Open The Dialogue

Did you watch the 61st Annual Emmy Awards on Sunday night? Or were you one of the 24.8 million people who turned on Week 2 on Sunday Night Football? I tuned into the game (I live with a Giants fan) but thanks to the power of social media I was easily able to follow along. But how effective was the social media integration for this year’s Emmys?

Pros:

• On the front page of Emmys.com was a live-updating widget that allowed me to read both tweets and Emmy related status updates. But the best part was easily the Celebrity twitter tab that allowed me to check out only tweets from different celebs around the room.
• Over on Facebook a lively amount of conversation was happening on the Emmy’s Fan Page. At the same time one person was live-tweeting results and performances on the Emmy Twitter feed.
• While there was no live video, it was nice to see Dr. Horrible’s “web video” interception.  It was a good laugh but watch it for yourself (below). Some of those jokes might become true…

Cons:

• No live video. Unlike the President’s Inauguration, this was meant to be a complement to the broadcast not a replacement.
• While I enjoyed the live action widget, I wish it lived on a separate page.  With the amount of things it was pulling in, it was a little hard to follow. Plus when I went to see it again, it was gone!  The Emmy’s threw away a wealth of reaction.
• The YouTube channel that Emmys.com links to didn’t have a whole lot to do with the broadcast.  Considering how much work goes into these productions, couldn’t some exclusive video be shared,

Judgement:

• The social media integration for this year’s Emmy’s may have won a supporting actor award but certainly not a lead.  While the ideas were in the right place, the extra effort didn’t seem to be there on any of their social media properties.  Still it was great to see events like this embrace social media and I hope they do even more with it next year.

What was your favorite part of the Emmy’s?  Did you participate online at all?

FCC To Unclog the Internet: Social Media to Act as Plunger

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski launched the website OpenInternet.gov to build support for legislation that maintains equal access to content over the net.  The use of social media channels on this site is impressive with the integration of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms.  The goals are widely supported in the social media community with Mashable outlining why they support this measure.  Video of address is below:

MySpace and Twitter in Complete Harmony on Status Updates

According to RWW, MySpace announced that it will offer greater sync capability with Twitter.  It will keep MySpace more relevant in light of Facebook’s popularity. In addition, it will facilitate building branded assets on MySpace by allowing Twitter to send out messages across all platforms.

GEICO Hosts Fastest Growing Online Biker Community

By way of The Blog Council, GEICO’s MyGreatRides.com is a great example of creating an online community for your target publics.

Social Media Policy 101

Still trying to formulate your company’s social media policy? This list of over 80 policies from About.com to Yahoo gives a wide selection of possible guidelines. Of course, Serena Ehrlich shows how some guidelines (like ESPN’s) can be both good and bad.

Facebook Privacy Concerns Continue

Facebook Beacon has been shut down after two years of lawsuit problems and anti-privacy allegations. Of course, this announcement may be lost in the most recent instance of Facebook data mining, an experiment by MIT.

Can Ad Agency + Social Media= Success?

Can social media marketing and advertising co-exist in your marketing department? Here’s a look at a few problems that ad agencies need to overcome in order to make social media marketing work.

When I do research on a company’s social media presence, I keep coming across a common recurring problem: It is almost darned impossible to find out what some companies are doing in social media from their corporate websites.  This is especially true for websites of major multinationals and comes across as if they don’t want the consumer to find them in the medium.  Too often, social media activity is hidden away on a distant website or with a forgettable name resulting in loose links to the brand.

While it may help us PR folks in researching what a company is currently doing in social media, more importantly, it will help potential consumers connect with your brand on a daily basis by making it easier for them to find your social media assets quickly and easily. As such, these are my top three recommendations in making it so:

1. Have a clear section on your website that lists and links to your social media assets.

This is now about as important as the About, Contact or Products sections on the corporate website.  It simply befuddles me to know that a company is active in social media, but there is virtually no way of finding out what they are from their corporate website.  If the company is a multinational then they can be forgiven for not having this on their global website, but this is absolutely a necessity for their regional or national website for each country.

2. Keep your social media assets as closely branded as possible.

Facebook has a process of reclaiming branded pages if they are currently taken by someone.  Your corporate url and your Facebook page name should be as close to each other as possible.  Meaning, if your corporate URL is: www.yourcompany.com then your Facebook URL address should be http://www.facebook.com/yourcompany.  This goes for all the other platforms as well, so people can easily guess what your page may be if they want to connect to it directly.  Twitter profiles can be changed a little due to space constraints but it should still be as close to the original as possible.  If the consumer is not able to find your social media profiles directly, they should always have the option of going back to your website to look it up, as mention in number 1.  Too often, I have found myself typing in the most logical URL on Facebook for a company, only to be disappointed for not being clever enough to guess the page for their super awesome campaign that is temporarily going on at the moment.

3. Make your content shareable.

This all about doing what social media is all about.  Just today, I came across some great  photography tips by a professional on the website of a major camera company.  I really wanted to share the video but there was no way for me to do it.  The content was locked and the only way others could see it too was only if they were compelled to come to the website.  This was a missed opportunity for the company in turning a single consumer into their evangelist who could have reached tens if not thousands of others in his or her network.  Now repeat this for every other consumer who may have wanted to do the same and you can easily see the loss for having locked content.  So, make your content shareable and at the very least it will get you more exposure.

I am certain others have said this before but it bears repeating in the hopes that this becomes the M.O. for all companies using social media.

(Photo by Andy and Becky on flickr.)

For those of you that didn’t have time to watch the full video from OTD’s previous post this week, I wanted to highlight some of these amazing stats brought to you by Socialnomics:

• 96% of Gen Y has joined a social network
• Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the US last year met via social media.
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4^th largest after China, India and then the United States
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama.
• YouTube is the 2^nd largest search engine in the world.
• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.
• If you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you were earn $156.23 per hour.
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, only 14% trust advertisements.
• Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
• 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone and 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle.
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook, DAILY.

Clearly, social media is not the fad or the fun past-time that many thought it was at one point.  It has become a deeply embedded part of our lives, more than many of us might even realize, but the numbers don’t lie.