In my opinion, they are doing the best jobs. For the video podcast I host called Marketing Voices, I recently interviewed Pete Blackshaw EVP of Nielsen Online, who just completed an analysis of the campaigns and how they use social media. He gave me good insight on what corporate marketers need to do to make their brands better.
One of the more interesting thoughts he had involves reaching out in numerous languages. That seems like a no brainer but so many times i believe marketers forget to translate their messages.
Just as a promo point, Peter Blackshaw also is releasing his new book in July 2008 called Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends; Angry Customers Tell Three Thousand. I am sure it will be a good read.

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I just interviewed him for Marketing Voices and here is the interview, below. His advice on how marketers can effectively reach word-of-mouth influencers validates the use of blogs.
Rick discussed three ways that he thought were most effective: 1) set up a company blog 2) use next-generation PR tactics to reach out to bloggers and 3) advertise on blogs.
That last point is only still just catching on among marketers, but may be the most effective of all three strategies, both in terms of reach and influence. Rick cites Doubleclick’s research paper “Influencing the Influencers: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth,” which concluded that influencers pay considerably more attention to web ads than non-influencers when in the purchase decision process.

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Rafe was once at the magazine Red Herring and he has an interesting perspective on why audiences are responding to their own passion points and reading the blogs that matter to them rather than general interest newspapers.
We discussed the frustration I often see of my journalist friends who have academic training in journalism, but see bloggers not respecting journalism’s ethics yet getting more traction with their blogs. There are really no answers just observations.
Needless to say, journalism schools around the country are developing their curriculums differently to deal with these social media influences.

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Roy is also co-author of a book called Marketing Champions: Practical Strategies for Improving Marketing’s Power, Influence, and Business Impact. He has worked with numerous marketers from IBM, Wells Fargo, Microsoft and Visa – resulting in improving the stature and value of marketing at these companies.
In this podcast, Roy advises marketers to speak the language of business and not just the language of marketing, He also recommends that marketers should develop systematic processes for their marketing similar to processes developed by finance so that outcomes for marketing can be better measured and tracked. All good advice and I would love to hear how corporate marketers in the community achieve what he suggests because I believe many do.

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Crumpler explained how his company can help marketers better determine who is driving online opinions.When the service launched earlier this month, news coverage highlighted the potential value to marketers who have been searching for effective ways to participate in discussions and debates online in communities where some of their most passionate potential consumers are already sharing ideas.
The bottom line for BuzzLogic customers is that the social media universe can now be managed as one single channel, with the new ability to cut through the noise to the 10 or 20 most influential bloggers – a slight tweak on competitors’ offerings in that the focus is not necessarily on the most popular blogs, but specifically the most “influential.”
In his conversation with me, CEO Crumpler says this conversation targeting ad system delivers more than two times the performance than what could be done just a few months ago. The cost is $12,000 for an annual subscription which to me seems very reasonable given that many PR clipping services cost that for an annual fee.
I am not promoting the product, but I found the capabilities impressive and I wanted to draw attention to it for the MarketingProfs community.

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On my podcast show called Marketing Voices , I recently interviewed Charles Pizzo, a communications expert, about his tips for what you do when taken to task by a blogger. How do you “fight back”?
Pizzo mentions that it is all about setting up an online monitoring service and he refers to a free service called MonitorThis. Pizzo also talks in the podcast about how people can track and identify these cyber-smearers. All very good information in about 10 minutes!

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I host a show for PodTech called Marketing Voices, and I wanted to discover team blogs that have made it work. I spoke to Paula Berg, PR manager of Southwest Airlines, who has been managing the corporate blog for some time. It has been really successful, and they have more than 30 contributors, all of whom are making it work because they don’t have to blog daily or weekly, but quarterly.
Additionally, the Southwest employees represent all functions of the company–pilots, flight attendants, operations –and they have a passion for what they do. In my opinion, that is why it works, the passion for what they do shines through in what they write.
They don’t have to contribute unless they want to. Paula told me not all the people are great writers but their styles work and minor editing is all that is required.
Any more team blogs that people know about that are successful?

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At IDF, professionals from various groups and skill sets teamed up to share their IDF experiences using social media side-by-side with more traditional marketing and communications efforts.
We talked a lot about her strategy and challenges at melding marketing with public relations and advertising today. Intel is very interesting as a marketing group because they are expeimenting a lot with social media implementation–more so than any other corporation I have recently worked with.
As we all know, all communications is becoming more integrated, and there is an immediacy to marketing that only was only inherent in the recent past to PR activities at many companies. Intel really impresses me because they are taking social media implementation to the most strategic level and it is really working for them. Other companies could definitely learn from them.

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Nothing like the Democrats debate on CNN/YouTube, where I was quite impressed with the way that YouTube made the debates more worthwhile and interesting.
Given that it is THE TV industry… and they are supposedly some of the most creative, innovative people, I was expecting much much more. YouTube could have been used to take questions from the world audience asking those TV stars why they wore the dresses they wore, or why they picked out those certain high-heeled shoes. Not that I really care about the answers to questions such as these, but I would have loved to have viewed the interaction.
In my opinion, this venue provides the opportunity for social media use given that it is all about conversation and the reporting of conversation.
Just think if some of the stars would be asked to Twitter their thoughts and the other stars could respond to them in real-time… and the audience could read what they wrote. The gossip rags would go nuts and the whole scene could be much more electric.
Oh well there’s always next year.

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He and I have discussed lately how important storytelling is to Intel’s social media success. Being able to relate ideas and information through stories rather than just through the presentation of facts is what makes much of Intel’scommunication come alive. People’s passion for what they know and do gets illustrated through storytelling in Intel’s podcasts, videopodcasts and blogs.
Teaching executives how to storytell has been a well-used public relations tactic for many years, but I believe the ability to storytell is truly reaching a new level of importance given the prevalence of social media.
However, I am struck when I watch vblogs and listen to podcasts how many people today are not storytelling with social media. They don’t have a beginning, middle and end to their pieces, but instead often just list facts and thoughts, and don’t connect the information so that the viewer/listener etc. gets the point of the podcast, video blog, etc.
I suppose it comes down to media training for many of these individuals, or maybe others don’t feel as strongly as I do about this need for storytelling?

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