The State of Social Media

Last weekend we endured the Hypiest of Big Hype release with the launch of the Apple iPad. A few days in and there’s some talk of drastically overoptimistic first day sales estimates, some genuine buyer’s remorse, and of course the inevitable backlash from trendsetters looking for the New Shiny Object.

The official host of the iPad Honeymoon turned Hangover party is Hewlett Packard, which seems to have a lead on gaining the sought after “iPad killer ” moniker for it’s offering in the space, the iSlate.

What’s interesting for social media marketers is the anatomy of HP’s campaign to win back some mindshare from the savviest consumer electronics company in history: pure social media. Leaked photographs through Engadget and Gizmodo, and a blog launch you can find on industry blogs but not from HP’s homepage (at the time of this writing), etc.

This isn’t a huge surprise considering the demographic and technographic HP is targeting but it is somewhat of a milestone. This is the most important product launch HP has had in years and the cornerstone is a video blog? Although we would expect there to be a big budget Old Media campaign to debut later in the year once the iSlate is closer to release, it’s notable that the medium HP chose to highlight its New New Thing is a blog that’s not even two years old.

One way to spin this is that HP is making a clear case for what they think is most effective at this stage of their campaign. The other is that they’re making a clear case for what they think is not effective. HP didn’t integrate social media elements into an old media campaign. They just went all in.

To Blog or Not to Blog?

With only 54 of the Fortune 500 companies blogging, this is a question still being pondered by many. Cisco, HP and Intel are in that blogging minority and Reem Abeidoh of Problogger interviewed me, Tac Anderson of HP and Michael Brito of Intel to come up with A Guide to Corporate Blogging.

Ryan McLean commented on the post stating, "I don't think I will ever be in a fortune 500 company. But if I ever am then this post will come in handy." I agree with Reem's response that despite the company size "ultimately the process is very similar." And although I represented the Cisco blog in this interview I have helped build blogging strategies for many small companies and have followed the same process successfully. So whether you're coming from a big or small company this guide is a must read!

Tac, Michael and myself are also contributors to the Conversations Matter blog.

CORRECTION: Reem is not a Problogger staff member, she is a Social Media Strategist for Outrider.

The Value of Social Bookmarking for Marketers

In my efforts to explain the value of social bookmarking for an internal marketing group I created a presentation that outlines:

• What is Social Bookmarking?
• The Growth of Social Bookmarking
• Marketing Value of Social Bookmarking
• Good Use Case Examples of Social Bookmarking
• Recommended Best Practices: What to do & What NOT to do

For marketers, social bookmarking is more than just a way for users to store, classify, share and search their sites - if used correctly it's a way to drive traffic and fuel a viral campaign. The growth of social bookmarking isn't slowing down either. According to Hitwise from August 2006-February 2007 Digg was up 9% and del.icio.us was up 130%.

HP and IBM are ahead of the curve and have already adopted Social Bookmarking in their marketing programs. HP has even created their own widget to encourage users to bookmark their sites and they were also one of the early adopters of Social Media Releases (read an earlier post on this topic). IBM is also using Social Bookmarking links as a way to encourage users to 'tag' them.

Here are some best practices I recommend to get started:

What to do:

• Encourage social bookmarking by adding links to make it easy for users – consider asking email subscribers to bookmark your site as a call to action
• Consider developing a custom widget that matches the corporate website look and feel to leverage multiple bookmarking sites (like HP did)
• Consider what pages of your site make sense to use social bookmarking on (ie. news, events, tools, resources). Typically, anything that is updated regularly or acts as a resource
• Make sure your approach is consistent and sustainable - try to avoid dramatic fluctuations in ranking algorithms

What NOT to do:

• Don't submit content just to get traffic without taking into account whether the content would interest the community – if you waste their time, they’ll stop giving it to you
• Don’t make multiple accounts to artificially promote your content – this is an act of desperation. If you have good stuff, they will keep coming back
• Don’t use software programs to automate the process by spamming as many social sites as you can – nobody likes a spammer
• Don’t pay someone else to do these things either – there are people out there who are obnoxious for a living. Let’s not encourage them

Resources for this post:
Social Bookmarking & Marketing
Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs
Wikipedia
HP Web Usability, Experience and SEO Blog
HP Social Media Release
IBM Social Bookmarking Examples
Earners Blog

B2B Marketing 2.0 – Conversation Enablers

Someone at work asked me how to 'leverage the power of Web 2.0' and what I have done to take advantage of some of the new technologies. I responded by saying that Web 2.0 technologies are useful for creating conversations with my customers, not just for pushing content (why pushing content isn’t good enough anymore is a post of it’s own). Then I was asked what training wheels I would suggest for someone looking to get started. I came up with this list of things I started with and would love suggestions from expert readers on others:

Blogging: Corporate blogs are becoming more common with companies like Cisco, HP, NetApp and Boeing which already active participants in the blogosphere. The common platforms for business or corporate blogs are WordPress, Movable Type and Leverage Software which goes beyond blogging to create communities.

Wiki's: Corporate wiki’s are collaborative websites which rely on a community of users to generate content and build pages. Wiki’s can be used in so many ways here are some example that come to mind –improve internal communications and expand the reach of your internal knowledgebase, use it to build a community within your customer base to create user generated documentation, use it with partners to co-create proposals. Some examples of external corporate wiki’s sites are: Linux Questions, IBM and Adobe. Three popular corporate Wiki platforms that come to mind are Confluence, SocialText and TWiki.

Social Networking: There are many social networking sites and although most of the one’s I’ve come across are personal in nature they do touch on certain business topics and can be exploited to reach a community that shows interest in topics related to your business. This site lists a few of the more popular social networking sites.

Second Life: Second Life is a ‘3-D virtual world’ – it offers a platform that can be used to host online events and collaborate with a broad audience in addition to just starting a hallway conversation with other avatars online. Notable companies on Second Life are Cisco, Reuters, Sun Microsystems and IBM.

LinkedIn: An online community of business professionals – this site can be exploited to build an expert within your company on a specific topic by taking advantage of the ‘Answers’ area of the site. It can be a good place to find potential clients and partners – and of course it’s more obvious use is finding potential job candidates.

I have limited this list to ‘conversation enablers’ – I'll be working on a follow up post around widgets and which ones are most likely to have “business value” which I think is even more interesting.