Even though a majority of its employees already were quite active on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, Vestas did not see any need to rush into social media.  The company stuck to its knitting, building more of the 43,000 turbines it has installed for customers in 66 countries across six continents, while it studied this new thing called social media.

The company’s group communications department started by monitoring social media sites to find out what people around the world were saying about Vestas. They didn’t want to jump in too soon with nothing to say.

“We approached it with curious caution and slowly started to build a presence, says Kasper D. Borch, Web Editor of Vestas.com.  “If you engage in social media activity, you need to have some interesting and substantial content for the other users. Done wrong, social media can backfire and create bad will and angry users instead.”

Slowly, Borch and his team turned from passively listening to actively engaging in dialogues and conversations.  While he admits that “we are only at the very beginning,” Borch likes to point out that more than 5,000 people have hit ‘Like’ on its Facebook page, it has more than 4,000 followers on Twitter and the videos that Vestas has uploaded to YouTube have been viewed more than 140,000 times by people from all over the world.

Being active in social media has begun to pay off for the communications team.  Sky News reached out to Vestas via Twitter about a burning turbine in Scotland.  Borch was surprised the news outlet relied on social media rather than the phone or email, but he and his team were prepared to respond quickly.

As it gets more experience, Vestas’s social media efforts are expanding.  While most of its Facebook and Twitter posts are rather dry press releases about new sales or installations, the company’s marketing team has been promoting contests such as the Global Wind Day photo competition from related organizations to encourage more interest in wind energy.

Borch just has one simple piece of advice for anyone who wants to participate in the online conversations, regardless of topic: “Listen!” he says. “And always be humble and polite when asking or answering questions.”

Are you feeling pressured to keep up with social media first-movers?  Or are you taking the time to listen before jumping in?

The UN is committed to social media as a way of engaging its diverse constituencies and raising awareness and gaining support for a variety of causes.  Here we outline a number of ways in which the organization is using social media to drive its business goals.

193 Countries. One Social Media Strategy.

Leading the charge is Nancy Groves, social media manager at the UN’s headquarters in New York. Groves, who previously worked as a librarian at the UN, recently outlined her efforts in an interview with Mashable.

Groves is part of the UN Secretariat, the body charged with carrying out the day-to-day work of the organization. But there often are a vast number of differing opinions and points of view among the UN’s 193 member countries. Thus, it can take a significant amount of time to get permission to make her posts.

In December, four social media experts, @adamhirsch, @alecjross, @rachelsterne and @sree, trooped over to the UN headquarters in New York to offer their advice to some 300 United Nations staffers as well as students and journalists on how the UN can best harness social media tools to reach their global objectives. You can view a video of the entire session here.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Answers Questions via Social Media 

But it’s not just the social media team that reaches out to the public. Last September, for the first time in its history, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon answered questions submitted from Twitter, Facebook, LiveStream and other social media networks. The conversation was moderated by Juju Chang of the ABC television network.

According to an article in Social Times,  upwards of 5,500 questions were received from around the world. More than half came from China, including one that asked why so many people die from hunger in Africa when there’s enough food in the world to feed everyone.

Crowdsourcing the United Nations Strategy on Youth and HIV/AIDS

For the two months before Christmas last year, the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS  invited people aged 15 to 29 to help create and shape a new United Nations strategy on youth and HIV/AIDS through an online collaborative project using several social media platforms to facilitate the development of new policies to combat the pandemic.

Called CrowdOutAIDS.org, the initiative’s name alludes to the popular concept of crowdsourcing, which consists of letting large undefined groups of people collaborate and come up with innovative solutions for tasks traditionally performed by individuals (see the press release from the UN News Centre).

The Social Media Campaign for Human Rights 

“Our social media human rights campaign focuses on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and aims to help more people know, demand and defend human rights,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in a statement.

The campaign launched by the High Commissioner’s Office followed an online discussion on Facebook and Twitter called “30 Days and 30 Rights,” which counted down to the UN’s annual December 10 celebration of Human Rights Day with a daily post about one specific article of the Declaration.

Education and Awareness–in Six Languages

Turning back to the UN Secretariat: its primary goal is to get out educational messages from the world body–information about the UN’s mission and its various efforts around the world. That includes “warts and all,” not just its vaunted humanitarian work saving and improving lives. The social media messages often include details about famines, wars, genocide and other disturbing news.

It’s neither easy nor quick, as all social media posts have to go through the UN’s political review process. Groves and her team have to be careful with language and wording. To avoid offending anyone or causing an international incident, she relies on a peer editing process.

Once approved, the posts must be translated into ALL of the UN’s six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish).

To speed up the process, the team often will re-use content that has already been approved for use in a press release or video, for example.  But the social media specialists can move quickly when needed, as they did during the earthquake and tsunami in Japan when they used Twitter to connect victims and relief centers.

Working for diplomats, Groves and her team learned quickly to deal diplomatically with people who post questions and comments that are less than flattering about the UN. Although there are many of these, the social media staff tries to respond to every question and criticism, often with links to statistics pages or other information.

Does the UN’s mandate to tweet in 6 languages and meet the needs of 193 members make your social media strategy look simple?  Or do you deal with a similar level of complexity? 

Rick Wion, McDonald's Director of Social Media

With headlines like “#McDStories, McDonald’s Twitter Hashtag Promotion, Goes Horribly Wrong” (Huffington Post), “#McFail: McDonald’s Loses Control Of Hashtag” (Paid Content), and “McDonald’s #McDStories Twitter campaign backfires” (Telegraph), things weren’t looking so good for McDonald’s yesterday in the world of social media.  But was all the hype justified – did the #McDStories really spiral out of control with negative backlash?

This morning I spoke  with Rick Wion, McDonald’s Director of Social Media, to look at the facts behind this Twitter campaign, and to see what lessons social media managers can learn from the “#McFail debacle” (Paid Content).

McDonald’s Runs a Promoted Trend Campaign

According to Wion, the campaign started with a simple goal:  ”to tell people where our food comes from.”

McDonald’s – no stranger to managing social media controversies – purchased a Promoted Trend for 24 hrs on Wednesday, January 18, with the aim of driving followers to watch videos about the “proud origins” of McDonald’s food and produce.  Starting at midnight, the promotion initially featured the hashtag #meetthefarmers, and this tweet:

The reaction to the #meetthefarmers tweet was very positive, and farmers even chimed in to share their experiences.  Then, at 2pm, McDonald’s switched to feature a new tweet, with a different video and new hashtag–#McDStories:

Closely monitoring the hashtag, within an hour Wion and his team realized that things were not going as planned, and “changed tacks quickly.”  The #McDStories was switched back to #meetthefarmers by 4pm (after just two hours).  By 5pm mentions of #McDStories had slowed to just a few dozen.

It would seem that the damage control was effective, and by replacing #McDStories with #meetthefarmers so quickly, the negative tweets slowed down to just a small trickle.  To put this in perspective, on January 18th, there were a total of 72,788 tweets mentioning McDonald’s–Wion says the brand normally averages 25,000-30,000 mentions daily on Twitter.  Just 1600 of these tweets included the #McDStories hashtag–a small drop in the daily bucket.

Still, some of those tweets were quite nasty, gross and amusing–

–enough to gain the attention of some major media outlets.

Admittedly, the campaign did not go as McDonald’s had planned–but on social media, you need to plan for the unexpected. So what lessons can social media managers learn from this controversy?

1. Make a plan, but be ready if that plan goes awry

The main lesson, according to Wion?  ”You don’t have 100% of control of what happens” on social media, and to participate, brands must be ok with that.   McDonald’s is – and will continue to face the good and the bad, the fans and detractors – to maintain an active and engaged social media presence.

Wion told us that “any marketer in social media has to be ready to change course if the plan doesn’t play out as you think.” In this case “the hashtag didn’t go as intended,” but once the negative feedback came rolling in, McDonald’s changed tacks quickly.  There “was not a viral response that went out of control,” as much of the media coverage implied, and the number of negative tweets dropped dramatically within just a few hours.

2. Choose your words (and battles) carefully

When choosing language and content for social media posts, he said that the brand thinks about both fans and detractors and is “careful about what we pick.” It’s safe to say that the brand will consider the possibility of a hashtag hijacking next time they create a promoted trend. McDonald’s did not engage directly with the detractors, with the exception of righting a “clearly false” tweet from PETA supporters (addressing a “black and white” issue that Wion said the brand has addressed with PETA in the past).

As for the ensuing storm of media coverage over “#McFail”, there’s nothing the brand can do beyond riding it out.  It also helps for the social media team to willingly offer its knowledge from the experience as “a social media parable for marketers” (as PaidContent put it.)

3. Keep the focus on your customers

As a brand, McDonald’s mandate is to focus on its customers, and provide them with entertaining and valuable content on social media channels.  The aim isn’t to convince those who aren’t customers to become fans of the brand–it’s to engage those who love McDonald’s and want to hear more. Negative chatter on Twitter is unlikely to convince McDonald’s fans to stop eating there, but providing new and interesting content is a way to keep them coming back.

4. Don’t focus on the negative

As for the trigger-happy media coverage when your brand does have a misstep (such as articles with #McFail in the headline), McDonald’s Rick Wion admits he was surprised by the negative reaction–but the brand doesn’t plan to stop tweeting anytime soon.  On the day McDonald’s launched #McDStories, only 2% of the tweets flooding in mentioning the brand were negative.  And during the flurry of negative press coverage that followed, the original “When u make something w/pride…” tweet remained in the Top Tweets–not because McDonald’s paid to keep it there, but because it saw consistently high levels of engagement.

Whether you’re a Quarter Pounder with cheese lover or haven’t stepped under the golden arches in years, you’ve got to have respect for the brand’s willingness to put themselves out there, before friend and foe alike.  What do you think – should big brands like McDonald’s risk the loss of control that comes with a Twitter campaign like this, or is the potential backlash not worth the exposure?

Once fans log onto the Hershey’s Facebook page (with over 3.2 million fans), they can scroll down and find “more fun on Facebook” through links to Facebook pages for Hershey’s Bliss, Hershey’s Syrup, Hershey’s Kiss and Hershey’s Kitchens (“recipes for every occasion”).

Anna Lingeris, public relations manager at Hershey’s, spoke with Ragan.com about how her team engages fans of these multiple brands on social media, after inheriting the company’s Facebook pages from the marketing department.

The main question is: why does Hershey’s keep Facebook pages for each of these individual brands? “Each brand has its own personality,” Lingeris says. “To mash them all into one, you’re doing a disservice, because you’re looking at it from a corporate standpoint rather than a brand standpoint.”

While the classic Hershey’s page has a “genial, friendly tone,” the Reese’s page is more “conversational” and the Kitchens page posts tips for fans and boasts a “resident baking expert” to answer questions right on the Facebook wall.

Once fans are on a Hershey’s page, Lingeris aims to make Facebook “a one-stop shop” for them.  Rather than promoting events that are happening elsewhere, Hershey’s found success with a s’mores photo contest held entirely on Facebook.

But not everything is individualized for a specific Hershey’s brand on Facebook. “Sometimes content is cross-posted among multiple pages” says Lingeris, including polls, behind-the-scenes videos, photos and more.  The team also looks to other social media, including Twitter and Pinterest, to find content to post on Facebook.

What is the timing for posts? Lingeris and her team post once or twice every day on Hershey’s Facebook accounts, with the philosophy that “more content generates more engagement.” Fans’ questions are answered if the company’s “decision tree” determines that they should receive a response – so there’s a system in place to respond to questions, but it doesn’t guarantee that each post will receive a reply.

Lingeris also stressed the importance of listening to fans, being “aware of what your fans want to hear, what they want to talk about” and recognizing that sometimes “They just want to voice their opinion.”  Which is often perfect for the brand, because fans are happy to share their love of the product.

And when fans do express their love – or their dissatisfaction – respond immediately when appropriate.  When Vinny Martino, a boy with Down syndrome and leukemia, posted on a Facebook page that Hershey’s declined to send the T-shirt he had requested, fans immediately began sharing their disappoinment.  Lingeris’ team was closely monitoring the page and immediately send Martino a package with T-shirts and wrote a response for not sending them in the first place.

Martino posted a picture of himself in the shirts (which he collects), and Hershey’s turned a potential PR flub into a social media success.  “We took something that could quickly escalate into a more negative situation and made it positive,” Lingeris told Ragan.com.

By letting “each personality to shine through” on Facebook, Hershey’s is engaging fans across a wide spectrum of products in a much more intimate way than a broad, all-encompassing “Hershey’s” page would allow.

1. a simple, easy-to-understand story
2. a fair and just cause
3. an army of fans ready to fight for you

Yesterday, Walgreens started a Twitter war with Express Scripts, a prescription drug insurer–around a fairly complicated issue.  The company has created an entire web site dedicated to explaining why its contract negotiations with Express Scripts broke down.  It uses 326 words to describe the “Issues at a Glance“–contract negotiations don’t often lend themselves to being explained in 140 characters.

An issue like prescription coverage is a highly sensitive, personal issue.  For many customers, it’s hard to understand which large corporation they should blame when contract negotiations break down–and it’s always tough for a large national brand to credibly position itself as a victim.  (And do you really want to?)  Which makes this a tricky communications issue in any medium, let alone the minimalist world of Twitter.

Still, Walgreens had some other weapons in its arsenal:  Twitter’s Promoted Products.  It took to Twitter with this tweet, which it paid to promote yesterday:

The company also paid for #ILoveWalgreens to be a Promoted Trend.  Over the course of the day, the brand tweeted about the Express Scripts controversy several times (in addition to promoting other brand features), answered questions from customers about the issue, and engaged with both supporters and critics.

Adam Kmiec, Walgreen’s Director of  Social Media, tells us that Walgreens had three goals in taking the issue to Twitter:

• “We wanted to tap into all the reasons people love Walgreens and drive awareness of this conversation beyond just our followers.
• We also knew that there were thousands of customers who were upset and inconvenienced by not being able to use their in-network pharmacy benefits at Walgreens because of Express Scripts’ stance. We wanted to give these customers a forum to be heard online.
• We also wanted to help make any transition as easy as possible and ensure that our patients fully understand the issue. So we also had a process to redirect them to the right answers or take the conversation offline.”

The use of paid advertising to drive these types of conversations, however, drew some vocal critics.

Some accused the company of trying to “pay for love;” others objected to the self-promotional language of the hashtag itself:

Express Scripts responded, tweeting out a series of 6 “Facts” about the negotiations with Walgreens. (“Fact 2:  Walgreens’ proposed rates/terms would make them the most expensive pharmacy in our network.”)

When companies start pointing fingers and slinging mud in public like this, nobody ends up looking good.  Over the course of the day, Walgreens shifted more and more of its tweets to issues other than the Express Scripts controversy.

So what about that army of fans?  According to Kmiec, the Promoted Products campaign reached more than 25 million people.  Twitter told Kmiec that it was “one of the best performing branded trends ever and reached performance levels usually associated with non-branded trends.”  Drugstore News reports that the positive tweets outweighed negative tweets by a ratio of 12 to 1.

Still, using paid messaging to manage a crisis was a risky move.  In spite of the reported numbers, the “conversation” was not always a positive one, and marketers who are thinking of using the service to appeal to the public should be prepared for rough terrain.

What do you think?  Gutsy move that showed customers that Walgreens wasn’t afraid to take on a tough issue?  Or did Walgreens make a PR crisis worse by adding fuel to the fire?

Researchers used software called HealthMap to monitor how often the cholera epidemic was mentioned online during the first 100 days of the outbreak (from 10/20/10 through 1/28/11), and looked at the number of tweets mentioning cholera and #cholera.

The results included 4,697 online reports (in 8 languages) and 188,819 tweets, according to New Scientist, and this data enabled the researchers to follow the outbreak’s progression.  The information from online sources “closely matched the official reports” from hospitals and health clinics.  The difference?  The data from HealthMap and Twitter was available in realtime, without the two week lag before the official reports were available.

New Scientist quotes the study’s lead author, Rumi Chunara, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School: “The techniques we employed eventually could be used around the world as an affordable and efficient way to quickly detect the onset of an epidemic and then intervene with such things as vaccines and antibiotics.”

Twitter has also been used to help track dengue fever outbreaks in Brazil and vaccinations in the US.  It was also used to watch the progression of swine flu in 2009, although researchers noted that “For the general public, information overload can quickly turn into public hysteria.”  With “swine flu,” “#swineflu” and “CDC” all appearing as trending topics, public health officials had to balance the usefulness of more people using Twitter (and reporting outbreaks) with potential “false positives” and mounting public fear (more at MSNBC).

Still, even with the potential short-comings, the opportunity to leverage realtime data to manage a fast-moving outbreak has enormous potential.  When dealing with an epidemic like Haiti’s – where cholera has infected 520,000 people and killed more than 6,500 – having realtime access to this data could help save many lives.

Essentially, Pinterest is about visual content curation.  It’s the perfect place to tell an engaging story and get people involved in that story.  Which is why it’s a great platform for cause marketers.

Omaha-based PR & Social Media Strategist Jennifer Strauss Windrum has been using Pinterest to engage followers for the cause she founded,  WTF (Where’s the Funding) for Lung Cancer?, which is dedicated to raising awareness around lung cancer.  Jennifer has created a number of boards related to her cause, and she told me today that she’s been astounded by the level of interest and engagement she’s seen from other users.  Check out her boards here:  Faces of Lung Cancer (493 followers), WTF Lung Cancer Merchandise (486 followers), SMAC! Sock Monkeys Against Cancer (504 followers).  Jennifer personally has 366 followers on Pinterest, so her boards are being discovered and shared by a community that’s broader than that to which she’s personally connected, and she’s amazed at the comments and repins that her boards have generated.

Based on her experience with Pinterest, there are a number of ways that cause marketers can use Pinterest:

1. Aggregate content and tools that empower your supporters to spread the word.  Jennifer shares resources with WTF? supporters through her blog and on Facebook — but Pinterest gives her the opportunity to collect all of those resources in one central location where supporters can easily find and re-share them.
2. Keep the story alive.  As you add new pins to a board, those visuals appear in your followers’ streams, generating likes, comments and re-pins, and keeping followers engaged.
3. Connect with people around their passion and build the community.  People find your content because it’s re-shared by their friends, or by searching on Pinterest around keywords or browsing content channels.  Visual images have a deep ability to inspire action and engage.
4. Collaboration and  product development.  Jennifer is working on launching a line of Sock Monkeys to raise money for lung cancer research.  She created her SMAC! Sock Monkeys Against Cancer board to share ideas and efficiently collaborate on a prototype with her seamstress; that board has now become one of her most popular boards.  Another board, Packaging Ideas, has generated helpful tips from other users.

Other cause marketers are catching on.  Cause Marketing for Dummies author Joe Waters has started a board collecting samples of different cause marketing campaigns, and Beth Kanter has curated a board of non-profit infographics.  Expect to see non-profits and associations of all types start to experiment with Pinterest generate passion for their causes.

Pinterest works for cause marketing because “cause marketing is all about stories,” Jennifer said.  ”And if your story isn’t visual, you need to find a way to make it visual–and easy for people to share.”

Cabbie Rashid Temuri gets most of his customers through Twitter. Customers can follow him on the social media network and check his location on Google Latitude or find My Friends so that when they need a cab, they can tell if he’s nearby and then tweet for a ride.

According to a recent story on ars technica, Temuri has built a loyal customer base because of his social media habits as well as because of his customer service.

A typical cabbie would put his hack up for availability through his company’s dispatch service, responding to calls from customers that are relayed to him. But Temuri – whose Twitter handle is @ChicagoCabbie  – posts his availability on Twitter and often will offer a special deal, like the time he tweeted an offer of $5 off the meter until 2pm on a trip to either of Chicago’s airports. He also offers free Wi-Fi in his cab.

It’s paying off. Temuri thinks that his social media clients represent about 90-95% of his repeat business. That enables him to pick up conversations begun on the last ride and the clients welcome getting back into his cab, knowing it’s a driver they can trust from prior experience.

Surprisingly, that wasn’t his goal when he launched his Twitter account. Originally, he just wanted to use it as a tool to help customers understand the nature of the taxi business and avoid common misunderstandings between cabbies and clients.

Temuri prefers Twitter to some of the other ways to book cabs and rides. Taxi Magic and Uber both enable folks to call a cab via a text message, for example, but charge fees to the drivers.

How likely are you to tweet for a taxi? And are you surprised by the success of using Twitter for small-scale business or customer service?  Let us know in the comments below.

(Also see our post about the Twitter-using ballgame beer vendor: Take Me Out To The Ballgame….and Tweet for Beer!)

The campaign began with a tweet from the @WhiteHouse account on Tuesday, December 20th, which asked “What does #40dollars mean to you?”  The idea was to get the average American talking about what $40 dollars every two weeks means to them, and what they would lose if it was removed from their paychecks.

The campaign “blew up” after it was retweeted by the President’s @BarackObama Twitter account (with nearly 12 million followers), according to MediaBistro.

A blog post on WhiteHouse.gov also explained the campaign, and encouraged the public to submit their responses via the White House website, Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.

The results?  The response was so huge that #40dollars was trending on Twitter for a few hours, with about 2,000 messages per hour coming in at its peak.

According to an analysis by Crimson Hexagon of 40,000 tweets with the #40dollars hashtag, the majority of responses were fairly positive and supported the campaign, ex. “#40dollars allows my son to have hot lunches at school”:

• 47% of tweets were about what $40 can buy
• 31% of tweets were about the need for tax cuts

Just 8% of tweets said that $40 “is not enough,” making it unclear whether those tweeters supported the campaign, as reported by Mashable.  Finally, 13% of #40dollars tweets were negative, generally about Obama – for example, “@BarackObama is spending #40dollars every 15 seconds on his Hawaiian vacation.”

The #40dollars campaign was successful in producing the type of discussion – and response – that the White House was looking for, with both opponents and supporters speaking out under the hashtag, but overall sentiment leaning strongly towards support of the tax cut extension.

Is social media an effective way to influence and mobilize public opinion about political issues? How much influence do you think leveraging public support on a public forum (Twitter) had on the final decision made by Congress? Let us know in the comments below.

1. Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far.
2. Twitter Brand Pages: How the First 20 Brands Are Using Them (Full Gallery)
3. KLM To Launch “Social Seating” Service
4. Social Media Nightmare: Citibank “Has Customers Arrested.” Video Goes Viral. Now What?
5. How Coca-Cola Doubled its Facebook Fans in 6 Months
6. Facebook Marketing: Newsfeed Impressions Matter More Than the Number of Fans
7. 77% of Fortune Global 100 Companies Use Twitter
8. Blogger Relations #Fail: ConAgra Cooks Up a PR Disaster
9. US Mobile Internet Use to Increase 25%, Smartphone Use Nearly 50% in 2011
10. Klout is Broken. Here’s Why.

Surprised a different post didn’t make the top 10 list?  Let us know in the comments!