April 11, 2012
- Celebrity endorsement used to mean attempting to have some of celebrities' popularity transferred to the product being pitched. The message was, "I like this, you like me, so you should like this, too." J.R. Johnson is a veteran entrepreneur and founder of the social travel site and app Trippy. Trippy is using a new model for celebrity endorsement that's more participatory — for the brand, for the celebrities, and for their respective social connections —than standard...
April 4, 2012
- According to Banafsheh Ghassemi, VP Marketing at American Red Cross, relying too heavily on sentiment and other analyses from social media can create blind spots for marketers in our multi-channel world. We need to be listening on all the channels in which we engage our customers. In this conversation, she shares with us her perspectives on the integration of business strategies and emerging technologies, such as sentiment analysis....
March 28, 2012
- In today's convo, we look at how one company's blog-centric content marketing strategy benefits from solid vision and good tools. I speak with Emily Bosma, Digital Media & Content Anthropologist at Turnstone Furniture and Mike Lewis, President of content marketing platform Kapost. Turnstone is using Kapost to help manage its blog — and bloggers — to improve workflow and analyze post effectiveness....
March 21, 2012
- When Pepsi's Tropicana wanted to give a social lift to its recently launched Trop50, it faced the challenge of creating advocacy at scale among bloggers as part of its Trop50 True Resolutions Facebook experience. Working with Social Chorus, Tropicana focused on the Power Middle of relevant bloggers. The earned and paid efforts succeeded in activating 174 bloggers who produced 210 blog posts and over 36,000 social actions across multiple social media platforms....
March 16, 2012
- Cyberbullying is a challenging issue for teens and young adults. Reachout.com — an online support community for teens and young adults — has just launched the "Don’t Just Stand By" teen Facebook app developer competition to help provide information about cyberbullying and encourage action. In today's convo, I speak with Anastasia Goodstein, Director of Digital Programs at the Inspire USA Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Reachout.com....
March 14, 2012
- The air can often get very thin in the executive conference rooms of large corporations. How are those at the C-level maintaining their brands' reputations and dealing with crisis as news cycles continue to shorten because of Twitter and emerging platforms? And are there lessons for small- and medium sized businesses to be found in their travails? Bill Wohl, former CCO of HP, discloses the answers....
March 6, 2012
- Brands need to develop ways to manage their communications in the context of short news cycles and near-instant social media sharing. In this convo, I speak with Toby Webb, founder and chairman of Ethical Corporation, who offers some actionable advice on reputation preservation and crisis management.
March 1, 2012
- In this convo, Alex Schott, Entergy's Manager, Social Media & Multimedia, describes a framework for managing the weather conversation — preparing before, reporting during and solving after the storm. He also shares how the company integrates broadcast and social media to reach as many customers as possible during a storm. Crisis communications is only one element of Entergy's expanding social media activities intended to provide information, improve support capabilities and, in...