From Brand behavior in social media, state of the “laptop per child” project, to the new plan of Nokia for mobile music, news on Wikia search project, Youtube trying a new chance to create a business model, and Microsoft showing a bit more on what’s happening with Facebook. Here are the links for today: Read More

Blogging is still in its amateur stage but now we’ve got some interesting feedbacks and case studies we can analyze to know more on what’s to do or not. To get reviews of some interesting corporate US blogs, go on Viral Garden blog to read “The Company blog checkup top 10“. There you can have reviews of 21 corporate blogs. To these 21 reviews, we can add many other ones, like the ones of Twitter, Google, Facebook, Boeing, Delta, StonyField farms blog, Johnson & Johnson BTW (By the Way), Kodak, Accenture blogs, Microsoft blog, and many products or service blogs. Which can then help to build 10 recommendations/ rules to follow for company blogging. Read More

Consumers are key for companies. Key because they’re clients and best advocates of the brand. Traditional marketing and communication is meant to develop awareness and stimulate consumers to become customers through seeding value added to people buying the brand products. CRM is meant to increase loyalty by offering information and generating repeat business. In that process clients, prospects, consumers, and users are restricted to receivers role. When asked to contribute they’re always lead, and in a way not inviting to engage with the brand (answer a survey isn’t that much engaging). But as Trendwatching said, consumers are the global brain, and brand should do much more to leverage that community of theirs, that would definitly be a smart way to shorten decision making process, help out-of-the box thinking, and generate more proximity with people that can become their advocates if included in the ideation and service enhancement process. Here’s some ideas of how to leverage that untapped and smart resource. Read More

Any connection between Social Media and Google? Obviously we can answer Orkut, the current Google social network, and if a bit more “geek” we can say Social Graph API or OpenSocial. But there’s another interesting thing that connects Google to social media. It’s the Google User Experience, sort of “Mantra”. Read More

From Chris Garrett Read More

Twitter is like the hype itself since its launch. Everybody’s using it and this webservice smells like there’s some great opportunity integrating it into communications planning and marketing strategies. But how can 140-words text improve brand reputation? What is the return on investment of such an application for brands and above all how can it become a competitive advantage using it? Not so easy to answer but after some use you’ll discover Twitter is more useful and engaging that you may think, but only if associated with a blog and social media activity (see this post regarding social media activity). Read More

Reviews, suggestions, and conversation between consumers and brands are core business of social media. It’s an easy doing right now posting one’s opinion on a product, service or idea, using blogs, wikis, conversation platform, and obviously product review tools included in e-commerce platform. Which means there are negative and positive opinion posted on what companies are selling. And which also implies companies may be scepticals about social media since they don’t get the hand over the message but only become part of the discussion. Yet, as Joshua Porter explained why brands shouldn’t fear product reviews, companies shouldn’t fear social media because it’s in fact a huge opportunity to develop product/ service range, increase customer care quality and quicken innovation. Here are some thoughts and ideas about how to challenge consumers and turn their requests, suggestions, arguments, and negative opinions into interesting points to enhance your brand equity and customer loyalty. Read More