Chaired by Nick Jones, MD of I Spy, the session was kicked off by Orla Malone of Facebook. Orla gave an overview of Facebook’s current advertising offering and shared some case studies on how brands were using Facebook effectively.
This was followed by I Spy’s excellent CEO and former Yahoo Sales Director, Jim Brigden. Jim outlined the need to have an integrated tool that allowed both management and tracking across search and social advertising campaigns.
Amy Clarke, Ecommerce Manager and Radisson Edwardian delivered an excellent client perspective on the effectiveness of Social Media used by an upmarket hotel group and the need to get buy in across the group.

Amy shared some interesting views on how Radisson are using Blogging, Twitter, Interactive video and Facebook to connect with customers. Their excellent blog for the May Fair hotel even delivered Trip Adviser comments bad and well as good – true openness.
The session was rounded off by Colm Bracken, Group Search Manager at Microsoft Advertising and Dave Coplin, Director of Search – both giving their insight into how Social was transforming the Search landscape.
The event was opened by the effervescent and international Social Media maestro, Mel Carlson. All in all a ‘super-exciting’ event.

#smwldn

With the likes of Tweedeck, HootSuite and others providing a better user experience than Twitter itself, it seems that Twitter wants to create a richer destination site to attract advertising revenue.

Another feature is that the new Twitter.com will display information over two “panes” instead of over one page.

More here: http://twitter.com/newtwitter

http://bit.ly/c5XXnl

One thing that has come out of this election is how politicians have uses Social Media to interact with the public at large but also with specific groups and target marginalised individuals. Social media and the willingness for people to share their thought, views and anything else is a major change in both how we live our everyday lives as well as engage with society at large. When watching Question Time on the BBC or listening to Any Answers on Radio 4, it is no longer necessary to do a double take when David Dimbleby ask us to follow the programmes ‘tweets’ or for an old colleague to Link-In to us and for them to see what we’ve been doing (sometimes in great detail) for the past few years.

As I am sharing my thoughts with you, I should point out that the original headline came from Shane Richmond of the Telegraph’s Tech blog who in turn, obtained a spin of the headline and the thrust of the piece from David Armano, of Edelman Digital who had written an article for the Harvard Business Review.

In David’s article he dives deeper into this ‘Social Sharing’ shift, citing it as being bigger than Facebook and Twitter as well as looking at elements that make this phenomenon so big. These elements include:

• Data Gathering
• Knowledge Sharing & Collaboration
• Content Distribution
• Social Currency

Read more at the Harvard Business Review: http://bit.ly/cQ5zYa

What was true 20 years ago is true now and Levi has hit the Zeitgeist again and developed an integrated Social Media strategy with a plug-in for facebook. The plug-in has an integrated “like” feature with every product on the site that allows you to see the number of people on facebook who like the item – it also allows you to cast your own vote.

A big thank you to Aden Hepburn,  Head of Digital at IdeaWorks (Y&R – WPP) who is a fellow Linked In member of the Intelligent Social Media Group
http://bit.ly/cgU2c9

Reggie James

See it here:  http://www.digital-clarity.com/blog/social-media/measuring-social-media

Sample of 100 Companies: 29 US Companies, 48 European Companies, 20 Asia-Pacific Companies 3 Latin America Companies.

Data collected between November 2009 and January 2010 by Burson-Marsteller’s global research team.

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Speaking at Marketing Week’s Social Media for Brand Building event yesterday, Nick Shapeless Sony’s head of corporate communications highlighted the use of Twitter as a tool to amplify the company’s PR activity.
Sony launched a campaign for a special edition of its Cybershot camera range last year and used social media to extend PR coverage over nine months, resulting in over £12.5m in revenue.
More at NMA: http://bit.ly/9n6kWJ

Looking to catch up with Facebook and Twitter, the idea behind buzz is to add elements of Social Media to Google’s Gmail service.

Learn more at http://www.google.com/buzz

The official Google blog today outlined some enhancements to Google search that has more of a social feel and indicates the direction (in part) as to where the Search Engine is heading.

Some of the new features include a new image search algorithm. Now when you’re doing a search on Images, you may start seeing pictures from people in your social circle. These are pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr. Just like the other social results, social image results appear under a special heading called “Results from your social circle.” See video below and read the blog here : http://bit.ly/cbgC5C

Social Media Week conferences take place simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo. It will explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large. More at: http://socialmediaweek.org/about/

Special thanks Julia Eilon for promoting this event: http://chinwag.com/blogs/julia-eilon

One of the most frequently asked questions when companies are looking at the commercial use of Social Media is, “How can my company use Social Media to win new business”? Fear not my hunters of this elusive Holy Grail; the answer is to be found at the offices of the computer behemoth, Dell. After pioneering the use of the internet first time round and using paid search advertising to its full potential, the company has done it again by using Twitter to sell its equipment round the world.

Dell has announced that it has more than doubled the amount of money it is making via its Twitter accounts around the world to $6.5m. Of that $2m was made directly and another $1m was accounted for when traffic to Dell.com was factored in.

The $3m included both 2007 and 2008 when there was minimal Twitter activity, but the 2009 figure shows real growth that has come during the year the number of people using Twitter within the Dell organisation has increased to somewhere between 100-200.

Some of the strongest growth Dell is seeing is coming from emerging markets. It highlighted Brazil as one area it was doing particularly well.

Dell’s operation in Brazil via its @DellnoBrasil Twitter account has generated $800,000 in eight months of activity.

Richard Binhammer a spokesman for Dell, said the growth in Brazil showed the social web was not just a European or US phenomenon, but a global one.

“That’s interesting not only from an emerging market perspective, but from a social web perspective as well as it shows the spread of services like Twitter.”

Another market Dell highlighted was its @Delloutlet operation in Canada.

“DellHomeSalesCA went onto Twitter because a number of Canadian Twitter users and bloggers were asking us why isn’t Dell on Twitter in Canada. Now it is,” Binhammer said.

Since it began operating on Twitter @DellHomeSalesCA has generated $150,000 in sales. As has happened in other markets where the social web is used, the market itself has helped inform a business what its customers want as much as what they don’t want.

In addition to generating $6.5m in sales revenues via Twitter, social networking in a wider sense has allowed Dell to make what it says are 3.5 million social connections from sites such as Facebook, Google’s Okut, Slideshare, Flickr, YouTube as well as Twitter, Dell’s own Direct2Dell online community forum and its crowdsourcing project IdeaStorm, which has 60,000 members.

“These are people who are fans or followers of Dell on social networks. There are more besides this as we are not counting the many bloggers we listen to and engage with,” Binahmmer said.

The crowdsourcing of IdeaStorm is proving to be a valuable part of Dell’s social media operation. Thousands of ideas come to Dell via this site from users suggesting changes and modifications. Hundreds of these have been acted upon.

Binhammer cited Dell’s launch of a product for aids charity (Red) that came from user suggestions; expansion of its Linux product offering for consumer PC and laptops; and a change to keyboard design for its Dell Mini netbook range as another.

“Users had a problem with where the apostrophe key was located on the Dell Mini’s keyboard. They were finding it hard to use because of the reduced size and so we changed it. That was a crowdsourced idea.

In a post on the Dell blog, Lionel Menchaca, chief blogger at Dell, said that looking to the future Dell would be taking steps to tackle what he described as “the big issues on the horizon like profile collaboration”.

He said for Dell (or any company), isolated social media efforts would not lead to long-term success and said the PC maker would be focusing on three key areas:

1. Streamlining its presence in social media networks and creating meaningful content for customers and continue to increase its connections in those places.

2. Focus on building a tighter integration between Dell.com, Support.Dell.com, its Dell Community sites with its presence in social networks.

3. Continue its focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into the Dell business units.

This article was first published by Brand Republic in December 2009 and certain extracts have been taken from this original article

Reggie James

AOL / Ooze from Universal Everything on Vimeo.