Cisco, Comcast & Virgin America Share How Facebook And Twitter Are Changing Business Models

While at SMASH Summit, Evelyn Rusli from TechCrunch did a interview with, Frank Eliason from Comcast and Bowen Payson, Virgin America about how Facebook And Twitter Are Changing Business Models, Shaping Brand Identity. Check it out:

Avoiding Social Media TMI

It’s a strange thing to tell people that my job literally requires me to check and update Facebook.  At a time when Facebook updating is becoming a workforce interruption  on par with the NCAA tournament, how are marketers supposed to draw the line between what we should be doing on our social networks and what’s personal use?

Or maybe a better question is: do marketers who use their social media networks for their job still have a “personal use” option?  For all intents and purposes, the answer to this is probably no.  Authenticity is fast becoming a requirement for having influence in social networking. That means that They get to know who you are.  In some cases, that means they also get to see the pictures of you passed out on someone’s lawn at Mardi Gras.  c'est la vie.,.

What that doesn’t mean is that we have to lose all perspective of professionalism.  There are lots of ways to express yourself through your network without compromising the carefully cultivated image you’ve sunk years of blood sweat and tears into.  More than anything else, this seems to require some understanding of why you publish on Facebook, your blog, twitter, whatever – and who your audience is.  What’s the point of what you’re saying? Are you adding value to a business conversation that never ends with a new perspective?  What does your social media network expect of you? What are they willing to accept from your opinion?  Are they expecting you to give them a play by play of your day?  Do they need to know about your relationship status?

Most of the people I’m connected to share valuable insights about what they’re working on or ideas on how to make our work a little better.  Sometimes I’ll connect to somebody who has a fresh or witty perspective.  This is basically what I expect of them, and in turn probably what they expect of me.  The danger seems to come from overstepping those boundaries.

The best rule of thumb I’ve heard in respect to social media publishing guidelines is the company party rule.  If you were at a business mixer, what would you bring to the conversation?  What wouldn’t you bring?

Most importantly, what would be considered “oversharing” or uncomfortable?  If you answered with, “not a damn thing”, then you might just be John Mayer.

Funny Friday: Politician Canned Over Terrible Tweets

Ever wonder what politicians are like when nobody’s looking?  Thanks to Stuart MacLennan, former Labour parliamentary candidate in the UK, we have an idea.  I’m sure not all politicians are this entertaining once the cameras are off, but a girl can dream.  Let’s hope those of us responsible for advocating social media adoption at our own companies remember to cite this as a great example of “insufficient filtering”.

(Tweets are NSFW, follow link here at your own risk =) )

The Evolution of Crowdsourcing (and how my husband roped me into watching a basketball game last night between two teams I’m not even remotely familiar with)

Yesterday, an interesting thing happened on the internet.  As reported today by Trey Kerby from Yahoo (courtesy of previously mentioned husband):

“. . . going in to the Phoenix Suns' matchup with Ginobili and the Spurs, Jared Dudley knew he had to do something. Somehow, he needed to shut down this scoring machine. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so Dudley did what we all do when we need answers — he took to Twitter.”

Jared Dudley crowdsourced his strategy against another player for a professional basketball game?  That has to be a first, right?  Check out the tweets and the following results (again from Kerby):

“Amazingly, it worked. Ginobili scored only 10 points on 5-14 shooting, made no three-pointers, and had two turnovers in the Spurs loss. It was his worst game in a month and third lowest scoring output since the All-Star break.”

Amazingly is definitely the right word - even I know enough to say that's good!  Kerby goes on to share his hopes for the future of crowdsourcing in his domain:

“Hopefully, crowdsourcing game plans is the next big Twitter craze. I don't know about you, but I anxiously await the day when you can look at Twitter's top trending topics and see "#howtostopLeBron" and "#thisishowyoubeattheNuggets" alongside "#JustinBieberRocks." It's a pipe dream for now, but this is a good first step.

Since crowdsourcing’s introduction to the social media lexicon, of all the promising Web 2.0 technologies, it has made the least amount of headway into the way humans interact.  Social networking sites like Facebook have fundamentally changed the way we socialize with each other.  Twitter and blogs have changed the way we get our news and information.  Why hasn’t crowdsourcing changed the way we get knowledge and work on collaborative projects?  Why does it still feel experimental and not familiar?

Sure, there have been any number of successful crowdsourcing projects, one notably where I work.  But why are they still projects and not just the way stuff is done?

In the interest of crowdsourcing, I’d love to hear from the crowd on this one.

Who has time for Twitter when there's Flutter?

Skittles Twitters The Rainbow

What if a real company decided to turn their whole site into a twitter conversation?

That’s what skittles did in what can only be described as a bold move to embrace Web2.0.

What a unique approach. In a traditional viral campaign, you launch a viral concept and it takes on a life of its own, living in media largely beyond your control. Skittles did one better. They launched a viral campaign and turned their website into an incubator for the virus. Talk about putting your money where your mouth is! An argument could be made that the skittles website isn’t core to their product sales, so replacing it with a twitter results page isn’t as big of a risk as if a B2B company were to do it. But still, you have to respect the moxie of Skittles’ Web 2.0 marketing team. What a great campaign!

Pulse on the Blogosphere

The Military Counter Attack Plan for Bloggers
Who knows how to protect and defend better than the Air Force? Well they are not only protecting our country but they are also protecting their blog and they have a detailed flow chart to determine their every move.

Friends for Burgers?
That's Burger King's new message with their Facebook app that promotes giving away a Whopper when you delete 10 of your friends. Now that is an expensive burger if you ask me! Check out other anti-social Facebook apps here.

Intel's Show & Tell
Intel's published their Social Media Guidelines for everyone to see. If you're trying to figure out what your guidelines are this may be a good place to shortcut your process.

Media on Twitter
This isn't acutally a blog post but a great reasource. If you're using Twitter as a communication channel to reach the media this Wiki page lists all the top dogs! A must for your PR department.

Cisco Marketing Has Got Game

Some call it social media excellence some just say we've gone crazy...whatever you call it, it seems to be working.

As an extension to the social media efforts that we're leveraged for Cisco's ASR launch, Cisco announced a tournament around the EDGE QUEST game where they are offering $10,000 cash plus a Cisco ASR 1002 router to the sole winner. Not a bad deal for playing a game but the competition is stiff with a top score currently at 204,540.

I haven't exactly kept it a secret that I'm one of the marketers behind this campaign so of course I think it's cool but here are a few specific reasons why I think it’s working for us:

1. We're reaching our target audience in a new, fun, and engaging way. Last year online gaming attracted 28 percent of the total worldwide online population -- almost 217 million people -- and according to CIMS, 24% of those were IT professionals! Us marketers are always trying to fish in a big pond but it helps when they’re all swimming in the same place.
2. Low cost, high ROI. This program was an extension of an existing program. The EDGE QUEST game was created at launch so the cost of the tournament includes just the "carrot" of $10K plus the router. We also invested a small amount in changing the game a bit for the "money round" of the tournament but no budget went into promotion we focused solely on social media outlets. In return we've had an influx in PR and Blog pick-ups and a substatial increase in traffic to the game and product page. All of this activity of course is being measured and considered as part of the ROI of the campaign.
3. It was just a blast to work on. Hey there's nothing wrong with that - it's fun for the people engaging with Cisco in a new way and it was fun to be part of the marketing team to develop and creatively promote the game and tournament leveraging social media tactics which included a social media release, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg and Flickr.

This particular campaign won't work for everyone but creating a social marketing campaign can get your customers engaged and extend your message far beyond traditional marketing.

Life in Real Time

Ryan Kuder twittered his last day at Yahoo! as they gave him the boot. You get a play-by-play update of this day from getting the news to backing up his files to getting his phone confiscated.

What's interesting about this is how real-time every aspect of our lives can be. Every meeting, every event, every conversation could be documented in seconds with the quick movement of one's thumbs across the keyboard on their phones. A private conversation with a customer or a meeting with an analyst can be 'Twittered' at anytime and posted for the world to see. This illustrates yet another way Web 2.0 is changing the way we communicate.

For marketing professionals the only thing scarier than someone twittering something negative about one of our campaigns is no one twittering anything at all.

Newsletter gone cold? Warm it up in the Web 2.0 Oven!

I have to admit, I love newsletters. As a "traditional" communication medium, you could do far worse. One of the problems with traditional newsletters though is that they're sent out in the format I need to send them in, regardless of what my customer wants. That just changed with a new Web 2.0 technology called FeedBlitz. With a recent announcement they are turning up the heat by claiming to not only send my newsletter via email but they also enable delivery via Skype, AIM, Twitter, RSS - and my favorite, an audio podcast!

This service has only been out a week so I can't give it a personal endorsement yet but I'm working on changing that. If you have a chance to try it please let me know what you think.