we respond when we find our name being used or abused?’ The Social Media Monitoring tool by SMI is a simple tool to help communicators think through actions when an organisation finds itself in the digital firing line (see graphic below).

Editor’s Note: SMI again this year will be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief of BP and a veteran of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, on a series of instructional Social Media Crisis Communications workshops. The first is scheduled for Feb. 29th in London.

From a crisis communications perspective, Carnival Cruises, parent company of the stricken Costa Concordia Italian cruise ship, is in a precarious position. The company’s safety record is taking a tarring daily in the press and we may not yet have seen the worst: the ship could still sink further into the sea, creating an environmental hazard and adding further shock to the families of the missing. How then does the company respond to this? By offering survivors a 30% discount on future cruises! Cue: the hammering on Twitter.

As of writing, #Concordia will again be trending, for all the wrong reasons. Here’s a typical snapshot of the public reaction to its generous offer.

Carnival though shouldn’t be judged (entirely) for this tin-eared offer. It’s made efficient use of its social media channels, particularly on its Facebook page (home to nearly 1.4 million fans) where it’s toned down the cheery, we’re-going-on-holiday tone and answered serious questions about safety procedures. It even decided late last week to go quiet. “Out of respect for all those affected by the recent events surrounding our sister line, Costa cruises, we are going to take a bit of a break from posting on our social channels,” it wrote on January 19, generating over 5,000 Likes after two days.

Carnival has been one of the more progressive social media marketers. It’s spent a lot of money and effort into building a vibrant community on Twitter and Facebook over the past few years. Wisely, in one of the darkest hours of its corporate history, it’s used these same communities to share bad news, along with the good. This approach of using social media channels to amplify your crisis response message and even share tragic news was pretty rare even a year ago. It’s good to see crisis communications professionals embracing the idea that Facebook is not just a happy channel whereby you lavish games, give-aways and other goodies on fans.

Still, Carnival’s response has been remarkably inconsistent. For example, after saying it would go dark for (admittedly, they didn’t specify for how long) they started piping in on Twitter, commenting on the awesome-ness of a customer’s photo. Too soon to come out of mourning? Probably so. Better to repeat the Tweet that you’re keeping quiet for the time being. Other things to consider: tell us when you’ll be back online, and tell customers you  still want them to share.

What’s happened in the waters off the Tuscan coast is tragic. There are still 20 people missing. Out of respect to their family, keep the message consistent. The eyes of the world will be watching. And Tweeting.

Editor’s Note: SMI again this year will be teaming with Neil Chapman, former comms chief of BP and a veteran of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, on a series of instructional Social Media Crisis Communications workshops. The first is scheduled for Feb. 29th in London.

Twitter has announced it will see in the New Year with a major redesign for its site and mobile apps, aiming to simplify its interface and give advertisers a better platform to engage with users.

The changes will happen in two key areas: brands and civilians (or ‘private users’). Civvies will allegedly see increased functionality through four new buttons:

Home: The news feed, now featuring embedded media content.

Connect: @replies and @mentions, now offering the option of entering another user’s handle for instant information and connectivity.

Discover: A dedicated space to search for trending topics and hashtags, which will identify stories and trends based on connections, location and language (how long until we see stories suggested on the basis of tweet content?)

Me: The user’s profile, presented in a more aesthetically-pleasing manner.

The redesign has yet to be rolled out universally, but a poll of Mashable readers suggest that 41 percent of respondents ‘love’ the new changes. Most criticism appears to focus on issues with the mobile apps, specifically missing features in iOS.

The big news in this announcement, though, is really what’s going on with brand pages. A bit late to the party (Google+ has recently announced brand pages and Facebook, well…), Twitter now promises new features to marketers that will offer the potential to interact and engage with followers even more so than previously:

Expanded header image: Allowing brands to display their logos more prominently and clearly, as opposed to the current format which often obscures design elements by the tweet time line.

Featured tweet: An auto-expanding tweet with embedded media potential that sits happily at the top of the brand’s page – and stays there – helping to highlight a particular campaign or promotion.

Noise clarity: @replies and @mentions are separated, making it easier for marketers to streamline dialogue and respond and engage appropriately.

The new branded pages have been rolled out to 21 major marketers, including Coca-Cola, Disney, Nike, Subway and Paramount Pictures – all identified as strategic players in the Twitter advertising game (although the ability to see these pages is being rolled out as slowly as the pages themselves).

According to data from eMarketer, Twitter’s global ad revenue is set to reach $139.5 million in 2011, potentially hitting $400 million by 2013. But how much will these new brand pages contribute to that figure? Facebook boasts 300 million brand followers on board, Google+ a comparatively tiny 148,000. Facebook clearly wins that round, and Google+ is an environment designed for brand engagement – something that was not the original focus of Twitter. All-singing and all-dancing these new brand pages may be, but much of their new effectiveness will rely on users straying from their standard newsfeeds and onto brand pages themselves. Marketers will have to find new and creative ways of making that happen.

Do you feel stressed, overworked, unable to manage your time and priorities amid a daily deluge of messages, tweets, updates and Inmails?

No, this isn’t some corny infomercial for a new gadget solution. Instead I’d argue it’s  just a pretty accurate guess of how nearly everyone feels about the social media information overload they battle on any given day.

“Social is running out of hours. Social is also running out of people,” is how Forrester Research CEO George Colony described things this week at LeWeb, and it’s this sense of social media saturation that could yet bring about a  shakeout in existing social networking services, as well as a new chapter of social media innovation to cut through the information chatter and clutter that we’ve all created over the last 10 years.

Cue Twitter’s new redesign, which adds a new level of relevance, navigation and usefulness to its steady stream of oh-so-addictive and oh-so-distracting tweets. Taking a bit from Facebook and a bit from Stumbleupon the new Twitter wants to curate the content clutter that it has helped create.

It’s exactly this goal of decluttering our social online lives that another fledgling social network, Unthink, is promising to achieve….if only it can first convince us to join yet another social network.

Since the consumer boom, psychologists have long debated the drivers that push us into impulse buys, or how we reason with and justify purchases. Now we’ve social shopping in the fray, the psychological aspects of shopping are even more complicated. Indeed, Facebook storefront maker Tabjuice describes the sprawling web of social shopping as ‘a mighty confabulation of social rules and subconscious needs’.

To help clarify some of the forces at work here, Tabjuice has created a cool infographic which illustrates the six universal heuristics that apply to shopping, and demonstrates how they are applicable on a social playing field, too.

1) Social proof
When we’re unsure of our behaviour, we look to others’ actions for validation. ‘Should I buy this coat?’ asks the character on the infographic. ‘I don’t know, ask your Twitter followers’, comes the reply. Indeed, 81 percent of social shoppers have sought advice from their peers through social sites.

2) Authority
While asking friends and family about a purchase is a crucial factor in social shopping, so too is the opinion of the big wigs, with 77 percent of social shoppers seeking out reviews from specialists or experts to help validate their decisions.

3) Scarcity
Tapping into primitive survival instincts, we tend to assign greater value to resources as they become less available, due to the fear of potential loss, the infographic says. Indeed, how often have you been swayed by the buzz words ‘exclusive’, ‘limited edition’ and ‘only a few remaining’? As such, it’s not surprising that 77 percent of people like receiving exclusive deals and offers.

4) Like
‘We emulate and agree with people we like, admire and find attractive because it helps build social bonds and trust’, states the infographic, noting that nearly 50 percent of shoppers have made a purchase based on a recommendation. What better platform for this behaviour than Twitter?

5) Consistency
We humans are a stubborn race, with 62 percent of shoppers preferring to stick to brands they know in the face of uncertainty. This speaks volumes for the importance of brand awareness and values.

6) Reciprocity
Surprisingly, despite the ills of mankind, we do have an innate desire to repay favours ‘in order to maintain social fairness’. In an online shopping context, this means sharing deals and circulating special offers – which we do in abundance, as over 25 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook every month.

This is psychology at a pretty basic level, but nonetheless a level that those in the f-commerce arena should be well-versed in if they’re to keep drawing the punters in.

Traditionally, bagging a Black Friday bargain meant getting up at the crack of dawn, waiting outside in the freezing cold for the mall to open and having your ribs decimated by hundreds of elbows from other pushy, determined shoppers. Sounds kinda quaint today.

As the masses welcome social shopping into their lives, however, this weekend’s frenzied shopping experience is likely to take on an altogether more relaxed and civilized manner.

According to comScore, an estimated $37 billion will be spent online over the festive period this year, up 15 percent on last year’s $32 billion. Meanwhile, Shop.org’s eHoliday survey anticipates that 73.7 percent of retailers will use Facebook pages to reach out to shoppers, a marked increase from 57.1 percent last year. Indeed, according to CNBC, 18 percent of chief marketing officers say that social media promotions are their top sales priority this weekend.

To be sure, Facebook users have an enormous selection of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals to tickle their fancy. eCommerce platform Payvment, for example, has launched a special Black Friday deals section for its Shopping Mall, offering up to 80 percent off products from its list of over 100,000 retailers.

Other brands are taking the opportunity to boost likes and brand awareness through giveaways and fan-specials, like Omni Hotels and Resorts, which will be giving away 100 room nights to 100 lucky fans on its Facebook page over the weekend. Even organizations not specifically retail-focused are jumping on the Black Friday social media bandwagon; make a $100 donation to the International Rett Syndrome Foundation through its Facebook store, for example, and receive three free awareness bracelets.

However, while 2011 arguably marks one of the early years of the f-commerce reign, some stores are now going beyond simple sales and giveaways and adding a new ‘live’ dimension to Facebook shopping. Santa Monica-based commerce company BeachMint has announced that it plans to create a live video shopping experience that will stream over Facebook on Cyber Monday (Nov. 28). The first event is set to take place at 10am PST with hosts Hillary Kerr and Katherine Power from fashion authority WhoWhatWear, and will feature BeachMint staff searching for the best fashion deals in real time, so that watchers can also take advantage of the bargains.

With such an enormous range of goods on offer online for the same low prices (if not, in fact, lower) as those in-store, and available for purchase in a more comfortable and enjoyable environment, it will be interesting to see how physical, store-based sales stack up this year, and whether Black Friday 2011 marks the end of holiday shopping routines as we know them.