In the latest issue of the San Jose Business Journal the top Silicon Valley PR firms are listed and we are excited and honored to see Voce own the #2 spot. We just celebrated our ninth anniversary and recognition like this will give us the fuel we need to march for the top spot in the coming years. Our clients deserve the credit for this one. They entrusted us with their programs and we are grateful.

This past week Voce celebrated 9 great years. A big thanks to all our clients and friends that attended our event in Palo Alto last Thursday night.

Here are a few select photos, you can catch the entire photoset over on Flickr.

Alright, so one of the weird little misconceptions I’ve been dealing with for a while now is the belief that social media marketing is, well, how do I say this? “Cheap.”

It’s an opinion often held by marketers, communicators, executives, and the like, many of whom have clicked on the pony-tailed chief’s ‘DIY’ blog and the clever, professionally underproduced video on YouTube and the messy, yet oddly functional fan page on Facebook, and because of this, have formed an opinion of what social media marketing is, how it’s done, and ultimately what it must cost.

And really, can you blame them?

These folks are simply making a calculation of value based on the tangible merit of what’s being presented to them — with very little insight, understanding or weight placed on the effort required to really bring these projects to life, let alone what it takes to keep them going and make them truly successful.

Of course, to complicate things, there’s a near endless parade of free online tools and services that are surfacing every month, each in their own way perpetuating the “man-this-stuff-is-cheap” mentality as their own hype cycles crest (cough, FriendFeed) and later crash.

Lastly, and most importantly, I think there’s a tendency in ROI conversations to over indulge in hard numbers sans consideration for all the underlying soft costs of social media projects. And by “soft costs” what I’m really getting at are the *absurdly high* time and attention investments that typically come with these projects and what are the unique shared scars among many a social media practitioner. If you’ve ever administered a blog or a community of sorts, you’ll know what I mean, nuff said.

Sadly, time and attention factors are often overlooked and greatly underestimated in most marketers’ understanding and appreciation of these projects.

Now, does this mean social media work can’t be done on the cheap? Nah, of course not. You go right ahead and create your corporate Blogger account and your executive’s MySpace page and that barely-discernible-but-kinda-indie looking mobile video of your company event;)

Kidding aside, just remember that free is never really free. That time’s an investment too. And that social media marketing requires a lot of it and because of this, “cheap” investments could end up costing you a bundle if you’re not clear about what you’re buying.

[This post has been cross-published to Media Guerrilla]

Last week Voce sponsored Ignite Portland 3.

Over 750 people packed into the Bagdad Theatre to watch 13 speakers talk for 5 minutes each on various topics. Each sponsor is given a moment on stage, so I proudly shared that Voce is looking for some Northwest brands to fire up.

IP3 was a great event for us to sponsor as Portland has one of the most attended of the Ignite series. Originally started by O’Reilly, Ignite has now spread to cities throughout the world.

We are looking forward to following this sponsorship with an event in Portland (Legion of Talk) where we will bring in Voce clients to share their successes and challenges with PR in social media. Stay tuned for more information about these bridge building events!

On Friday I’ll be attending/MC’ing BlogPotomac in the DC area. This latest un-conference is being organized by Geoff Livingston with some assistance from Debbie Weil. I’m glad to say many of the session leaders are longtime friends and colleagues and I look forward to the discussions.

I feel flattered that the event has followed the BlogOrlando model I started a few years ago. If I have my facts right I think Geoff returned from BlogOrlando this past year and said, “Let’s do this in DC!”

A number of other locations/events have sprung up in the past few years: BlogSavannah, SoCon, BlogPhiladelphia and BlogCarolinas to name a few. I’m glad the BlogOrlando concept has spread as it has. However, my original inspiration for BlogOrlando was BlogNashville which took place in 2005…seems like so long ago.

I hope to post some photos from the event and perhaps a recap, but I imagine most of the comments will come on Twitter.

Speaking of BlogOrlando, we’re holding our first planning meeting on June 26th.

Alright, so there’s all sorts of assumptions companies make about social media these days, one of the most dangerous of which is the assumption that the feedback, opinions and insights people share online are absolutely representative of their customer base.

Be careful about walking into this particular perception warp, it’s very easy to fall into and terribly difficult to escape.

Yeah, there’s a ton of valuable customer feedback to be gathered and analyzed on the web, however, more often than not, that feedback is coming from what’s best described as, well, a vocal minority. The perception warp is believing this group of customers online reflects the opinions, attitudes and experiences of *all* your customers (e.g., the much, much larger silent majority).

I was reminded of this recently on a client project where we were analyzing commenter registrations on the company’s blog. Our WordPress admin page showed thousands of comments and thousands of registrants, but as we chopped up the user data, we found that about *40* commenters accounted for nearly a third of the total comments.

I’ve seen very similar patterns on other projects, and generally speaking, I think there’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that the ratio of writers to readers online is wildly disproportionate. And unfortunately, once again, it’s one of those unique challenges that falls onto the laps of those who manage social media programs to determine just how much weight to put on the collective customer feedback culled from the web; also I suppose, how influential (or not) your vocal minority of customers are to your silent majority of customers.

Our own Matt Podboy is attending the OnHollywood Conference in LA the next few days. Usually, LA and Matt make an interesting combination.

You can follow his real-time commentary on Twitter.

Over the weekend the famous ‘measurement’ question was discussed quite a bit by Scoble and Owyang. A few months ago we talked about the monitoring and mining aspect, but Scoble asks the direct question, “how will doing this help my sales?”

Like Robert says, this question is asked quite a bit by some of the large firms we talk to. What’s the quick response? “How are you currently measuring your PR/Comms/Marketing programs?”

The answer usually can go one of two ways:

1. A company describes how they currently measure the ROI of their PR/Comms/Marketing.
2. A company admits they really don’t have a good measure on the ROI of existing programs.

If 1: then part of your work is already done for you. Find out how to apply some of the existing methodology to the project. After all if X is the standard they use to measure all other programs, then how can you integrate a way to measure X in your project?

Kami Huyse did this with the SeaWorld Journey to Atlantis project. Many of the existing programs are measured by exit surveys, why not use the same tool to ‘equally’ measure the different programs.

If 2: then you can set the precedent for measurement within and organization. One of the great things with online content is that you do have plenty of data to work with. The trick is what to do with the data, and how to determine what’s relevant to the client. Is it RSS subscribers? Comments? Links? Bookings?

If you know how and what you’re measurement goals are to begin with it’s easier to build in the proper components from the start.