Companies in Silicon Valley are starting to leverage the personal Twitter feeds, Facebook profiles, and blogs of their employees for corporate promotions.  By integrating employees into social media influencer campaigns, companies are acknowledging the value of their employees as spokespeople.

Twitter feeds for employees are uncontrolled, filled with personal information such as pictures of pets, boyfriends, and the lives of their kids.  However, since work is a big part of their lives, the employees often include information on technology or products that they  are involved with.

Big brands contract with us to map out which employees have Twitter feeds and to rank the value of the individual employee’s Twitter feed for marketing purposes.  We then pitch the employee and try to get their cooperation in getting the word out about a marketing asset such as a YouTube video.

We use the same process with blogs.  However, very few employees have blogs that are influential.  Leveraging Facebook profiles is still in the beginning stages.  However, we’ve seen some success with getting employees to join relevant Facebook Pages as Fans and then interact with the community on Wall posts.

Message boards are another hot area to get the help of employees.  We map out the most active employees on relevant message boards and forums.  Many of the forums are off the main corporate site.

These techniques are highly effective in companies with thousands of tens of thousands of employees.  However, they can also work for smaller companies if the executive team gets behind the effort.

–

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

Two weeks ago (I know, in social media time this translates into two years), I attended the Building Brands on Social Networks event sponsored by Sprout as a part of San Francisco’s Social Media Week 2010.

During the half-day summit, representatives from companies such as Facebook, Altimeter Group, and Technorati gave presos that illustrated great examples of marketing and creative advertising campaigns that implemented social media tactics to yield significant metrics and results. But I recognized a trend in the case studies: they were all campaigns focused around consumer products.

Much of the consumer strategy discussed could not be directly applied to B2B companies. In fact, when an audience member asked the Building Brands panel if they could offer any successful examples of B2B social media campaigns, no one could give an answer. After a few moments of shifty silence, the best the panel could do was, “We’ll get back to you on that.”

Perhaps I should have jumped up from my seat and rattled off our clients to that audience member, but instead I will provide an answer in the form of this blog post. Page One specializes in social media strategy for B2B companies. So if anyone from the Building Brands event is still waiting for a response, take a look at the following case study videos to see the social media work we’ve done for B2B companies such as Cisco:

For two more Cisco examples, head over to Page One’s Case Study page to access videos about the IT Innovations Forum and the ISR Product Launch: Cisco Case Studies.

Say what you will about Google Buzz (and plenty of people have), one thing is clear: it’s doing what any new technology aims to do.  Be disruptive.  The main question that people have been grappling with since its launch is whether or not this particular brand of disruption has necessarily been good.

From my vantage point, there are two areas that have seen the biggest disruption from Buzz.  The first is our own personal identity.  And I’m not talking about the privacy issues.  Yes, these are big privacy concerns, and Google doesn’t deserve a pass, but they’ve already started to take steps to rectify the privacy situation.  The deeper sociological implication that the privacy issue strikes at, though, is how we treat different segments of our online personality.  Until now, email was always the most private.  It existed in a separate realm than social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.  The email address was the most direct, most serious, and most intimate way of interacting with someone online.  Google’s integration of your contacts into chat and reader applications made sense because these communities were very private.

Buzz immediately broke down these walls; not just with privacy snafus, but by attempting to aggregate your online identity in a place that was linked to your email.  Literally.  Content from sites like Google Reader, Picasa, Flickr, Twitter, and Gchat can now appear in one aggregated stream.  Which forces people to look at their email not just as an address, but as a full-on social network profile.  In fact, when people rushed to change their privacy settings, it was the first time a lot of people really understood that such a thing as “Google Account settings” existed.  It’s a somewhat understated and nonmaterial difference, but it is a tidal shift in our personal conceptions of our email and contacts.

This dovetails with the issues created from the second major area of disruption, the disruption of share communities.  This happens on two levels.  The first is that of the major social networks, which were already suffering from concerns as far as differentiation.  Buzz now offers yet another avenue for real-time information updates, which should create a period of confusion for communities as they try to figure out where in the online social landscape this newcomer fits.

Which causes issues for the second level of share communities, which are our personal networks that we have built up over time.  A flood of new, undifferentiated information threatens share community ecosystems by creating burnout or backlash not just against technology but individuals, as well.

In the end, though, these theoretical concerns might be overwhelmed by the potential for Buzz’s content generation.  And this isn’t just conjecture: by the end of week one, Google pulled in over nine million posts and comments. At best, Buzz will find acceptance and a niche in terms of sharing and aggregation that will become a vital part of people’s Internet tendencies.  At worst, it’ll be seen as a misstep, but will probably continue humming along despite the disappointment.

Or at the bizarre, maybe Brazil will find a use for it.