Busy two days in Miami. I began my day yesterday presenting at The Social Networking Conference. The session itself I think went well (according to some nice folks who came up to me afterwards).  The topic of my session was “Anytime, Anywhere Social Media Marketing.” I had the session recorded so I’ll post it here once I get the file. The topic of the presentation was how we’ve built our social media team based on the concept of continual engagement with our customers vs. campaign mentality which ebb and flows. If a social media engagement is build around a campaign that campaign will sunset, ending the engagement with the customers.  Most brands walk away from the customer base they have build up; Facebook fans, YouTube views, UGC submissions. What we are focused on is how we maintain a regular conversation with customers outside the confines of a campaign start and stop.

I am happy to say I met 4 great social media counterparts today, 3 at the conference.  IBM @adamclyde,  JetBlue @jetblue, Ford @ScottMonty and one ala a mutual agency connection, Intel @Britopian. JetBlue and Ford are definitely focused on regular conversations with their customers. Scott at Ford is building out individual experiences with their different brands depending on the customers interests (@  FordDriveOne @ FordDriveGreen @ FordCustService @ FordMustang @ FordTrucks @ FordRacing @ FordRacing_ITO @ FordAPA). He recognizes someone interested in their Green initiative isn’t going to be interested in the same topics as someone who is passionate about his/her Mustang. I’m not a car gal but I certainly understand customer segmentation and this makes complete sense to me. It’s a massive undertaking but one that I’m sure Ford will benefit from. I plan to do a podcast with Scott in the coming weeks and will post it here. Really interesting stuff.

JetBlue is famous for their amazing Twitter conversations. Morgan is the main guy running that program. I was amazed how responsive he is committed to being on their Twitter feed. The number one question he gets asked is “Why is my flight delayed?” I love where Jetblue is going with this engagement model. What I also love is they have drawn the line with ‘virtual extortion’. They get contacted fairly regularly from bloggers wanting free tickets to events, etc. Bloggers will of course give them a shout out on their blog but JetBlue has to put up the free ticket first. This is a really grey area that can get quite sticky. I think it’s still a case by case basis depending on the corporation. IBM has a policy they don’t fly reporters anywhere or pay for anything. JetBlue has created a policy that is comfortable for them that they adhere to. At Microsoft we are unable to accept any gifts over a few $100’s. I was actually invited twice to Sundance this year and respective declined both offers. While it was very kind and generous of both companies to invite me and I’m quite sure my husband I would have had a great time MSFT has a strict policy on accepting gifts from partners or even potential partners.

IBM’s perspective is a bit different. They are adapting social media to work within their company culture. They are not a consumer business so running a Twitter account for customers isn’t probably the best use of his resources. They use social networking to connect their over 300K employees around the world. They have wikis, twitter feeds, virtual meet ups, etc all focuses around building internal awareness to a global company where people on the same teams may be on other sides of the world, and maybe not even speak the same languages. Adam does a great job explaining here.

Love learning from others!

I love this post by Tom Humbarger. It goes directly to the point I made here that if you are using an agency to build, manage, create, and strategize your social media work you need to ask yourself, are they doing as good or better than you? Forrester released their report on community platforms last week, you can get a copy from Telligent. As part of their criteria they measured how active the vendors are in the social media community. How engaged are they in the dialog? Do the company leaders blog, vlog, tweet, and generally participate and contribute to this vibrant community. I think this is absolutely a fare assessment criteria. I sent out an RFP last month to find a social media agency for Windows and my first filter on whether or not I invited an agency to participate is if they had a compelling blog. You can have a company blog, but if it’s updated every 8 weeks that just doesn’t count. Your agency needs to be a regular contributor. Why? Because if you don’t walk the talk how can you truly be the best?  If I am planning to train for a marathon am I going to look for advice from someone that runs them regularly and know intimately the pitfalls and workarounds or am I going to take advice from someone that’s never actually run a marathon but thinks it looks really fun. And I don’t just mean the top head honcho guy. If the head honcho ‘face’ man is the one engaged with the community that experience is likely not going to trickle down to your project team. I had an agency submit a response to my RFP last month and list their top brass as team members. That sets the expectation that those people are going to be day to day contributors to my project team and I didn’t have confidence that was going to be the case. Are your front line people engaging? What better way to learn that real life. Novel idea.

We had a BIG launch this weekend. Okay, it was supposed to be Friday but after some technical bumps the Win7 beta became available for customers Saturday morning Seattle time. You can download it here. My social media team was monitoring and engaging all weekend. They were using TweetDeck, I use Monitter.  Most of the conversation was focused on people trying to download the beta. Twitter helped us escalate a few issues very early. We found out within about 15 minutes of the launch that there was a bug with Firefox. Customers could only download if they were using Internet Explorer. We were able to escalate this issue much quicker because it was brought to our attention right away through Twitter.

Saturday and Sunday the conversation on Twitter was coming through at an average of 1 post per 5 seconds. This morning we are seeing rates of posts 1 every 2 seconds. The volume is amazing. But what’s proving to be most valuable to us right now is the real time feedback this is providing. We are able to escalate issues almost instantly has they get posted on Twitter. For example, a few customer have had problems with the feedback channel. They have posted screenshots of errors they are receiving. I’m escalating those error messages to our product team to investigate. We are defintely staying on top of customer issues and taking feedback real time. There is no other mechanism besides Twitter that allows us to get such instant customer feedback.

Thanks Twitter!

Happy New Year. I’m easing back into the working world today. I have 2 big presentations this month, one internal and one external so I’m fast and furiously getting my brain back from the mush it was in with two weeks of eating, skiing, reading and movies. (You MUST see Curious Case of Benjamin Button!) I did see a data point this morning that is interesting to me as a Social Media gal… Facebook saw their highest traffic ever on Christmas Eve. According to Hitwise on Dec. 24, 2008 Facebook reached 2.18% of all U.S. Internet visits compared with a 1.42% average for November 08.

Traffic to the site increased 41% on Christmas Eve 2008 compared to 2007. Traffic also increased 41% on Christmas Day 2008 compared to 2007. The site reached a ranking of 5th among all categories of Web sites. What does that say? Wow! Go where the people are. Both my husband and I were off for the holidays but one of the few sites we still visited frequently was Facebook. It’s there, good economy or bad, holidays or not.