Leveraging Social Media - Tom Parish Consultancy Website

Just a quick announcement that I'm bringing online a new blog that will serve as my home base for the Internet marketing consulting work I do. It's called www.LeverageSocialMedia.com, and the title captures the purpose.

You know that I host the EnterpriseLeadership.org show, but you may not know my involvment in helping architect that site. I've had the opportunity to work with an amazing team of people at BMC.com to bring this project along. I've also worked with other communites: talk.bmc.com and the DBAzine.com site for database administrators.

Now that social media and social networks are moving into the mainstream, I figure it's time to broaden the dialogue. My plan for the new site is to do more than be a watchdog for new trends and startups. Seems like there are plenty of those kinds of blogs around. I'm interested in finding, reporting and reviewing practical insights. Dig into the people issues, business issues, outsourcing issues and, of course, the technology issues.

What makes social networks work and why do they fail? How do you create a vision for one and then actually execute it to hit your goals? What about benchmarks - what makes practical sense to benchmark in the area of social media? How do you create a strategy that will outsmart the competition - which is likely thinking the same thing? Most importantly, how do you initiate and then support marketing departments into this new channel of marketing?

After 3 years of working with clients on blogging, podcasting and various social media-based projects, I have a burning desire to get some of my thoughts circulating. More importantly, I'm interested in learning from others what they are seeing so we can collectively be more successful.

I have a podcast interview coming up soon with Rohit Bhargava, Vice President of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations of Ogilvypr.com. We're going to discuss the topic of social media optimization and social media trends for 2007.

This will be one of many interviews. In fact, to get things rolling I've already posted my interview of Kalivo and their HUB technology. If you want to get an early start on how to leverage social media - listen to the podcast.

These are the issues I think need more attention now for a business to leverage the technology of social networking and social media.

Tom

"The Googe/YouTube Come-On" from Business Week

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_50/b4013027.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

This is interesting and and sure hits on the right points that are hot now - should the big networks sue for copyright infringements or ... well maybe that visibility on YouTube has 'some merit' after all. Decisions decisions ...

We're in a funny transition now even with B2B and B2C marketing. Don't you think ... it's just in every conversation I hear now.

Blogging (audio/video) and social media optimization strategies with YouTube and Google Video 'appear' enticing but ... you can't measure the results.

So, you can't tell you management what the payoff is.

But on the other hand traditional marketing isn't working very well anymore ... but it's safe because it's familiar. Do it even it hurts I suppose.

But on the other hand as they look over their shoulder there is this tidal wave of change occurring that isn't measurable yet it's equally undeniable.

What to do ... ?

Tom