Hi all. I need your help.  I have been invited to moderate a panel on social media next week in Chicago.  The panelists include marketing and sales professionals from Myspace, Bebo, Facebook and CafeMom.    I am super excited to attend the event and meet some of the panelists, especially since Andew Shue (co-founder of CafeMom) will be sitting on the panel. In case you don’t know, Andrew is a pretty awesome actor and was “Billy” on Melrose Place.  He is also the brother of Elizabeth Shue, an actress who gained her popularity playing Daniel’s girlfriend in the Karate Kid (and yes, like most boys my age … I did have a crush on her and I did sign up for karate lessons). Okay, back to the topic at hand.

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Some call it social media excellence some just say we’ve gone crazy…whatever you call it, it seems to be working.

As an extension to the social media efforts that we’re leveraged for Cisco’s ASR launch, Cisco announced a tournament around the EDGE QUEST game where they are offering $10,000 cash plus a Cisco ASR 1002 router to the sole winner. Not a bad deal for playing a game but the competition is stiff with a top score currently at 204,540.

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“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” – Howard Aiken

As Dr. Aiken discovered, knowing which direction to go doesn’t mean much if you can’t get your team to follow. Thankfully, unlike Dr. Aiken we don’t have to convince people to buy in on an idea as crazy as building a computer at a time when phones were considered state of the art. But knowing that doesn’t make our job any easier.

All marketing campaigns come down to getting time, money, or resources and to be done properly, your Social Media Marketing campaign will likely need a little of all three. For many of us, this means approval from one or more decision makers on a marketing campaign that may be fundamentally different from anything they’ve done before.

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This morning while on Linkedin, someone who I am connected to asked the following question to their network:

Which are your 3 best SMM (Social Media Marketing) tips?
Looking at primarily Facebook and Youtube, as well as social bookmarking tools such as; del.icio.us, digg and twitter - which are you top 3 advices to succeed with sharing your sales message.

I have yet to answer the question but I am planning on it.  I thought I would first chime in here.  As I consider myself somewhere in the middle of a purist and corporatist, I often find myself torn on the most effective way to execute social media. I realize that most users of social media despise marketing messages and/or filter them out anyway.  I also realize the true value of having “real conversations” with “real people”.  I believe that it’s not just about conversations, but the content of those conversations. As a consumer, I want to talk about topics that I am passionate about. As a marketer who spends most of my time in social media, I want those conversations to be relevant to the product or service that I am responsible for. 

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Hello, my name is Angela. And I’m an addict.

I’m addicted to entrepreneurial action.

I get emails from customers through the HP Consumer and Small Business Community Wikis, and they motivate me into action. I’m so proud of the little wins we earn as HP continues to adopt social media and social networking. Often, though, these little wins are sandwiched between little bouts of failure.

That said, you should know that I am addicted to flagrant and noble failures.

Why? Failure means I’m innovating and inventing. When something new fails, I don’t stop. I just tweak and move forward if the idea merits the effort.

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We have a current debate going on right now within HP’s Community Counsel and I thought I would pose our question to you for your input.

Normally I’m a bit of a blogging purist. NO GHOST BLOGGING. Always use your real name, always use your full name, no pseudonyms, aliases etc.

But we just had a new blog request that made me step back and re-asses my thinking. I find this a useful practice to do whenever I start getting an emotional knee-jerk reaction to a question (which I did this time).

We have a blog request from a group within HR and the proposed author is very hesitant to use her full name. Being a mother with small children she is very worried about having too much private information out there and doesn’t want what information that is out there too closely associated with what she does for a living.

Since she is in HR she is also concerned about backlash from prospective job candidates that don’t get hired or about the potential deluge of recruiter emails she would get (she already gets a large amount). Because of all of these factors (and a self professed irrational fear) she wants to just use her initials.

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About a week ago I became famous. Well, ok–famous inside the company where I work. But since that company (Intel) employs around 85,000 people, I’m going to do a happy dance for this proverbial five minutes of fame as they may be all I get. How did this come about? Recently the team of company journalists who publish our intranet found my internal company blog on social media and decided to link to it on the front page of the intranet website. This sparked an amazing dialogue, with nearly 9,000 views and 50 comments. And it was interesting to see the reactions of folks from a company like Intel–where it’s not unusual to run into colleagues who have worked at the company for 30+ years. (Intel is celebrating its 40th year this year).

My blog post, and the subsequent discussion, focused on whether employees should be encoraged to participate in social media externally. (Internally we already encourage the use of blogs, the Intelpedia wiki, and other collaboration tools). And I was surprised to see how widely people’s sentiment of social media varied. From extreme “be very afraid” to “keep up the good work,” many of these comments asked for the same thing: show me why.

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I joined Cadence Design Systems a little over a month ago as the company’s social media/Web community manager. My first mission: recruit, train (and then, on a weekly basis, cajole) a small army of expert bloggers from within the company’s ranks of engineers and product managers.

Cadence makes the software and hardware tools that very smart people use to design the latest and greatest chips for computers and electronic devices. The folks who work here are also very smart. They are on par with rocket scientists. I am a Neanderthal (no offense, all you Geico cavemen) in comparison.

The company’s user community, cdnusers.org, has discussion forums and articles – mainly technology-related papers and interviews featuring folks in the electronic design automation (EDA) space.

Adding blogs to this successful mix will give the community additional information and insight from Cadence experts.

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For years now I’ve scratched my head at why so many corporate marketers don’t “get it.” Social media has seemed like such a no-brainer. When you sit down with marketing managers and CMO’s and talk to them *like consumers* about how annoying and intrusive traditional marketing is they all agree and talk about what a life saver their TiVo is.

Switch the conversation around about how to do non-intrusive marketing and you are often met with wrinkled brows and scowls. So what gives? Are all CMO’s Dr Jeckle and Mr Hyde?

The truth, is that traditional marketing is easy. Spend X dollars for X number of months running the latest creative. Ad agencies and media outlets have made it drop dead easy. Todays marketers are busy and that isn’t going to change as companies brace for a *possible* recession. Can anyone say “reallocating resources”?

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In my social media blog, I wrote about a personal experience I had with Twitter and the Geek Squad.  To make a long story extremely short, I twittered about the fact that the Geek Squad could not retrieve the data on my hard drive after it crashed; and that they weren’t really geeks after all.  About an hour later, I get an email from the founder, Stephen Roberts asking if he can help in any way. I gave him the details and he emailed me back a few hours later confirming that they didn’t have the right software in the store to help me; and that they would have to send my laptop to their tech center in Kentucky to retrieve the data (costing anywhere between $400 - $1200).  I saw the string of emails that he sent to the actual technician that I spoke with a few days earlier.  I decided against it and took the laptop to a local computer geek.  Three hours later and $250 out of pocket, I got my data.

Mike Arrington also experienced a similar situation with Twitter and Comcast. After several failed attempts to get his internet connection fixed, he “lost his cool” and ripped Comcast a new one on Twitter.  Within 20 minutes of his first tweet, he got a call from a Comcast executive who wanted to know how he could help.  The exec told Mike that he monitors Twitter and blogs to get a better understanding of what people are saying about Comcast. As a previous employee of Comcast, I am sure he is very busy reading, and reading, and reading.

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