Make belief – The official blog of Renaissance Creative

On Wed. March 9th from 5:30-8:30, bring your colleagues & meet us on the patio at III Forks for “Wind-Down Wednesday”, an evening of collaborative networking at III Forks in Tapestry Park.

Sponsored by us at Renaissance, and our new collaborative partner, leading web design and internet marketing company, Interchanges, the event aims to bring together professionals across Jacksonville for a night of networking and more.

Last night I moderated a panel discussion at the University of North Florida called Strictly Social. The purpose of the event was to bring together professionals in Northeast Florida who use social media every day in their jobs, but who each do very different jobs.

By doing so, I hoped to bring together people with different enough backgrounds, and diverse enough expertise, to facilitate a quality conversation about a range of topics. Now that the event is over, I believe that I was successful.

I’d like to thank both UNF’s PRSSA chapter, and UNF, for both inviting me to speak, and for hosting the event. Without them, it would not have been nearly as successful!

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.

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.

Even though his face was really made for TV, Renaissance Creative’s Social Media Strategist, Ben Lamothe will be working out his vocal chords this coming Monday. Ben will be joining host, Melissa Ross, on our local NPR / PBS affiliate, 89.9FM’s “First Coast Connect” at 9am (7/12/10), to discuss the Crisis in the Gulf. Ben will specifically be addressing BP’s social media response to the crisis. After a fumbling start, BP now has substantial social media strategy in place- but is it working, or being upstaged by Twitter’s satirical BPGlobalPR? Ben will let us know his thoughts. This is educational stuff, so tell your boss to “Back off!” (…or “Tune in!”).