When we started working with Ford in 2007, their social media activity consisted of a lone (unauthorized) YouTube channel. It has been incredibly gratifying to be a part of such an amazing evolution and to watch our client grow and master these new and emerging tools and ways of communicating, and be recognized by their peers for doing so.

Congratulations! We are so proud!

As one might expect from his title, Stewart will be responsible for leading SMG’s Enterprise Services practice group and will work with clients like SAP, ICANN and others to help develop strategy as well as foster and manage the organizational change that is a core part of effective integration of both collaborative and social media tools inside and outside the enterprise.

For those who don’t know him, Stewart is an experienced content strategist and project manager, dynamic speaker to corporate audiences and conferences, author of two books, and editor of Future Changes, a widely-read blog on information design, content strategy, wikis, and collaboration that has been cited by The New Yorker, The Guardian (UK), CIO Magazine, Fast Company, InfoWorld, InformationWeek, and The New York Times. He’ll also be contributing regularly to the SMG blog.

Friends, please join us in welcoming Stewart to the SMG team!

SMG, in partnership with Sopexa USA, an integrated marketing services and communications agency dedicated to the promotion of wine & spirits and gourmet food in the United States, will support an integrated marketing campaign that will take Beaujolais cross-country, making stops in New York, Chicago and California for media and trade events.

We’re honored to have been chosen as the social partner to help bring conversation about 3,000 dedicated producers, prestigious domaines and a number of châteaux in the Beaujolais region to new and interesting places online!

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/slapers

Despite the easy laughs at the expense of self-proclaimed experts, big brands are on the hunt for help in figuring out their approaches to connecting with consumers on Facebook, providing service on Twitter and instituting internal social media guidelines. Because it can touch everything from communications to marketing to customer service to product development, social media has created a muddied playing field that some see as ripe for creating agency opportunities… [Read the full Article]

See also: Social Media RFP: Ask the Right Questions, Find the Right Partner

SMG was interviewed recently for an article in Canadian Business. Read the full story here!

“The incident served as an important lesson to brand managers everywhere: with the advent of the Twitterati, a public-relations disaster is only ever 140 characters away. Moreover, your loss could be your competitor’s gain. “Twitter provides instant feedback for brands, and that can mean both positive and negative things,” says Leona Hobbs, director of communications for Toronto-based Social Media Group. “It’s important to listen and monitor what is being said, because you’ll be able to act on things early, which is key.”…” read more

SMG was featured in a recent article on Springboarders Blog. Read the full story here!

“FM: Do you think it important for young, entrepreneurial companies to have a well-defined competitive position, target market and value proposition? Why?

MF: Yes, I do. Absolutely – without question – I think a young entrepreneurial company needs to have those things before they have anything else. Those are the first things you need. You need to understand who the competition is and align your value proposition against weaknesses in the competitive offer. That’s exactly what we did. We took a look around and realized there were a lot of Public Relations (PR) companies engaged in social media that didn’t particularly have ‘build’ capabilities, nor did they have marketing sensibilities in terms of ‘creative’. We also identified there were a lot of advertising and marketing agencies that were engaging in social media that didn’t understand the ‘relationship’ aspect of social media the way PR companies did. And additionally, for us there’s a real, identified need for business consulting-type requests around how you define what it is you’re going to be doing – that involved a lot of research and neither of those organizations were good at that at all. So we took a look at all three vectors of competition, bridged all of them and presented an offering that filled all of the holes in all of these traditional models. That was done within the first few months. We took a look at the competition and identified that those things were extremely important to our positioning…” read more

SMG was featured in a recent article on CelebrateSmallBusiness.com. Read the full story here!

“Fox says her carefully selected staff’s expertise in emerging mediums like blogs and with social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace is what has driven the growth of her business over the past three years. While many the world’s biggest agencies have struggled to grow interactive divisions, Fox had assembled a small team—SMG has never staffed more than 18 employees—which strives to know everything there is to know about the world of social media. It’s this expertise that wins over clients, Fox says…” read more

Later that year, in support of the 2008 Focus launch, SMG designed a program that included inviting digital influencers to media drive events (a first), capturing video for the web, establishing a company Flickr account (on which all the images were licensed under Creative Commons) and perhaps best-remembered, created a Ford Focus social media press release (SMPR) on the Digital Snippets platform. Small things, but big steps for Ford (or any Fortune 10 company) in 2007. Following the Focus launch, we continued our work in integrating social media into the Communications toolkit, supporting dozens of programs and providing strategic counsel on the use of social media.

Flash forward a year to July 2008. Scott Monty joined Ford as Global Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager and the public face of social media. Within weeks, Scott established a number of Ford Twitter accounts and began actively engaging online on behalf of the company, reaching out to thousands of people in support of his goal to “humanize the brand”. Taking our direction from Scott, we continued our work integrating social media into every “traditional” Ford media event, experimenting with content syndication, giving hundreds of online influencers the opportunity to experience Ford vehicles firsthand, developing key social media metrics and working in lockstep with the Communications team on digital crisis communications and aggressive story correction around the Automotive Congressional hearings (among many other things – it’s been a busy year, as Scott can testify!).

Together, Scott and I presented a case study on the results of “setting content free” at Ford this spring at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Among the good stuff: 5,000 unsolicited blog posts, almost 1.5 million views on YouTube and over 120,000 views on Flickr. Ford now has more than a dozen SMPRs, and making content readily available has become institutionalized. It’s just part of what they do.

And this month we saw public acknowledgment of Ford’s amazing progress in social media. In July 2007 the only Ford social media property was a YouTube channel. In February 2009, Ford was recognized as one of the Top 10 Brands in Use of Social Media According to Social Media Leaders by Abrams Research. The results of the survey were published on eMarketer.com.

Please join us in heartily congratulating Scott and the Ford Communications Team on their tremendous achievement! And now? Back to work!

**Side note: Ford was similarly acknowledged by Mashable in February of 2009.