Does social media seduce us?

So you meet someone. And there is something about that someone that enthralls you.  Something that makes you want to spend hours with that person. Time becomes non-existent. Food-an afterthought. Your current friends and family wonder where you have been. Why? Because you have been, in this case, sucked into social networking and social media and it’s now become this mating dance of sorts.

 So the questions, have you been seduced by social media?  Does it seduce us? Sure It does. Admit it, you know you have been sucked in and seduced by its offerings of endless friendships and relationships with like minded people, its cool widgets, it’s offer of making things easier so you can connect with more people etc., etc.  That’s right, Social media and the public are in love with each other right now. or better yet, are infatuated with each other.   The result being, we, the users, are willing to to be fed whatever social media and it’s networks want to serve us right now. We’re willing to accept it because It’s fresh right now.

The relationship is fresh. We go out with each other and we have no complaints, or if we do, we overlook them for now.  In fact, we tell others about our relationship with social media. We want others to see it, we want to share it. We want them to be a part of it.

Because Social Media is that bright shiny thing. That hot new boy toy. The smoking girl you met last week.

In fact social media can do no wrong right now because social media has a lot of siblings and a lot of connections and they all are very loving and friendly and willing to go out with you too. It’s like one big brothel!

The only thing you need to bring to the table is your personal information. All you have to give up is some tiny bits of personal information that should not take to long to give up and is really not that big a deal and you’ll be back doing your social media thing in no time etc etc. And based on the fact that it’s not that big a deal, you go ahead. And you forget it about it.

Problem is, the relationship may sour. or even already might be starting to sour. Most do, at least to the extent that 50% of all marriages fail. So why will this one be any different?  You’re realizing that maybe it wasn’t as sexy and shiny and new as you thought. So now what?

You’ve just given yourself, all of yourself over to this relationship, and now it has soured.  What do you do?

Hell it’s social media, just go join another one. Go find another social networking group.  Think about it. A relationship ends, you mourn, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off and you go and find another relationship to jump into.  But now you’re wizer, you know better, you’ve learned from all of the previous relationships and now you know exactly what you are looking for. The question is. Who will be in charge of this relationship? You, or the other? Who’s calling the shots? Assuming that both have learned from their previous relationships, here are 11 things that both parties should be aware before entering into any new social media, social networking union.

Your next relationship with social media will be better than the previous one because of a few factors. 1) You know what you’re looking for 2) The relationship is based more on trust and understanding of each other 3) The relationship involves even more communication 4) You are available for each other all the time 5) There will never be a betrayal 6) Self improvement will be mutual 7) It will be important to share with others 8)  Mutual Respect will be necessary 9) We promise to be the person we are, and not the person we wished to be 10) Our privacy will always be our privacy 11) My data is mine and not yours and when I want it back, I mean it I want it back. Don’t make me jump through a bunch of bullshit hoops to get it back either!

So in answer to my question. Yes, social media does seduce us. It always will, but fool me once shame on you, fool me twice and shame on me.

Social Media is not…Part II

As if having over 60 ideas, suggestions and observations of what “social media is not” was not enough, I now add an additional 25 responses from Linkedin and Twitter.

Social Media is Not

65. Your free answer generator if you run out of inspiration. After receiving this reply I responded that the person could do better than that and thus I received the following:

Social Media is not about individuals, it only is about its own gods and half gods. Since I am not a half god nor a god, it is quite obvious people would not know me. Social Media is also not definable since it is everything you want it to be and everything anyone else wants it to be. People who like to catch it in a few lines do not understand Social Media, since Social Media is more than some definitions and words alone it is a journey that never ends.

66. … A one way thing.

Be prepared for lots of criticism and people who have a lot of time and every motivation to make sure that what you are is accurate and true. If it is not… well we have all seen the examples.

Accept that any company/ product/ person that ventures into social media will be scrutinised and critisized.

While some shy away from social media for this reason exactly increasingly there is a realisation that abstaining is not a risk – free strategy. Getting out there and being honest might be scary but it certainly gains you a lot in terms of engagement and reputation.

67. … A substitute for a real social life.

68. …Doing much other than seriously turning everyone into a marketing expert to our global detriment.

When I mentioned that I would like to have him expound on this, and suggested perhaps he look at it differently, I received this heated response that diverts into a global political rant..

I’ll look at it as I please, thanks.

Anyone who tells me “you need to look at it like this” needs to look at, well, that kind of language and is a function of that culture.

The only reason I “need to look at it like this” is because your professional reputation depends upon the success of social networking. Otherwise what I said wouldn’t be such a threat to your well-being. None intended, but that’s what drives a statement like that.

True, social networking is not all bad, and they’re not all great either.

Where is all this communication getting us? It is a bourgeois pastime, a distraction from crippling debt, anti-intellectualism, fake dionesianism, and while on the surface, available to everyone for low-low rates, is yet another competition for time and energy towards things that really matter, like democracy and true personal freedom.

Our world is entering what appears to be an even greater period of vapid leadership than ever before. Why? Because MySpacers can’t see that Mr. Obama needs a team of 300 economic advisors. Bill Clinton could argumentatively engage that number in a blind-chess-tourney. All they see is a well-tailored marketing message.

Our present democratic contender is a direct result of the attitudes arising from social networking. He provides a message that is well tailored, yet inappropriate for our circumstance (he got prominence from unenlightened religious/political leader Oprah Winfrey, won the nomination on an anti-war platform, and having won it and being confronted with the economy, he’s got nothing. Nada. Zippo.)

We need a seriously deep, connected technocrat/intellectual to undo the ravages of this prior administration. This generation is going to continue to fail to see that all that glitters is not gold, and not all that’s being sold is worth buying. Unfortunately we’ll be worse off than with Hillary because they don’t know how to identify with what’s needed on a basis of principle over personality. And that’s the big, big problem.

At that point, I wished him well in his future endeavors!

69. The greatest thing since sliced bread, and it gets just as stale over the course of a few days. 🙂

70. The only internet marketing strategy.

71. An avenue to “push” your product.

72. A replacement for all marketing strategies and tools like ad, pr, print, tv, radio or other methods for a company.

73. Is not a replacement for good customer service or a good reliable product or product support.

74. Is not going to directly reflect $$ at the cash register in a short term– nor can it always be quantified in terms of dollars but actually name, brand, product recognition. Just as a tv ad might not reflect in significant sales, the social media should be dealt with in the same manner.

75. Is not static. It’s going to evolve so staying only on myspace.com isn’t the only place. There are other options that can employ social media within the context of the marketing strategy tools.

76. Is not just about the number of friends on whatever site you choose to be part of– you actually have to participate and you actually need to have a great product to deliver. It’s not just about the sizzle, you need to have the steak that goes with it. (as in show me the beef)

77. … Is _not_ a mass media

78.  … Something you can do in your spare time.

79. …Addictive

80. … Going to make you any money this year. Or next year. Or the year after that. Or the year after that, or the year after that, or even *gasp* the year after that — unless you’re kin to Rupert Murdoch.

81. …A goal in and of itself.

82. …new.

It’s something you and your organization are already doing, only without applying the “social media” tag to it. It’s using <insert platform here> to make it easier for people to reach each other.

The concept is ancient both from conceptual and technological aspects. What’s new is the shiny implementations popping up… and actual mainstream acceptance. It’s now officially cool to be connected.

83. …Owned by marketing, nor PR, nor advertising.

84. …A destination, it’s a tool.

85. … Accurate and qualitative enough to trust.

86. …Is not a solution to every communication or PR problem

87. …Is not just for kids

88. …Is not a replacement for developing a solid strategy and should not stand alone as a tactic

89. …Is not a new way of thinking, it’s a new way of doing.

As you can see, the perceptions sometimes do not mix with reality. I engaged in some really lively discussions on this topic and will cause me to create an interesting slide presentation on the subject. I’m amazed as well at how skewed and actually how misinformed some of the respondents were. You can also see, where some are completely fed up with even talking about social media anymore. Their loss I suppose. In the end, as I was telling someone earlier, in a few years, we might not even recognize the monolith that is social media as it evolves into iterations that we haven’t even thought of yet.

Twebinar #2 review: Who owns your brand? We do.

Yesterday Twebinar #2 brought it on home. Huh? What I mean is that, though the first one was good, the second one was great! For those of you who are wondering what the hell I’m talking about, this is what a twebinar is and was.

The twebinars are a series of  mashups in which Chris Brogan and David Alston have assembled the best and brightest from PR, Marketing, and Social media into a series of video interviews, live sound bites, and live video, into a massive twitter round table. What occurs is this healthy discussion on a certain topic, in this case the brand, and more specifically, who owns your brand. The discussion is rapid fire, the tweets even faster, and this is something that has gotten better, and not only combines the best and the brightest as a focal point, but really what makes it work so well, is the conversations that occur with stars in their own right from companies far and wide. 

I was amazed at the depth and breadth of the tweets. Combine this with Chris Brogan moderating the stream of videos, the conversation with some live guests via web cam and phone such as Richard Binhammer, as well responding to questions via twitter and you have this organized chaos of free flowing discussion about a very poignant and hot topic at the present moment. Your Brand.

I have to give props to how quickly things have evolved from the first twebinar. Given the improvement and the depth to which they took constructive criticism to heart from the first twebinar, this bodes well for the next, which means that we will be seeing more of these in the future. For me, the twebinar produced 18 new followers in twitter, which is very cool.

What I would like to see for the next session is a way for a lot of us to be able to see the videos and the flow of discussion at the same time. I was using Summize-recently bought by Twitter. I was also using Twhirl too, which had some latency issues, which caused me to use Twiiter as my main client, So I toggled from the videos to Summize to Twitter. It worked for me since I was listening more than I was watching. But ultimately it worked.

What I took away from the mashup was simply that brand management is as important as anything that a company might do, and yet sometimes the brand gets ignored through complacency, smugness and ignorance. Often times, when this happens, it’s too late to try and grab marketshare back.

Yet, the companies that do value the customer, and who ultimately realize through an epihpany sometimes, that the customer is the one who defines the brand, are the ones that realize that YES they(the customer) are the brand as much as the company is.

Bottom Line, the twebinars give marketers, social media champions, PR peeps and N00bs all a chance to voice some very valuable opinions and thoughts and what it tells me is this. There are soooo many superstars out there who DO get it. I want to connect with them as much as I want to connect with the true superstars in the space.

For those of you that did participate yesterday, what did you think? What did you take away from it? and how will use what you learned? What should happen in the next Twebinar?

26 people you could trust in the social media space.

In the second part of my series of trust in social media, I thought it might be a good thing to mention and highlite 26 people in the social media/marketing space whose thoughts I appreciate and whose knowledge and willingness to share that knowledge I value. I also thought it more important that it should be a list of people who would do their best to be a straight shooter, tell the truth, and give you what you need, not what they want you to have. Big Difference.

If I were you and you were either looking for that list of people whos blogs and companies that you could refer to on a daily basis or just starting out in trying to understand what social media is as it pertains to marketing, then this list is a good start. Not all of them swim in social media waters only, but it is still a very strong list for you to work off of.

  1. Scott Monty
  2. Stowe Boyd
  3. Chris Brogan
  4. Jeremiah Owyang
  5. Rohit Bhargava
  6. Charlene Li
  7. Phil Gomes
  8. Shel Israel
  9. Lee Odden
  10. Steve Rubel
  11. Valeria Maltoni
  12. Brian Solis
  13. B.L. Ochman
  14. Toby Bloomberg
  15. Drew McLellan
  16. MIke Sansone
  17. Seth Godin
  18. Geoff Livingston
  19. Maggie Fox
  20. Becky Carroll
  21. David Armano
  22. Joseph Jaffe
  23. Mack Collier
  24. Guy Kawasaki
  25. Gavin Heaton
  26. Rachel Happe

So who do you trust? Who’s words do you take to heart and try to apply to your businesses? Who motivates you to no end?

A creative proposal with a kick ass social media plan

Two agencies compete in a head-to-head pitch for a fictitious project based around the film “Casablanca.”  live in front of several hundred people at iMedia’s Entertainment Marketing Summit

Doug Schumacher and his badass team at Basement, won the pitch. Here is  the marketing strategy and creative thinking that won them the fictitious gig. Pay attention especially to the social media plan within the slides.

Here is the premise for the pitch:

“Shortly after winning the 1943 Academy Award for Best Picture, all the prints of ‘Casablanca’ were mysteriously lost. Although many stills, newspaper accounts, magazine articles and subsequent interviews with the stars of the film have long been available, nobody has seen ‘Casablanca’ since 1943.

“Then, in January 2008, an archivist stumbled across the prints in the Warner Bros. Burbank, Calif. lot. Excited by this discovery, Warner Bros. has chosen to do a limited theatrical re-release of this great but long-missing film.”

The mission:

The hypothetical re-release would be for Valentine’s Day weekend, 2009. The budget to work with was $350K-$500K for creative development and non-paid media, and $1,000,000 in paid media.

Here is the competitive landscape:

  • A Matthew McConaughey/Kate Hudson romantic comedy opening on the same day and date
  • A Michael Bay war-action-adventure flick, set in Iraq in a bit of counter-programming; same opening day and date
  • A long-awaited two-part “More Sex and the City” is airing on TNT, part one on Valentine’s Day eve

Here are the slides:

The trust factor in social media marketing

I don’t know how much I reference Seth Godin but I guess it’s for good reason. I like what he says about marketing, because he uses a ton of analogies and for me, thats a good thing. I need examples, real world or not, but I need colorful descriptive analogous ways for me to wrap my arms around complex ideas and simple ethereal notions.

With that being said, I was reading something over the weekend and was re-reading an old post by him in which he says the following:

 Worry about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread.

I’ve been writing alot lately about social media experts and last week actually compiled a list of what social media is not and subsequently received a tremendous amount of answers, but essentially the underlying theme is this: if you were to couple the question of what social media is not with the experts that are the in the social media marketing space, what you and i are looking for is TRUST. Trust that what I’m hearing is legit. Trust that what I’m reading is applicable.  Trust that I can utilize social media to connect with my audience, my customers, and my users.  Trust that social media is not just a buzzword.  Trust that social media and it’s experts are not just caught up in the jetstream.

One of the other underlying themes of social media marketing, as a marketer, as someone dipping their toes in the proverbial waters of soaicl media, is how do you segment  what you are hearing, what you are reading and what who you are listening to?, How do you separate fact from fiction, How do you know? How do you know what you know,? How do you know they know? I know it sounds sort of like a comedy routine but…

I know that there are some companies out there that do it right but Im going to guess that for every company that does it right, there are 5 who say they can and never have, in their efforts to capitolize on the trend. But trust in any setting business or otherwise, determines the outcome of any engagement, it requires a tremndous leap of faith. Just like marriage. or any type of relationship for that matter.

So going forward, as you venture in, who do you trust/ and why should you trust them?  Does someone who has expert status warrant your trust?  It reminds me of the time where our company needed a Cisco engineer to come out and do some work for us. At the time, his rate might have been $150 an hour. The company said, they were sending out the very best they had, their heavy hitter… So we waited, and about an hour after he was supposed to show, in walks this guy- a bit disheveled, sunglasses on, mumbles that he’s from Cisco. He comes with nothing, no laptop, no pen, paper, nothing, knapsack. I repeate…nothing! Oh and he wreaks of alcohol… First impression? Not so good… But it gets better.

So the guy asks about 5 or 6 questions sits down at a terminal, works for under an hour, gets up and says,”You’re all set”, and leaves. WTF? Blink blink.. ala South Park. We’re screwed.

Bottom Line?  It was done perfectly. He was a heavy hitter, he did his thing and he did it well. Though outward impressions notwithstanding, this guy rocked the house.

The morals of the story are many.  Do you go with your gut, let them do their thing, and sit back and see what they produce? Perception is not always reality? Go with what people tell you and trust them?. Word of mouth, in this case was correct? Company hype was dead on? It’s ok to trust the disheveled engineer whos breath wreaks of alcohol? Cisco engineers rock?

Ok so you’re asking “So what are the parallels to social media marketing you ask?  Well, per Seths point, when deciding what to believe and not believe, in regards to social media you can go 2 ways. You can listen to the person who has a huge following and is passionate or you can listen to the person who talks the talk on their website but does not have much more than tha,t that can be substantiated.

Case in point, when reading about social media marketing on blog sites i would want to read someones blog who has been around no less than a year or longer and or someone who has a pretty solid base of followers and is passionate and or someone who might be on the agency side who ‘does” or “is” the social media marketing person at that agency and has chosen to blog about it.

Who would you trust?   Who would I trust?  That will be in part II

The definitive working list of what social media is not

I had, awhile back, compiled a list of what i thought social media was not. This morning while exchanging tweets, Beth Harte mentioned that Amber Naslund had just dropped a post on what social media isn’t, which led me to thinking: “why don’t we create a list of what social media is not”! There are so many lists and blog posts out there that are touting what it is, that maybe we should clarify and quantify what it is not. I would like this to be a continuous work in progress and need everyone to contribute as little or as much as possible. So here goes:

From Search Marketing Gurus we have the following:

  1. Social Media Isn’t:  Easy
  2. Social Media Isn’t:  Fast
  3. Social Media Isn’t:  A Substitute for Sound SEO Practices
  4. Social Media Isn’t:  A Substitute for Sound PPC Practices
  5. Social Media Isn’t:  A Practice to be Done by Interns
  6. Social Media Isn’t:  Another Place to Distribute Your Press Release
  7. Social Media Isn’t:  Something That Will Work if Your Site is “Broken”
  8. Social Media Isn’t:  Something To Send Out Mass Emails For
  9. Social Media Isn’t:  Something You Can Do Without Participation
  10. Social Media Isn’t:  Something You Can Do in Disguise

Courtesy of Rachel Happe we have: 11. Social media is not community

B.L. Ochman says that:

12. Social media isn’t a one-shot deal 

13. Social media isn’t a technique

14.  It’s not a short-term project

15.  It’s not an experiment, 

16.  It’s not an event, 

17. It’s not a quick fix.  and 

18. It’s not something you throw money at.

Brian Solis tells us that Social media is not:

19. The final frontier

Robert Young from GigaOm, mentioned 2 years ago that 

20. Social Media is not Mass Media.

Is that still true? I think it’s not true any longer, nor might have never been. Its perhaps a function or channel of mass media though, or slowly becoming that.

John Gray writing for imediaconnection wrote that: 

21. Social media is not just for kids, and I’m down with that!

Don Schindler from Media Sauce Blog tells us that:

 22. Social media is not advertising or

23. It’s not marketing, it’s about connections.

Ike Piggot over at the Now is Gone blog mentions that, 

24. Social media is not a commodity.

According to the Deal,

25. Social media is not the next bubble. But that was 3 years ago.

26. Social media is not a direct response marketing channel according to the 10e20 blog

27. Social Media may not be all that it’s cracked up to be, this from Jennifer Laycock over at searchengineguide. What the hell does “all that it’s cracked up to be” actually mean? I never really understood that statement.

28. Social media is not about Links, this from Li Evans

29. For teens, social media is not technology, it’s life!

30.  Social media is not a free for all, thanks Luke Armour

Brian Magierski mentions that:

31. Social media is not just another marketing channel. 

Laura Porto Stockwell  believes that

32. Social media is not new

Thanks in part to Scoble we know that Social Media is not:

33. Newspapers

34. Magazines

35. Television

36. Radio

37. Books

38. CDs

39. DVDs

40. A box of photos

50. Physical, paper mail and catalogs and

51. Yellow Pages

And here are mine:

52. Social media is not up to them, it is up to you and your voice

53. Social media is not predicated on many to many

54. Social media is not one to one, but it can be.

55. Social media is not closed to anyone

56. Social media is not calm, sedate, unresponsive.

57. Social media is not passive

58. Social media is not laryngitis

59. Social media is not mainstream, yet

60.  Social media is not static

And here are Amber Naslund’s:

61. Social media is not Show and Tell

62. Social media is not a Popularity and Numbers Contest

63. Social media is not a Silver Bulllet

64. Social media is not just for “Experts”
 

Ok so I think 64 is a pretty good start. What am I missing here? Feel free to add yours or, feel free to tell me where some of these might actually be wrong. Let’s talk about it!

Social Media slides you can relate to

For the sake of virgin ears, the actual title of this slide presentation is “What the F**K is Social Media”? and I wish I could have taken credit for this but it came from alisa leonard hansen’s blog site titled Socialized or thewebissocial,  which came from Marta Kagan take your pick. Subscribe to both their sites, they both have a good take on whats up. Though I am down with Marta’s genius. Per this, it’s amazing as you work through the slides how large the numbers are and yet how they ( social networks and social media per se) have not even scatched the surface.

Searching for social media experts

I just read an article in Adweek about Ford hiring Scott Monty in its quest to grapple with and implement the monolith that is… trumpets please… social media. While reading the piece I couldn’t help but wonder outloud just how social media experts became social media experts in  a space so relatively fresh in our collective marketing, media and PR consciousness. Not that Scott is not one, but this thought came to me after reading that Ford ran 50 candidates through the gauntlet before choosing Scott. 

Which begs my first of many questions: Though they chose a good person, who made the final decision, and what was it based upon? Who were the other 50 and why were they not chosen? I know that there is always a bit of subjectiveness to this process but I think, given the “newness” of the space, that it had to be absolutely fascinating to see how the whole thing went down. I do have to give some credit to Ford for stepping up, now more than ever, and especially given the state of the economy and the auto industry in particular. Somebody, somewhere, within that organization had the foresight to get to a decision maker and say, “we need to grab onto the beanstalk that is social media.

Some other questions I had and I’m sure other likeminded organizations are probabaly grappling with are:

Do we, they become expert like from writing it so much that we begin to understand how it works? Do experts, or are experts people who have implemented  a or some social media campaigns of any scale, successfully or unsuccessfully? What is the criteria? Are they IT people? marketing experts?  PR experts? What determines the experts title as the “expert”. Who determines it? Their peers? The  nascent industry itself?

I do think that longevity in the space that is and has been marketing, PR and even IT/internet/marketing, certainly is a determining factor. Why? Well think about it, when we all got into the business of what we do, what we did then is certainly not what we do now. Our jobs, titles and positions have all evolved. They have morphed into what the public and our bosses have demanded, expected and required us to learn, on the fly. And currently for some of us, that is all things social media related.

With that being said, when I write about the top 30 social media evangelists, I write from a position of referring to these people time and time again about social media topics that are hot. I mention them because they have their fingers on the collective pulse of their clients, their usage of bleeding edge technology to leverage brands, and their willingness to share their experiences. I call them experts, because their names and their blogs come up in conversations, they are constantly pushing out valuable information, and they are essentially practicing what they are preaching. And I find myself going back to “them” because clients and what I do and we do on a day to day basis, requires that I learn fast and implement faster.

Funny thing though, even the experts are wondering who the real experts are!

And if you really want to know the truth. Social media has to be a “practice what you preach model”. Why? You can’t be successfull in the space by being quiet and stealthy. it’s all about the sharing and exchanging of information without pretense. That’s right, the conversation. 

But to be successfull in the space, it is eventually going to boil down to those who do and those who did and not those who have heard and those who say.

All I do know is that the expert does not or should not call himself the expert. I can’t place the quote but:

Anyone who has to tell you that they are “the man”, ain’t “the man…”

Social Media Marketing

We talk, I talk, and everyone else talks a lot about social media, social networks and the impact it’s having on our online lives. Right now it has yet to hit critical mass, though you might not think that by looking at the lastest numbers.

With that being said, there are tons of those who wish to be on the inside looking out rather than vice versa. And those are the people that “work” for marketing companies, ad agencies, and Fortune 1000 companies. They have been approached by their bosses and they’ve been charged with figuring this social media thing out and how they, as a company, can leverage it for their benefit.

Problem is, trying to sort through the ones who have, the ones who claim they have, and the ones who wish they’d had. I recently encountered a company that HAS in a big way. If you have not yet determined how you are going to use social media for your company, perhaps your first step should be to undertsand the many uses. Once you see the many ways that it can be used to either brand a product, brand a company, or drive traffic, sales and eyeballs, then you can start to figure out what the big picture is of social media. But to understand the big picture, as I said earlier, you need to talk with people who HAVE done it.

I had the privledge of sitting down with Jason Breed from Neighborhood America awhile back to discuss their award winning Elavate platform, and their business model in general. A quick blurb about NA,  Neighborhood America was recently recognized for Best Social Networking Solution by The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) Winning a Prestigious CODiE Award.

Here’s some quick perspective for you; More than 1,100 CODiE nominations were submitted by 600 companies in a total of 76 categories. A panel of expert judges narrowed the field to 340 nominees, from which the 2008 CODiE winners were chosen.

The point of this post is this, if you are looking for guidance, direction, and advice from someone like Jason or a company like Neighborhood America who is smack dab in the middle of social media, and social media marketing, then you need to look no further. Of course, I know they are not the only company out there that can roll out a solution for you, but as a starting point, it sure is a good start. Seriously, if you were to decide right now, today that you were going to go out and evaluate social media companies, how are you going to do it? What will it be based on? What is your criteria? I do recall awhile back that Chris Brogan created a cheat sheet on how to evaluate a company for social media marketing services, you may want to check it out. At the least, Chris writes a good blog on all things social.

From a social media marketing standpoint, you may also want to check out Scott Monty’s blog site as well. You may find it usefull depending on your grasp of social media.

All of this though makes me think that perhaps my next worthy post should be a a listing of companies poised to help you figure out what your social media marketing initiative will be. If you know of some other worthy companies, I am certainly willing to listen. Besides, isn’t that part of the conversation that we are all engaged in right now?

One more thing for J Breed…. Go bulls…