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Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become synonymous with big deals… and holiday season chaos. In fact, some say that the name ‘Black Friday’ first originated in Philadelphia where it was used to describe the disruptive traffic that occurred the day after Thanksgiving. Others say it was named for the point at which retailers begin to turn a profit, otherwise known as ‘in the black’ because most retailers during the year were ‘in the red’ (ie. using red pens on their balance sheets).

Anyway you slice it, given the history of disruptive traffic (and potential in-store madness), the online and mobile shopping holiday experience is looking even more appealing as offline purchases continue to migrate online with online shopping statistics demonstrating that 71% of all U.S. adults now shop on the Internet. So, for those looking for Cyber Monday Deals, brands and social media networks are raising the bar.

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Last April, LinkedIn introduced the Company Follow feature in hopes of offering businesses an opportunity to further interact with their audience. By giving companies the ability to share profile updates, business developments and new job opportunities, how much value did this feature add to the site? Unlike social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, where you can make company pages and offer content as the business, LinkedIn still did not offer a way to directly communicate with its followers.

This was until early October when the site announced the launch of company status updates, giving businesses the ability to offer shareable, personalized content to its followers.

Because LinkedIn is a site focused on connecting professionals, this provides unique opportunities for companies to interact with their employees and customers. Whereas people primarily use Facebook and Twitter to interact with their friends, people are much more willing to seek out and interact with businesses and professionals on LinkedIn. In light of LinkedIn’s new feature, I have compiled my top suggestions on how businesses can best utilize company status updates.

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"Proceed until apprehended," the rallying principle for social media experimentation & execution shared by Brandon Friedman, Director of Online Communications for the Department of Veterans Affairs captured the pioneering spirit of all of the panelists from the October 6^th Ogilvy Exchange: Can the Department of Defense realize the full power of social media? The experienced panel of practitioners — rounded out by Jack Holt, former Senior Strategist for emerging Media at the Department of Defense, and Lieutenant Commander Chris Servello, Director of Emerging Media for the US Navy’s Chief of Information — shared very practical tales from the trenches for applying social media to some of the government and DoD’s most difficult communications challenges.

Lessons & Links
Social greatness comes from the inside out - Jack Holt shared a number of helpful lessons, but thematically returned multiple times to something often overlooked — it is critical to embrace the principles of better interaction and connection internally before the promise of social media engagement with external constituents can be fully realized.

Even small engagements are important. If you visit the Department of Veterans Affairs remarkable Facebook page, you will see 1×1 questions and customer service being addressed in a very “public” forum. Take a read through the discussions and see if that changes your impressions of the Department.

There is power in speaking directly to your audiences — Last week, LCDR Servello’s group at Navy released a YouTube video of the new F-35 fighter landing on the USS Wasp. This brief video clip has racked up a remarkable 200k+ view on YouTube in a week of release with no traditional media aircover — overwhelming evidence that there is an audience for the stories the Navy has to tell. Social media empowers them to speak directly to their audience in the same venue where they can carry the story forward to their networks. continue reading

Now that we’re four weeks into the new fall television schedule and the hype has died down (and baseball is getting in the way of Glee), it would be interesting to know how much attention network executives are paying to Trending Topics on Twitter compared to Nielsen ratings. My guess is that one is becoming as important as the other.

People do all sorts of things when they watch TV, according to a recent report from Ericsson, like eat, talk to people in the room, and work. Rarely is television the only screen in the room.

Despite all the DVRs and Hulus and time shifting, Americans still have favorite television shows and wouldn’t dare miss them. It used to be imperative otherwise someone would spoil the surprises at the proverbial water cooler the next morning. But now, it can be spoiled in real time on social networks. In fact, some programs actually prompt viewers to tweet both subtly by showing small hashtags in the corner of the screen and obtrusively with live hosts begging “tweet me.” Twitter actually reported in May that “across networks and genres, when TV shows bring Twitter elements into the broadcast, there’s a direct and immediate increase in engagement on Twitter: anywhere from two to ten times more Tweets created while the shows air.” Ask and you shall receive.

And it’s not just Twitter driving the television viewers to talk. There are two fairly well known apps that try to make television more social by enabling you to share what you’re watching (both with horrible names). GetGlue is an app that basically serves as FourSquare for television shows. IntoNow from Yahoo! (which just launched a partnership with Facebook) has much fancier technology that uses your phone to listen to your television and then reports what you are watching. Like GetGlue, it has a check in feature but it also makes recommendations for similar shows that you might like based on what you’re watching. That’s cool, but it still requires me to go looking rather than disrupting what I’m doing like most social media platforms in general.

So does television need to become more disruptive? Not for me. Does it need to be more social? Maybe. Secretly, I would like to know what my friends are watching. That’s a connection and something to talk about. It’s fun to say: “I love that show too!” The Media Lab at MIT has been working on a cool remote control that could show that. If a brand could bring it to me, I’d take it too. In the meantime I’m fine using Twitter to find out what Snooki is doing. I should be working anyway.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

[Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

FOUND! Lost script for Steve Job’s dramatic unveiling of “Social Media” service.

The Keynote Address he never gave. Origins uncertain.
Circa 1977. Reed College Auditorium.*

(The following is purely fictional and intended to honor the brilliance and vision of Steve Jobs)

[Notes to self:]
STEVE:
Get directions to auditorium from Woz.
Fill up bike tires.
Replace bulb on Carousel before conference!
Wear that black turtleneck from mom?

SCRIPT:

[LIGHTS DOWN]

[ENTRANCE MUSIC: John Lennon's Imagine, or maybe the Who's Baba O'Riley?] [note to self: invent digital music playback device]

Welcome. I’m Steve Jobs from Apple Computer. Maybe you’ve heard of us.

[wait a full minute for dramatic impact. Walk slowly.]

This is a day we’ve been looking forward to for a long time. continue reading

This past week social media showed users a little bit of everything – from the serious to the silly. If you’re anything like me, your Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds are continuously populated with link sharing from friends (and them adding their own commentary, which is always logical). Here are some of the most common serious and silly links shared among my friends this week. What was shared most in your feeds?

The Serious

Obama joins FourSquare

President Obama becomes one of the most high-profile people to join Foursquare. So far more than 27,000 followers are receiving his tips as he checks in across the Midwest on his bus tour. His tips are different than mine and yours as he’s sharing how to improve the economy and not what his favorite item is to order off the menu.

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We met with Heather to talk about the evolution in travel booking online, due to the huge growth in peer recommendations, and the continued growth of travel clubs such as Jetsetter. Jetsetter is a community of travelers that provides members with insider access, knowledge and exclusive deals on vacations.

Heather describes how social media is used by her team, the travel brands she sees as doing well in the space and makes her predictions for the future of social travel.

Exclusive for our blog readers! You can join Jetsetter via this  link: www.jetsetter.com/register/promo/ogilvy

To echo the thoughts of my colleague Claire: the concept of content sharing happens in more places than simply the online world. Intuitively, we are all constantly creating and sharing things that define who we are. That form of creation can take many forms: a drawing on a refrigerator, an Instagram snapshot, even a simple status update on Facebook or Twitter.

Never before have we had more mediums to express ourselves—yet never before has it been harder to be heard, seen or to generate feedback around the very morsels of content we try to share with the very people we want to see it.

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We are not all the same!

As the Hispanic market continues to expand in the U.S., more and more companies are targeting this ever- growing segment of the population through social media initiatives. A 2011 TeleNoticias-LatinoWire Hispanic Social Media Survey found that when marketers employ social media to engage with Hispanic consumers they turn to Facebook (84%), Twitter (62%), YouTube (42%) and Blogs (40%)

As a Hispanic who spends a rather large amount of time in the online space, I find it interesting that often we are still lumped together as one big group of people, as if we all behaved the same. It might come as a surprise to some but some of us like to get our messaging in English. Don’t get me wrong, I am fully bilingual, 100% proud of my Mexican background and I communicate with some friends and family in Spanish in person and online, but I like my promotions in English. Some friends of mine, on the other hand, are much more interested in Spanish promotions.

So why does this matter?

More often than not Hispanics are targeted on the basis of language and/or culture, and as Jose Villa from MediaPost.com points out, “most online Hispanics are comfortable reading and writing in English.” Moreover, the growth of the Hispanic market is happening thanks to the American-born children of immigrants, who are “bilingual, bicultural and increasingly influential within their multi-generational households.” so it is important that you know who in the Hispanic market you are targeting.

Key Takeaways: Before launching your campaigns, you should have thorough research of what segment of the Hispanic population you want to target and then use that to develop your Hispanic market strategy – It is not just simply having a Spanish version of your ads and promotions, or simply having a Spanish Facebook page – something I unfortunately see quite too often. As experts, we need to delve into the needs and wants of our target market and truly understand their online behavior to have successful campaigns –this holds true for regular campaigns and for Hispanic ones.

Just targeting Hispanics as one group that thinks and behaves alike is no longer enough. With all the great measuring tools out there, you can see that we, as a growing group, are all different and are as diverse as the population overall.  Make sure you do your homework and find out what we like, how we navigate and utilize the online social space, and how we like our information before reaching out to us!

Also, for a good start to find out about Hispanics in Social Media, try these two resources: Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) and Hispanicize

Although it was a few weeks ago, my mind is still buzzing with learnings from the 2011 Digital CMO Summit, which I had the opportunity to attend in New Orleans with John Bell. This unique event was not only filled with hands on learning and compelling content, but brought together some of the most innovative brands for a two day summit. More to come on that in my next post.  While I was at the summit, I had the opportunity to meet some truly inspiring and interesting people - who not only breathe social - but know how to apply it to a entrepreneurial spirit to fuel really smart ideas among the vibrant New Orleans community. Meet Chris Schultz, President of Voodoo Ventures. We briefly sat down with Chris who shared his passion for creativity and the importance of entrepreneurship in New Orleans, especially Post-Katrina.

Chris is a co-founder of Launch Pad, a collaborative workspace in downtown New Orleans that is home to more than 60 startups in the Big Easy.  He created Launch Pad Ignition, the first seed accelerator on the gulf coast, and part of the Techstars Network and the Startup America initiative.  The list goes on: He also co-founded TribeCon, a conference about leveraging online communities to create offline change and mentors young entrepreneurs in the community in addition to building his own companies. You can see part of his interview with us in the video below:

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