Ragan Conference: The Social Media (R)evolution

I am listening to Shel Holtz speak at Ragan's Corporate Communications and the Social Media Revolution. I am up next. The room is full - 250 people? I had a great conversation with  an attendee who hopes to bring back learnings to her otherwise conservative leadership.

Shel's a seasoned communications pro and knows how to speak to a roomful of corporate communictors (PR people). He has a sober point of view about the fundamental shifts and the practical applications. Overall, his emphasis is on what we should include in our communications effort - the right social media tactics - versus the overthrow of the PR process as we know it today. His appoach makes him much more accessible to communication pros then the usual "everything you know is wrong" -type of social media speaker.

The role of the communicator:
Old: produce stuff
New: orchestrate

He mentioned a few best practices (along with the dreaded Dell/Jarvis story):

Forbes.com Widget
Shark Week widget

Southwest Airlnes - I wannagetaway.com
Deloitte's employee videos

The Presidential candidate's use of Twitter

Dell's Ideastorm and their use of Twitter for special deals (Dell Outlet)
Coke's Virtual Thirst program in Second Life (create a virtual vending machine) & their response to criticism - great YouTube video from Coke project manager

GM FYI Blog and the run in with the New York Times (when they published their response - and the back and forth with the editors - on the blog when they couldn't get a letter published in the Times)

Jonathan's Blog/Sun's CEO's blog post regarding employees leaking information

Community at Intel including Intelpedia (knowledge management)

Users joing a Facebook group to brink back Cadbury's WispaBite

Orbitz' usage of a Twitter-like comm tool for customers to update each other

Cogenz: the private tagging service via ASP model

Small issue: I disagree with his contention that the Web will all be "3D" in five to ten years. Having developed next generation interfaces for interactive TV in the nineties and throughout Web1.0, I lived through the 3D craze then. While I do think they will get more sophisticated and accessible. But there are terrific interfaces for computing experiences that do not need a "real-world" metaphor to work well. The restrictions of 3D space do not always make for the most engaging or useable experiences. 

Shel's a great speaker and hit upon the fundamentals of the change via storytelling. See him when you can. Read his blog. 

Comments

[Andrew Careaga]

Nice summary of this morning's session. I too am attending the conference and this is the first time I've had the chance to see and hear Shel present. As much as I enjoyed his morning keynote, I got more from his "Blogs Gone Wild" presentation in the afternoon.

[RichardatDELL]

sounds like a great session. Shel has certainly kept an eye on our evolution and change at Dell, so I am sure his perspective was a great one...and with more to come as Jeremiah Owyang likes to call it, Dell swell. Its chronicled here:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/02/25/social-media-saga-continues-as-company-advances-towards-dell-swell/

[Barry Reicherter]

Agree on the 3D comment in terms of virtual worlds, but 3D data visualization is quite helpful for presenting very detailed or multi-layered information. TouchGraph and ThinkMap are providing compelling tools for publishing.

[John Bell]

Richard - he certainly completed the redmeption part of the story with mentions of IdeaStorm, the blogs, et al. It seems to me from the outside that Dell really has been transformed into a 'voice of the customer' believer. Hope that is true.