Everybodysagenius’s Weblog

Hey Everybody,

Social media seems to be getting hotter than the sun these days and that means new case studies. So throw out all your boring, old slides on Motrin Moms, Blendtec and ComcastCares for some of these newbies. I have included links and short descriptions below to a few new ones that I have been reading about (many are stories from Mashable). So make sure that when you present Web 2.0 case studies to new clients or your boss, you are current and interesting. Oh, and here’s a social media case study of my own that you might remember.

Check these out:

1. Cadbury (the candy company) recruits “secret agents” in their Operation Goo, who create Cadbury content for the chance to win $30,000+ in support of their Twisted candy bar. Check out the case study here.

2. SeaWorld channels the barroom favorite, photohunt, in a viral photo comparison game that leverages Facebook, Twitter and iPhone apps. It’s a whale of a conversation campaign. See the case study here.

3. Vitamin Water pits Kobe VS LeBron in a Facebook promotion. This one allows fans to track and discuss a basketball battle for the ages. Check out the case study here.

4. Us Weekly sells their Facebook page for advertising to State Farm. Check out the case study here.

5. Here is a link to 10 more that are pretty cool. Including Target, Chuck, Threadless and Ford. Thanks Thoughtpick.

And check out a whole wiki of social media efforts and campaigns from the BeingPeterKim.com.

Thanks for stopping by and if you have links to any other good social media case studies out there today, share them. Lets grow a big collection together.

Best,

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

Every once in a while you read something that really makes sense and/or rings true with what we are doing. This article by Jason Cohen, was exactly that for me this morning. It is one of the best articles on marketing that I have read in a long time. It has a little history, some case studies, real advice and more. I hope that you will read it and enjoy it too.

The article that I am talking about is called, Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don’t want to. With so many self-serving, marketing speak articles on social media circulating today. This true interesting article is a nice reprieve.

Here is a short excerpt:

How do you “win” the Internet? No one knew, and even those geeks who indirectly convinced the world to live on the web didn’t foresee its massive effect. The Internet was not, in fact, “just another form of media” — it created opportunities where Amazon is 34x bigger than Barnes & Noble, where NetFlix destroyed Blockbuster, and where Skype is worth $2.6B while telecom companies drop like flies.

It’s not just a new media, it’s a completely different world. Business models are changed forever.

Flash-forward to today, and the same pattern is emerging, just in a different guise.

Thanks for the great post Jason and keep up the great work

Good Morning Everybody,

I am sitting in a social media presentation today and around every corner, our speaker relates each tool to social capital. So what is social capital.

Well, wikipedia defines social media as:

Social capital is a concept developed in sociology and also used in business, economics, organizational behaviour, political science, public health and natural resources management that refers to connections within and between social networks as well as connections among individuals. Though there are a variety of related definitions, which have been described as “something of a cure-all“^[1] for the problems of modern society, they tend to share the core idea “that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so do social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups”.^[2]

To me, social capital is not about the amount of readership, but the richness of the relationships. I am fine with 10 readers a day on this blog. I am okay with less than 100 Twitter followers. As long as these relationships are real. My power to disseminate information and create motion online is directly proportional to the authenticity and authority of my relationships.

One quick example of what I mean: The other day, I needed to find a social media intern for the marketing company that I work for. In about thirty minutes, I put out a few tweets, a post on our Facebook group and made about three phone calls. In the next few hours I had more than 30 replies back from interested students.

Now if I had just auto followed thousands of people, I would probably have more followers. But I couldn’t expect as much action.

Remember social media tools are not publication and dissemination tools. They are conversation tools. More eyeballs does not equal more market power.

Enjoy,

Will Flavell

@swept14

Hey Everybody,

I just wanted to share some sad and shocking news that I heard with you this morning. So, the rapid decline of newspapers is becoming more real everyday. Check out his article from TIME discussing the possible demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Ever wanted to know what a death sentence feels like? You can get a pretty good idea over at the Seattle Post Intelligencer. On Jan. 9, Steve Swartz, an executive from Hearst, announced in the newsroom that the company was putting the money-losing newspaper, known locally as the

As you might expect of any news broken in an actual newsroom, the whole thing is captured on grainy video. One reporter holds a digital recorder; a photographer snaps away. The executives wear shirtsleeves with ties askew. When Swartz, looking not unlike a man condemned, says, “At the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing the P-I in print,” he has to raise his voice to be heard over unanswered phones and garbled bursts from the police radio.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Yeah, that is pretty sad. I hope they get a buyer. But not really the best market for hope on that buy. So where does that leave the PR Professional. Well, strangely, I also saw this story from Sally Falkow of the Bulldog Reporter discussing what PR Pros will do after newspapers.

If the media is truly dying, what happens to PR?

Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and co-author of Get Content, Get Customers, spoke at a PRSA Cincinnatti luncheon recently.  His presentation was titled The Present and Future of PR.

Pulizzi says that in a conversation with Forrester Research he heard a prediction that within two years half of all US newspapers will stop production.  If that happens the PR and media relations model will be broken beyond repair.

Who gets to tell the story then? ” If PR’s role is to help manage the information from an organization to its “public”, doesn’t that include the creation of targeted story-telling initiatives like custom magazines, enewsletters, blogs, white papers, etc.?” asks Pulizzi.  And I’d add video.

Check the rest out here.

Have a great weekend,

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

Just a quick post this morning, but I saw this chart on eMarketer this morning and I had to share it. Traditional media is tanking. I hope that all of you out there reading this are already pitching social media. Best of Luck.

See eMarketer for more information.

Hey Everybody,

I don’t know if anyone is using this yet, but I just read an article on Viewzi.com. It is a new search engine that aggregates search results from MSN, Yahoo, Google and more. It also does a great job of providing visual differences between types of search. It has beautifully different and vibrant user experiences per type of search. It allows you to search just cost and deals with products, or MP3s, or comparison search results, or cloud searches. Their weather radar display is also very cool. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey Everybody,

I don’t know if you have all been on Facebook this morning or not, but it’s new look is available that we have all been reading about. I love it. It is much more openly spaced and a lot more visual. I think that the new way organizing apps (widgets) is really cool. If you haven’t seen it yet, refresh your Facebook and follow the link in the upper right hand corner.

I also like how the ads are now displayed to the right, so that you know easily what is an ad. It is easier to avoid and easier to find. Read more about the new look here.

This is my favorite SNS and it just keeps getting better. Nice Zuckerburg, nice.

Thanks Facebook,

William L. Flavell

Hey Everybody,

I am sure that many of you know about the DEMO conference. If not, it is like the superbowl of emerging technology. They have a couple a year. The next one is They are doing a great job right now of maintaining a strong Facebook Group with all kinds of apps, videos, photos, and much more. They also have a really interesting Twitter presence. Their name is DEMOtweets (we really need to do something about that name: tweets). And they have a 500+ user LinkedIn DEMO group.

So, DEMO has a lot of presence online and they have a lot of great groups and great stories. So, what you might ask is a missing strategy. Well, the missed opportunity is for the technologies. With DEMO being the superbowl of emerging technologies, and all the tech news media and VC (venture capitol) groups world-wide watching, you would think that every new tech company in the world would be putting out info. Well, they are not. Very few are, in fact there is not one fan video up yet on the DEMO facebook group, which has 545 members so far. This is a great opportunity for one of those presenting companies to engage a highly interested audience.

Here are some of my recommendations for applying this strategy:
The strongest social media opportunity for DEMO right now is the DEMO Facebook group. It has 545 members and currently hosts no fan videos. The right tech company could be the first group member to put up a product demonstration video in the fan section. It would also be a good platform to post up your videos of DEMO or the DEMO training process. This way you can be contributing content and writing updates that are DEMO themed and that will also showcase your idea or product. Every update that you make to the group will automatically show up in the feeds of all the Facebook DEMO group members’ pages. This involvement with the Facebook Group will be used to build relationships with others in the tech community and to spread your name.

In addition to the DEMO Facebook group, DEMO also sponsors a Twitter account named DEMOtweets that provides DEMO stories to everyone following. It currently has 75 followers. We can join Twitter with a DEMO-themed account, follow the DEMOtweets account and send them messages. We can also use this platform to promote whatever product or idea at the DEMO conference. The tech press also regularly does Twitter searches on subjects or events of interest. The more DEMO posts that we have the higher the chance that we will get noticed and picked up by this press group.
DEMO also runs a LinkedIn group with more than 500 members. LinkedIn only offers one-to-one communication between its group members. It does not allow for multimedia posting either. But, this will be final stage in the social media communication strategy for DEMO. You can use LinkedIn to make business connections with those users that comment on our Twitter tweets or Facebook group additions.

Enjoy,

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

Just wanted to share this copyright free version of the Social Media Press Release. I got it off of http://www.pr-squared.com a while ago. Just wanna offer it to all the PR people out there. I think that I have said this before, but I don’t think that the new standard social media press release is ever gonna be considered the standard news release format. Instead I think that we are moving away from the days of a standard form of communication with each other and with media. What is a standard anything anymore?

But this template does give a good idea of some of the multimedia applications and tools that we (pr People) should be including in all of our communications efforts.

Peace and have a nice weekend,

Will Flavell

Social Media Press Release download location

Hey Everybody,

If you are like me, than are always searching for the right way to accurately define a lot of the new media terminology. I just wanted to put up a quick post to give my favorite definition of Social Media. This is a marketing centric definition, but I really like it.

It comes from Expansion+: social media is basically a dynamic, collaborative approach to communicating ideas using the Internet as a medium of communication.

Hope that helps,

William Flavell