We are really excited that Kris Jones, President & CEO of pepperjamSEARCH has agreed to be the inaugural interviewee in our social media optimization series.
Pepperjam is an industry leading full-service internet marketing agency recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing privately-held businesses in the United States.
Kris is considered one of the top internet marketing experts in the world. A true pioneer and leading voice of the industry, he is a prominent speaker and moderator at leading national and international marketing conferences. Read more...(1053 words, 1 image, estimated 4:13 mins reading time)
Interesting article in the Boston Globe this weekend about how the airlines are now using social media tactics to improve customer service especially with its top customers.
Continental Airlines now has customer service reps whose job it is to visit forums and blogs and see what people are saying about their airline. The main SMO guru at Continental is Scott O’Leary. According to the article:
Since being assigned to monitor Flyertalk, www.airliners.net, and blogs on various websites, O’Leary has solved dozens of problems that irritate road warriors. He has posted more than 500 comments in the past year alone on Flyertalk, most answering questions, shooting down rampant rumors, or highlighting a change in the airline’s frequent-flier program.
The #2 social networking site last week unveiled a new look with some pretty cool features. While MySpace gets all the media (and user) attention, Facebook has had a pretty good 12 months.
At the unveiling of Facebook Platform, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerman rattled of the following numbers (courtesy of Mashable.com).
General Growth
More than 24 million active users
More than 100,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007
An average of 3 percent weekly growth since Jan. 2007
Active users have doubled since Facebook expanded registration in Sept. 2006
User DemographicsRead more...(419 words, 1 image, estimated 1:41 mins reading time)
Interesting story from MySpace today where Barack Obama supporter Joe Anthony who had been running a successful MySpace site for Barack suddenly found out that his space was actually Barack’s.
The MySpace site, which Joe Anthony started 2 ½years ago, is something that the Barack camp had been ok with. In fact according to the AP story with the Obama team, which worked with Anthony on the content and even had the password to make changes themselves.
Problems arose when the Senator’s Presidential aspirations started to gain momentum and the campaign became concerned about an outsider having control of the content so the campaign told Anthony they wanted him to turn over the MySpace site to them. Read more...(365 words, 1 image, estimated 1:28 mins reading time)
Great article by Jeremiah Owyang about social media strategies. What makes Jeremiah worth reading is that he has walked the social media path, as he helped Hitachi develop its social media plan.
In his blog post, Jeremiah outlined his 12 strategies for organizing your Corporate Social Media Program. The top ones I thought were:
Recognize the new influencers: Like Media, Press, and Analysts, consider Social Media yet an additional influencer group to reach.
Track who’s who. Create an index of bloggers and influences in your industry, consider putting on an internal list, an internal feedreader or even on an industry wiki.
Read more...(531 words, 1 image, estimated 2:07 mins reading time)
I had an interesting discussion with a client about my KFC post. The question that they asked was that if I had been working on reputation management with KFC, what would I have had them do differently?
It was a great question which eventually led to this post. When an event like rats in a restaurant happens, no amount of PR or reputation management will make the story go away. The situation happened, and what you are trying to do is mitigate the impact of negative press that you are receiving. In the KFC case, as a result of their inactivity, search engine result pages and social media sites like Technorati and YouTube are full of KFC and rats stories. These postings and files will live infamously online for years, impacting the public perception of KFC for years. Read more...(741 words, 1 image, estimated 2:58 mins reading time)
It is my guess that KFC did not have a reputation management plan in place before last weeks YouTube video of rats in their restaurant hit the Internet. Before you could say “rats” the video had gone viral and KFC had a huge public relations problem on their hands.
Unlike PR crisis in the past, where the duration of the crisis was limited to people’s memories, location and new cycles, the Internet means that the rat issue in Greenwich Village is not just a local NYC story. Suddenly it is a national story that has a lot of negative implications for KFC. Read more...(396 words, 1 image, estimated 1:35 mins reading time)
Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdbl has an interesting posting titled 7 Opportunities for “New School” SEO. Todd’s suggestions might say SEO, but four of them are very applicable to anyone interested in SMO.
1. Social media marketing
SMM is NOT social media manipulation – it is learning what social communities online are looking for and giving it to them… (…so hard that they BLEED)
To often SEO’s think that SMO is simply manipulation of social sites like Digg and MySpace. It is not that simple. The social netwoeking sites are all different, and to be successful with social media marketing you need to know the difference between MySapce and Bebo. Read more...(443 words, 1 image, estimated 1:46 mins reading time)
That was the question that many observers last week when the news broke that Universal Music Group was suing Grouper and Bolt.com for copyright infringements. Well it seems that the reason why YouTube was not included was because YouTube was giving away stock in itself to Universal, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG before it was sold to Google. So now Universal, Warner and Sony could receive $50 million from Google’s acquisition of YouTube.
In some circles that is called settling a lawsuit before it goes to court!
It is well known that one of the first steps that a Human Resources department takes after receiving a resume from a recent college graduate is to head over to MySpace and Facebook and learn more about the candidate. A bad or negative profile on these social sites can mean the end of the application process for many students. Reputation management should be something that every college senior focuses on this year. It can make the difference between finding your dream job or just any job. Read more...(354 words, 1 image, estimated 1:25 mins reading time)
