Corridor Conversations

A presentation i am giving early next week on Reputation & Risk Management from a perspective of a Social Media Practitioner.

My presentation focuses on these areas.

If you are a part of the social media fraternity or even a keen observer of social, you would have heard about the big fuss around Klout changing their methodology for scoring online social capital. If the buzz on twitter is to be believed it seems that more people have had their scores downgraded than upgraded as positioned by a blog post from them. But then again it’s always the unhappy people that are the vocal ones in a situation like this rather than the ones who are positively impacted, so it’s hard to refute their claim and possibly wrong as well. Personally I understand the frustration some people may have around their new lowered scores, me being one of the people impacted as well (-ve 10 points). But I believe Klout has done the right thing here and here are my thoughts on this.

I recently had the privilege to speak at “The Futurist CMO Conference” that recently happened at Gurgaon, India. The topic I spoke on was ‘Channels 2.0 – how digital marketing can help OEMs’, well this blog post is to provide general pointers i made on marketing partnerships in that presentation. I am leaving out the digital parts for another time .

I guess we all know the importance of partnerships, especially in the area of marketing. Carlos Slim Helu the Mexican business magnate recently said – “In this new wave of technology, you can’t do it all yourself, you have to form alliances.” and he is spot on. We all need alliances and partnerships to achieve our business and marketing goals. The key to is finding the right ones and navigating successfully through it, the latter sometimes being more difficult than the former,  especially when you are dealing with large size organizations that may have different goals and a totally different culture.

I recently had a conversation with the Paul Writer team where I talked at length about Intel’s integrated social media strategy and highlighted some of the cool digital ideas that were executed by Intel. Based on that conversation, one the things on which I got a fair bit of feedback and affirmations was on the question of outsourcing social media and what was the right balance between internal and external social media teams. So I thought it would be a good idea to list them down here for Corridor Conversations readers as well as elaborate my personal view on this.

My take on outsourcing social media and how do you strike the right balance between internal and external social media teams.

Read More

Guest Post by Euan Wilcox (Regional Managing Partner - The Upper Storey )

There is a lot of talk, and honestly a lot of contradictory information, about Social Commerce. No wonder some brands might approach the whole opportunity with some trepidation and caution. Fortunately for me, my agency The Upper Storey, and Dell, we jumped headlong into Group Buying at the end of 2008 way before the over-hype made the picture significantly more complex.

Some people might question if group buying is a significant part of social commerce. I would agree, I think its true relevance to the potential field is probably minor. But it certainly fits under the broader definition of social commerce and is one of the most talked about today. For me there is no point arguing definitions and I find the Wikipedia definition more than satisfactory: Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.