Social Media Blog by Michael Brito
Insights into the social web & real
time community engagement
time community engagement
I was asked by my previous professor to come and speak to her class of graduate students at Golden Gate University about social media. I spent about an hour talking through some basic definitions and also included more advanced topics like Forrester’s Social Technographic Ladder of Participation, the POST method, Robert Scoble’s Social Media Starfish and Rohit Bhargava’s 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization. The presentation was well received and some students even joined twitter; and I take full credit for that! I hope you enjoy the preso.
Introduction to Social Media
It’s different in every company and in my experience; the term “ownership” has negative connotations and is the cause for organizational conflict, hurt feelings and a decline in productivity. This is one of the downfalls in working for a large company.
So, back to ownership … is it marketing, PR or the business units who are out there building community? I really don’t know and I really don’t care. Implementing social media within in an organization requires a paradigm shift. It requires employees at all levels – starting at the very top – to change their thinking and embrace online relationships; as well as the conversations that blossom. It requires those who touch social media to communicate and share what they are doing internally. Working in organizational silos only harms the effort.
And walk through life with their heads down as if those who participate in social media don’t really exist? I don’t get it.
A few months back, Burson-Marsteller conducted a study that found that 15% of Fortune 500 companies communicate with people via corporate blogs. Only 74 Fortune 500 companies actively maintain a blog! It’s almost criminal. Now of course, a corporate blog is just one tool in the overall social universe; but I wonder how many of the other 426 companies have some presence in social media. It doesn’t have to be a blog. It could be a twitter account, Facebook page or a community hosted on/off domain. In my opinion, companies, brands, products – whatever you want to call it – have to participate in some way. And I am not just talking about the Fortune 500 either.
Here’s why:
A study back in June showed that 55% of consumers want [...]
My good friend and social media strategist, Reem Abeidoh, just interviewed me and my colleagues Tac Anderson (HP) and LaSandra Brill (Cisco) for a post she wrote on Pro Blogger. Here is an excerpt from the intro paragraph:
In order to maintain a competitive edge, corporations are increasingly looking for opportunities to make them stand out. Although traditional media serves as a solid medium that disperses company messaging to the world, the trends of information consumption are evolving. After some initial hesitancy, corporations are slowly starting to realize that it is important to jump on the virtual bandwagon of blogging. This medium represents the missing ingredient that traditional media lacks: the ability to directly connect a company to its customers.
On October 28 at the San Jose Convention Center, the Blog Council is hosting a new event called BlogWell. It is a panel of enterprise marketers and professionals that will discuss social media.
I anticipate that it will be a great discussion as they will be sharing case studies, best practices, and other insights into corporate blogging and social media. These are people who not just theoretically talk about social media; but also execute and are held accountable for the results. My good friend and colleauge, Ken Kaplan from Intel will be presenting.
