Social Media 101 Workshop

I’ve been invited to give a 2 hour workshop to a large Japanese company in Silicon Valley today. My audience will be senior marketers, as they want a Social Media 101 training to understand, why, what and most importantly how.

To me, many corporations were asking the why and what is it in 2006, and this is the year of deployment. As I left the Silicon Valley tech bubble land, I realized that there are so many corporations that are still not even contending with those first two.

What will I talk about? The most important thing are the changes to corporate communications. There’s another influencer group in addition to Press, Analysts, and Media –”Social/Community”. I’ll know if my workshop was a success, because the folks I’m speaking to will start to turn to each other and talk and brainstorm. I’m always prepared for the person who’s going to push back, they don’t want change, they’re happy the way things are going and want to continue to control messages.

Somewhat related, I heard that the CEO of Jet Blue has been removed from his position, why? The company took a hit during recent ice storms, and then there was a very embarrassing public incident of a jet being stuck on the tarmac, and it took him a long time to respond, 9 hours or so? How did he respond? he used social media, and used an online video. I’m still trying to get the details about this event, if anyone has a definitive resource of all of the incidents, that would be good to know. Companies need a plan to respond to a crisis, some of the best plans have a social media aspect to it, why? Because it’s human and real.

Other companies that have screwed up? The CEO of Whole Foods was caught being a form of a ‘troll’ in his own company Yahoo Finance forums, puffing the company up and trashing the competition. That’s clearly a wrong way to to use social media.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 5:44 am and is filed under Events, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.