Corporate Social Media Crossfire

Session: “Why you should create a corporate social media platform:
community, blogs, rss, podcasts, wiki”

Monday at adTech 2006
Okay, so my first impression was this is the most crammed space, poor setup and forecasting for a conference. We were crammed into a tiny little meeting room and I felt like the guy next to me was sitting on top of me. I read that there were 10,800 people here and my bet is that 98% of them were in full business attire. There is definitely a coastal difference to conferences and you can tell in the subject matter as well. As I sat down and got ready for this session, I was soon to realize that big brands and companies still didn’t get it and were still just tiptoeing around web 2.0, social media marketing and how the guerrilla approach was affecting their users’ perception of their products.

What you see is that I took side notes throughout much of my coverage so I’ll be somewhat tagging those to a degree of reflection of the moment. [realization] Definite lack of experts in the web 2.0 space, most people are in the middle. Lack of this trend in this area, maybe coastal. The reason I say this is because much of the web apps insurgence is coming out of California, England and some startups in NYC. A lot of this opinion is based on requests/leads we receive from these areas to build and market web apps.

Techsmith: (Sorry didn’t have full name) Spoke about some web 2.0 type tools they were using.
Flickr account – users contribute photos
Blog – promoting actual users, schedule meetups, post videos
Forums – user community
Del.icio.us – social bookmarking
Second Life – experimenting
Blog Ads – targeting actual community’s blogs
Screencasts – like a podcast, similar to using WebEx, webinars

Scott Wilder, Intuit (Wonder if Scott was at my talk on Social Networking at Intuit)
He manages online communities – Quickbooks, discussion boards
[Interesting]
>Sits in the product development group – knowledge transfer from developers to community.
>Spreading WOM – facilitates offline conversation from online
>Using Mashup: Google maps with accountants in your area (Wonder how safe that is to have someone’s address?)
>Meetup.com – sending RSS feeds to users for events, training, etc.

Martin Green, CNET Networks
Mentioned “blog bling”: cool term, web 2.0
(knows his stuff a lot more than the others)
Examples of Badges and widgets – Amazon, Gapingvoid, Firefox
Firefox – mentions spreadfirefox.com (Woo Hoo!)
[Interesting]
>badges are controlled by company (what about letting users create your badges? Go 100% UGC)
>what about a widget directory? (quick note to self, intellectual property?)

Ross Ozer, Fidelity Investments
He’s been podcasting for a year. Interesting vertical and demographic he has to deal with.

Doritos Person
Just starting to use a blog (big brands slow to adopt)
She mentions having a community of 300 users…

My Overview of this session:

Technology is the ability to expand social strategies, it’s not just creating the community, but what you do with it. I think what you find is that the smaller, nimble companies are adopting these tools and tactics very quickly, taking them to market, adjusting as they collide with something in the way and innovating to stay ahead. I was generally shocked by the lack of knowledge and the true entry-level approach to the web 2.0 space, social networking, etc. The next few sessions seemed to tap into the same areas and gave a little more insight into these areas.

technorati tags: social networking | corporate marketing | social network strategy | web 2.0 | social media marketing | adtech