Out of the thousands of social media communicators online, I find it ironic that one of the most successful adopters of the social media toolset has been Sesame Street. Of all the CEOs and executives in the world, Big Bird and the Cookie Monster seem to have figured out how to drive the Sesame Street brand into the new media space with childlike glee… but did they look at the “big picture” of corporate business? (PERSONAL NOTE: I love Sesame Street. As a father of a seven year old boy I can appreciate that he gets to laugh and learn from some of the very things I grew up with as a child.)

Sesame Street has detached some of its own video work into appealing directly to the online crowd, skillfully learning to take some of those age old ideas many web surfers grew up with and present them with some adult humor and whimsical entertainment. Surely as a brand name Sesame Street has to have just a little recognition with 39 seasons of broadcasting with over 4100 episodes (Sesame Street is one of the longest-running U.S. television shows in history) That strength allows the main SesameStreet.org site to produce over 800k visits a month (per Compete.com)

Looking at some of the projects Sesame Street has done, they have a YouTube landing page that has 80 videos that have produced roughly 1200 subscribers and 30,000 channel views. While these numbers are not “epic” in the world of YouTube, the viral effect of bringing Sesame Street online creates some new benchmarks for them.

If you do a simple search for the words “Sesame Street” on YouTube- there are dozens of videos that fans have loaded that often have an excess of 100,000 views each. The amount of branding and air time that they have garnished from this evolution to the online space is very interesting to see in such an established brand as Big Bird.

The crew over at Sesame Street has moved the entertainment company into several different projects that include the Sesame Street Podcast “a series of free portable video episodes featuring Murray Monster and all your other favorite Sesame Street Muppets. In this second series of Word on the Street podcasts, celebrity guests and fuzzy friends explain the meaning of words like “octagon” and “insect.”

Unfortunately Sesame Street has some problems online too…

Strangely enough, the CEO of Sesame Street (who in my mind is Big Bird, however the Executive Producer is Carol-Lynn Parente) has a slight image problem online. If you Google Big Bird - there is an unfortunate image in the results (top center of page) that has Big Bird making a rude gesture. Considering he is the public image of the company, the image may be offending his target audience of parents and children.

As we scroll through the results, if Big Bird really was a real person… he also has a YouTube video with the title of “Big Bird- The Muppet Unmasked” that dives deep into his personal life. As a public figurehead that video may be something that he wants to carefully look at and consider the stock ramifications. According to Google, the term “Big Bird” has an estimated click rate of 6 to 8 times a day. That means at least 180 to 240 sets of eyes are being exposed to the wrong message… and a good potential number of those eyes could be children. In actuality that number could be ten times higher in terms of raw searches for the term “Big Bird”

In the real world however, chief executive officers are not the only people involved in running a successful company. Every great CEO relies on a team of professionals to produce results.

So if Sesame Street has a Vice President… we have to look at Cookie Monster too. His friendly furry blue face makes most people feel relaxed and at least a little light hearted, yet right at the top of his image search results is an angry monster saying “What the hell is this crap?”

With a subconscious glance, our visual search has exposed the bi-polar second man of Sesame Street. He has a deep and dark side that many of us didn’t know about, which is further detailed by his YouTube video “Cookie Monster vs Martha Stewart” Who would have thought that the friendly blue running mate had such a two-sided personality?

Understanding the darker secrets of our public facing figures is critical for any business. If Cookie Monster was running for political office or wanted to help his company through an IPO, there could be some very serious repercussions of not managing this issue beforehand.

The “Big Picture” is that web sites have become multi-locational brands. A brand, whether now exists on many different levels on many different locations. On the beneficial side of Sesame Street, the 800k+ monthly visits to the main site is quickly dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of views to hundreds of YouTube videos (and that is only one social community site) On the negative side we see potential brand damage against the highest ranked executives of the company.

I hope my more light-hearted analysis of social media branding and reputation helps connect the issues for you. Understanding how different elements of the online frontier interact with audience members is critical for companies moving forward in this environment.

For more realistic examples of the same issues, check out my other articles below.

As always- let me know if you have any comments or insight to Big Bird and Cookie Monster’s problems!

We often hear the question: What corporate social media sites use Wordpress?
After all- It is free open source software. It is often followed with questions like: Who would use free software to run a significant corporate site? Lets take a look at a few…

Big Media Sites

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• CNN

Companies you may have heard of:

• General Motors
• Ford
• Reuters

Some governmental sites:

• Library of Congress
• NASA
• United States Post Office

The list goes on and on.

As a media platform Wordpress has revolutionized the way information can be rapidly syndicated across the internet. This transformation is due to several main reasons:

1. Wordpress is a widely popular blogging platform- In 2007 it had 3,816,965 downloads.
2. It is user friendly (and becoming friendlier) - For business usage, Wordpress has the ability to become more intensive or scaled back for user education. The visual interface for administrators can be customized for any user level, and the visual design for visitors can be altered to serve any brand need. A pivotal feature of the admin side of Wordpress is its “Office-like” user interface that allows anyone who can muster sending e-mails or editing a Word document the ability to make a site change.
3. It is scalable- Wordpress can be hosted through Wordpress.com for free or downloaded and installed on nearly any web server. Small business users can run popular sites off virtual hosting services, while full 100k+ user sites can easily be managed on dedicated servers. In addition to Wordpress single user, there is also Wordpress MU (multi user) that allows thousands of blog platforms to interact or form a community.
4. It has an almost unlimited support group of developers. As of 8/30/08, they have contributed 2,809 plugins that have been downloaded over 11 million times. Each plugin represents anything from a single new feature (such as extra e-mail functionality) or robust applications that manage intensive functionality. The cost in labor-hours for the development expertise that is freely given by community developers often exceeds thousands of dollars.
   
5. It has unequaled customization and design options. There are thousands of free visual templates that allow Wordpress to fit nearly any business need, as well as hundred of premium templates that include extra functionality and visual appeal. Under the Wordpress platform, a site can maintain an unlimited number of static pages or use the systems dynamic properties to manage information.
6. It doesn’t tie companies to excessive licensing restrictions. Per Wordpress- “Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee.”
7. It offers data security. Wordpress is based on a fairly simple database design that is governed by multiple levels of user permissions (i.e. you can define what different people can see) and dozens of plugins allow for monitoring how users interact with the data, where they came from, where they go, and how they can control other users on the platform.
8. Wordpress is based on the social web. This is an important point. Wordpress is constantly being enhanced and modified by thousands of different individuals and businesses every day. Those interactions constantly develop niche application that integrate with other web platforms and applications like YouTube, Twitter, Google, Flickr, Linkedin, Digg, Stumbleupon, OpenSocial, etc. This mutual development from other platform users creates unique mash-up functionalities.

123 Social Media is based off the Wordpress platform and we fully endorse it as a business tool for many of our own projects. We run into many projects that utilize complex proprietary content management systems that have less than half the features and present more technical hurdles than they do solutions. If you have questions about the capabilities of Wordpress, add some commentary below or contact us.

So many corporations are jumping into the social media space that a small few are defining exactly what you should (and should not) do. Today we are going to look at ePerks.com, a real estate web site that is a lead generator for real estate agents. Looking at the overall reaction that has occurred over the past few months, this will probably be a case of how social media killed the corporation.

From the beginning of June 07, ePerks went into a fairly aggressive campaign of traffic building through various sponsored posts in the blogosphere. To start off this wonderful story, lets take a look at some amazing quotes currently floating around about ePerks:

” Sleazeball lead vendor ePerks.com (corporate motto: “We don’t totally suck because we can’t get anything right!”) has found a great new way to respond to criticism: Censorship.” ~ Gregg Swann, Bloodhound Real Estate Blog.

Beware of ePerks- “Wow, now here’s a company to avoid. I found an ad on Craigslist for real estate Broker help. I know I should have known better, but I want to share this with you so none of you make the same mistake.” - Dennis Pease - ReMax Real Estate

One of my favorite bloggers Mary McKnight created this list of posts which includes hundreds (if not thousands) of comments:

• Ruthann Macklin: Im Mad As Hell-You Will Be Too When You Read About Vlad Zablotskyy and ePerks
• Kevin Wilhelm: Spreading the word about Vlad Zablotskyy and his battle with ePerks
• Susan Goulding: ePerks & Freedom of Speech?
• Sean Giorgianni: Zablotskyy the Scrivener
• Aaron Mallo: Suport Vlad Zablotskyy in his defense against ePerks.com frivolous suit
• Hunter Jackson: E Perks Sues Blogger Vlad Zablotskyy
• Mitch Argon: ePerks Sues Real Estate Blogger
• Dennis Blackmore: Why Real estate Agents are Bailing out of ePerks
• Barry Cunningham: Real Estate Radio
• Aaron hoffman: Nominee for PR Blunder
• Felipe Cook: ePerks and Freedom of Speech
• Don Reedy: Stop ePerks and get sued
• Debra Davis: Atlanta Homes and Condos
• Colleeen Kulikowski: How ePerks, Wake Up
• Gregg and Denise Tomlinson: Eperks using questionable tactics
• Benjamin Ficker: Spreading the word about e-jerks
• Ginger Sala: ePerks vs Blogger: Is free speech at stake?
• Scott Schang: Vlad Zablotskyy - A Martyr for Reputation Management
• Andy Beard chronicling the story
• Greg Swann starting up a fund to help the blogger (Vlad)
• Phoenix Real Estate Guy, Jay Thompson calling them out as EJerks
• Inman News which covered Vlad’s legal problems in March.

Looking at a partial list of 25+ industry bloggers in the real estate industry giving negative reviews, we can now ask the question:

What does that type of publicity do to a company?
Well… it doesn’t help it. That is for sure!

Starting in January, ePerks traffic took a staggering impact as it went from 165k a month to 50k a month within sixty days. After the decrease ePerks never came out of the tailspin.

The reduction in visitors in January of 2008 was just a signal flare, which could have been foreseen by a simple analysis of how the site was performing months beforehand. After the service launched in July 07, ePerks pages per visit (and visit duration) took an identical route straight to the bottom. The site apparently converted very little from an outside perspective since its creation. (keep in mind that the June/July 07 numbers below are artificially inflated as the only people visiting the site those months were employees, developers, and beta users who had a reason to stay on the site.)

The outrage created in the social media blogosphere was simple: dozens of unhappy customers came out and said that they had paid for leads and saw no return. When the social media space errupted, hundreds of negative reviews quickly submarined any attempt to buy more traffic. Spending more and more budget to market a business was simply driving more prospects to turn to the blogosphere and inquire about the quality of the product they were about to spend thousands on.

The impact of the reviews appears to be a rather brutal shot at the bottom line of ePerks. Taking a look at the paid advertising driving a majority of traffic to ePerks, online budgets quickly went to zero (data provided by SpyFU)

At this point in time, searching for the name ePerks on Google takes you to result #3, a proud entry saying “ePerks- A Scam or A Gem? | Go Beyond MLS” which is the original post by Vlad Zablotskyy that may have been the spark that lit a corporation soaking itself in gasoline.

The whole situation highlights some root problems for companies:

1. Make sure you have a quality product and grow your company at an acceptable rate to provide value to your clients.
2. Never call a prospective client an idiot (this was done here.) It will come back to haunt you.
   
3. Never, Ever, EVER, turn your social media relations over to a lawyer.
   

What is your perspective on companies experiencing negative/positive impacts from social media? Does anyone else see this as an increasing trend?

Monitoring the huge trend in corporate social media, executives around the world are testing new ways of sharing information and trying to discard some old school stumbling blocks. Many corporate decision makers are left looking at advanced spreadsheets and blindly take shot after shot in the dark (hoping they hit the mythical beast “the prospect” in the process.)

As our team at 123 is often moving around and speaking to these decision makers, we occasionally like to flex our brains a little and examine a company online. Are they doing it right? Are they doing it wrong? Are they even trying? Most importantly, what type of information is available by spending a few minutes browsing around the net?

One of the companies that caught my attention for reviewing was Intermec. When I first visited the Intermec site I thought “uh oh, another corporate site” and then I noticed they had a few unusual links at the bottom: del.icio.us, Digg, and Technorati.

I found this odd, mostly since a good portion of users coming to this site (business decision makers) have little knowledge of what del.icio.us, Digg, or Technorati is.

On a flip side, I would have to assume that no one on del.icio.us, Digg, or Technorati has any clue what Intermec does. (BTW, they are in Seattle and I am one of the rare people who actually knows what Intermec does.)

For those of you who don’t know, “Intermec Inc. (NYSE:IN) is in the business of helping you achieve the most return from your automated information and data capture (AIDC) and mobile computing systems. That means we do more than design and build the industry’s most complete lineup of rugged, reliable and versatile equipment. We also work with you to get inside your challenges, to know your unique situation and then leverage our strong relationships with resellers and industry-leading alliance partners to help you create a total solution that harmonizes with your networks, platforms and processes. Our collaborative, connected approach can ensure a more complete and seamless implementation whether your needs call for our Gen2 RFID, bar code systems, rugged computers or a Cisco WLAN infrastructure.” (Quoted from Intermec site.)

What does that mean? Well… that is the type of stuff you see on many corporate sites these days. It is the officially confusing way to make sure that social media doesn’t work and that the general visitor suffers a quick case of avoidance. If you land on nearly any page of the Intermec site, you discover brochure pages that would be confusing for the general population of a larger social networking site. If you are lucky, they may actually take a second to read the “about us” page and be baffled by the terminology of an industry, or be lost when a company uses acronym descriptors like AIDC, WLAN, or Gen2 RFID.

If you were a user of Intermec’s products or looking for like-minded information, the site design may be presenting the information at the right experience level. However general social media sites are not experienced in the vocabulary of your industry, so examining the actual social networks they are trying to maneuver in reveals some problematic issues:

Technorati has 100 results for the term “Intermec” on various blog posts and articles. I am unfortunately not spotting any official Intermec blog or centralized source of information to harness that exposure. It appears as if all the product reviews and random commentary are either not pointing back at the main Intermec site, or randomly linking to a nestled product page. With the amazing amount of information Intermec releases in newsletters and articles, it is somewhat baffling to find that they are not syndicating the content through a branded blog or properly setup information site.

Digg reveals another unfavorable scenario:

Ouch. Zero results. Perhaps someone working at Intermec should Digg a few results…. or they may have tried doing that a little too often and found themselves removed from the Digg platform for spamming (I didn’t check to see if it was removed for spamming.)

Del.icio.us reveals that while popular is popular, it is also a strange way of losing money.

Del.icio.us has 259 mentions of Intermec. At first glance this would probably mean “success” to most corporate marketers. They have tagged content for words that could produce some relevant traffic for the business. Unfortunately a variety of suppliers (and Google) seem to be buying the traffic via the adwords campaign highlighted in red on the screenshot to the left. Intermec itself is buying the keyword “Intermec” for brand protection, paying $1.75 to $2.90 per visitor.

Rather than receive “free traffic” from a social media site, Intermec is actually losing advertising budget to both del.icio.us and Google. This is a typical Google issue found on many sites that utilize the Adwords system for monetizing traffic, social media transforms from organic traffic to paid traffic.

Moving away from social media sites and looking at Compete.com, we can see that Intermec has been doing a decent job this year for increasing traffic. According to open data sources, traffic is up roughly 160% since last year. The top relevant keywords sending traffic to the site are:

1. intermec
2. intermec technologies
3. rfid tags consumer products
4. rfid chips

These keywords are ultimately one of the “sweet spot” targets for other competitive companies. Collecting the information on five to ten competitive businesses usually reveals the best keyword choices and open targets for driving organic search traffic. Allowing your competitors to do the heavy lifting work of experimenting with keyword phrases is an effective way of reducing the project cost of your own keyword campaigns (either paid or organic.)

Back to my questions from the beginning of the article:

Are they doing it right? Are they doing it wrong? Are they even trying? They are trying, but missing to target the right demographic in social media. This is a general promotion issue in many marketing campaigns: the target is missing the demographic.

While sites like Del.isio.us, Technorati, and Digg have massive communities, they may or may not have a niche audience that fits with your overall mission objective. Even if an article or project page was “Dugg to the Top” what results would 500k generic visitors produce? (Probably none)

When corporate social media campaigns are launched, it requires strategic mindset to analyze the available audience and choose an appropriate goal for the business. The steps to examine in launching a promotional effort with social media has a very simple core:

• Needs of the Business
• Budget and resources (labor, talent, available bandwidth, and dollars)
• Competitive Analysis (like minded information, finding sweet spots with maximum ROI)
• Understanding of the available audience
• Conversion goals of the campaign
• Measurement

In Intermec’s case, there could be useful reasons for using Digg, Del.icio.us, or Technorati, but the benefit for a corporation in such an audience would need to focus on relevant campaigns that work within the confines of the audience. There are also additional benefits that may be a step removed, such as promoting an article or whitepaper within a community like Digg to produce a specific search engine result.

If you would like to read another article on other types of information that are readily available online, read my article on Intelius, which includes financial, marketing, and brand impact information results you can find online.