There are few services that I love to use. One of these is Mailchimp. It’s a great Email Marketing platform that you easily use and have fun! It’s the company that when you send an Email campaign, it tells you: “Great Job Nikos, have a banana!” These are some of Freddie’s (the chimp) messages that I see every day on my screen.

Anyway, the reason of this post is a video that they posted today on their blog. They talk about the story of “Rudy”, an Email Marketing guy who spams people in order to satisfy his boss. For you that are working in the email marketing (or you want to know more about that) take a look:

Mailchimp has also a Blip.fm account where you can subscribe and listen to their music selections. Good job guys!

1. Tell a consistent story
2. Engage your fans in a conversation
3. Connect the content
4. Fish where the fish are
5. Reinvent business

You can also view the video version here.

It was about time to see a Social Media campaign coming from the number one refreshment drink in the world. Coca-Cola Company, one of the top global advertisers (mostly in Print and Broadcast media), is going to use Social Media to promote the happiness message around the world. Three guys from Germany, Belgium and Mexico are going to travel around the world visiting 206 countries, where Coca-Cola is sold. They will have cameras, laptops and other gadgets in order to post in Social Media websites the happiness of people around the world. Expedition 206 will last one year and the team will start on January from Madrid, Spain.

Coca-Cola will track the campaign through Facebook fans and friends, Twitter followers and website pageviews. Clyde Tuggle, senior VP-global public affairs and communications says: “The challenge that we put to the communications team was to think about the social and digital media space as a new venue for driving good public relations for the company. The team, which has typically worked in the space of print media and broadcast media was suddenly challenged to go into this new media space and come up with an idea to expand our brand.” (AdAge)

Follow @x206 on twitter and become a fan of their Facebook page.

The idea of traveling around the world is not unique. Let’s see how this campaign will go..

Sustainable Brands Boot Camp –13 week online sustainability training program intended to get business professionals up to speed on what they’ll need to be competitive and sustainable. Brought to you by the producers of the Sustainable Brands Conference.

Participants will learn from some of the world’s top sustainable business practitioners. Each of our faculty members is a leading sustainable business expert in his/her specialty, counseling many of the world’s top global brands about how to step up to today’s market demands and successfully build business value and brand equity by innovating for sustainability.

The course follows Sustainable Life Media‘s 4-step prescription for building the better brands of the future: “Observe, Re-Design, Measure and Communicate.” In just an hour-and-a-half a week, over one business quarter, you and your teams can gain a solid grounding in the core disciplines needed to move successfully in to the new age of sustainable business. Topics include market drivers, business model and product innovation, supply chain partnerships, brand strategy and marketing, metrics, and more.

If you haven’t yet taken the time to give yourself a full orientation to the basics of building a sustainable brand, now’s the time. Sessions are available live and on-demand.

This is a great idea. The BC Dairy Foundation (British Columbia, Canada) created a new campaign to promote the power of milk. They created ‘The Week Shop‘, an online (and offline) store that sells products for people that are ‘weak’ due to lack of milk consumption. There is a YouTube Channel, a Flickr account and a very good website that supports this campaign.

This is a funny commercial of Chair Pants.

So, drink milk if you don’t want to be the future customers of “The Weak Shop”

Do you know Squidoo? It is a company that Seth Godin founded and “gives you a simple way to gather, share, and spread information on a topic you care about.” Visit the Squidoo.com and create your lenses! “Lenses are pages, kind of like flyers or signposts or overview articles, that gather everything you know about your topic of interest–and snap it all into focus.”

Two days ago, Seth Godin and Squidoo launched the ‘Brands in Public‘ which is a great way to track all the information (from various sources) about a brand. Why this is important? You can now easily focus on a brand and see what’s the buzz about it. There are many different groups of people that can be interested in this website such as the actual companies, fans, customers, competitors and many more.

According to Seth Godin: “You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.”

Take a look on Brands in Public and find your favorite brand. Today there are 99 brands in Public! Here you can find some of them.

• In-N-Out Burger in Public!
• Zappos in Public
• Mini Cooper in Public!
• Apple in Public
• Microsoft in Public
• Amazon in Public
• Starbucks in Public
• BMW in Public
• Google.com in Public
• Porsche in Public
• Coca Cola in Public

Dear Kodak,

You made a mistake and you named your camera Zi8. It’s ok.. Everybody does mistakes but is this the right way to say it?

Kodak Zi8 is a competitor of the very successful Flip camera and Creative Vado. Boston Globe didn’t like the Kodak’s name and they said:

When Kodak needed a name for its new pocket video camera, its marketing geniuses came up with something dreadful: the Zi8.”

And now Kodak creates a new model and they decided to find a new and better name for this. According to them, maybe they cannot find the name by themselves. What? How can you say this? It sounds like: “We tried to name a model and we failed.. We think that we cannot make it..” Come on.. You cannot say this. You are Kodak and you must be capable to find a name.  For this reason, they created a contest. I totally agree with the contest. It is a great way to create a buzz, involve your community and spread the word. But the post on Kodak’s blog (A Thousand Words) was a fail. This is what Jenny Cisney, the chief blogger, wrote:

You may have seen a recent review of the Kodak Zi8 by the Boston Globe where it received high praise for everything… except it’s name. “When Kodak needed a name for its new pocket video camera, its marketing geniuses came up with something dreadful: the Zi8.”

Woah. Ok. With our next pocket video camera in development we started thinking about the name. A few were run past our discerning CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett who said “Are you serious?” Back to the drawing board. Or is it?

Maybe we don’t have the answer. Maybe YOU do! We are asking people on Twitter and on this blog to tell us… what do you think the next Kodak pocket video camera should be called? What would you call a video camera that is rugged, simple and ready for action and adventure? (Hint – we like the letter “Z”!)

Is this the right way to say it? I guess not. I agree that you have to admit your mistakes and be honest but this is not the right way. Kodak could just announce the contest in a more fun way without mentioning the Zi8 mistake. (At least don’t write it as an introduction in your post)

According to many ‘Social Media Gurus’ (if this term exists) you have to build your community in order to be successful! This is not new. The community building happens since the creation of the world. People used to build communities in order to be more powerful and more protected. Some years ago, companies used to build communities through events, exhibitions, sponsorships and many more. Nowadays, the trend is called Social Media. Why? It is easy, inexpensive and with better results. How? It is very easy! You just communicate with your audience and you add value on this communication. Be real and show that you care about them. Make them to trust you! And if you have great products and services, you are a winner! The drawback of this is that many companies (your competitors too) try to do the same and you have to be creative, unique and fast! There are several examples of winners and losers on the game of community building!

Zappos is a clear winner! It is the company that uses Social Media better than everybody else. The culture of Zappos is ‘communicate with the customer and do it well’! Zappos encourages its employees to create Twitter account and tweet! Until now 438 employees use Twitter. There is the ‘What employees are doing right now’ page that shows all the tweets of employees. There is a ‘start’ page that the CEO of Zappos explains to his employees what is Twitter about and how you create an account. Is this amazing? YES! Twitter is a great way to communicate with people and Zappos knows this. For Zappos is not only Twitter. They have 13 blogs, Facebook accounts, YouTube channel and many more. You cannot do anything more than ‘Love Zappos!‘

Dell is another winner. They try to segment the market and create multiple accounts for Twitter and Facebook. Dell has a very organized Community page. They try to communicate with people in as many places as they can. (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn etc.) Strong brands need strong communities and Dell knows that very well.

Let’s find a loser. Sony can be one of them. Do you see Sony around? No. Sony made many mistakes and some of them are about communications. Sony has a community page but they are not successful because as I mentioned before they were not creative, fast (just started – beta version) and unique. Sony has few Twitter followers, few Facebook fans and unfortunately this is SONY! I am most of my everyday life online and I rarely hear something about Sony. It is their mistake and they have to fix it. (Along with all the other mistakes)

This picture doesn’t mean a lot (Twitter is not the only measurement). I just want to compare the accounts.

What about Apple? Apple is a unique company. It is the company that uses NO Social Media and has one of the strongest and fanatic communities. How? Through their fans. Apple doesn’t have to do anything for this. Apple fans create the Social Media buzz and this is phenomenon. No Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and Videos are owned by Apple.. It is crazy that everybody talks about them without doing anything. Of course Apple has its own way to build its community but this way is unique.

Successful brands build strong communities, offer great products and services and they win!

Every company has its own  R&D (Research & Development) department where engineers, designers, marketers and many more try to find great ideas for new innovations… New products, new services.. new ideas! It’s nowadays the easiest thing to innovate new products and have fresh ideas.. You just find them on the internet. But is this professional? It depends.. Several well known companies started having their own websites/communities asking for new ideas and people go there and vote the best ones.

One of the first companies that launched this method was Proctel & Gamble (P&G).. What did they do? They tried to find great brains from all over the world.. After P&G more companies as Dell, Starbucks, Kraft and many more followed this idea..

So.. Think.. Think.. Think.. and give it to them.. Hopefully both of you will be benefited.

Recently I attended a very interesting event of SFAMA (San Francisco American Marketing Association) at the offices of Adaptive Path in San Francisco. The subject of the panel was “How Tech Bloggers are Leading the Marketing 2.0 Revolution”

1) Robert Scoble of Rackspace/Building 43
2) Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester
3) Kevin Marks of Google and
4) Mark Silva of Real Branding

The discussion was about success stories of small businesses, specific tactics for driving local search optimization and the use of social media as a business driver.

Robert Scoble said that ‘we participate in news’ and marketers have to consider this as an opportunity. He also talked about the Zappos phenomenon and how the company ‘pushes’ the employees to use Twitter. “Most of the companies push their brand instead of creating relationships with the users and add value and this is wrong!”

Kevin Marks believes that the information is like a fruit. Marketers let the fruit mature and they offer it to consumers/users. The users will share these fruits with their peers and the information will be expanded. The Marketer creates content for the public and then he/she waits to get the feedback. “It is wrong that Marketers send more information than they receive..”

Jeremiah Owyang said that “people go to people for information” and according to a recent research of Forrester, the corporate blogs is the less trusted source of information for the users.

Twitter accounts of the speakers:

Robert Scoble – @scobleizer
Jeremiah Owyang – @Jowyang
Kevin Marks – @kevinmarks
Mark Silva – @MarkSilva