Tracking Social Media Trends
Filed Under (Marketing) by Rajesh Kumar on 10-09-2008
The term social media and these days tends to be rattled off in every discussion. In fact, I like to relate more to the term Conversational Marketing made famous by Scoble and Shel Israel via their book Naked Conversations. Yet, there are very few sources that can help develop a general understanding of what it is. I came across this absolutely must-see slideshow at Slideshare. It can also help you explain this concept to others.Check out this award winning slideshow below.
Debbie Weil recently posted a list of ‘List of 67+ Big Brand Corporate Blogs’ . You’d be surprised to see how blogs and other social medial have proliferated to engage customers across consumer goods (Coca Cola, Whole Foods, Starbucks,Wal-Mart), Services industry (Marriott CEO Bill Marriott, Starwood, South West Airlines, Delta ) , Technology (Google, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Nokia , Lenovo, Texas Instruments), Financial Services (Quicken Loans), and as well as Manufacturing (Boeing, General Motors, Pitney Bowes ) and so on (Mario Sundar of Linkedin has published his highly credible list of top 15 corporate blogs for Sep 2008 here ).
It clearly represents an evolving change in the ‘format’ of marketing itself, in which lot of things that have been considered strictly no-no in the business of PR and marketing are becoming acceptable. This include casual/informal interactions of the brand ("We need to have all clearances for the message"), over exposure of the brand ambassador ("What, the CEO’s going to talk about the brand and competitors everyday?") and so on. Interesting.
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Rajesh,
Thanks for the shout out and for the pointer to the slideshare deck — a good one!
Even Infosys blog is quite informative.