Yesterday Chris Reid and I co-presented a case study at the Canadian Marketing Association’s 2009 National Conference on Sled Talk, Yamaha Motors‘ corporate blog, which was launched in March 2007. Here’s the blurb:

It’s been two years since Yamaha Motor launched one of the first corporate blogs in Canada. Sled Talk debuted in March 2007, but what has happened since? In this engaging case study, Chris Reid, National Manager, Product Planning and Research, Yamaha Motor Canada and Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group, one of the world’s largest independent social media agencies, will walk you through the process of doing it right: getting executive buy in, proper planning and pitfalls to avoid. They’ll also share some of the many benefits Yamaha has realized across their organization as a result of their brave decision to be one of the first companies in Canada to open the doors to conversation with their consumers.

You can watch the slideshow on Slideshare below (without notes – we like to call this slideshow karaoke) or download a version for yourself with notes when you click through. Please feel free to use the data in blog posts or presentations. It’s licensed under Creative Commons non-commercial attribution, so a link back would be appreciated.

Please let me know what you think!

Doug’s post last week got me thinking about how personal brand and reputation map to identity. By way of disclosure, I’ll preface this post by saying that before SMG, I worked for a company whose primary business is domain names and related services.

Those of us immersed in social networking and related web services, are often so focused on the next big thing we forget about domain names which remain the primary building blocks for establishing an online identity. Savvy marketers and communicators think about domain names first when coming up with campaign ideas, naming a new business venture or even deciding on a baby name.  At $10 per year it is a small investment to make, even if you aren’t ready to develop a site. At the very least, it is a shrewd defensive move to purchase hold your name so someone else can’t purchase it and use it.

I’ve heard the arguments against domain names – that they’re irrelevant because of the power of search and that web services with hostnames (e.g. yourname.myspace.com) are the future. These hostnames, or so-called “vanity URLs” are the names you choose across social networking sites and web services. While important that your username be consistent and that you take steps to register your name on multiple social networking sites, I don’t believe these replace domain names. Just for kicks, you can use namechk to check out your own user name availability at multiple social networking sites.

And, of course, I won’t discount the power of search. In fact, a well-chosen and optimized domain name can boost your search engine results significantly. Given our personal brands are spread across scores of sites, surely bringing together all those disparate services and organizing them under a single domain (which you control) makes sense. And it is a heck of a lot easier (and more professional) to tell someone to go to socialmediagroup.com to read your blog instead of socialmediagroup.blogspot.com or worse.

One of the latest developments in domain names is .tel.  It is a global directory service that brings your contact information together in a single place. You don’t need to build or host a website to use .tel, it is easy to update and manage and a fast way to connect with people using the web or mobile devices. You can take a closer look at mine here. You can read more about .tel’s plans to become the world’s largest phone book, here.

If I’ve piqued your interest in domain names, here are some other sites to check out. My favourite “inside baseball” domain name commentary and news site is CircleID. Check out Hover to create your own personal URL shortener as well as simply buy and use your domain names. Finally, I like Domainr for name searches beyond the standard .com and .net.

So, what do you think? What is the role of domain names in social media?

I’m approaching my one-month anniversary at SMG and I can’t believe how fast the time has flown. My name is Janine and I am the newest addition to this fabulous team. Prior to joining SMG, I spent three years in school studying journalism and public relations and another three years working at the City of Burlington as a communications advisor.

I think one of the hardest obstacles I’ve had to deal with while going through this transition from government to agency (other than the hours, LOL) is changing my writing style from formal and comprehensive to friendly and interesting. In government, I often used words like application, initiative, fiscal responsibility and, my personal favorite, critical. So instead of writing, “Here is the document you asked for.” I wrote, “As requested, attached is Word document you required.” Both say the same thing, but are written differently.

Another area of writing that I’ve found difficult to adapt to is letting go of my grammar impulses. You see, I am what Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, calls a “grammar stickler”. But over the past couple weeks, I’ve had to get over my comma-happy phobias and express myself through extreme punctuation, short-forms and emoticons.

Now, I’m not saying that the Internet is full of sentence fragments and split infinitives because it’s not. What I am saying is it’s more important in the social media world to get the right message out than it is to properly punctuate it. And since it is often difficult to interpret written tones like sarcasm and humor, sacrifices must be made.

I’ve explained how writing for social media and writing for government are different; now let me tell you how they are the same. The bottom line is that both are written for mass audiences. Whether it’s a blogger writing his daily post or civil servant developing her council report, their ultimate goal is to get their message across in the clearest way possible and to keep their audience moving from one paragraph to the next. It seems simple, right? Well, it’s not and any writer can tell you that.

Did you know that the average person only reads the first three paragraphs of every news article? And that that same person only scans a headline, looks at the photo and maybe reads a lead paragraph while surfing the Net? So if you are reading this right now that means I’ve successfully captured your attention for the entire post. Go me! But let’s test that theory. Leave me a comment telling me what your favorite punctuation mark is and why. Mine is the question mark because I love to ask questions. What’s yours?

For those of you unfamiliar with the #amazonfail phenomenon, here it is in a nutshell:

Hundreds of gay-and lesbian-themed books suddenly disappeared from Amazon.com’s rankings over the weekend, causing an uproar among authors and activists who alleged it was a stealthy extension of the company’s policy concerning adult content. The internet bookseller claimed it was the result of a technical “glitch.”

. This incident happened at lightspeed over the Easter weekend – 36 hours from initial post to hitting a blog on the Wall Street Journal, and then today the Technology section of the paper itself (that’s less than 60 hours from consumer complaint to mainstream media story).

There was a time when one might have the luxury of four or five days before a blogstorm hit a mainstream publication with a mainstream audience. No longer.

Timelines are condensing.
The reason why is Twitter. Unlike a blog post, which realistically would take me anywhere between an hour and an hour and a half to write and research, I can tweet something (with a link to original source material) in about five seconds. To over 4,000 people. Additionally, those people are ambiently consuming the information I have posted in real time, on mobile devices via apps like Tweetie and on their desktop via clients like Tweetdeck. Both of these services are designed for maximum information intake. A very different mode of consumption from from a blog post which I would expect most people to read via a feedreader they check perhaps once a day.

It’s a viral platform.
Replies on Twitter (unless sent by private direct message) are public – they are distributed to a broader network, and the whole conversation is visible to thousands of people who may choose to engage and forward it on to their own networks. When something catches fire, it’s exponentially viral on Twitter – I’m not simply emailing it one to one to my friends, I am literally broadcasting it to hundreds or even thousands of people who have subscribed to my content. If they like the information, they may do the same, and so on, and so on…

Amazon was less than forthcoming initially, but has since released a well-worded mea culpa from Director of Corporate Communications Patty Smith that stated,

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Does it Matter?
Sure, it matters right now, no question – Amazon has suffered a blow to their corporate reputation. There have been over 300 articles about the incident in mainstream publications. Therefore the question of the moment is how well are today’s Corporate Communications departments prepared to deal with this dramatic acceleration in crisis communications timelines (I’d answer not well – someone senior enough to respond would have to be living online 24/7 to have caught this).

But here’s a question for six months from now: if dramatic incidents like this become commonplace because of things like Twitter, will it still matter from a corporate reputation perspective? In other words, if the media doesn’t report on it, making it visible to an audience broader than the estimated six to nine million Twitter users (not all of whom are active or even paying attention), is a Twitterstorm big enough to actually matter?