Social Media is About Community
Social media has changed the way all marketers, including B2B marketers, think about marketing. Everywhere they turn they are bombarded with messages about social media, and more specifically Twitter, Facebook, blogs, iPhone apps. How does a classically-trained Director of Marketing stop the currently marketing plan while the organization learns about social media? They don’t stop what they are doing, but the learning part is easy.
Continue Reading this post on SocialMediaB2B.com
Social Media to Help Local Businesses
Michelle Courtney runs the website TriangleB2B.com to provide local businesspeople with helpful information that they can use to grow their businesses. Read more
Social Media in NYC Hotel
On a recent trip to NYC, I chatted with Brian Simpson about the Roger Smith Hotel’s involvement in the New York social media community. Read more
6 Reasons to Attend Triangle Startup Weekend
This weekend’s Triangle Startup Weekend is a great event for anyone who wants to collaborate on new businesses ideas and flex their coding skills in interesting ways. But this is not just an event for entrepreneurs or developers, as companies are about more than just ideas and lines of code. These companies need names, logos, press releases, social media campaigns, videos along with their great ideas and shiny websites. So if you are someone who is willing to get behind an idea and work hard all weekend, here are six reasons to consider attending Triangle Startup Weekend at Edge Office in Downtown Raleigh.
1. Choose your function
While you may not be able to find a new job in this economy, you can work in a different area from the one that brings in your paycheck. You may not even be dissatisfied in your job, but are looking for a short-term challenge. If there is a skill that you have been honing in your spare time, but haven’t brought to the professional forefront, this is the perfect opportunity. Startup Weekend participants are helpful and open and generally will assist you in working with those new skills.
2. Choose your project
Unless you currently run a company or manage lots of employees, someone else is telling you what to do and what projects to work on. Startup Weekend gives you the chance to choose which team you would like to be part of. It’s great to pitch an idea to the room, and maybe your idea will be voted to the top. But if it is not, pick the one that best fits with your interests and experience. And the team that you pick Friday night may not be the one you return to on Saturday morning. You are totally in control of your destiny.
3. Lead an area
As the group dynamics develop around skills and interests, you can speak up and lead one of the functional areas. It may be something you normally do, or may be totally new, but there are leadership roles and organizational roles in every project. Someone has to be in charge of defining tasks and making sure they get done. This is even true in a non-programming role where you may be the only one handling the tasks.
4. Work hard and have fun
Everyone on a team has to be committed to the project and work hard to meet the goal: launch by Sunday evening. Does this mean work through 54 hours straight without sleep? That depends on the team. If the project requires that amount of work and everyone has committed to it, then it does. But mainly the amount of work derives from the team’s expectations. If you have committed to building the front end of the website by Saturday, then your team is counting on you to do that. The work needs to be something you enjoy and are happy to do. Of course there will be stress over the weekend, but it is about fun in a business building atmosphere.
5. Network
An obvious benefit of Startup Weekend is that it gives you the opportunity to network. And this is not a few minutes over a craft-brewed beer and some finger food. This is an intense weekend of solving problems, working together, fighting it out and creating something of value. You will get to know people in a real working environment. You may find a new business partner. You may find someone that seems cool, but writes messy code. These connections can be what you make of them, but the goods ones will be stronger than you might expect. Bonding happens in the trenches of building a business.
6. Start a company
The goal of Startup Weekend is for each team to start a company that can launch by Sunday. This is a very lofty goal that requires hard work, the right idea, the right team and lots of coffee. This has been done many times over the lifespan of Startup Weekend nationally, and even locallly. Last July we launched four companies at RTP Startup Weekend. The challenge is to find the time and dedication to sustain that company after the event. This will also depend on the people involved and the demands of everyone’s regular life. It can be done, but it is not the norm.
If you come to Triangle Startup Weekend thinking you will be on the road to your personal recovery as part of a successful startup and the stock options are just around the corner, you may be disappointed. But if you come to experience the thrill of working with great people to build a company in weekend, you will have a great time. See you on Friday.
For more information, go to TriangleStartupWeekend.com.
Social Media at NC State Fair
I recently sat down with Karlie Justus, a PR/social media officer with the NC State Fair and NC Department of Agriculture and we talked about her integrated social media campaign for the 2008 State Fair. Read more
Launch of New Social Media B2B Site
Earlier this week Kipp Bodnar announced the launch of a new site focusing on the impact of social media on B2B companies. Below are both his announcement and a video explaining the site. I am including them here for two reasons. The first is that I am involved in the project and they are good explanations of why we are doing what we are doing. The second is they include shoutouts to me, so I wanted to share a collaborator’s thoughts about my social media insight.
Over the course of the past year I noticed a lack of conversation about how social media would change the way B2B companies operate and market their businesses. At the same time clients were asking me for examples of social media’s applications in B2B situations. It is these two factors and some other discussions with friends that lead me to start SocialMediaB2B.com. Big thanks to Jeff Cohen who has stepped up to help lead this project.
I plan to post excerpts of the my SocialMediaB2B.com posts here as well, so look for those in the Social Media category. They will be taqgged socialmediaB2B. If you are interested in social media in a B2B environment, make sure you subscribe over on the site. We have lots of great posts in the works.
Kipp Bodnar Talks about Social Media Breakfast Raleigh
Even though Kipp spends so much time in front of the camera himself, I thought I would take this opportunity to ask him a few questions about Social Media Breakfast in Raleigh, NC. Originally started in Boston by Bryan Person, Social Media Breakfast has now expanded into others cities with local organizers in each city. Social Media Breakfast gives local communities an opportunity to come together once a month and discuss various topics related to social media. Go to the Social Media Breakfast Raleigh website for more information about upcoming events and planned speakers. And join us next month.
Federal Trade Commission Makes Videos
According to the Ad Age blog Songs for Soap “the Federal Trade Commission released its own music video viral campaign — a set of singsongy spoofs to combat those freecreditreport.com ads that seem to be on every time you turn on the television.” While I am not going to argue about the use of the term viral, even though one cannot produce a viral video, it has become shorthand for a quirky video that marketers hope viewers share with everyone they have ever friended online, I will certainly question how successful this campaign will be.
The FTC hopes to inform people that freecreditreport.com is not free, but signs users up for a trial membership that is only free if you cancel within 14 days. There has been plenty written about staying away from the site, but the Feds are trying a different approach. The site they are singing about, annualcreditreport.com is the government-sponsored site where you can get a free credit report from each of the three credit bureaus for one year.
Here’s a link to the other video on YouTube.
Below are the reasons this campaign will not succeed, and they don’t need much explanation.
1. The song is not very tuneful
2. The singer has no presence and actually appears to sneer while he is singing.
3. There is nothing clever or catchy that causes someone to want to share this video. While the songs are different in style, the sets and direction of the videos are similar enough to the originals that they feel like note-for-note cover versions with no personality, rather than spoofs.
4. While the videos mention other services that charge fees and their service is free, it is not clear that this is an ad for a government-sponsored site.
5. Experian, the credit bureau that owns freecreditreport.com, spent $70 million in advertising in 2007, and reportedly more in 2008.
6. These videos are posted on YouTube and nowhere else.
7. There is no presence of these videos on Digg, a site that helps content go viral.
8. Google results are poor for these videos, and includes a couple of blogs (now this one) and some news articles about it. The first page of Google results even includes a review video of how to use the site annualcreditreport.com.
9. The video is buried on the FTC website and does not appear anywhere on the site it is advertising.
10. YouTube’s related video feature encourages the viewer to watch the freecreditreport.com videos, which will remind everyone how much better they are and will lead viewers away from these videos rather than sharing them.
So yes, it is important for the Federal Trade Commission to let people know there is a free credit report web site and the one they are most familiar with is not actually free, but this is not a good way to do it. Their new videos are so similar that many consumers will just think they are watching another installment of the video series they know and like.
Branding and Social Media from Will It Blend
As part of a work project, we interviewed George Wright, VP of Marketing, and Kels Goodman, Video Producer, of Blendtec. They are the creators of the popular YouTube videos series, Will It Blend?, which has generated over 200 million views. They spoke about the inspiration for the series, the goals behind the campaign, the keys to social media, and how it relates to B2B marketing and corporate culture. They even gave a shout out to Koroberi.
Originally posted at Koroberi.com.
Disaster Ignites Media’s Reliance on Twitter
With the recent bushfires in Australia, the worst in the nation’s history, social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr has kept people informed and in touch. According to an article from the Australian newspaper, The Age, “Mainstream news outlets, battling to provide comprehensive coverage of the tragedy, have incorporated accounts published on the social networking sites extensively in their reports.”
The people on the ground had better access to the tragedy happening around them, and mobile and web tools gave them the outlets to get this information out to the rest of the world. Even the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, used his Twitter account to talk to his 7,000 followers to provide links to emergency government assistance and ways to donate.
More and more people are tapped into these social networks, and the outpouring of content continues to grow with every major event. Tragedies feel bigger because we can put a human face on them. We read the words and we see the pictures as they happen. And acts of heroism get magnified for the same reason.
Originally posted on Koroberi.com