March 31: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

I recently asked my team (marketing, sales and product) to start coming to our weekly staff meeting with one article/blog post that spoke to them. It could be on anything but they needed to be prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about. The goal is to share these on a weekly basis. Here's what week one netted:

DP Rabalais:
Interesting post by DirJournal on how airlines are using social media as part of their marketing strategy. The article looks at how four airlines are using social tools such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Blogs, etc, and what kind of results they’re getting. The airlines covered are: Southwest, JetBlue, Delta and Virgin.

Jay MacIntosh:
This MediaPost article is really strong in describing the importance of content (i.e. people sharing content is the fuel of social…) and how data and insight can/should drive ongoing improvement 

Doug Wick:

My article for today’s meeting is a post from Lenovo’s VP of Consumer Marketing, David Churbuck, on his personal blog, someone who is decidedly outside the social media echo chamber (not to discount the value of thoughts from within the chamber!).

This illustrates the mindset of many marketing folks out there who are focused on consumer marketing, and his advice hints directionally at what Powered does. But most people don’t connect this idea with social – it’s still a long walk from this first bit of advice. Anyhow, thought it might spark some interesting discussion for us. Also note the sole comment from Jim Forbes . . . yeah that Forbes.

Bill Fanning:
The iMediaConnection article that I’d like to share is titled “Rules of Engagement Marketing” at . This article discusses the benefits of having a two way dialogue with your customers as opposed to old marketing tactics of shouting at prospects in an interruptive manner and expecting them to listen.

Beth Lopez:
This ClickZ article discusses a new trend that is starting to take shape - Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are driving more traffic to sites than Google. Also states that social media is poised to become possibly the only growth sector in advertising in 2009. It will be interesting to see this play out in the coming year and how the social networks/platforms will monetize their platform w/o being serving intrusive display ads - particularly in light of Gen Y psychographics towards marketing. Another question that I will pose to our team (this article had me thinking on this) - Will Google and search become irrelevant in the future (or severely minimized) and lose out to social media sites? Only time will tell. But I will say that I, personally, am using Google less and less as I connect with friends and colleagues on twitter, yammer, Facebook and email to find out where to go on the Web. In fact, for the March newsletter, the majority of content was crowdsourced on yammer and our blog instead of me going to Google to search for relevant articles. Food for thought.

Trey Anderson:

This post from the Creating Passionate Users blog does a good job of discussing the types of strategies that might be employed to help cultivate a community.

Don Sedota:

This ReadWriteWeb post reinforces the impact that strong relationships and information flow have on achieving business goals within the organization.