Corporate Community Social Network

Particularly in business, there is great support for the idea that timing is everything. The same is true about building your brand. And perhaps the best time to focus on your brand is in a challenging economy.

Very few companies are seeing the volume of business they forecast 6 or 12 months ago. Many have seen some slight improvement in the past month or two, but are still in a wonderful window of time where focus can be turned inward on improving processes and building brand. Using a corporate community social network to both extend the visibility of your brand, and to really listen to the voice of your customer to improve your products and services is actually easy and cost effective. Start small. Track your brand every day by running a basic Google search and seeing how you show up. Monitor blogs and mentions related to your industry and comment back. Establish yourself on Twitter and track both your customers and leaders in your industry who have reason to tweet about your industry and, ideally, your brand. Make a modest investment and create your own branded social media community by utilizing a social media platform and populating it with compelling thought leadership, surveys regarding your products or direction, or contests that engage your clients. These activities are useful both to provide information to your user and partner community as well as to gain valuable information from your community.

There is so much being written right now about the down economy and how to survive, but I believe that by simultaneously focusing your extra energy and staff availability on improving the internal processes of your organization and improving the visibility of your brand, a company does far more than survive the downturn. It thrives and grows into a stronger and more effective company overall; one that benefits from listening and engaging more with its community.

Happy Memorial Day weekend!

Recently the World Economic Forum launched a number of new several social media tools and is inviting web users to discuss key issues on the economy, US politics, business ethics and the environment, is this a nod to the growing importance of social media or just a gimmick?

WEF is coordinating discussions on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and an OpenForum wiki, as well as a photo group on Flickr and corporate streaming video hosting on its own WEF website. Also press conferences are being broadcast live through Mogulus and Qik. We have to ask the question: Is this genuine dialogue or some form of scary business social management of the many by the few? A grand attempt by the people who got us in to this mess to look all warm and fuzzy!

The forum has also opened corporate branding channel on YouTube channel for the second year and will pick some of the most popular comments from the corporate community social network channel and broadcast them during sessions at next year's events.

WEF's social media corporate branding initiative builds on the YouTube channel run last year, which recorded more than 5m video views in the six weeks leading up to the 2007 WEF forum, and drew responses from Israeli president Shimon Peres and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who responded to questions at the Google-owned video-sharing website's stand in Davos.

This year WEF will also pick one contributor from its corporate community social network to attend the forum in person, judging videos by the numbers of views they draw, their originality and creativity, and by how well they answer one of four key questions.

Users are being asked: how confident they feel about global growth in 2009; to what extent environmental issues will be sidelined by the economic crisis; what their expectations are of incoming US president Barack Obama's administration; and whether company executives should abide by a similar code of ethics to lawyers and doctors.

The successful contributor will be invited to attend the WEF forum with all expenses paid and will cover the event as a citizen reporter, posting coverage on the YouTube Davos channel.

The WEF's social media network project is the latest in a series of initiatives by YouTube as it focuses on more heavyweight political events. The site ran a debate last year with CNN in which 2,300 video questions were sent to Democrat candidates for the presidential nomination, while the equivalent Republican debate attracted 4.49 million viewers to CNN.

Does this mean that social media has grown up and that ordinary people’s views are being taken seriously or that political marketers are getting more web savvy and are deploying business social management tools as a control mechanisms for the masses? Probably both, but as long as the machine is asking, it would seem childish not to answer!

Time will tell if the pull opinion seekers will win, over the mainstream push practitioners, but one thing is still for sure – most media spend is still going on channels that talk to us, rather than with us. We can only hope that the trend to open conversations will grow and grow.