atkinson advisor

Next time you want to direct people to an exact spot in a YouTube video, try adding the timestamp in the link. To jump to 1:32 in the clip,
add #t=1m32s to the end of the URL.

For example, during the July 28 House press briefing, reporters questioned Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the meeting among President
Obama, Harvard professor Henry Gates, and police officer James Crowley.

 This link takes you to the start of the YouTube clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDtOKodLdhE&feature=PlayList&p=42029F03573BDA18&index=0 
         
By adding #t=17m42s to the end, you direct users to a humorous exchange between Gibbs and reporters that starts at 17:42 of the clip.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDtOKodLdhE&feature=PlayList&p=42029F03573BDA18&index=0#t=17m42s

http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html

It’s essential to understand your target audience when developing a social media campaign. Where are they online? How active are they? Forrester’s Consumer Profile Tool is a good place to start.

Forrester’s Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives. The Consumer Profile Tool allows you to analyze your intended audience by age range, country, and gender to see what percentages our your target demographic is in each group. The site also offers an explanation for each of the groups.

The hottest social media tools will come and go. Their impact — namely the ability to converse directly with your key audiences — is here to stay.

Clients frequently ask if they should get into social media. We believe they should, but only by adding social media tools to the mix of their overall communication strategy.

It’s essential to take a step back, understand how each tool works, and map out a strategy before diving in by creating a Twitter account or setting up your company’s Facebook fan page.

Bill Seaver, our friend at MicroExplosion Media, has a three-step model for venturing into social media that we think makes a lot of sense.

1. Monitor. Learn about the different social media tools and find out how people are using them to talk about your company, your competition, and your industry. Are other companies you admire using Twitter to interact with clients? What are bloggers saying about you, and which ones are influential enough to affect opinion? Observe how people interact with one another and the brands that you want to model. Also observe how frequently people post, tweet, comment, etc. so you can assess the time involved.
2. Participate. With a better lay of the land, you can start joining the conversation by commenting on blogs, posting messages on forums, or writing on a Facebook wall.
3. Create. Now you’re ready. Creating involves possibly starting your own blog or launching a Twitter account. You may even decide to host your own social network. At this stage you’ll want to continue monitoring and participating, because new tools—and new conversations—are being created every day.

http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/ceo-and-coo-blog and http://twitter.com/zappos

Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh blogs about everything from how poker relates to business strategy to how Twitter can make you a happier person. He would know. While he hasn’t posted to the blog in a few months, he frequently updates his Twitter account, which has a following of 340,000. “CEO Tony” tweets highlights from conferences, updates followers on his travel plans and occasionally offers exclusive Zappos.com deals.

by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

People are using technology to get the things they need — information, recommendations or advice — from each other instead of corporations. In Groundswell Li and Bernoff, two Forrester Research analysts, use consumer data and experience with dozens of companies to examine this social trend.

New media technologies such as networking sites (MySpace and Facebook), user-generated content (YouTube) and blogs allow people to come together and share information, making them a more powerful force than institutions. But instead of feeling threatened, companies can harness that power by using these tools to build relationships with customers and other key audiences.

Li and Bernoff use real-life examples of how companies use social media technologies to listen to their target groups and join the conversation that’s already taking place. They emphasize that companies should concentrate on the relationships, not the tools.

Blogs are the most prevalent part of social media. Technorati, the top blog search engine, counts more than 130 million of them.

For years, companies have had policies governing the proper use of e-mail and the Internet. It’s time to seriously consider adding a corporate blogging/commenting policy.

In short, the policy should require all employees to disclose their company affiliation any time they blog or comment on a blog about issues of interest to the company. For example, an employee at an architecture firm building a new convention center would have to disclose his employer when commenting on a blog about the project’s viability.

The disclosure is important for two reasons. The first is liability. Cisco was recently sued for comments one of its researchers posted on a blog about patents. The company modified its policy in response to the suit.

The second is transparency. Many important debates are taking place in the blogosphere. Companies have every right to participate in those discussions as long as employees disclose their interest. If people discover a lack of transparency, they will be quick to condemn the company in a very public and permanent way.