3) What would you recommend other marketers consider before launching a corporate brand iPhone application? Before launching an app, be sure it is going to work in a way that is useful for your customers. With a franchise restaurant for example, be sure your franchisees are on board. If you can only order at some restaurants but not all, it may confuse customers. Or taunt them if they want to use it but can’t. All or our restaurants are company owned, so that wasn’t an issue. Also, be sure the app does something of real value, like allowing customers to order food. If it’s just a store locator for example, people may not want the app after they’ve found you.

Twitter lists allow people to create lists of people they follow, which is supposed to help us find new people to follow. If you enjoy following Jeremy Story, surely you would be interested in seeing who he is following. This alternative (still in Beta) helps replace the now spammy Follow Fridays and the suggested list from Twitter to follow.

My first impression is that people are being way too vague with their lists. Bloggers? Ok, what kind? Coloradoans? I can find those on my own. My suggestion is to make the lists as specific as possible, include geography, profession, topics, demographics, etc. So far, my lists are former-Schenkein-ites (my first PR agency), PR Pros in Colorado, Colorado Women in Technology and Chicks Who Click Crew (a niche conference for women in social media). I’d much rather know “Freelance Designers in Colorado” than just “Designers” or “Denver Restaurants” than the label “Food.” Although I do love Scobleizer’s list of Venture Capitalists.

So now you have potential lists of people to follow and pitch your product, right? Not so fast. That’s a horrible approach there. Same rules of Twitter apply. Find new people to follow and interact with and save the sales pitch for a brochure. The best opportunity for a corporate Twitter account is to contribute to their own helpful lists to the community. If you’re Whole Foods, make lists of gluten-free food companies, vegan food companies, organic food bloggers, all the Whole Foods Twitter accounts, etc.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people will glom onto the number of lists as another indicator of influence along with number of followers. I hope rather than a popularity metric, users will find it as a way to meet more interesting people online.

1) What three things would you recommend to a social media strategist for a brand?

The three pieces of advice I would give to a social media strategist for a brand are: be curious, be patient, and be persistent.  Curiosity comes in because, to be successful, you need to want to learn everything you can about your brand.  You want to learn how things work, the strategy, the past, the present – all of it to be able to communicate with people in a passionate way.  On the flip side, you should also want to be curious about the community that you work with – get to know them as individuals and build authentic relationships from what originally are business relationships.   Patience is necessary because you can not control the nature of communications.  There will be times when the things you want to say don’t get spread as quickly as you want them.  There will be times when things spin drastically out of control.  Remembering to be patient and trusting in your ability to connect with your brand and with your audience is essential to success.  Persistence is just having the energy and passion to do it every day – social media communities and relationships are build over time and you have to be persistent to get your voice heard.  People will ultimately be attracted to this persistence and want to hear what you’re saying….

2) You did a blog post several months ago stating that you don’t pitch bloggers with your products. Is that still true? What have been the pros and cons of this strategy?

“I don’t pitch bloggers” was a mantra that I came up with because I don’t blindly contact bloggers and social media influencers with a product pitch.  For me, the most effective way to utilize social media is through building relationships with your key fans.  Working at a well-known brand, I was able to effectively find our key spokespeople on the web and build a community from there.  From there, I was able to use those relationships to open doors to other people and other opportunities to introduce the brand to new people.  The pro’s of this strategy are that the relationships are authentic, they are trusted, and usually yield strong results and grows a strong network of people willing to work with the brand.  The Cons are that it is time intensive – building a real community means having real relationships.  It takes time and isn’t all encompassing.  I think, ultimately, the right mixture of pitching and relationship building is the right way to do things but it is dependent on the strength of your pre-existing community.

3) You planned a successful sold-out event during BlogHer? What was your strategy in selecting bloggers? What would be your recommendation to other companies when selecting bloggers?

The best strategy for selecting bloggers is to find out who is already talking about you.  Those are the easiest relationships to build – these are your brand advocates that are out there already.  If you’re a young company and the conversations aren’t there, find people who are talking about competitors but are open to discovering new companies.  This all stems back to step one in social media which is to listen – listening to what the crowd is saying will help develop any strategy.

Once you have a list of people that you feel you can approach – read their blogs.  Find out who these people are.  Ultimately, the relationships you build with bloggers will turn them into spokespeople – so make sure that they stay true to how you want your brand to be perceived.  Bloggers are all unique and have different voices – some of those voices may conflict with how a brand wants to be perceived.  Taking the time to “get to know them” by reading their blog will set you up for great success.

And finally – for a good event – let the crowd decide.  We sent out invites to the people we worked with and encouraged them to spread the word and invite people on their own.  Successful bloggers are natural networkers and they will discover new people that have a passion for your brand that you may not have been able to find yourself.  It creates a larger network and makes for a happier community.

Getting customer service is so hard at this point that there is an entire site dedicated to Get Human, helping you find a real human to help (supposedly). Average wait for AT&T? 18 minutes. Have fun with that.

It’s why I love social media, specifically Twitter. It changes the game. This past week, I booked a flight on Travelocity for my upcoming sojourn to Europe. A one-way flight from Denver to Boston to Reykjavik to Oslo. Or so I thought, until I got a call from Steve in India who informed me that my flight wasn’t actually confirmed. I could either do Denver to SEATTLE to Reykjavik to Oslo or I could cancel my flight. Denied, Travelocity.

So I took it to the streets.

As a company, they now have a potentially crazy, angry customer on their hands. What to do? What to do? Oh, respond!

Well played Travelocity and Joel Frey! Joel was extremely helpful and promised to put a senior agent on my case, and that’s exactly what he did. The senior agent called that afternoon, offered me the Seattle leg again and explained that it was actually less total travel time than Boston. For long, extraneous reasons, I’m not going to book through Travelocity, but I found their customer service to be top notch.

It’s why social media is a game changer. And not just in the sense of needing superlatives for your client’s boring new product announcement. When your customer is talking about you to all of their friends on Twitter (which sometimes equals thousands and thousands), you best not have your head in the sand.

To top it off, Travelocity had this nice touch. Right back at ya, Travelocity.

I love fashion and clothes, but I’m also a geek, so I love it even more when the two diverge at the App Store.

Style.com

Style.com

When it comes to geekery, Conde Nast nails it with its Style.com iPhone application. The app gives you access to view blog posts on fashion industry parties, the look of the day, men’s fashion, style fashion blog and video. The best part of the application is that it lets you see the looks of every single fashions show. The app is beautifully designed with a sleek aesthetic that echoes Style.com. When I bought my iPhone, I don’t think the App Store had many that were targeted at women, despite women being a sizable audience of the iPhone. That’s the App developers loss and Style.com’s gain. The revenue stream appears to come from being sponsored by H&M and the advertisements it places between its photos.

Lucky Magazine

Lucky Magazine is an entire magazine dedicated to shopping. And its iPhone application is similarly based. The app currently lets you shop its fall handbag guide, denim guide, fall shoe guide and new fall looks. The app has a heavy advertising basis with its selections and also offers you the ability to shop Clinique (boooring). Yet I don’t mind being advertising selections if they’re gorgeous and similar to something they would highlight in a normal editorial. They also disclose at the top if they’re an advertisement. Yet the app feels cheap compared to Style.com.

What’s more interesting are the fashion magazines missing from the App Store: Elle Magazine, Harpers Baazar, Glamour, Marie Claire and Paper. It leaves me wondering if they’re going to get into the game, and if it has been a worthwhile strategy for Lucky and Conde Nast. InStyle has a new iPhone app that is intuitive and beautiful but appears to be advertising based with no disclosures. Uh oh, InStyle. I doubt you’re really featuring multiple Hello Kitty outfit options on your own accord. Nylon also offers an option that is a hot mess when it comes to user interface that is almost unreadable.

Whether you’re into fashion or not, the apps paint an interesting picture of how two different publishing outlets are utilizing the iPhone.

Ford held a meetup with bloggers to introduce the new Ford Taurus hosted by some of my favorite bloggers – Andrew Hyde, Aimee Greeblemonkey and Amber Johnson – and I got to go as a blogger. I don’t think my blog is what they were really targeting, but hey, free appetizers! Thanks Ford.

My grandfather drove a Ford Taurus, so my association with it is old people. The car was surprisingly more sleek than I would have guessed, but still had room for mobsters to hold at least three bodies. At least. The car inside was gorgeous and had great features. It seems to be a huge lead in style compared to previous models. Yet, I can’t see myself purchasing one as I prefer smaller sedans like my Civic.

The best part to my ears was the Ford PR person talked about their CEO’s focus on quality. My parents believed in buying cars and driving them into the ground. They bought American – a Ford Sable and GM station wagon – but the problems continually stacked up. Their next set of cars were a Honda Accord and Toyota Corolla.  And thus, my first two cars have been Civics.

Yet the quality of Ford’s social media approach is dead on. They were triumphant with their Ford Fiesta agent program, in which my friend Jeremy Tanner is taking part. Letting small groups of bloggers make their own decisions while test driving the Ford Taurus will help play a crucial role in helping people believe that Ford is about quality. Yet to me, the true test for quality when the new drivers of Ford Taurus talk about the quality of the 2009 Taurus in 2019. That’s the true litmus test.

Photo taken without permission from Andrew Hyde

As we were leaving the meetup, I told Ef that I was going to write about it for Soci@lByte, and then he told me he was going to write about it for the HuffPo. Hello one-upmanship. But in his article, he has a great point – 16 to 19 miles per gallon isn’t acceptable in 2009. Somehow, I missed that point, but maybe because I was worried about Andrew driving down the wrong way on one ways.

This past Tuesday, Ignite Boulder 6 played to a crowd of 600 plus. If you’ve never attended an Ignite, presenters are tasked with sharing knowledge about a passion in 5 minutes with 20 slides and slides advance every 15 seconds whether you’re ready or not. Both Ef and I have presented and if you’ve ever wanted to be pushed shoved out of your comfort zone, presenting at Boulder Theatre to a crowd of hundreds that expects you to entertain and educate will do it for you.

This past Ignite contained a brilliant presentation by Jen Yu made me salivate with her presentation on food porn. Dave Burdick of the Daily Camera compared Ghostbusters to journalism, which was hilarious even though I’ve never seen Ghostbusters. Jen Newell (semi-rhymes with Yu) taught us how to speak Swedish or rather Bork, Bork, Bork.

Ignite was started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis and have spread across the country and even in Europe. Ignite Boulder is one of the largest in the country, and this article from the Daily Camera sums it up nicely. The next Ignite Boulder should be in December and the next Ignite Denver is Oct. 16. Go and attend both. Or even better, sign up to present.

This presentation by Vikas Reddy on Awkward Rules at Ignite Boulder 3 was one of my favorite presentations.

Julie Penner at Ignite Boulder Six on Dijbouti is Just the Beginning.