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Taking this course got me back to twitter once agin.  The reason why I was not a regular twitter’er is that my company’s corporate network is completely blocking any sort of social media sites (how ironic!).  My company cellphone also don’t allow me to install any apps so I can’t really take advantage of the concept of “twit as I go”…

But I got back on it as much as I could, and started following a bunch of intersting people.  Since I am a hockey fan (particularly with my home team – Vancouver Canucks), I started to look for Canucks/hockey related people to follow.  I am very suprised to find out that Canucks GM Mike Gillis just recently got on twitter! 

To me, the impression of NHL GMs is that they are very old school.  And they seldemly have any direct communication with the fans (through newspaper, webiste…yes…but I am talking about at a personal level like twitter).  So I am very glad that Mike Gillis is taking a giant step in reach out to the fans.  He is personally answering fans’ questions and expressing his opinion about his team.  It’s great!

Let’s hope he doesn’t accidentally leak any trade secrets on twitter…

It is one thing to use social media as a marketing tool to get messages out, drive customer engagement, or just getting some brand awareness.  It is a totally different thing for a company to empower employees to participate in social media.  My thumb-s-up to pixar for empowering their employees on a touchy subject.

This video is worth the whole 8 minutes…

Now that our group have a little bit more direction on where to head towards for our final project, we are starting to look at how other beer brands are doing in the social media space.

During our class, a topic that we covered was how to tie together online and offline activities using social media.  This is one tough subject for many social media marketeers that takes a bit more than just getting the brand on facebook or twitter.

While looking at  Okanagan Spring’s Facebook page, I saw that they came up with a cheap and easy way to get people involved, not to mention to get their offline products exposure to a targetted group of audience,….FREE BEER SPONSORSHIP!  Dah…how nice!  So next time if you want your local sport league champion to celerbrate with free beers or if you are organizing a community BBQ, have your video recorder ready!

Here is yet another airline-bad-customer-service story…

For those of you who are parents, I am sure you understand how messy it can get when it comes to diaper change…not to mention while you are not at home or anywhere not private.

So here is an incident where the power of social media helped a couple to get compensated from a typical “un-listening” airline customer service rep.

The coverage of the incident | The blog | The resolution

And of course, news stories like this can’t hide from the Internet…

At the end of the day, the company involved are more likely to lose in bad PR.  So does it worth to save the incremental cost as suppose to make their customer happy?

While preping for our final project (Howe Sound Brewery and use of Social Media), I am looking into how various big name and BC microbreweries make use of social media such as facebook or twitter.  Initially I was going to come up with a spreadsheet of where everyone is at…then I figured…what I heck…I’ll just blog it (make it easier to link up everything).

The Big Boys:

Molson Canadian | Facebook | No Twitter | Blog | YouTube
Kokanee | Facebook | No Twitter
Budweiser | Facebook (US) | Facebook (Canada) | Facebook App | No Twitter
Coors Light | Facebook | No Twitter
Sleeman | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube
Alexander Keith | Facebook | No Twitter
Moosehead | Facebook | Twitter
Labatt Blue | Facebook | No Twitter
More Later…

BC Microbreweries:

Howe Sound | Facebook | Twitter | Flickr
Okanagan Spring | Facebook | Twitter
Granville Island | Facebook | Twitter
Lighthouse | Facebook | Twitter
Bowen Island | No Facebook | No Twitter
Russell | No Facebook | No Twitter
Vancouver Island | Facebook | Twitter
Dead Frog | Facebook | No Twitter
More Later…

An hour into this post…

The list keep growing and growing (and I haven’t put down any internationals yet!), just about everyone seems to be using social media of somesort….looks like this project is becoming interesting (at least need to be more specific on what we are trying to compare….)

What else can be a better fit than talking about Groundswell when blogging about e-Marketing and social media? It also “just happen” to be the first assignment I chose for my course: ) – a book review of Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.

Before going into details of the book, just a word on the overall impression of the book after 2 chapters…

After the first 2 chapters of the book, I was still a bit sceptical about this book. Is this book just trying to explain an unstoppable phenomenon to managers who do not keep up with the current technology trends? According to the book, Groundswell is “A social trend in which people use technology to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations”. It describes how people make use of various technology trends such as blogs, social media, feeds, wikis, and open source to communicate and collaborate. Groundswell is the new “Word of Mouth”. Products and services are no longer being reviewed by the typical editorial review but by everyone who is willing to participate and collaborate. For me, I was already part of Groundswell without even knowing what it is. So it gave me a false impression of it being a book of buzz word without concrete content.

Fortunately as I read on, the content become more specific and I start to understand why this book becomes popular.

Chapter 3 provide a useful profiling method for the people involved in the Groundswell. It uses a ladder called “The social Technographics ladder” to describe people’s level of involvement in the Groundswell. This new “Technographics” may give marketeers a new perspective in segmenting their position than the traditional demographics or physcographics. This is a useful first step when marketeer get into the ‘P” stage of tapping into the Groundswell (more on this later)…

Part two of book (from Chapter 4 to 9) is really the sole and essence of the book. It provides specific approach, strategies and case studies for marketeers to tap into the Groundswell.

The POST method is provided as a starting framework to assemble a work plan. (POST = People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) Many companies knows that they need to get into the groundswell but don’t know exactly where to start, so POST is a good reference point.

To help reader digest the POST framework, various useful cases are provided so that the framework can be more easily absorbed. The cases provide illustration on how companies can listen to, talk with, energize, support, and embracing the groundswell. It is useful to note that the POST framework should be used in order. One pitfall we may fall into is that we get too hyped up about a new technology trend and jump right into it without first trying understanding how it affects people (customer/employees) and how important it is to first define the objective and strategy.

Part 3, the last part of the book is about the future of groundswell and how this trend may reshape e-Marketing. It ought to provide some insight into the future but it really just reinforce the idea presented in part 2 of the book. In some sense, this is the weaker part of the book. I think a way to enrich this part is to cover how companies can be more fully integrated in the groundswell once they have gone through POST; how to empower their employees so that they get involved into the groundswell from the bottom up. Many cases in this book are about top level management tapping into groundswell and interacting with customers. A natural next step may be promoting grassroots level employees’ involvement also. Another important aspect that may use more coverage is how to do brand monitoring in the groundswell without outsourcing to third party. This was briefly covered under “Listening to the Groundswell”. With groundswell covering such a wide technology spectrum, I can see that monitoring is a daunting task. But some smaller organization that are just starting in this space may not (or may not want to) afford third party consultant.

All in all, Groundswell is a good introductory book that for sure is an eye opener on the subject. It serves a wide range of readers as it provides the buzzword, the business school framework, and yet some concrete cases that are indeed quite helpful.

Well, the main reason is my two-year old son.  He recently fell in love with “Buzzyear” (Buzz Lightyear in his language).  And of course, what happens in a day on the Internet is really like a lightyear in real life!

So let’s take a look at how Pixar make use of social media for Toy Story…

Welcome to my blog about eMarketing, social media, etc.

The blog is part of a e-Marketing course that I am taking.  It serves as a mean for me to put my own perspective on the development in the e-Marketing world.  I hope to maintain this blog not only for the course, but also maintain beyond it as I found interesting stuff on this fast changing area.