Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 5:23 pm by Joe Mandese
Ach, the OMMA Social privacy panel is taking on some illicit, and possibly illegal tones. First, moderator and 360i digital marketing guru David Berkowitz shares an anecdote about a cousin who is using social media to trade “sexual favors” for some concert tickets, then Carrot Creative’s Mike Germano admits to using BitTorrent to access media content, not because of convenience, but because it is “free.” Or as Hollywood studios might say, because you want to steal it.
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Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 5:10 pm by Joe Mandese
Carrot Creative chief Mike Germano seems to be polarizing OMMA Social’s privacy panel, taking a hard line position that no one cares about control and privacy.
All the other panelists think it’s kind of important, and one Surya Yalamanchili, Director, Product Marketing, SocialMedia.com, even bet Germano that even Facebook will be a little more controlled sometime soon.
“Let’s just bet a case of beer that in a few years, when Facebook gets to 1 billion users, it’s going to look very different.”
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Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 5:02 pm by Joe Mandese
Mike Germano, co-founder and president of Carrot Creative, is on a short social leash these days.
The social media and marketing guru, who has used the platform to market a variety of brands successfully, including his own political career, says he’s no longer allowed to post Twitter comments after a few libations.
“I’m not allowed to tweet after 9 o’clock after I’ve gone out drinking for fear of what I might say,” Germano disclosed to OMMA Social attendees listening to the last panel of the day: “But Enough About Me: Maintaining Privacy in Social Media.”
Despite the restrictions his agency partners have put on him, Germano doesn’t believe that consumers are all that hung up about social media privacy. Mainly, because they’re already “putting themselves out there.”
“Your either in, or your out. There are no controls,” he asserted.
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Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 4:48 pm by Joe Mandese
What keeps Don Steele, VP-digital marketing at MTV Networks Entertainment Group up at night? Aside from all the emails he receives from MTV’s management about Twitter, it’s the fact that the current obsession with the micro blogging platform may be taking energy away from other important social media outlets that is currently making a difference for MTV’s brands.
“Wait a minute, we have 1.8 million fans of ‘South Park’ on Facebook that we haven’t spoken about for weeks,” Steele bemoaned.
Talking about the accelerated half-life of social media platforms that has made Twitter the current star,
There’s so much going on, Steele wondered out loud, “Are we just moving around the struggle.”
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OMMA Social:
Taxing
Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm by Joe Mandese
How do you create an online social community around a group that’s really only interested in your brand 16-weeks of the year?
That was the frank way Denise Sposato, director of communities at H&R Block, put the tax preparation brand’s online social networking strategy. It’s been a learning process, she added, noting that H&R Block initially was “a little too entertaining” in its social media approach, and that it’s taken it a while to find the right mix of education and entertainment.
Interestingly, the biggest driver of traffic isn’t anything H&R Block did itself, but something the federal government did: Three major changes in the tax law.
“That drove numbers. People were hungry for information,” she said.
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Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 3:45 pm by Joe Mandese
Wow, I had no idea what kind of pressure faces a corporate twitterer. Heck, until OMMA Social today, I didn’t know there actually were corporate twitterers. But I’ve been getting a kick out of there views on their business, a very nascent one at that. But what really struck me, is how seriously they’re taking what some might see as a corporate lark, or a toe in the digital marketing waters.
“One word can bring you down,” confided David Puner, communications manager at Dunkin’ Brands, and the man behind Twitter feed Dunkin Dave.
“Those words in those tweets,I do understand the power in those words,” Puner added, “Each word has the power to bring you down.”
So how does he go about selecting which words to actually tweet. Well sometimes it comes straight out of the promotions Dunkin Donuts is offering that day. Other times, it could be something as pedestrian as the weather outside.
“I can talk about how freezing cold it is outside,” Puner shared about the tweet influence of working out of Dunkin Donuts Canton, Mass., headquarters.
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Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 3:38 pm by Mark Walsh
Comcast’s Frank Eliason says that someone mentions the company up everday in 10,000 blogs. “And we go through every single one of them,” he said. Sounds more like surveillance than customer service. He mentioned the stat in connection with the build up of his “digital care’ department from three to 10 people to keep up with Twitter, blogs and all the other social media outlets online.
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Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 3:24 pm by Joe Mandese
Asked by OMMA Social moderator, and Knowledge Networks research guru David Tice, how each of the corporate twitterers extend their reach via Twitter, a platform that reaches “probably less than 10% of the population,” Six Flags’ Billy Custer said, yes, but they’re the right 10%.
“People in advertising always talk about how you reach the influencers, and in my opinion, a large amount of those people are on Twitter, because they can use it to influence people.”
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Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 3:16 pm by Joe Mandese
Corporate twitterer David Pruner comes across as pretty authentic. The communicatiosn manager of Dunkin’ Brands Inc. spoke in folksy terms to the crowd at OMMA Social, referring to the popular micro blogging platform as “the Twitter.”
He acknowledged that it’s been a bit of a cultural struggle for a corporation that has “standards” and “layers involved” in everything it does, but he said the donut and coffee marketer has managed to suspend its need for control.
“What we knew was that whoever the person was that would be tweeting for us, basically had to be empowered, and couldn’t have anyone breathing down his neck,” Pruner said.
That’s a good thing for Pruner, who also happens to be the guy tweeting for Dunkin’ Brands.
“You have to trust the one who tweets,” he said.
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Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 3:01 pm by Joe Mandese
That’s right, if you’re a social media user, you can have your cake and eat it too. Especially if you follow amusement park Six Flags Twitter feeds.
“We primarily talk about roller coasters and funnel cake,” said Bill Custer, social media agent at Six Flags, to a pretty big laugh from the attendees at OMMA Social.
But he wasn’t kidding.
“We’re starting a funnel cake Friday, which we use the hash tag for,” he noted, adding that Six Flags seeds the conversation about “how awesomely delicious funnel cakes are.”
“Believe it or not, people like to talk about funnel cakes,” Custer said.
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