We’ve all seen social media “Share” buttons on emails and wondered if they really work. Well, a new infographic from GetResponse (below) tells us the answer: they don’t but, then again, they do.

Confused?  You’re not alone.

Using “share” buttons or icons apparently only 23 out of 10,000 emails get shared on Facebook, 7/10,000 on Twitter, and 4/10,000 on LinkedIn. On the face of it, that looks pretty derisory – though it’s marginally better than nothing. What’s interesting is that the click-thru rate (CRT) of shared messages on social networks is much, much higher than a standard email, often twice as high.

It stands to reason really, it’s coming from a friend and it’s in an environment you trust, so you open it. How, then, to get more people to share emails via social media. How many pixels would it take to offer an incentive? Perhaps you should make it more obvious within the message.

However you do it, the potential rewards are great.

Our first Social PR conference in the UK, Social PR 2011, proved a popular and fascinating day for the 160 or so attendees and live streamers who joined us – plus the many hashtag followers on Twitter. Here were my takeaways from the day:

1. Social PR is an Opportunity, not Just a Threat – Social PR is often driven by the fear factor of reputation and crisis management, yet the opportunities go way beyond this. The excellent presentations by Marshall Sponder on How to Identify Influencers and Ebony Tamara Walker on Blogger Outreach demonstrated how pro-active engagement with the right people is a positive opportunity for brands to grasp.
2. Pointers on Dealing with a Crisis – It helps to have planned for it (what will you do, what will the effects be, what can you do now to mitigate the damage). You also have to accept that saying sorry may not be enough, you may have to change how you operate in order to really to fix the problem. There may also be long term problems – e.g. negative comments in search – that you need to deal with. Getting a statement out before the crisis breaks is one approach. It’s been dubbed a “Prebuttal”.
3. Social Media Monitoring is an Essential Activity – especially for companies wanting to find out what kind of content generates engagement. Five by Five and Brandwatch combined well to do this while monitoring the launch of various Activision video games.
4. Influence is a Tricky Concept – While Marshall gave us lots of tools for influencer analysis (Peekyou, Ecairn, Mpact, followerwonk, Tweepsearch), Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd dismissed the tools on offer and suggested his influence scorecard as an alternative method of deciding who matters. Buy Marshall’s book here.
5. There are Best Practise Methods for Blogger Outreach - Bloggers need PR’s to provide them with access to blog-friendly materials and to communicate with them clearly before, during and after events. Bloggers don’t want to compete with each other (e.g. in competitions), but they do like to show off at bit, and having the latest news is valuable to them.
6. Engagement Metrics are Critical to Success – Katie Delahaye Paine gave a great virtual presentation from an airport lounge in the US :). We need to measure which “Phase of Engagement” our customers are at and move them along her 5-point scale towards “purchase” and “advocacy”. Her final word on measurement?  “Look for your failures first”. Buy her book here.
7. Good Social PR Starts with Good Internal Communications – Katie Howell, who knows a thing or two on this topic, stressed that brands cannot hope to engage properly on the social web unless they engage properly internally. There must be close and slick comms between departments. Social media cannot be silo’d and crises cannot be limited to a PR effort. To coin a phrase “We’re all in this together”. This issues will feed into our next event Social CRM 2011 – on 6th May.
8. The PR Industry is in for Some Interesting Times - For an industry that aims to exert control over external communications, social media is going to prove a major test. There are new skills to be learned, new tools (often highly technical) to be understood and integrated, new “influencers” to be connected and engaged with, new jobs to be filled and new audiences to be reached.

All the presentations from the day (except the Sony Ericsson which is not for public release) are available now on our Slideshare account. The videos of the day are available below (please bear with the brief but annoying adverts).

Early Bird tickets are on sale now for Social CRM 2011, taking place on 6th May. Don’t miss this important follow-on event.

A recent Financial Edge article suggested that social media is the next bubble, with over-hyped valuations, waiting to burst on an unsuspecting throng of investors. I have my doubts. Here are 5 reasons why I think the valuation of social media companies is largely justified:

1. Facebook is worth $30 billion – Facebook’s $30 billion valuation is the target for most critics, yet Facebook isn’t just a network of 500 million people, it’s a marketplace where real money is spent and made. Zynga‘s games alone are worth tens of $ millions in revenue and there are thousands of developers creating new games, tools, networks and plugins for Facebook every day. It’s a global industry, employing (albeit indirectly) hundreds of thousands of people – so, I would say, justifiably highly valued.




2. Social media is growing up - While many social tools and services started out as free, the industry as a whole is growing up to the fact that it HAS to make money. Groupon is setting the tone for social businesses by charging (some would say over-charging) a hefty fee for it’s services. MarketMeSuite, the brilliant social media marketing dashboard [disclosure: I'm an Advisor] charges $5.99/month. No freemium model. If you want it – you have to pay. And guess what? Customers are happy to pay for a great service.




3. Media is as old as the hills – We all talk about social media being new, but in reality it’s just the latest evolution of “The Media”, which started out with the Ten Commandments and has’t stopped evolving since. Social media isn’t a blip or a passing phase – it’s the latest incarnation of something society absolutely cannot do without. The big difference is, we’re no longer reliant on news-makers for the story. We are the news-makers.




4. Business is still slumbering – While most of us now use social media with friends, remarkably few businesses have realised the value of social media communications, for marketing, customer comms, PR, sales, research, product management etc. This is a massive industry still waiting to happen. Take social CRM for example. I predict that by 2012 most large businesses will be seeking to integrate the social web into their CRM systems (if they aren’t already), the investment will be huge.




5. Twitter is still underestimated – For most of the businesses I advise, the most powerful social media tool available to them is Twitter. Yes, it’s messy and hard to understand, but there are tools emerging that monitor, categorise, store and organise the bites of information we share via Twitter, making it much more manageable and valuable. Additionally, in the same way as Facebook is a marketplace, Twitter currently powers thousands of small businesses via it’s API. It’s a whole ecosystem reliant on the host. If Twitter doesn’t get a similar valuation to Facebook, I’ll be investing.