Yesterday I spoke at the Creative Company conference in Five Points, which was organized by the advertising and marketing firm Wingard Creative.
My talk focused on the importance of a business or corporation creating an online community for its customers. I used examples from companies such as Sony, Starbucks, Target, Southwest Airlines and more, to illustrate my point.
I used examples of branded communities across different social networks: Facebook, Twitter, DailyMile, Last.FM, Foursquare and Goodreads.Each of these networks has a different function, but each has the capacity to host a branded online community.
After I was finished speaking, I realized that there were other platforms that exist that could also house a branded community, including Quora, LinkedIn, DailyBooth and Formspring.me.
October 25th, 2010
Blogs go corporate
by Ben LaMothe, in Blogging, Consumer Trends
Two weeks ago I was a visiting lecturer at my alma mater, Central Michigan University. Over the course of three days, I spoke to about 16 different classes. It was an exhausting experience, but I also learned a lot in the process.
I talked a lot about Facebook, Twitter and foursquare during my lectures. However one lecture seemed to focus largely on blogs. The class I spoke to had a very (in my opinion) extreme view about the value and long-term value of blogging.
One student suggested that people no longer have the attention span for blogs; that anything beyond 140-characters is more than many can handle.
I countered by suggesting that while personal, Here’s-What-I-Did-Today blogging may be falling by the wayside, corporate blogging is experiencing a major surge.
Today Foursquare added a new feature to its web site: Buttons.
This means the most to businesses actively using Foursquare, because it makes it possible to create buttons for individual locations and embed them on a web site as a button. Here’s the official word from Foursquare’s blog:
On Wednesday this week Steve Jobs and Apple announced a number of new products and concepts at an Apple event in California. Among them was the launch of Apple’s first foray into social media, called iTunes Ping.
I was listening to the event on my iPhone and following the commentary online via Twitter. There were lots of interesting instant-reaction Tweets by industry types. I found this one, by Kara Swisher, columnist for AllThingsD.com, to be quite interesting:
Apple Ping is “vertical Twitter” says Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, sitting next to me at launch event in SF
At the time of reading, I hadn’t used Ping yet. My first thought was, Oh, I’m Not Sure This Is A Good Idea. Apple is an utterly closed company, making its living off of closed platforms. There is no sense of openness, of encouraging sharing, that is required in today’s social media landscape.
There’s a new report out today by Pew that shows a considerable growth in the number of people aged 50+ who are using social media. Statistics have been trending upward for a while, but it appears that the growth is accelerating.
Naturally there is an interest in understanding what this means for people working in marketing. How can this trend be used to benefit brands?
