Blog Potomac Recap - Overview Part 1 of 3
June 23, 2008 :: Steve FisherLast Friday, Network Solutions sponsored Blog Potomac in Northern Virginia which brought together some of the top minds in social media and public relations. They talked about the current landscape and how companies can benefit from implementing a social media strategy. You can see recordings of the presentations on the Blog Potomac site.
This is part 1 of 3 in the recap of the event.
Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager and Chief Blogger, Direct2Dell
Lionel is a Fortune 50 blogger and is a rock star in the blogging world. He spearheaded the blog and social media effort at Dell 2 years ago. He has been there for 15 years starting in tech support.
He started the blog with as a tech support type of blog and the big challenge was the support issues people had with Dell. Started to look at the difference between supporting one customer and talking to a large audience at once.
His mantra from companies looking to leverage social media is “People want to connect with other people, not a corporation”.
Digg-style features and ideas voting from the broader public to have Dell actually take those recommendations and do something with them.
Microblogging is the next step in our strategy to create discussions in a whole new way.
Strategy for us now is to have our people active on IdeaStorm and touching other blogs and the rest of the blogosphere. We are working to blend these things to make it easier for customers to engage. It is right now the tech-savvy user and we want to bring this to a more mainstream audience.
Washington Post Local Business Editor Dan Beyers
The trend over the next 10 years is that it will all be sent over the Internet in some format. Don Graham, Publisher, is a huge social media junkie and recently they had an intern lunch and he asked for people for Facebook app ideas, which impressed most people because of how the paper is perceived as an old media dinosaur. WPI has 60 blogs that cover every topic under the sun, even an obituary blog….
His strategy is that you should stick to your niche, write quality content, create a new model of audience engagement and that the online content is one big database and we have to unleash it in new and exciting ways.
Our mission is to inform the world and we must move the way the future is going. There is a discussion raging in the publishing world that the print side of the business should move to the non-profit model for posterity and keeps the media alive for the record.
The newspaper still makes more money in ad revenue than the online right now but we are in a transition period where that will be changing. The online advertising revenues are for national campaigns where the print thrives on the local ads.
The difference between the blogs and the traditional articles is that the blogs must be read by a second person and fact checked which is less than the traditional article review process.
Each blogger is responsible for moderating their blog’s comments and it may take a bit longer to review than we would like. It is a good exercise because we are interacting with the audience that people see as extremely important.
Blogs in elections – from a newspaper standpoint, we can deliver content faster which is great. We are also looking to move to tags to make the content more accessible and easily searchable. We are trying to prove that editor driven blogging works to free up the journalists for “higher altitude blogging”.
NEXT TIME IN PART 2
In part 2 we will continue the recap and cover the presentations by Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group and Jeremy Pepper of Pop! PR Jots.
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