Daily Archives: June 30, 2009

Community Moves From BlogCouncil.org to SocialMedia.org

The Blog Council, a community of social media leaders at large companies, has officially changed its name to the Social Media Business Council and will call SocialMedia.org its new online home.

“Every day, our members share advice on how to build successful, scalable and self-sufficient social media programs,” said Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Social Media Business Council and its parent company, GasPedal. “This new name and domain better reflect the wide range of issues our community focuses on.”

The name change was a collaborative effort, with members sharing dozens of name suggestions before selecting Social Media Business Council through a vote at Member Meeting 4 in New York City.

“We’ve got a great group of active members,” said Sernovitz. “It’s fantastic to see how much pride they take in the Council and how willing they are to collaborate — not only on social media issues — but also in advancing the group itself.”
Social Media Business Council members represent the heads of social media at the world’s largest brands, including: Abbott Laboratories, AccuQuote, Allstate, Amway, Analog Devices, Ariba, Avery Dennison, Chevron, Cisco Systems, CME Group, The Coca-Cola Company, Community Medical Centers, ConAgra Foods, Dell, Duke Energy, First Data, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, General Mills, General Motors, H&R Block, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, IDG, Intel, Intuit, Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente, Kraft, Mayo Clinic, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Molson Canada, Nestle Purina PetCare, Newell Rubbermaid, Nokia, Novartis, Orange Business Services, PepsiCo, Petro-Canada, Pfizer, Pitney Bowes, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Salesforce.com, SAP, Sara Lee, Starbucks, SunGard, SWIFT, Symantec, Turner Broadcasting System, Tyson Foods, U.S. Coast Guard, UPS, USAA, Walmart, and Wells Fargo.

About the Social Media Business Council:
The Social Media Business Council, formerly the Blog Council, is a brands-only community that helps large organizations build successful social media programs. Members gain instant access and advice from the heads of social media at the world’s largest brands and collaborate with one another in a friendly, productive, and private environment. Learn more about the Social Media Business Council: http://socialmedia.org

The Social Media Business Council is a GasPedal project. We teach word of mouth marketing and social media to companies of all sizes. Learn more about GasPedal: http://gaspedal.com

Reid Hoffman, founder of business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn, says that the massive amounts of social data available on the Internet will change the business world by allowing for the development of products that yield analytics from user relationships and identities.

A video interview with Hoffman, discussing how new products will be created from social data, is featured on IdeasProject, a website developed by Nokia. IdeasProject is an online “information space” that provides a new way to interact with thought leaders and their big ideas about the future of connected communications. For more on Hoffman’s big idea, visit: http://www.ideasproject.com/idea_person.webui?id=4101

“Once you have all these piles of data, people will build products out of the synthesis of this information,” explains Hoffman. “I think the Web 2.0 platform concerning actual identities and relationships is really just at the beginning stages of its growth–we’re not close to even the midpoint of this development.”

“As the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman redefined online professional networking, making a seminal contribution to the rise of social media,” said Valerie Buckingham, Director of Technology Marketing, Nokia. “Now Hoffman is once again setting his sites on the future, exploring how companies will use the growing base of online social networking information as a foundation for business innovation.”

Over the next month, editors from the IdeasProject are featuring their favorite ideas as submitted by the public and sending a Nokia N95 to the ‘Big Thinker’ who contributed. Share and submit your ‘Big Idea’ with the world by visiting http://master.ideasproject.com/userideasubmit.webui

About Reid Hoffman:
The founding CEO of Internet-based professional network service LinkedIn and now its Chairman and President, Hoffman has been called the ‘most connected man in Silicon Valley.’ He has personally mentored many of the Web 2.0 CEOs and has given valuable advice to many Silicon Valley VCs, as well as to the United States military. Credited with inventing the term, ‘Second Generation Web Entrepreneurs,’ he is director of such social network enterprises as Mozilla, Vendio, Six Apart, Kiva.org, Grassroots Enterprises, and Tagged. He is also an investor in Facebook, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Technorati, Dopplr, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, and several other firms. As Executive Vice President of PayPal, Reid was instrumental to the acquisition by eBay and was responsible for partnerships with Intuit, Visa, MasterCard and Wells Fargo. Reid graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a BS in Symbolic Systems and from Oxford University with a Master’s degree in philosophy and a Marshall scholarship.

About IdeasProject:
IdeasProject, a project of Nokia hosted at www.ideasproject.com, brings together the most visionary and influential “big thinkers” to contemplate the big ideas that matter most to the future of communications. It is a new kind of conversation platform aimed at uncovering the connections between these thought leaders and their disruptive ideas. Explore the IdeasProject website, subscribe to its RSS feed, join its Twitter feed (IdeasProject), and come back often to learn about great new big ideas as they break.

About Nokia:
Nokia is the world leader in mobility, driving the transformation and growth of the converging Internet and communications industries. We make a wide range of mobile devices with services and software that enable people to experience music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games, business mobility and more. Developing and growing our offering of consumer Internet services, as well as our enterprise solutions and software, is a key area of focus. We also provide equipment, solutions and services for communications networks through Nokia Siemens Networks.

HubSpot announces a social media monitoring feature, the newest addition to its inbound marketing software. The tool tracks a small business’s activity on social media sites, monitoring the company’s brands, relevant industry keywords and online coverage and activity of competitors as an integrated part of HubSpot’s inbound marketing system.

http://www.hubspot.com/blog/bid/4884/HubSpot-Introduces-Social-Media-Monitoring-to-Inbound-Marketing-System

While other social media monitoring services can be expensive and geared toward big businesses, HubSpot’s new social media integration offers an affordable way for small businesses and marketing professionals to monitor and share relevant, interesting content with their communities. As an integrated part of HubSpot’s comprehensive inbound marketing software, the social media monitoring tool eliminates the need for companies to use multiple marketing tools and services.

HubSpot’s social media monitoring tool collects new content daily that is relevant to a company’s industry keywords or brands. The tool makes it easy for users to post the content to Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites; comment on it; and track the developing conversations. The tool offers a simplified way for a company to engage with its audience to establish itself as a thought leader and a hub for interesting, useful information about its industry.

The social media monitoring feature is integrated with HubSpot’s inbound marketing system, a software platform including tools that allow professional marketers and small business owners to get found online by managing search engine optimization, blogging and social media, as well as landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics. There is no additional cost to existing customers for the new tool.

“Many small businesses struggle to manage multiple tools in attempt to monitor their online brands while working within tight budgets,” said HubSpot CEO and co-founder, Brian Halligan. “HubSpot has added social media monitoring to our inbound marketing software to let small businesses easily manage their online presence using one comprehensive system they can afford.”

Learn more about HubSpot’s inbound marketing software at http://www.hubspot.com/products.

About HubSpot

HubSpot, Inc. provides Internet marketing software that helps businesses get found online, generate more inbound leads and convert a higher percentage of those leads into paying customers. HubSpot’s software platform includes tools that allow professional marketers and small business owners to manage search engine optimization, blogging and social media, as well as landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics. Based in Cambridge, MA, HubSpot can be found at http://www.hubspot.com. HubSpot’s free marketing tools can be found at http://grader.com.

clickbooq, inc. (http://www.clickbooq.com), a leading provider of interactive marketing solutions for professional photographers and visual artists, today announced it has successfully deployed Amazon CloudFront to serve the image-based content of its websites. CloudFront is a groundbreaking web service that is optimized for superfast delivery of web content worldwide. By integrating CloudFront technology and Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution (S3) platform to serve client images, clickbooq provides the professional photography market with the best possible site performance and speed around the world.
Using CloudFront, clickbooq is able to deliver image-based website content through Amazon’s global network of server edge locations. When visitors view a clickbooq website, their browsers’ file requests are instantly routed from a conventional central server to an edge server — generally located near the visitor — which means the request encounters fewer server hops; resulting in lower latency and dramatically increased delivery speed. Amazon CloudFront uses 14 edge locations to serve the major markets worldwide: eight are in the United States (Ashburn, VA; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; Newark, NJ; Palo Alto, CA; Seattle, WA; St. Louis, MO), four are in Europe (Amsterdam; Dublin; Frankfurt; London), and two are in Asia (Hong Kong, Tokyo).

“CloudFront gives clickbooq websites a huge speed advantage compared to competitive services and makes the clickbooq platform a truly global solution. Now, our users’ websites and images are served faster than ever before,” said Bryan Heu, CEO. “And the performance isn’t limited to our US-based users. clickbooq users around the globe will benefit from our CloudFront implementation, especially those users and visitors based in Europe and Asia.”

About clickbooq, inc.

clickbooq (http://www.clickbooq.com) provides a turnkey solution for professional photographers to create one-of-a-kind websites they can update anytime, without any technical know-how. Using clickbooq’s web-based application, photographers can build a full-featured Flash website quickly and easily. The company’s key competitive advantage is a multi-disciplined team of creative, technical, and strategic professionals with over ten years of experience in the interactive marketing industry.

clickbooq is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information visit http://www.clickbooq.com.