Social Media Blog by Michael Brito
Insights into the social web & real
time community engagement
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I attending the SMC event a few nights ago and one topic that came up was Forrester’s recent decision of not allowing their analysts to blog about social media unless it was on the official Forrester blog. Here is LaSandra Brill, Janet Fouts and Erin Robbins take on personal and corporate brands:
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.
This is my second stint at BlogWorld and I am very excited to be sitting on two panels to share my experience working with social media in a fortune 100 company. Last year, I was just a participant and found many of the sessions I attended to be extremely valuable, specifically the closing keynote by Mark Cubin.
The first panel, titled How to Implement Blogs & Social Media Strategies for Big Business is on Friday, September 19th from 3:30 PM to 4:45 PM, moderated by none other than Michael Rubin who works for the Blog Council. Others on the panel will be John Andrews of Walmart and Hillary Weber of Kaiser Permanente. This session particularly interests me because implementing social media in any way is definitely a challenge in corporate America; and I am pleased to be sharing my experiences with everyone.
The second panel, titled, Beyond Blogging: Stories & Social Media [...]
Whoa, it sure has been a busy two months. I have been swamped with other stuff that I have neglected to write in this blog. First, I was asked by Michael Rubin of the Blog Council to write a post for their blog that just launched. My post titled, Thinking Strategically about Corporate Blogging outlines several things marketers must consider before launching a corporate blog strategy.
I also wrote a post in my other blog about making the business case for using Twitter; and cite great examples of how companies (like @Richardatdell) use twitter to build relationships, listen, and participate in meaningful conversations. I also cite the not so good examples from HP and Yahoo; both of which are my former employers.
I was asked by Chris Heuer to be a part of the Interim Board of Directors for the Social Media Club. I humbly accepted and I am currently the lead [...]
The new blog is launched! Please tell me what you think and be honest. I actually designed the look and feel myself in Photoshop; and then hired the guys over at Unique Blog Designs to program it and build in the functionality. We ran into some problems with the latest version of Wordpress not being compatible with the version of MySQL database on my host; and we were locked out of the control panel for a few days because the license expired on Plesk (I hate Plesk by the way). Customer support was horrible; well…a good friend of mine was hosting the site for free so I should be nice (even though he was so darn non-responsive for like two days). Nonetheless, we moved hosts and everything seems to be working properly.
Don’t be deceived by the title. Advertising will never ever ever ever go away. Despite what Al and Laura say in their book, Advertising still works and is here to stay! However, social media is taking the market by storm for several reasons. I personally think its customer engagement. When customers feel engaged, they become loyal brand ambassadors with a strong emotion of belonging. This is something that can’t easily be taken away by a competitor. When a company can create that dynamic of two-way communication between a customer and a company, they are more likely to help foster long term, profitable relationships with them. Here are some recent headlines about companies that are adopting social media strategies as a part of their overall marketing mix.
In the news this week it is reported that hgtv.com is launching a social networking site for their target consumer group. Users of the site will [...]
I started this blog in September 2006 and receive roughly 1,000 unique visitors, 2,100 page views and two new clients. Not bad for a blog that I only post entries in about once a week. The fact is that blogging is essential in today’s society. Businesses of all sizes are learning that having a presence on the internet is simply not enough. Importantly, having a site that is truly customer friendly, optimized for the search engines, and one that is regularly updated is not only essential to a website performing well, but it can also contribute to the overall success of your business. One area of website management that some businesses are overlooking is blogging. Let’s take a look at this relatively new medium phenomena and just how a well crafted and managed blog can go far in supporting your company’s marketing strategy.
Mention the word “blog” to some folks and [...]
