I am looking forward to visiting some friends in Napa Valley over the weekend of June 30-31 where I will get to see how the other half lives! 🙂 After that, I will be heading to San Francisco to facilitate a workshop at the Gilbane Conference on June 2-4. My topic: Social Media and the Digital Marketing Platform. Everyone is talking about social media. Social networks are growing by the day with more and more people joining. New networks are popping up all over the place. Companies are challenged with building out community platforms around their products and services. Corporations are trying to figure out what social media is and how to integrate both the corporate communities and public social media platforms into their businesses. Where do you start? Should you be on Twitter? What about Facebook? How do you go about building out a platform solution? This workshop will teach new media techniques, including blogging and social media as well as how all of this ties into business strategies and goals. The session will provide a roadmap for building out and integrating these solutions.
T.J. O’Connor and I are looking forward to speaking on June 25-7: Ritz Carlton-Lodge Reynolds Plantation One Lake Oconee Trail Greensboro, GA 30642 Abstract: Companies are undergoing a massive shift in investment away from traditional media toward online media. New web sites and social networks are accelerating brand awareness and audience engagement. Customers are making their product purchase selections and engaging brands online. While they follow a familiar buying process, the selling process needs to adapt to a more dynamic online environment that you can’t fully control. How do you capture customer value in a complex online environment? The answer is to use new online marketing strategies to nurture and engage your direct and indirect audience across the buy-sell process. opei_newsletter09_spread
I enjoyed a trip to Philadelphia last week to attend the ITEC Conference . I spoke at two sessions on Thursday, here is a summary. Session 1 Second Circle Web 2.0 and New Marketing Metcalf’s Law – The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users We are in a new digital ecosystem and the search box is the new window to our intentions:
- 112M million blogs
- Bloggers are mainstream
- 2,700 Social networks
- 1.5 million photos added to Flickr daily
- 4 million daily Twitter messages
- Average age of evening news viewer: 60
As Chris Brogan has shared many times, there is a new information model: Information must be: Dynamic, Localized, Atomized, Relevant, Mashable, Mobile, Shareable Web 2.0 is a jargon term and overused, but it still is understood as representing a wide range of new technologies that share some common principles: Participation Social Software Mobility Folksonomy The Long Tail We talked about the following technologies that can transform new marketing and PR: Blogs Microblogging RSS, Content Aggregation and Syndication Wikis Session 2 – Web 2.0 for KM & Collaboration The second talk focused more within the enterprise and discussed how similar technologies are having an impact with team collaboration and innovation. Companies are realizing the benefits in using Second Circle tools for KM and Collaboration. However, there are some key differences inside and outside the firewall. Need for security Firewalls restricting access to social networks Regulations/ Sox prevents transparent communications Mix of public and private networks for content Rich new media impacting network performance Documents buried across servers and desktops Culture doesn’t support blogging and sharing views Can’t establish my personal presence and profile online Not using RSS to keep track of my information resources Access expertise across all my networks – work / personal KM & collaboration drives innovation, participative decision making, and information access, and colleagues access across an organization: Driving efficiency and lower costs Enabling distributed, networked businesses Delivering innovation and speed to market Supporting flexible working Knowledge as a distinct factor in market value Low cost open networks and services Generations of tech-savvy digital natives. A case study in life sciences pointed out four key strategies: Building customer relationships Enhancing the work environment Achieving competitive advantage Ensuring compliance and security We talked about the following technologies and how they are being used “inside the firewall” to drive value. Profiles & Expertise Location Corporate Blogs Wikis Document Management Search RSS, Alerts & Messaging Team Collaboration Some advice: Support your “Digital Natives” Foster Grass Roots Adoption – Participation Use Tagging Strategies and Folksonomy over overly burdensome taxonomy models Adopt light weight but clear procedures and policies for Information Management Governance, Security Contact me at CrossTech Partners if you want to learn more from the presentations: [email protected]
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