By Deanna Ferrari
Earlier this year, we launched a new blog series, “Social Media Tool of the Month,” brought to you by yours truly. Looking back since my first post on YouTube Direct in March of 2010 until now, it’s amazing how things have changed. Here’s a list of what our findings were then, and where they are going:
YouTube Direct: YouTube Direct is an open source tool for viewers to submit their own news videos to editorial sites such as NPR.com, The Huffington Post and Politico, or company websites. While it’s a great tool for citizen journalism, recent news on this has been pretty quiet. The original YouTube is still the go-to site for amateur video, and I believe will be for 2011.
Card.ly vs. Flavors.me: With people joining more and more 
social sites, it’s become more difficult to keep track of what platforms they’re on. Enter online business cards such as card.ly and flavors.me. We put them head-to-head last spring, and decided card.ly was more appropriate for a business like WordWrite, but flavors has been the favored site among individuals. Recently though, card.ly became BusinessCard2, with more of an actual social component to it – the opportunity for your audience to ask you questions on your page, and learn more about you. I think this will be more of the trend in the new year with pages that have been traditionally static. Perhaps more companies will make all aspects of their websites social?
Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is nothing new, but we explored how social bookmarking sites like Delicious are pertinent to the B2B space. Prospects can see the great content you’re sharing, great client work you’ve done, relevant industry news, and most importantly, content you’ve created such as blog posts, which help you market your expertise. In December of 2010, there was quite the hoopla across social networks when Yahoo! announced it was shutting down Delicious. According to its blog, though, Delicious will not be shut down. Instead, Delicious is looking for a different company to maintain the site. We’ll see where it goes…
The iPad’s Impact on Business: Steve Jobs did it again in 2010 with the introduction of the iPad. I personally don’t have one yet, but it’s certainly an essential business tool. It’s light, compact, and perfect to show customers what exactly your business does without ever having to open up a bulky laptop. It’s also perfect for taking notes at conferences or meetings, and keeping up with all things apps. We can only hope the iPad 2 delivers in the new year.
Social Currency for B2B: Does the phrase, “I’m on a horse” mean anything to you? It did for Old Spice as a catch phrase for its newest (and funniest) spokesperson. The company really got its bang for its buck in 2010 with the videos it produced, answering tweets and Facebook questions from fans. “Social currency” is what brought Old Spice its views, which according to Fast Company is “the extent to which people share the brand and/or information about the brand as part of their everyday social lives at work or at home, made up of six key dimensions or “levers” — utility; affiliation; identity; conversation; advocacy; and information.” In this post we explored how social currency can work in business to business social media with a client case study, showing that all it takes is identifying advocates, putting out the right information and identifying the right types of conversations. The concept of social currency will be an ideal metric as social media continues to explode in 2011 and beyond.
Crowdsourcing for Small Businesses: Crowdsourcing is really social media’s bread and butter. You can call on your community to give opinions on everything from what shoes you should buy from Zappos to what your brand’s next move should be. Anyone can use it really, and here we provided real niche business case studies of brands using crowdsourcing effectively. In the future, we can expect brands to keep using this method, as it is the ideal focus group for business success.
Essential Event Planning Social Tools: WordWrite has implemented two social media events (journchat LIVE Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Business Tweetup), so this past fall, we wrote about what tools helped us plan and execute these events efficiently. From Tweetdeck to Ustream to Plixi, there are so many great tools to help make your event a success. And more are being developed every day. My prediction for 2011? A one-stop-shop platform that helps you plan and execute an event, from beginning to end, along with follow-up and analytics. Here’s hoping it comes to fruition!
Online Job Seeking and its Social Component: Late in 2010, WordWrite introduced its “Education and Internships” page. We believe a solid PR foundation starts with a great education, so this page has resources such as presentations we have given for students to get started in a communications career. As we unveiled the page, this blog post centered on how job seekers can use social media to help in their search. Sites like The Sevans Network, Help a PR Pro Out and countless LinkedIn groups assist job seekers with leads on openings, tips on resumes, cover letters, and interviews. A perfect complement to a very time consuming and sometimes difficult process.
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Whew! That’s a lot to cover in nine months, and our posts don’t even scratch the surface of what’s out there. One thing I’ve learned in the past year after reading countless blogs and using these tools, is that it doesn’t matter what you’re using, it’s if you’re using them correctly. You could be taking Instagram photos for an audience that is only 10 percent iPhone users (Instagram is only available for the iPhone as of today), so only those people can partake in sharing their photos, too. It’s all about knowing your audience, and the appropriate way to interact with them to create an environment that eventually leads to sales. We still have a long way to go with social media, and I’m hoping 2011 brings a plethora of new tools to share with you.
Social media tool of the month is a regular feature on the WordWrite Storytelling Blog that appears monthly.
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Deanna Ferrari is a senior account executive for WordWrite Communications. You can follow her on Twitter @dferrari.
