Blogworld 09 - Social Media Success Stories

I had to pop over to my work network for a second, so I'm coming back late to this one. Here are the details about this session. What follows are my notes.

• Brian Wiegand of Alice.com is using Social Media to build a base of fanatics by connecting to MommyBloggers. They sell consumer products like toilet paper and cosmetics. They started something like 16 weeks ago(?) and have already seen a lot of interactions and traffic from their efforts.


• Frank Eliason of Comcast Cares is passionate about what he does. You have to put your most passionate people out there as bloggers. Frank isn't passionate about their product line, he's passionate about customers. Companies need to teach their employees to be out in the social media world. Frank is big on one-tweet resolution. Customers tweet their problems and Comcast jumps in and tries to fix it after only a single tweet. Different tools are good for different things. Twitter is great for listening to the customers talk between themselves. Forums are used to allow customers to form communities around your products. Every space has its own community aspect. Facebook is a great place for meeting people you already know, not so good for meeting people you don't know.


• Samantha Gammell of Oscar Meyer uses social networking to help custoemrs interact with the WeinerMobile. Seriously. The WeinerMobile is a marketing vehicle. The used social media to help for communities of the nuts who love the WeinerMobile. They use their blog to keep people up to date on what the 6 WeinerMobiles are doing.


• Justin Levy Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse bought into the company a while back. The company didn't have brand recognition as a small steakhouse outside Boston. When he took over, the restaurant was losing money. Justin immediately cut their advertising budget and went to social media. His goal was to own the front page of Google on search terms related to his restaurant. He figured that his customers found him through Google searches. In the first month of trying this, they were making a profit again because of the increased customer traffic.

The theme of this session was using social media to interact with and create communities formed around your products.

The Social Media Success Stories panel.