We have a wiki at the office. It’s not used much. There are a few reasons it’s not used. 1) You have to be on the corporate network. Our sales team who is remote is not set up for remote access or they simply don’t know ho to use it. 2) The wiki is dokuwiki which is somewhat easy to consume but a pain to add pages and info to for anyone who is less technical than a tech type user. 3) The biggest reason that the wiki has not been adopted is that the information out there hasn’t been all that valuable to the population at large.

I know #1 and #2 have to be addressed and they will be with an upcoming intranet project. We’re looking at hosting something on the cloud that we can use LDAP or AD to log on and maintain a single sign-on environment. We also want to find something that will be easy for user’s to add pages and intellectual property to. Finally it will have to serve as a platform for communication to the company. I’m very excited about this project but I’m going to have to reserve the rest of topics 1 and 2 for another post.

The third point I made above has been addressed with 2 initiatives I have completed in the last few weeks. The first was a long process of designing integration strategy and documentation including implementation documentation, project plans, risk scenarios, etc. The second was a simple Twitter page. I want to talk about the value of that twitter page today.

What I did:
I built a page on the wiki that consolidated all the current Twitter chatter about our company and all our competitor companies. I also set up a few searches to monitor our top customers and any discussion with those customers that focus on Shipping. I then showed this page to our Director of marketing, VP IT, director Sales Ops and a few weeks later our CEO. We now have a very nice little dashboard of all the conversations that are happening that are important to us.

How I did it:

1. Go to Twitter.com/widgets
2. Create a search widget for each Company name I wanted to follow, You do this by selection Search widget on the entry screen and filling out Google type search entry form.
3. I copied the code created by the widget
4. I created an HTML Table and started posting the widgets. I gave a cell in the table for each widget.

Marketing Impact/What we have learned:

1. End customers – our customers, customers hate our competitor’s offerings.
2. There is not much discussion about our company out there.
3. When we found an upset customer, we were able to respond quickly.
4. If an upset customer receives their package they probably won’t be upset anymore.
5. Most Important: our company needed a Twitter presence. Our customer’s are there and Our Customer’s Customer’s are there. We now have a service presence and I expect we’ll continue to grow from there.

I do want to make one point. The exercise to build this page took about 3-4 hours. It would take a more skilled person about 1-2. I could do it again now in about 45 minutes.

What are some of the ways you’ve used Twitter in your company?

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In this series of blogs I will be examining the various social media strategies and the social media tools that support them. I’ll be examining companies that are using the strategies, looking at why a particular strategy might have been chosen and discussing the success of the strategy. All of these companies and strategies are marketing/PR campaigns.

My goal is to write a case study for each of the social media tools and explain what strategies were applied to make the tool successful for the company applying the tool and strategy.

Here are the Social Media Tools we’ll examine.
Blogging
Bookmarking/tagging
Content Aggregation
Crowdsourcing
Microblogginng
Mashups
Online video
Photo Sharing
Podcasting
Social Networks ie. Facebook, Linkedin
VIrtual Worlds
Widgets
Wikis

I’m going to pick companies that have successfully applied these tools and attempt to define and explain the strategies they have applied. Since I want to be impartial I’ll pick the companies from a list that was compiled by Peter Kim in September 2008 of Social Media Examples. The list contains over 300 companies and the tools they are applying. You can find the article here A List of Social Media Marketing Examples.

Look for the first case study early next week.

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Google has started an add campaign on the radio to encourage people to advertise with Google. I have never previously heard any advertising for Google outside of the web and certainly not for their service. This is likely an early sign that BING is beginning to hurt their ad revenue. Non the less AdWords can be a very powerful tool for a business that does not have front page placement in the natural search results. I’ve put together a short video explaining how to sign up for AdWords and how to use it effectively to drive traffic to your site. The campaign I demonstrate is for local businesses that want to drive local traffic to their sites for advertising purposes.

Sign up Process

Click here to view the embedded video.

Create Local Ad

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you as a business have a web site that promotes your business but you do not rank high in the search engines then running local ads with Google AdWords is an extremely effective strategy.

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According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Twentieth Century Fox paid a high school valedictorian to plug a movie “I love you, Beth Cooper” in her graduation speech. The idea was to create a viral buzz for the movie. This idea came from a company called the Intelligence Group which Fox hired. Obviously the name Intelligence Group falls quite short. Companies have been very unsuccessful over time trying to mimic situations to get viral buzz. It seems buzz only really catches on when the buzz occurs independent of a companies efforts.

The book Citizen Marketers provides a load of excellent case studies of why and how viral buzz catches on and what it is that creates the buzz. One of the most important factors to buzz is the trust of the community and full disclosure from the company. If you want a message to go viral the community wants and needs to trust the message if they don’t trust the message the community will not only squash the message but they may give you a bunch of bad press as well. I’ve seen a bunch of cases where bad press was the viral buzz that ended up being created and in some cases such as EA games “acts of lust” contest they probably achieved their objective because bad cheep press is better than no press at all and they have created quite an anti EA buzz.

Case in point the Wall Street Journal article while not terribly critical of Fox does put them in a bad light as the speech and video failed to go viral, the school expressed disappointment, and the parents refused to comment. It seems to me Fox would have done better to consult one of there own companies to understand what creates viral buzz better by asking the folks at MySpace what really gets a viral campaign to take off.

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