Under the direction of Jim Farly, Group VP at Ford and Connie Fontaine, manager of brand content there, Undercurrent decided to depart from the viral marketing rule book. Bud told me they were not interested in the classic early adopters, the people who act as influencers for the rest of us. Undercurrent wanted to make contact with a very specific group of people, a passionate group of culture creators.

… I think the Fiesta Movement gives us new clarity. It’s a three-step process.

• Engage culturally creative consumers to create content.
• Encourage them to distribute this content on social networks and digital markets in the form of a digital currency.
• Craft this [as] a way that it rebounds to the credit of the brand, turning digital currency (and narrative meaning) into a value for the brand.

Ford’s success comes because it didn’t forget that the “social” in “social media” refers to people, not the electronic pipes that connect them, and that people – online or off – are still people, who still act in normal, human ways.

But that’s not so. In fact, Twitter and other social media are no more guaranteed-successful as marketing tools than are television and radio ads, or newspaper ads, or billboards. And not all forms of media are the right tools for all kinds of businesses. Twitter is more appropriate for some businesses than others – and for some entrepreneurs than others. For the others, the right tool might be a blog, or a media relations effort to secure free media coverage, or some combination of free, paid and social media.

Read the NBJ’s story here: Businesses using Twitter to build brand, bring in customers.

My thoughts: LinkedIn and Twitter are social networking tools, but you don’t socialize at work the same way you socialize after work. The brash informality of Twitter – and the easy speed of tweeting – creates potential problems for those who chose to connect it with their LinkedIn profiles. It could backfire on those who don’t temper their tweeting in keeping with their business-oriented social network on LinkedIn.

On the other hand, it could be like combining chocolate and peanut butter.

“The risk posed by social media for your company … exists whether you participate or not,’ observed Darrell Heaps, CEO of Q4 Web Systems, an IR website and communications firm out of Toronto. ‘If you’ve ignored social media and said there are too many risks, we‘re not going to get involved, then you are putting your company at higher risk … than if you know how to use the tools. The market doesn’t care whether or not you’re there. They’re going to use the channels that are most readily available to them to put their message out.’

Heaps made those comments during a panel discussion yesterday in downtown Minneapolis on best practices for using social media to communicate material information, co-sponsored by the Dorsey & Whitney law firm and the Twin Cities NIRI chapter.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs, collectively referred to as ‘social media’, have worked their way into the IR conversation. As evidence of how hot the topic is, NIRI chapters as well as consultants have sponsored several events on the topic around North America over the past six months.

Embrace the trend; plan your attack; update and integrate your policies across functions; implement consciously; train your employees; monitor what’s being said about your company; and manage the process. Those were the key takeaways in Minneapolis.

“Social media defines the online experience today,” Heaps said. Over the last couple of years, the line between social media and mainstream websites has blurred, he observed. “You go to your favorite newspaper site and you see comments, profiles, people interacting. The social concept has been applied to virtually every website.”

Citing a recent study by Brunswick Group, Heaps reported that 47 percent of buy-side and sell-side players surveyed in the US and Europe were prompted to research an issue and 20 percent made an investment decision or recommendation based on information from a blog. Nearly two-thirds of the US survey group expects blogs and social media to play an increasingly important role in investment decision-making in the future.

While social media raises new issues for publicly-traded corporations that must conduct their investor relations communications within the limits of a variety of laws and regulations, the challenges are not insurmountable – and the overall value of social media to enhance a company’s image and communications with customers, shareholders, clients, suppliers and other interested parties vastly outweighs the challenges.

Business Week looked at some of that in an article regarding Twitter that was published Thursday, saying, “Companies can work wonders before Twitter’s vast interactive audience of consumers, but it’s best to start slowly and build credibility.”

Says Business Week: “Business uses for Twitter are proving to be as diverse as those for the telephone or e-mail. They generally break into two categories: ways to follow customers and ways to increase efficiency.” Note that neither of those categories sounds much like a one-way marketing communications channel. In fact, says Business Week, “Companies who try to use the tool as yet another marketing arrow in their quiver—one that mostly carries targeted, one-way messages—usually fail.”

Twitter – and social media in general – is not a marketing channel, but a conversation conduit. Companies that use it that way will derive real value from doing so; companies that use it merely as a way to distribute the latest “company line” more than likely won’t.

Incidentally, the same is true for political candidates and campaigns.

Dirt is Good: Unilever Marketing Campaign

Knowledge@Wharton takes a look at the future of advertising in the age of social media:

It hasn’t caught on yet in the U.S., but a global ad campaign for Unilever’s army of laundry detergents — sold in Asia as Omo, in France as Skip, and by other names around the planet — hailing that “Dirt is Good,” is considered by experts to be a perfect example of a new path for marketing in the 21^st century.

The marketing push merges memorable images of children splashing in mud with a customer-engaging social message — “every child has a right to play and explore.” Some claim the ad helped push Singapore to increase recess time at its academics-heavy, stress-inducing schools.

The early success of Unilever’s advertising strategy is exactly the type of information that company marketing executives and ad agencies need to discuss as they struggle to develop new ideas to handle the cataclysmic changes in technology and communications — from Tivo to Twitter — that have altered the ways companies interact with customers.

Interesting comment in the story from from Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton, on the subject of what change the Internet brings to the relationship between brands and consumers: “The Internet is becoming more ubiquitous, more social and also more immediate, and that is upsetting all sorts of business models.”

Common Sense: Anonymous Blogging is a Permalink to America's Past

The Federal Trade Commission has released new regulations will add a layer of difficulty for companies hoping to promote their products, services or point-of-view via blogs and other social media. As the New York Times reports, the FTC…

…said it would revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980. The new regulations are aimed at the rapidly shifting new-media world and how advertisers are using bloggers and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to pitch their wares. The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.

The regulations deserve to face a court challenge on First Amendment grounds, but until they do and are struck down, companies and organizations that want to pitch their products or services via the social media should implement procedures to help bloggers and other social media users to comply with the FTC regs.

It is unclear how the FTC’s new regulations will affect political bloggers, who often accept “free” access to candidates and political events that they are writing about, or companies which are using the social media to promote a point of view or message rather than a commercial product or service, though Mesh Media Strategies is fairly confident that relevant case law would protect such communications from FTC meddling.

Transparency – the apparent intent of the FTC regulations – is a generally good principle for businesses and bloggers to follow, but there are times when it is legitimate for a company to prefer a measure of anonymity in its communications – especially when politics and government are involved. These days, for example, some health care-related businesses might fear the consequences of coming out publicly in opposition to the current administration’s push for centralizing control of health care in the hands of the federal government, yet still wish to try to influence the debate by working through third-party communicators such as independent bloggers. Or conservative Christian home-schoolers afraid of heavy-handed judges and public-school bureaucrats might prefer to write their blog posts regarding home-schooling, politics and such under a pseudonym.

That is – and should remain – their First Amendment right to do so, and such anonymous writing is a tradition older than the United States of America. In January of 1776, the ppolitical pamphlet Common Sense, urging for revolution and independence, was published anonymously. Only later was the identity of the author – Thomas Paine – revealed.

“Twitter gave us an up-to-the-minute ability to take what would normally be a crisis situation and make it just another event,” says Mr. Bianchi. “You can’t do that with a 1-800-number.”

But Twitter isn’t an automatic cure-all for customer service woes.

Entrepreneurs should bear in mind that Twitter is unlikely to be of help in dealing with a problem if it isn’t used regularly otherwise, says Shel Israel, author of “Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods.”

“If you just go to Twitter when you have a crisis, you will have no followers and no credibility,” he says. “The key to using Twitter effectively is to build trust with people who are relevant to your business.”

Steve Fusek, owner of Fusek’s True Value LLC, a hardware store in Indianapolis, now has an employee dedicated to updating the shop’s Twitter profile during business hours. Mr. Fusek says consumers expect to see frequent tweets and swift responses to customer-service inquiries they post.

“You can’t just sign up and leave it. You have to have someone on it,” he says. “If you’re not legitimate, you’ll be found out quickly.”

Social media works best when it enables real conversation, rather than being used to carry canned marketing spin. Transparency is the currency of social media.

eBay CEO John Donahoe

EBay CEO John Donahoe has started using a pocket-sized video camera and the company’s internal blog to connect with eBay employees. The Wall Street Journal reports…

Amid a turnaround effort at eBay’s online marketplace, he has been meeting with the company’s merchants and taping the conversations with a Flip camcorder. He’s posted many of these to a video blog for eBay’s internal employees.

In an interview, Donahoe said he got the idea to videotape and share his encounters in the spring from Cisco CEO John Chambers, who also makes videos with the Flip camera. (Cisco bought Flip maker Pure Digital earlier this year.)

“It was like a light bulb going off for me,” said Donahoe of his conversation with Chambers at a Microsoft conference. “I don’t have time to write a blog, and [text blogs] also have the problem that they can get spread virally.” So he bought a Flip camera (on eBay, of course) and started informally recording his encounters and other thoughts to share with eBay’s staff.

“I’m trying to drive a much more customer-focused organization,” said Donahoe. “It has such a powerful impact on me. I want to use it to educate all of our employees and also celebrate some of our sellers.”

What really impresses me with what Donahoe is doing is that he is playing a central role in this social media effort, but in a way that deliberately takes the spotlight off himself. Instead, he is forging a new role for himself as a communications connector between eBay employees and eBay merchants – and as the WSJ story goes on to show, eBay already is reaping tangible benefits from it.

Cheap digital social media technology makes it possible for Donahoe – and for the leader of almost any company or organization – to create such new connections and conversations that were previously difficult to create and sustain. Increased transparency, new connections and conversations open the door to new possibilities.

If he continues with this video-interview-blogging effort, Donahoe should expect the unexpected.
He’s likely to see a lot more light bulbs going off.

Incidentally, the Flip camera is a great product, but it’s not the onlytool that works for this purpose. The new iPhone 3Gs shoots video and allows on-device editing – and can be used to post directly to a blog, YouTube or a social media site like Facebook. With the Flip, you have to be able to download the video to a PC or laptop, edit it, and then post it. On the other hand, Flip has high-def models, the iPhone doesn’t, so far.

MR. GREGORY: …the fact that in this, in this media age, what he said, by anybody’s estimation, was objectionable, to sign a petition saying the government was behind 9/11. But it goes to something that’s going on in this information age…

MR. FRIEDMAN: David, yeah…

MR. GREGORY: …which is you can be a target real fast.

MR. FRIEDMAN: David, when everyone has a cell phone, everyone’s a photographer. When everyone has access to YouTube, everyone’s a filmmaker. And when everyone’s a blogger, everyone’s in newspaper. When everyone’s a photographer, a newspaper and a filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. Tell your kids, OK, tell your kids, OK, be careful. Every move they make is now a digital footprint. You are on “Candid Camera.” And unfortunately, the real message to young people, from all of these incidents, OK, and I’m not here defending anything anyone said, but from all of these incidents, is you know, really keep yourself tight, don’t say anything controversial, don’t think anything–don’t put anything in print. You know, whatever you do, just kind of smooth out all the edges, and maybe you too–you know, when you get nominated to be ambassador to Burkina Faso, you’ll be able to get through the hearing.

Friedman is right – at first – but then goes overboard.

Yes, in an era when everyone has or can have a cell phone, YouTube and a blog, everyone can, theoretically, be a photographer, filmmaker and newspaper. That’s the empowerment enabled by cheap digital technologies for producing and distributing content. And, yes, what people create and post online leaves a digital footprint that will likely reside on some server somewhere forever.

But Friedman goes overboard when he says people should, in reaction, “really keep yourself tight, don’t say anything controversial, don’t think anything–don’t put anything in print. You know, whatever you do, just kind of smooth out all the edges.”

Wrong.

What people should do in this current golden age of grassroots media is, think before they speak – or post online, because actions have consequences and when you publish via the online media you are making your content available to a potentially global audience. Bcause the new media is interactive and decentralized, you know not where your message will go, or who will respond to it, or how they will respond – or what social media format they will use to carry their response.

Say what you believe, and be prepared to act like you meant it. The social media is not a trap for those who follow those rules.