From the monthly archives:

September 2009

September 30th Event: Social Media and its Impact on Businesses

Our topic for this month’s roundtable is ‘Social Media” and how companies are embracing it. The roundtable will cover what companies may or may not be doing in regards to social media and how they can leverage it to best benefit them. We will be touching on many issues from best practices, user engagement, relationship building, brand building, consumer communication, mobile, and customer acquisition.

We have a great group of companies and people for this event as they comprise successful startups, industry executives and investors. You can see a complete list with brief bios below.

Trendrr: Trendrr captures and illustrates accurate, real-time market intelligence in an easy-to-use, digestible format. Users can track pre-set data sources or review others’ graphs to discover trends as they happen.

Attending: Mark Ghuneim, Founder & CEO
Twitter: @trendrr

CrunchBase Information on Trendrr
Trendrr
Information provided by CrunchBase

Foursquare: Foursquare is a location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. They are all about helping people find new ways to explore the city. It allows you to meet up with friends and allows you to earn points and unlock badges for discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people.

Attending: Dennis Crowley, Co-founder & CEO
Twitter: @foursquare / @dens

CrunchBase Information on Foursquare
Foursquare
Information provided by CrunchBase

Appssavvy:  Appssavvy connects web publishers and developers with the world’s largest and most visible brands, specifically around widgets and applications. It provides advertisers with contextually-relevant targeted media opportunities reaching an audience of more than 50 million unique online consumers enjoying social media application

Attending: Michael Burke, Co-founder & President
Twitter: @appssavvy

CrunchBase Information on Appssavvy
Appssavvy
Information provided by CrunchBase

Affinitive: Affinitive is a Word of Mouth (WOM) and social media marketing and technology

company. It engages, empowers, and connects passionate consumers by giving them the tools to express their passion for the brands, products, services, and causes they love, thereby cultivating conversation, long-lasting loyalty, and sustained awareness.

Attending: Bob Troia
Twitter: @affinitive / @bobtroia

MTVN: Joshua Dern, Former SVP & GM Social Media

Joshua is a senior digital media exec, artist, and designer. He has spent over 15 years creating digital experiences for some of the best known media brands. Most recently he was SVP & GM of Social Media for MTV Networks.

Barnes & Noble: Kevin Ryan, VP Social Media

A social media strategist with deep roots in all facets of content and social commerce, Kevin Ryan leads customer engagement communities for Barnes & Noble, including the company’s online book clubs, the My B&N reviews and recommendations platform, its blogs, and its presence on Facebook and Twitter.

He started the First Look Book Club, a forum that generates early buzz for pre-release books, and established the search-and-share feature that commerce-enabled the company’s discussion boards. Before Barnes & Noble, Kevin built and managed content programs at a number of consumer websites.

Twitter: @KevinSRyan

Hachette Filipacchi Media: Todd Anderman, SVP, Digital Media

Todd Anderman, named Senior Vice President, Digital Media, for Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. in January 2008, is responsible for the company’s web sites, mobile business as well as other emerging platforms. Over the course of Anderman’s career, he has successfully built and expanded a number of brands in the digital space.

Hearst Magazines Digital Media: Matthew Milner, VP, Social Media

Matthew is the VP of Social Media for Hearst Digital Media. He received his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, and his BA in literature from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school, Matthew worked in marketing and business development in the music business. After completing his studies at Kellogg, he worked in Sales & Trading on Wall Street, most recently at Lehman Brothers. He left Wall Street to write a romantic comedy called Guy Critical, and soon launched a site to market his novel. That site, originally called GuyCritical.com, “Where Women Can Ask Guys Anything,” eventually grew to become a social media platform called Answerology. Answerology was acquired by Hearst Digital Media in 2008.

Outbrain: Yaron Galai, Angel Investor,Co-founder and CEO,

Yaron is the Co-Founder and CEO. Prior to founding Outbrain, Mr. Galai was Co-Founder, SVP of Quigo, Inc. (www.quigo.com), a provider of performance-based marketing solutions for advertisers and premium publishers. He previously served as the CEO of the company for three years. Quigo was acquired by AOL in December 2007. Previously, Mr. Galai was Co-Founder & VP Business Development at Ad4ever, a developer of rich-media advertising technologies for the web which was later acquired by Atlas (a division of aQuantive – www.aquantive.com). Earlier, he was the Founder of NetWorks Web Design – an SEO and web design firm. At NetWorks he oversaw the production and search engine optimization of over 30 websites.

Blog: www.webx0.com
Twitter: @YaronGalai

Bessemer Ventures: Sarah Tavel, Associate

Sarah Tavel is an Associate at Bessemer Venture Partners. She focuses on the software, eCommerce and Internet sectors and has been closely involved in the Diapers.com, Metalogix, Yodle, Cornerstone OnDemand, Onestop, and CPower investments.  She also is involved with Bessemer’s investments in Intego, OLX and Parallels.

Sarah joined BVP in 2006. Earlier, she was a consultant for The Kerdan Group, a startup strategy consulting firm.

Twitter: @adventurista
Blog at www.adventurista.com

EDventure Holdings: Esther Dyson,  Angel Investor

Esther is a long-time catalyst of start-ups in information technology in the US and other markets, including Russia. Since selling her company, EDventure Holdings, to CNET Networks in 2004, she have taken on newer challenges in private aviation and space as well as in health care (as a director of 23andMe, a consumer genetics company). Esther’s IT investments have included Flickr and del.icio.us (both sold to Yahoo!), and  Medstory (sold to Microsoft), as well as Meetup, Eventful.com, Boxbe and Voxiva. Esther is also an active investor in air and space, with holdings in Space Adventures and Zero-G Corporation, as well as XCOR Aerospace, Constellation Services International, Coastal Technologies Group, Dopplr.com, Airship Ventures and Icon Aircraft.

Twitter: @edyson

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Social Media: The Impact It Can Have On Businesses

Social media has been and continues to be a major theme among individuals and businesses.  People use it to connect with friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, and even strangers. They use social networks, tools, and media to find commonalities amongst each other. Businesses use it as a way to market their products, brand, extend their reach, improve customer loyalty, acquire new customers and so on it is used as a tool to garner attention from the masses. In fact according to the Engagement DB, companies embracing social media grew revenues by 18 percent in the past 12 months.

Businesses are becoming more familiar and adapting social media, networks, and tools much more today than ever before as they see the power it has to extend their influence to their target base. They finally understand that social networking is not only about interacting with friends but also a way for them to interact with brands and companies.

According to Anderson Analytics’ May 2009 survey—52% of social network users had become a fan or follower of a company or brand, while 46% had said something good about a brand or company on a social networking Website—double the percentage who had said something negative (23%).

In fact more and more companies are using brand pages and applications to interact with their customers, one specific way is by using them to deliver coupons and offers to consumers to drive trials, store traffic and response. For example, a July 2009 Starbucks promotion, distributed coupons for a free pastry via Facebook and other social outlets. The chain was soon one of the top trending topics on Twitter and the top brand on Facebook, with more than 3.7 million fans.

Granted this is just one way businesses use social media. The other which has been proven to have an immeasurable effect is the way it enables businesses to hear from their customers, observe interaction between customers, increase trust and build credibility by expanding beyond traditional marketing messages and participate in “communities” with customers.

In fact social media is becoming so main stream that traditional companies — Ford, Levi Strauss, Best Buy, and Papa John’s, to name a few — are revamping their marketing operations to embrace their customers, rebrand products, and benefit from the social-media bonanza. In taking these steps, they have created online communities and encouraging their customers, follower, fans, or friends to directly talk and speak to them.

By no means are all traditional companies embracing social media, in fact most companies are taking a wait and see approach and continue to rely on TV, radio, and print for their advertising. However, companies like Best Buy and Ford who are forward thinkers are leading the way as they realize this is where their customers are and will be.

To that end I have listed below four ways social media can benefit companies from the start and if they stay the course can truly reap the rewards of social media.

•Customer Acquisition. Companies should integrated elements of Facebook and Twitter, the two most popular and wide reaching. A great example of using these as tools was the national pizza chain Papa John’s which added 148,000 fans on Nov. 17 through a guerrilla marketing campaign on Facebook. It offered a free medium pizza to anyone who signed up to be its fan on Facebook. The promotion gained it thousands of customers and drove its Web traffic up 253%. It now has more than 300,000 fans and hopes to top 1 million by the end of the year.

•Word-of-mouth marketing. Customers are the best evangelists for a company. Nine in 10 consumers trust their peers more than marketers, according to a recent survey of 25,000 by Nielsen. Starbucks tapped into WOM by starting MyStarbucksIdea in which customers can submit ideas for the company which are then voted on by other users, the best of which will be implemented by the company. One other example is by HP which used Twitter to power a scavenger hunt at a recent conference.

•Enhance customer service. Southwest Airlines heavily involved in the Twitter community, using the service to inform their customers know about deals among other things. In fact when a customer who had recently flown Southwest Airlines and found the airport check-in a two-button breeze, something which he mentioned on Twitter. Next thing he know he receives a “thank you” from the airline a few hours later.

•Speak directly to customers. Blogs, Twitter or Facebook can be an ideal forum for customers to offer their  candid viewpoints to companies. For better or for worse companies respond to positive and negative feedback. Brian Kalma, Head of User Experience and Web Strategy of Zappos confirmed that bad reviews as well as good are a part of the consumer story and need to be respected and seen as an opportunity to provide better products and services.

As you can see, I am a believer that companies will have no choice but to embrace social media as that is where there customers are and will be going. The ones who are reluctant to will see their customers move to their competitors.

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