Magic Satchel, Inc. » fan pages

Social Media: You have to jump in even if you don’t understand it

Kim — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:10:17 +0000

I know everyone is tired of the “what is social media” question, but I found this article to be a great quick-and-dirty argument for embracing social media as it happens. It really nails down how the internet became an essential part of business (apparently sometime in late 1997) and concrete examples of how companies jumped in or got left behind.

It’s not just about having a site, or even having a good site- what you say and how you interact with clients, customers and other businesses always, consistently- that is what now defines your brand. Before we had cameras, image wasn’t as important. Now that the Internet is what it is, it’s crucial to manage the perception of you, your brand and your company, or someone else will end up doing it for you.

It may seem like a lot more work (though it really doesn’t have to be) but it’s really amazing how many levels you can reach people on with the widespread usage of social media.

In a test run by BazaarVoice, Rubbermaid discovered that adding customer reviews to their website increased sales and decreased returns of their products. Skeptics said sales of low-rated products would crater. What actually happened is that sales of low-rated products increased. When shoppers were questioned, they explained that when they read why someone else maligned the product, often they disagreed or didn’t care about that particular problem. If the price was right, it was worth buying anyway.

Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don’t want to.

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Apropos of Nothing: Lofthouse Cookies

Kim — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:09:34 +0000

Everyone in my household is addicted to these soft, fluffy, sweet harbingers of cookie-ecstasy. I feel honor bound to implore everyone not to walk past them at the supermarket because they have the ability to cure disease, wipe your hard drive of malware and painstakingly launder your delicates. Lofthouse Cookies got Barack Obama elected- true story. They’re the kind of cookies people get angry with you for bringing places because no one can stop eating them.

Twitter scoops major media outlets on Hudson plane crash

Kim — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:37:52 +0000

Who had the best coverage of this week’s plane crash? For timeliness- Twitter. Below the snippet, the article covers the coverage pretty thoroughly.

Worth noting: Flight Captain C.B. Sully Sullenberger has a Facebook fan page with 197,077 fans as of this post.

… a US Airways jet made a water landing on New York’s Hudson River, shortly after departing from La Guardia Airport. I found out about it via a Wall Street Journal e-mail alert that was sent out at 3:52 in the afternoon, about 25 minutes after it happened, and I immediately checked my regular breaking news sources. Nothing on Google News. CNN.com had a brief story that repeated the details of the WSJ alert, and a grainy screen capture from a local television news report, showing a partially submerged plane surrounded by boats. I followed the link through to the ABC affiliate but there was no live video or even an older video report.

But this is where it gets interesting.

A colleague in San Francisco IM’d me a Flickr link. It was a mirror of a picture that had been posted to Twitter by someone on a passing ferry, and it told a story that the professional news organizations had thus far missed:

People had survived the crash. Scores were standing on the wing, or exiting one of the front doors into a gray rubber life raft, or the inflatable escape slide. I counted 34 on the wing, and 11 on the boat/slide. At least three of them were wearing what appeared to be the yellow life jackets stowed under the seats — the ones in the safety demonstrations that require passengers to connect straps and pull down a red tab or blow into a tube to inflate.

>snip<

There was more Twitter information, too. Plane-related tweets accounted for eight of the 10 top “trending topics” (Hudson River, MSNBC, US Airways, LaGuardia, etc.)

via Plane lands on the Hudson, and Twitter documents it all.

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