Feb 4 2010

The End of Social Media Fiefdoms?

February 4, 2010 – 7:00 am

By Jenn Riggle

Photo courtesy of antaldaniel

Photo courtesy of antaldaniel

Like the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, we’re seeing the barriers between the different social media platforms begin to topple. I guess this isn’t surprising, as we see social media become more and more a part of our every day lives.

The good news is that this makes it easier to maintain your different social media accounts and integrate their information. The bad news is that it’s also easier to maintain your various social media personalities and become a “Social Media Sybil” (okay, I’m really dating myself here).

Probably the example that we’re all most familiar with is TweetDeck, which allows people to simultaneously update their Facebook and Twitter status or view Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace updates from a single dashboard. By the same token, LinkedIn has shown a blending of platforms, recently adding Twitter feeds to its profiles. I always felt that in many ways, LinkedIn was a network of resumes. By adding Twitter feeds, profiles become much more dynamic and you really get a sense of what people are like by seeing what they’re reading (through links) and saying online. By the same token, since finding a job is a lot like dating, online dating services like eHarmony should consider adding Twitter feeds to their profiles as well.

But probably the thing that hammered this idea home for me was that job search sites like Simply Hired released new features that expand its integration with social networks liked LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. This makes it easier for people to connect with recruiters and hiring managers online. It also offers a “Share” feature that allows you to share job listings with friends on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – as well as through e-mail. This can help you determine if you know anyone who works at that company and enlist their help to get you an interview.

Meanwhile, Facebook is positioning itself to become your online identity through Facebook Connect, which allows you to access multiple Web sites with your Facebook information. More than 60 million people use Facebook Connect to access Web sites every month, many without even knowing it. And you can find it almost anywhere, including thousands of news sites, social media services, and now, even MySpace. Not to be outdone, rumor has it that Twitter is developing a “Twitter Connect” service that will allow you to sign on to other sites with your Twitter information, pull data and then publish it on Twitter.

But it would appear that the real game changer here is Posterous, which allows you to post things online using e-mail. For example you can e-mail a video to Posterous and it can simultaneously post it to your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, blog site and YouTube accounts.  Mashable recently did a comparison of Tumblr and Posterous and ranked the latter as setting the bar for ease of integration and “rolling out features faster than humanly possible.”

Would love to hear your thoughts about how this convergence is impacting you. But one thing is for certain, this is only the beginning and we’ll continue to see more social media integration as people try to be everywhere at once.

 
AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Jenn Riggle | Posted in Social Networks, social media | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (3)
Jan 28 2010

Is Social Media the “Road to Nowhere” for Hospitals?

January 28, 2010 – 8:00 am

By Jenn Riggle

Photo courtesy of Kenneth Hynek

Photo courtesy of Kenneth Hynek

It can be if you don’t know where you’re going.

And according to new research from Greystone.Net, this seems to be the case — only 1 in 3 hospitals have a social media plan.

I’m not quite convinced of the accuracy of this research, which reports that 9 in 10 hospitals/health systems are currently using some form of social media. While I love the idea that so many hospitals are using social media, Greystone.Net’s percentage of engaged hospitals seems overly optimistic. According to Ed Bennett, whose blog provides an ongoing list of hospitals engaged in social media, 540 hospitals, or 10 percent of the nation’s 5,010 community hospitals, are currently using social media in some form or another.

However, the fact that only 33 percent of hospitals (and again, I think this number is high) have a social media plan is problematic, since these efforts are not tied to strategy or to hospital marketing and business plans. In fact, I hazard to guess that many hospitals are simply setting up Twitter accounts, posting videos on YouTube and creating Facebook pages without thinking how they can use these tools to support their service lines and improve communication with the community they serve.

To take the analogy further (with the help of Former Vice President Al Gore) hospitals are simply traveling down the information superhighway without a road map. Not knowing where they’re going, it’s highly unlikely they’ll arrive at their destination. Chances are, they’ll get lost.

Greystone.Net’s research also shows that hospitals have not budgeted for social media projects or hired employees to manage these programs. This could be a recipe for failure, since social media efforts are time intensive efforts that require research and engagement – and without resources, these duties fall on the health system’s PR and Marketing Team, who are already strapped dealing with the day-to-day activities of the hospital.

So I thought I’d take a quick look at two health systems of different sizes and resources which have taken systematic approaches to harnessing social media and have had tremendous results:

1.  Aurora Health Care, a 13-hospital integrated delivery network in Milwaukee, Wis., has mastered Twitter. The health system has more than 6,000 Twitter followers (@Aurora_Health), when many other hospitals have hundreds. One reason Aurora Health has been so successful is that it understands that social media is not a broadcasting tool, but instead, is about conversation. Research shows that nearly 20 percent of Aurora’s tweets or posts are conversational in nature.

In addition, Aurora Health “live-tweeted” during a double-knee replacement surgery to help promote its orthopedics service line. As a result, not only did the number of its followers increase from 900 to 2,000 and it generated a national media placement on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” but it also received 20 inquiries about knee surgery, 14 who actually had the surgery performed.

2.  On the other end of the spectrum, Sarasota Memorial Health Care System, a small Florida health system, doesn’t have a huge marketing team, but it has done a great job with social media. John Domansky, a healthcare consultant and blogger from Iowa, ranked the hospital as a “Best Practice” social hospital for its engaging Twitter account, easy to navigate Web site and active Facebook page. In fact, according to an article in the Tampa Bay Medical News, Facebook drives 4,000 people, or 5 percent, of Sarasota Memorial’s monthly Web traffic. This comes just after the Web site address and search engine traffic.

Social media holds great promise, but hospitals need to allocate resources and integrate social media efforts with their existing marketing and business plans.

Two-thirds of hospitals don’t have a social media plan. The question they need to ask themselves: Do we feel lucky?

 
AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Jenn Riggle | Posted in Social Networks, social media | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (36)
Jan 22 2010

Conan Interruptus – Socializing Old Media

January 22, 2010 – 12:15 am

There is nothing like a PR disaster to get the ol’ buzz rolling, and the ongoing mess surrounding NBC’s evening lineup has added some fun for those of us who don’t have to deal with it from the inside or for any of the sparring camps representing the hosts.  The move to push Conan O’Brien off the air is particularly interesting in that it represents yet another example of the new age in broadcast – Socialization of Old Media.

The celebrities in charge of these shows often call attention to the failings of their networks, but this “conversation” about the juggling of the lineup got authentic awfully quickly. In  the old days firings were handled offline and quietly. In this case, the offended parties took their feeling directly to the small communities that surround late night programming on NBC and the Jay Leno Show. And Conan provided his supporters with some bits that showed his comic smarts in much the same way as his antics during an earlier interruption of his show (see clip here). Conan Interruptus

About the fight, Conan quipped he could go “star in a Lifetime original movie about a woman trapped in an abusive relationship with her network.”

All the one-liners zinging back and forth resembled nothing so much as a video Tweetfest.  I’m hoping that this fracas represents an evolving balance between the legalistic corporate speak of old and a new transparency in the world of television.

It was refreshing to see the fallen heroes of late night speak their piece in such an open manner. Radar online’s report on the Charlie Rose interview with NBC top dog Jeff Zucker this week sported a comment about Zucker being “what’s wrong with NBC.” Zucker tried not to cry over the $40 million + out of pocket for O’Brien and team, but did succumb to some strained explanations of the situation.

What’s also interesting is the way these studio matters have had an outsized influence on traditional and social media. Variations of The Tonight Show search became a trending topic on Twitter in recent weeks  – ironic, perhaps, for the anti-Twitter O’Brien. What’s not interesting is the debate in some circles about what the network did to Conan. Puhleese! He’ll survive and thrive, paraphrasing Jerry Seinfeld from a story by Sheila Marikar of ABC.

For PR people, the opportunity to observe such a crisis closely and to see the entertainers be so true to themselves was both a little refreshing and a little alarming. It’s a brave new world when such conflicts can’t be sanitized and controlled. I like it better for now, but many companies aren’t particularly well equipped to deal with similar crises scaled to their situations.

As for our late night TV “crisis?” David Carr reported this week in The New York Times that NBC didn’t kill these shows. We did. We have some affection for them, of course, but in a world where we get plenty of news fed to us all day, with the ability to see the reruns on a variety of channels the next day and where our friends are at work to keep us in the loop, well…we just don’t need late night TV like we used to.

I’m kinda glad the recent NBC conflict  spread in such a social way, aided by the principal players being themselves. It reminded me that TV can still be fun.

 
AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Michael Whitlow | Posted in Internet Marketing, Social Networks, social media | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)
Jan 18 2010

The Conversation about the Conversation

January 18, 2010 – 5:29 am

BlogPotomac 2009

by Geoff Livingston

Maybe it’s because I was gone for two months on a sabbatical, but returning to my reader has been a disappointment. Let me be more specific. In particular the social media, PR and marketing blog posts about PR, social media, marketing and, yes, the general “conversation,” read like a time warp back to 2007.

From social media consultant and PR bad apple rants to suggested proper RFPs and Facebook vs. Twitter posts, the social media conversation seems to be the same old conversation. The echo chamber seems to be in full effect tripping all over itself.

Hmm, that’s useful.

Meanwhile —-> There’s a mobile revolution going on driving the next generation of the web. And oh yeah, people are using it do really useful things, like raising millions of dollars to help Haiti earthquake victims. We’re talking record breaking amounts raised using mobile media.

Or how about an increasingly important issue raised by the semantic web with privacy? For example, Facebook users’ photos, home towns and friends lists are all public now, and Mark Zuckerberg would redesign the network to make all data open. While harnessing social information to serve users with “smarter” content companies, and increasingly nonprofits, sacrifice that most important aspect of the social web: Human relationships. In return for receiving users information in a trusted relationship, they move away from sincerity and return back to the 1.0 machine of consumer exploitation.

Or what about the incredible fight for viability the newspaper and traditional media industry continues to face? And then there’s the almost complete failure of government 2.0 to provide transparency into government.

What are we as a communications community of bloggers, the people that helped usher in the era of the social web doing to prepare our customers and readers for the web of now? In my opinion, the marketplace trusts us to provide this kind of intelligence. How can the current conversation about the conversation really be considered germane when overwhelming evidence shows a dramatic shift towards application-based and portable media?

It’s becoming a question of relevance. And it’s only a matter of time before people simply tune out.

Notes: Like Valeria Maltoni, I am a link nazi, but because of the sensitive nature of this post I felt it was best to not call out individual bloggers. Special thanks do go out to Ike Pigott for inspiring the title of this post.

 
AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Geoff Livingston | Posted in communications, social media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (35)
Jan 15 2010

10 Years From Now – A Look Back

January 15, 2010 – 12:16 am

Again this year, I got links to dozens of those inevitable posts that come up at the beginning and end of a year. All this got me to thinking about both inevitability about wishes for the future. An email from a friend came also, remindin me of a whole list of things that weren’t around in the olden days (cell phones, polio vaccine, etc.), and it turned out that the “olden” days included the early span of my life – providing even more cause to reflect about just where all of this is going, particularly when it comes to communications.

As colleague Geoff Livingston said in Now is Gone, “Communications have evolved more in the last 10 years than in the previous 100.” And, for those of us toiling in the consulting business at CRT/tanaka who are focused on such things, the next ten years hold some pretty awesome promise for the practice of public relations.

First off, there is no loftier publication on the the planet than The Economist, and it’s covering public relations.  The Economist gives PR a good start on the coming year and decade with its declaration  “Good News: Other firms’ suffering has bolstered the public relations Business.” Aside from being amused by “good news” and “suffering” in such proximity, I was impressed by the number of trends that seem to add up in our favor.

While Richard Edelman’s description of PR as the “organising principle” behind many business decisions is a point of view that might be more an aspirational goal for a PR firm exec, there are a number of opportunities on our next-10-year horizon that do seem attainable and desirable.

First, there’s the thorny issue of reputation. What used to be thought of as “reputation management” must become a more sincere effort to engage with dozens of stakeholders in any enterprise and incorporate lots of their thinking into the direction of the organization. This opportunity is especially applicable for business, and my 10-year crystal ball says it will also affect politics in the period. We simply cannot continue to have Republicans and Democrats treat the running of a great country as just a power tilt between two parties any more than we can have irresponsible lending drive us into another economic ditch. People are rebelling and will continue to do so. Public relations plays an important role in guiding organizations to do the right things.

The second big dynamic that caught my eye in The Economist was described as “the withering of many traditional media outlets.”  That makes PR “doubly important,” by its ability to bypass such old media and through its capability of engaging new media. There is no set of people on the planet better situated than public relations professionals to take advantage of this evolution in media, but there are some important warning signs to heed.

 Brian Solis provided some insight into just what it’s going to take to play in his post this week: “The Ten Stages of Social Media Business Integration.” I would add that not only do public relations professionals need to rise to such strategic ambitions, but also must continue to learn and knit together the techniques and tools required to operate. Everything from clouds to mobile marketing to bio-interfaces will blur the communications lines and may even challenge our ethics related to privacy, intrusive marketing and human-computer interactions. Take a look at scientist-gone-to-the-policy-dark-side thinker Andrew Maynard to get a glimpse of what the world of science may throw our way in terms of new ideas in the next 10 years.

Finally, a wonderful absurdity was served up in the closing paragraphy of the article in The Economist. Reflecting on the likelihood of more regulation on the heels of recent attempts by the Federal Trade Commission in the United States to shine more light on the endorsers of products and services (The Buzz Bin, December 11, 2009), the reporter noted, “After all, companies that fall foul of the rules will need the help of a PR firm.”

Here’s to a successful and prosperous (for all the right reasons) decade!

 
AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Michael Whitlow | Posted in Internet Marketing, PR, mobile, social media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)
Jan 14 2010

The Digital Kids of Generation X

January 14, 2010 – 11:57 am
Photo courtesy of Pink Sherbet

Photo courtesy of Pink Sherbet

By Jenn Riggle

Music soothes the savage beast – and my pre-teen daughter.

As the mom of two tween girls, ages 9 and 11, there’s always a lot of drama in my house. My youngest is a Chatty Cathy with an opinion on everything, while my oldest is a woman of few words – just eye rolls, sighs and one-word sentences. Most of the time, you find her in her room with her nose in a book or on YouTube watching music videos.

However, the one topic she’s always willing to talk about is music and what songs she wants to add to her iPod.

So we’ve become an iPod family. I spend a lot of time on iTunes and have gotten the hang of coordinating multiple playlists, one for each member of the family. My youngest is a Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift fan while my oldest listens to Panic! At The Disco, Green Day and Daughtry. My job is to keep everyone’s music separate (heaven forbid my oldest listen to a Kelly Clarkson song) – and then I add their music to my iPod so I know what they’re listening to.

And it appears that my kids are not alone in their early adoption of technology. Media giant Disney just completed a survey of 3,000 European tweens (ages 8 to 14) and have dubbed this group Generation XD, the digital children of Generation X (cute name, but I’m not sure it’ll stick).

The research found these kids are very comfortable using computers and playing videogames, but still value face-to-face interactions:

  • 95% feel that the Internet and computers are important to them
  • Face-to-face contact is still the preferred way to meet up with friends (30%) above texting (15%), online chat (14%) and mobile (8%)
  • 55% feel the Internet improves their life by helping them talk to their friends outside of school
  • Homework (59%) scores second only to gaming (74%) for the most common uses of the Internet

And while I have to admit, I don’t like all of my daughter’s music, she’s always excited when I knowingly bob my head when one of her favorite song comes on the radio. In turn, she’s gaining a new appreciation for older music and recently added Nena’s “99 Red Balloons” and The The’s “This is the Day” to her playlist. Of course, it didn’t hurt that M&Ms used the last song in one of their advertisements.

The good news is that we’ve at least found one thing we can talk about.

 
AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Jenn Riggle | Posted in Social Networks, social media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)
Jan 13 2010

Social Media To The Rescue

January 13, 2010 – 1:27 pm

With all the buzz over the earthquakes in Haiti it seems that real time search combined with social networks are making strides in the relief efforts. Yesterday evening I watched traditional media coverage of the large search and rescue operations on standby while online Twitter and Facebook covered the efforts and situation that were happening on location.

According to Google the number of blogs covering the Haiti crisis:

Google Trends shows how quickly the search has become a hot topic:

It’s not a matter of who is the journalist or news anchor in the case of social media, concern over ownership of retweets or information privacy is out the window. In the case of crisis the network moves the news in order to expand the communal concern rather than respond to ratings.

Recently, an interesting thought was raised about how Social Media has become the news to Traditional Media. In comparison to being a reactionary channel for branding I think involvement in social media has a way to push communication past a professional news pitch to something that hits closer to home. In the case of Haiti news, almost instantly there were charitable actions being shared through the community.

There is great potential for new tools to help maintain the momentum by showing where the money that is being donated is being used to enrich the community. So when the dust settles where will that leave efforts in Haiti? Does Social Media have the ability to extend past the flash of the news to create a sustainable relief effort? If it is to be successful there needs to be a connection past generating the buzz and awareness to continuing the action of support. The ability to store the data from the buzz even has potential to help with generating action plans for the future.

 
AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Wyatt Wood | Posted in Social Networks, mobile, social cause, social media | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (8)
Jan 7 2010

A Tale of Two HIPAA Violations

January 7, 2010 – 10:58 am

By Jenn Riggle 

Photo courtesy of Hoggheff aka Hank Ashby aka Mr. Freshtags

Photo courtesy of Hoggheff aka Hank Ashby aka Mr. Freshtags

It sounds like something out of a Charles Dickens’ novel. While most of us were busy preparing for the holidays, two stories were unfolding in different parts of the country where hospital employees lost their jobs because they of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) violations.

The first story takes place in Houston, where 16 hospital employees were fired for accessing the medical record of a medical resident who was hospitalized after being shot during an attempted robbery.

According to George Hulme’s blog for Health Information Trust Alliance, this looks like a simple case of hospital employees “snooping” to find out confidential patient information. The sad thing is that even though the employees may have accessed the medical record out of concern, they didn’t have the right to do this simply because they worked there.

The National Association Medical Staff Services (NAMSS) reminds us that HIPAA requires hospitals to deliver “appropriate sanctions” when employees violate the law. But rather than using this incident as a teaching opportunity and suspending them and offering more HIPAA training, the hospital quickly terminated the 16 employees.

Another thing to think about: How was the hospital able to identify the people who viewed her record? Hulme hypothesizes that the hospital was monitoring and logging patient record access and was alerted to the increased interest in this patient’s medical record. Truly, Big Brother is watching you.

The second story takes place in Mississippi where a hospital administrative assistant was forced to resign because hospital officials believed that a tweet she sent to the Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour violated HIPAA regulations.

According to news reports, the governor wrote on his Twitter page that he was, “Glad the Legislature recognizes our dire fiscal situation. Look forward to hearing their ideas on how to trim expenses.”

The employee sent a tweet to the governor saying, “Schedule regular medical exams like everyone else instead of paying UMC employees over time to do it when clinics are usually closed.”

While the employee clearly references a check-up the governor had at the hospital, no real patient information was shared. In fact, according to reports, the employee didn’t believe she violated privacy laws. She’s quoted as saying, “I wasn’t really jabbing at him…That’s just what people do on Twitter.”

Maybe the biggest mistake this employee made was making a snarky comment to someone in a position of power. This comment wouldn’t have been appropriate if she sent it to the governor via e-mail or said it to him in person – let alone made it in a public forum like Twitter. Her tweet referenced a past hospital visit and implies that the hospital gave preferential treatment to a patient – which made both the hospital and the governor uncomfortable.

While these are completely different stories, they both show that hospital employees are unsure about HIPAA regulations and how they apply to them.

The Takeaway: Hospitals need to share stories like these with their employees to help bring clarity to regulations that often seem murky and confusing.

 
AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Jenn Riggle | Posted in Social Networks, social media | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (18)
Jan 6 2010

Holiday Resolutions For Social Media

January 6, 2010 – 1:56 pm

As I gathered with family and friends over the holidays this year I did something amazing: I didn’t check Facebook or Twitter!

Rate your social media participation over the 2009 holidays (12/23/2009 – 01/04/2010)?

 1 – Declined a lot
[ 45% (14 votes) ]
2
[ 13% (4 votes) ]
3 – Stayed about the same
[ 32% (10 votes) ]
4
[ 3% (1 votes) ]
5 – Increased substantially
[ 6% (2 votes) ]
Other





We all heard about how social media was influential for increasing e-sales by “efficient, low-cost way for retailers to communicate directly”. So we know retail is listening to the power of social media.

How well did it personally connect people with people during the holidays? Personally I found it hard to engage users online when I had so much going on IRL (in real life). To communicate I reverted back to the old way of communication – email and phone. So much for new technology/networks when parts of the family are still figuring out dial-up.

So what does this activity mean for engaging this year on a personal or brand level? Taking a thought from Dan Zarrella’ post about predictions social media marketing evolution. The user base of most online networks are demanding a more targeted and personalized experience. This stems from the fact that ultimately the user wants more than a face to a profile – there needs to be in real life connection. It’s been proven model for business – so there should be no difference for personal connections. TrendsSpotting’s 2010 trend pre­dic­tions in 140 characters – emphasizes the fact that personal connection will take social media to the next level this year.

In conclusion this year I hope to find the right balance between real life and social media relationship. What is your resolution or personal goal for social media engagement?

 
AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Wyatt Wood | Posted in Internet Marketing, Social Networks, market research, social media | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
Jan 5 2010

New Year – Same Old Aught Decade Hang Ups

January 5, 2010 – 2:13 am

 

By Mike Mulvihill

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Photo: Courtesy Optical Illusion 

First the good news – business loves social media.  A January 3 update to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research annual survey on the adoption and practice of social media by the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., found that more businesses are experimenting and engaging with social media.  Among the survey respondents, 91 percent of companies report they incorporated at least one social media service or tool in 2009. Literacy and awareness was also on the rise with roughly 75 percent stating that they were now “very familiar” with social networking. Conversely, there was an impressive drop in Inc 500 companies that did not use social media at all, which plunged from 43 percent in 2007 to 9 percent in 2009.

Among smaller business, the trend lags. A November 2009 survey  produced for area Chambers of Commerce in North Dakota and Minnesota asked about their use of popular social media platforms for maintaining either Personal and Business connections.  For business leaders in four Midwestern markets, Facebook is the social media platform of choice. Facebook is the platform most frequently mentioned as the site used by respondents (70 percent personal use; 43 percent business use). LinkedIn was the platform next most frequently mentioned as the site used by respondents (23 percent personal use; 41 percent business use). Twitter (17 percent personal use; 19 percent business use) was about even with Blogs (15 percent personal use; 20% business use) as the third most frequently mentioned platform used by respondents  Three others in the survey lagged significantly in use by respondents – My Space, MSN Live Space and Wikis.

As Larry Weintraub covers in his Smart Marketing blog, these businesses have likely zeroed in on the four reasons to use Social Media for your business – Marketing, PR, Market Research and Customer Service.

Now, here’s the bad news.  Control is still a major issue, especially at larger companies. According to a nationwide survey conducted by Robert Half Technology, 54 percent of 1,400 companies surveyed completely restrict employees from visiting social networking sites. Another 19 percent restrict use for business purposes only.

Businesses are increasingly using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter for marketing purposes, but those same companies don’t want employees logging on during work hours.

The Robert Half spokesperson said employers find social networking a waste of time. “It takes away from primary responsibility. When socializing on sites such as Facebook, we lose track of time.”

A secondary concern companies mentioned is the potential for employees leaking confidential information or sharing thoughts that may reflect badly on the company.  The spokesperson said that many of these companies are still trying to set boundaries.

 So while business increasing embraces the desire to “push out” info using social media, they still have not gotten over the fact that they have engage communities by trusting people to have conversations with customers, suppliers and their many other stakeholders.

 I’d love to see a survey of how many of the 91 percent of companies using social media are failing miserably because they still just don’t get the fact that every employee is an ambassador, whether at the supermarket, a cocktail party, the kids soccer match or when active on a social media site. They trust their salesmen to represent the company unsupervised, but can’t trust their employees to use social media responsibly. Seems like there’s still a lot of growing up to be done in 2010.

 
AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Mike Mulvihill | Posted in Blogging, Case Study, Internet Marketing, PR, Social Networks, communications, market research, social media | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)