General Mills, Target, Best Buy, and Fingerhut Bare It All at Interactive Marketing Confab

05/15/08

So, you wonder, do major consumer brands “get” social media, or are they even starting to deal with it at all yet in any meaningful ways?  Well, thanks to our local 850-member strong Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association, we had a chance to hear from some of our more well-known corporate biggies last night.  It was a gorgeous, sunny, 70-degree evening in downtown Minneapolis, but a crowd of 300+ jammed inside (on the third floor of the Solera at 9th and Hennepin) to hear a panel that had been billed as Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise? [I guess we can assume the hope is that marketing will do that, and not the lawyers… :-) ] The panelists were:
• Jim Cuene, Director of Interactive at General Mills
• Gary Koelling, Creative Director/Social Technology, Best Buy
• Jason Kleckner, Manager of Information Architecture, Target
• Brad Smith, VP eCommerce & Digital Marketing, Fingerhut Direct Marketing
• Moderator: Michael Kraabel, Group Creative Director, Gage Marketing

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You Have to Love How One Beer Company Does Corporate Blogging

04/26/08

Corporate blogging is still a little understood art.  And very little practiced, to be quite honest, outside of the tech field. You think most companies are blogging?  Guess again. According to this ongoing survey, only a measly 11.6 % of the Fortune 500 are doing it—as of about a week ago, to be exact. (Not to speak of the even smaller percentage of those doing it well, I might add, whether in the Fortune 500 or elsewhere.)

But there was an absolutely great front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday: For All You Do, Bud, This Blog Is About You.  Here’s an excerpt:

(Jim) Arndorfer, 37 years old, is a full-time employee of Miller Brewing Co., the U.S. arm of SABMiller PLC. A former reporter for Advertising Age, he now runs Brew Blog, a free Web site dedicated to breaking news about beer. Especially news about Anheuser-Busch’s beer.

Brew Blog is the latest and perhaps most unlikely front in Miller’s drive to rattle Anheuser. Mr. Arndorfer tracks the St. Louis company’s every move, from earnings reports to management changes. He relishes revealing details of its products before Anheuser does.

Okay, this is funny!  I think it’s one of the best front-page pieces in the Journal in a long time.  [But then, I would—I’m a blogger!] A great, big shout-out to the reporter, David Kesmodel.  The competitive antics of these two big brewers is no secret; it’s the stuff of ad industry legend.  But, more than this, I think the Brew Blog is a great case study in corporate blogging. Here are some reasons why....

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03/14/08

Guy Kawasaki launched a new site this week called Alltop, which makes the boastful statement that “We’ve Got All the Top Stories Covered All the Time.” It’s a news and blog aggregator site for those who either can’t or don’t want to bother with setting up their own RSS readers or start pages—which is a large percentage of what I’d call mainstream web users. RSS remains very geeky and has low penetration beyond the tech-literate crowd. Mainstream users, Kawasaki and his partners reason, just want to go know, quickly, what’s going on related to their favorite topic or field of interest.  And I put experienced users like me in the category of people who will like Alltop, too. The site launched with pages covering 40 broad-interest topics.

Guess what, friends?  One of those topics is Social Media!  And I heartily recommend you bookmark that page now—socialmedia.alltop.com—because I think it’s a fantastic collection of sites and blogs in this burgeoning field, which can be a real challenge to keep up with. [Okay, so NewMediaWise is one of the sites listed—what can I say? These people are brilliant… :-) ]

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03/10/08

Some interesting information popped up today about blog influence—actually, I saw two studies cited, within minutes of each other, that seem on first blush to be opposing. But, in reality, I determined they’re complementary, and certainly of interest to anyone involved in blogging or social media. The first was noted in a story called New Media An Important Place To Be Seen. In this piece, The Center for Media Research reports that, according to the most recent BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey, “many new media options are showing double digit growth.” In particular, blogging experienced 21.5% year-over-year growth for purchase influence—the second highest of any new media type, and well ahead of any traditional media class (many of which declined). Granted, this study was just for a single category of products (electronics), but other recent studies have show an increasing influence for blogs in general.

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03/05/08

Great piece today by Cathy Taylor on one of the Mediapost blogs, Social Insider. In it, she points out that many agencies aren’t walking the talk about social media, particularly when it comes to blogging. And the first commenter makes the interesting point that social media may go against the whole culture or M.O. of agencies—implying not to look for much improvement anytime soon. 

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