Inside Social Media

How Ford does social media

JD Lasica — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:26:53 +0000

Ford’s social media efforts from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Scott Monty & team take integrated approach rather than focus on short-term campaigns

Major corporations have begun jumping into the social media pool. One of the biggest success stories this year has been the performance of Ford Motor Co. — they’re making big waves but aren’t splashing around, thanks to the integrated approach taken by Scott Monty, head of social media, who joined Ford only in the summer of 2008.

I caught up with Scott shortly after his keynote chat with the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher at Blogworld Expo. Their BWE conversation was largely inaudible, so this 6-minute interview serves as a quick synopsis of what Ford is up to in the space.

“It’s a commitment. It’s about changing about the business model and embracing it day in and day out.”
— Scott Monty

“We don’t think of social media at Ford in terms of campaigns,” Scott says, “because it’s a commitment. It’s about changing about the business model and embracing it day in and day out.”

From top to bottom, Ford has infused the company with the Zeitgest of social media — employees feel a connection with their customers and a sense of having skin in the game. Social media helps put a human face on the company. “It serves to remind people there are real human beings working at Ford Motor Co. who are passionate about great products,” he says.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Given Ford’s strong performance in recent months, including a $997 million third-quarter profit, several publications suggested that social media could be one of the key drivers of the company’s recent success. According to BusinessWeek, the automaker will spend 25% of their marketing budget on digital and social media this year.

Three weeks ago Ford won the Society for New Communications Research’s award for brand of the year for its “innovative use of social media to improve the way the company communicates with its stakeholders.” A couple of the notable social media programs Ford has launched include:

• Fiesta Movement: Ford has given 100 “socially vibrant” people on the Web a Ford Fiesta (including Sarah Austin of @pop17) for 6 months. The Fiesta is a European car that Ford will begin producing in the U.S. in 2010. The 100 “agents” get to do whatever they want — tweet, take photos or videos, blog — and Monty’s team aggregates the conversations on Fiestamovement.com without editing it.

He adds: “At the end of 6 months they return the cars and we get real-time feedback from them that we’ve fed into our engineering team to make tweaks to the North American production version.” It’s a combination of crowdsourcing as well as digital buzz. “Ultimately what we’ve got is 50,000 hand-raisers who have seen the Fiesta online or in person who’ve said they want to know more about it when it comes out.” Fully 97 percent of those people do not currently drive Ford vehicles.

As a result, there’s already a 38 percent awareness of the Ford Fiesta in the marketplace, a phenomenal rate given that they haven’t spent a dollar in traditional advertising, Monty says.

• TheFordStory.com offers vieos, photos and articles about Ford, its employees and customers.

Monty also discusses why it’s important for corporations to get involved in social media if their customers are already talking about your brand, products or services

• Interview with Ford CEO Alan Mulally (Socialmedia.biz)

• Ford’s $1 Billion Q3 Profit: Does Social Media Deserve Credit? (Mediaite)

• Ford’s Social Media Guru Scott Monty: “Social Media Is the Cocaine of the Communications Industry” (Kara Swisher at D)

• Interview with Scott Monty (buzzcast)

5 ways to improve your presentation skills

JD Lasica — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:10:06 +0000

Improving your presentation skills from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

If you give presentations or speeches in public — ranging from a workshop panel appearance to a keynote lecture — chances are that you could benefit from sharpening your presentation skills.

I met Danielle Daly, co-founder of Rexi Media, at Blogworld Expo last month and was immediately impressed with how she and the Rexi Media team are helping to enhance the communication and presentation skills of executives and managers at Fortune 500 companies. In this 6-minute video interview, Danielle discusses 5 ways to make your presentation skills more effective.

This week Rexi Media is releasing an update to its already popular iPhone app, Presenter Pro, which lets you bone up on your presentation skills during your spare time (cost: $1.99). Presenter Pro focuses on 5 areas for enhancing presentation skills:

1) Body language: This covers areas such as effective gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, cultural gestures, use of passion, visualization, descriptive gestures, and others.

2) Vocal variety: How to add interest to your speaking style, how to sound more confident, how to add ingredients such as articulation, inflection, rate, pauses, changes in inflection and volume, and so on.

3) Structure: How to plan and structure your talk, how to hook listeners with an effective opening, how to manage time and enlist participation, how to end on a high note.

4) Visuals: How to think in pictures, how to marshal facts visually, how to use visual aids, use of color, balance and contrast, use of repetition, and so on.

5) The words you use: Think carefully about the contents of your talk — be human and accessible, know your stuff, relate real experiences, be persuasive, be economical and descriptive, avoid condescension and apologies.

Danielle emphasizes the importance of a strong beginning. “In the first 30 seconds of any presentation, people decide whether they’re going to tune you out,” she says. “It’s not about you, it’s about the audience,” and all too often presenters start out weakly by talking about themselves.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Rexi Media coaches on the delivery of presentations but also coaches on how to make the content of your presentation more effective. The Bay Area-based firm typically works with Fortune 500 companies, helping managers in large sales and service business divisions with an on-site visit followed by coaching them on virtual presentations and finally offering guidance through its mobile app, Presenter Pro.

• Presentation Secrets for Social Communicators (chrisbrogan.com)

• Own the Crowd With Better Speaking (chrisbrogan.com)

• A Guide to Public Speaking (ismckenzie.com)

• Two important speaking tips (chrisbrogan.com)

• The 3 Keys to Good Public Speaking (CenterNetworks)

• How to Give a Great Speech, Part 1: Preparation (lifehack.org)

• More effective presentations (Ontech)

The post 5 ways to improve your presentation skills appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Takeaways from Blogworld Expo

JD Lasica — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:42:43 +0000

Anthony Edwards of “ER” fame did his first tweet — to raise funds for the first children’s pediatric training hospital in Africa.

Bloggers, journalism, celebrities and what the future holds

There was a little bit of a SXSW vibe at the just-ended Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas — a communal feeling where the goings-on in the sessions (on the whole, consistently engaging) were overshadowed by the face time and first-time encounters between longtime Twitter friends. To be sure, BlogWorld is a smaller affair than SouthBy — one official told me 1,500 people turned out for the Causes/Activism track on Thursday, 5,000 for the next two days — but from my vantage point, it seems that the social media phenomenon has rejuvenated ones of the world’s oldest and largest new media gatherings.

Twitter was front and center throughout the affair, both on screen — where rolling tweets of each session’s hashtags were displayed (though not consistently) — and as a way for conference-goers to figure out evening social plans. And cameras and recorders were everwhere — here’s my Flickr set of BlogWorld.

Below is a recap of the highlights in my field of vision (see after the jump). In addition, I just posted 8 tips for raising funds online — a recap of the Tools for Nonprofits panel that I moderated at Blogworld — over at our sister site, Socialbrite.org.

Journalists vs. bloggers: Can we please move on?

As regular readers know, I’ve been blogging about journalism, blogging, and the need for journalists and bloggers to love each other and use the best elements of both worlds since 2001, when I started this blog (then called New Media Musings). See, for example, Blogs and Journalism Need Each Other in Harvard’s Nieman Reports in Fall 2003.

So it’s now irritating, and not merely tiresome, to attend a new media conference where too many of the sessions veered into hostility toward traditional news organizations. The audience questions to and reaction to CNN weekend anchor Don Lemon (below), was a case in point.

Why should bloggers want to work with CNN? Lemon should have more artfully worded his reply — “The plain truth is that my platform is bigger than your platform” — but, with the exception of a few outliers like iJustine or cross-over Twitter celebrities, that’s still true. It’s not about CNN, it’s about reach and bringing value to more people.

The notion that crowdsourced amateur journalism can supplant professional journalism, and actually do a better job — which many in the audience truly believe — is not only ludicrous but potentially dangerous to our democratic institutions. Journalism that ferrets out corruption, that takes the pulse of a community, that sheds a light on international events is hard work, something that the crowd tends to avoid. Just ask anyone toiling in overworked, understaffed independent journalism publications like Spot.us, AliveinBaghdad, Pro Publica, or the just-launched Oakland Local.

Similarly, I’ve finally found a fundamental disagreement with my friend, colleague and fellow Traveling Geek Robert Scoble. I tweeted my dismay at the bottom-line premise of his panel, How Social Media Is Changing the Definition of News: that news sites should pass along rumors and second-hand reports without fact-checking them. “The old world was i fact-checked before I published, in this new world i can correct it after the fact,” Scoble said.

Immediately after the panel, he cited TMZ’s early report on the death of Michael Jackson and the fact that no one remembers who reported it second. “It’s over. It’s over,” he told me, referring to journalism’s authentication function.

Well, no.

A rumor can circle the globe before the truth can put on its pants, and we’ve already seen examples of discredited reports cascading across our social networks (Twitter, Facebook, email) from people who should know better. (Snopes is a good place to start to fact-check rumors.) It’s a trend that will only get progressively worse in the years to come, and readers need a place to go for separating truth from rumor. I’ve long advocated that news organizations implement a widget-like tool to report on what trusted news outlets have reported, what second-hand sources have reported, and what are flat-out lies, so perhaps Robert and I are on the same page on this. But I’ve seen few implementations of this approach.

There is, to be sure, a growing tendency among the Twitterati and young people to embrace all things real-time and dismiss the hard work involved in actually picking up a phone to find out if something is true or not before passing it along. Passing along a rumor isn’t journalism, it’s what Matt Drudge usually does. Vetting a secondary report — picking up that phone — isn’t as sexy or easy as tweeting “Have no idea if this is true or not but …”

Still, fact checking will always remain a fundamental part of news reporting — whether you’re a professional journalist or a blogger looking to maintain your reputation.

Note: At Friendfeed, Robert says I misconstrued his comments.

Highlights from BlogWorld Expo

I haven’t had a chance to sort through my three days of note-taking, but here are a few snippets:

• It was great to meet Anthony Edwards, star of “ER,” after his general session. (I got several nice shots of him in my Flickr set.) We talked for a bit about how we might be able to apply social media to advance his new cause: Shoe For Africa. He did his first-ever tweet on stage — @anthonyedwards4 touting the #shoeforafrica hashtag. (Nicely done, sir!)

• Wisdom from Anthony Edwards: “As we communicate in this medium, let’s do it as if we’re seeing each other face to face. … Don’t do it with just your thumbs. Do it face to face, person to person.” That received a round of applause.

• Wisdom from Chris Brogan: “Amazing difference between building an audience and building a community. An audience will watch you fall on a sword, a community will fall on a sword for you.” I may add that to my Facebook favorite quotes.

• More Brogan, who spoke a lot about finding the heart in social media: “It’s OK to let a blog die. It’s not a kitten.” … “Tell stories. Take your ideas and make them small and compact and portable.” … “Build armies, make superfriends, equip and embed them.”

• Heard from the folks running the Chicago Tribune’s new network of Chicago area bloggers called ChicagoNow. A praiseworthy effort, with 115 local blogs, 10,000 registered users and 3.2 million page views per month. Here’s why the Tribune launched ChicagoNow.

• Cameron Sinclair: “Don’t spend your life running after Ashton Kutcher” for a social media campaign. Any fleeting bump of interest in getting a celebrity endorsement (if it’s not a sustained effort) will quickly fade.

• Hugh Hewitt on the journalism education program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism: “totally irrelevant.” I suspect he’s right.

• Ted Murphy, founder of Izea (formerly Pay Per Post): “The FTC is saying, Value is value. Whether you’re receiving product or cash, you have to disclose it.”

• Tim Sanders was quoted often: “Love is the killer app.” And good to see the #beatcancer hashtag so prominently featured on Twitter and CNN over the weekend.

• I love everything about Leo Laporte. But a keynote that says “Podcasting is dead” and “We are all now the media, congratulations!” needs some work.

• The Huffington Post surpassed the Washington Post in traffic on Thursday, Robert Scoble reported.

• One word for Thursday night’s dinner at the Italian restaurant Piero with some luminaries from the social good movement: Wow.

• There were some additional outstanding presentations, including SEO/SEM and by Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) on where enterprise trends and where social media is taking us. I’ll be referencing and incorporating those into future blog posts here on Socialmedia.biz.

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