In the social media space, video has become an effective, engaging, and low cost form of content (read my blog on video blogging here).  One app that makes the creation and deployment of video content easy is iVideo. If you have a 3GS iPhone, you have video built in.  If you have a 3G iPhone, the iVideo app will turn it into video camera. The truly cool and powerful function in iVideo (whichever phone you use) is its ability to share video content with numerous social networking sites at the click of a button. Any video you shoot, be it at a trade show or product demo, can be immediately uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. All you need to do is click the share button, pick the social network of your choice, and in a matter of minutes your content is before a global audience.

The grand cost of iVideo Camera in the iPhone app store –  I picked it up for $0.99 (it’s not a typo). You can read more about it here:  http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/ivideocamera-record-video/id332166209?mt=8

The article is well worth a read. You can find it here - http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=2605570

What’s the lesson here? Leverage the Web and social media tools to get as much feedback from your customers as possible. Give your worst customers the opportunity to speak up quickly and easily so you can fix their grievances in the same fashion. Here is author Jeff Jarvis’s description of a restaurant run according to Googlethink. Once you read it, ask yourself how it applies to your business. What can you do to find your worst customers/best friends?

“What would a restaurant run according to Googlethink look like—other than being decorated in garish primary colors with a neon sign, big balls for seats, and Fruit Loops and M&Ms on every table?

Imagine instead a restaurant—any restaurant—run on openness and data. Say we pick up the menu and see exactly how many people had ordered each dish. Would that influence our choice? It would help us discover the restaurant’s true specialties (the reason people come here must be the crab cakes) and perhaps make new discoveries (the 400 people who ordered the Hawaiian pizza last month can’t all be wrong??? Can they?).

If a restaurateur were true to Googlethink, she would hunger for more data. Why not survey diners at the end of the meal? That sounds frightening—what if they hate the calamari?—but there’s little to fear. If the squid is bad and the chef can hear her customers say so, she’ll 86 it off the menu and make something better. Everybody wins. She’ll also impress customers with her eagerness to hear their opinions. This beats wandering around the tables, randomly asking how things are (as a diner, I find it awkward and ungracious to complain; it’s like carping about Grandmother’s cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving). Why not just ask the question and give everyone the means to answer? Your worst diner could be your best friend.”

As I am fond of saying, one good example is worth a thousand blog posts. Before reading on, open up a second browser and point it to www.winelibrary.tv.  Once there, be prepared for what Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?) calls “a jet engine in your face”. “This blast of personality is Gary Vaynerchuk. He is a 32 year-old merchant who has made more than 800 daily wine-tasting shows online – just him, his glass and a spit bucket,” says Jarvis. These are all simply made, easily uploaded, video blog posts.

In doing so, Gary took his New Jersey-based family liquor business from $4 million in revenues just a few years ago to over $60 million a year today.  I guess that answers the question I started the post with. These regular video blogs that cost next to nothing to create enjoy a daily audience of 80,000.  As Jeff Jarvis points out, this has not only created explosive growth but is also “transforming retail and making it social”.  Gary calls himself the “the social media sommelier”. Social business, he says, is the future of our society.

 How can you make your business social? How can you leverage all these amazing tools we have at our fingertips to engage your customers and prospects?  Please share your comments, thoughts or questions right here.

When you dig a little (which we did) you’ll find not only that a Canadian orchestrate the victory but he utilized social media tools to pull off what some referred to as one of the biggest political upset in recent memory.   Whether you support or oppose healthcare reform in the US, the lesson is that social media marketing, properly leveraged, can significantly affect the outcome of a political race or, for that matter, the success of you company

For a good article on this check today’s National Post here or go to - http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2493174

If you think about it, it also applies to many other industries.  Henry Ford’s old adage that “people can have a car in any colour they want as long as it’s black”, which held sway for decades, is no longer.  Companies that give their customers choice (read control) engender their audience’s trust and this translates into increased revenues and profits (see Google and Craigslist).

How can you apply this to your business? Engage your customers in the areas that are most important to them: product development and customer service.  For powerful examples, see - My Starbucks Idea and  Dell Idea Storm.  My favorite Starbucks idea: coffee ice cubes - brilliant!

Please share your experiences and post any questions you may about how to apply this to your business.

Side note:  Jeff Jarvis first came to prominence due a critical blog post of an experience he had with Dell and which ultimately led Dell to pay attention to blogs and to begin engaging their customers.  Check one of the posts here - http://www.buzzmachine.com/2005/08/17/dear-mr-dell/

To this end, over the next few months I will be sharing some insights I’ve been gleaning from some leading thinkers and writers on marketing and social media/networking.

The first book I want to talk about is What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis, which I read (actually listened to, courtesy of Audible.com) over the holidays.  It will definitely influence some of our marketing strategies for clients in 2010.  To make life really easy (which is what the Internet is all about), before starting to discuss it, here is an excellent summary you can peruse to familiarize yourself with it.

Please share your thoughts once you’ve had a chance to check out the summary.

While many of our clients are Canadian-based companies, a significant number of them market their products and services online to US-based customers and should therefore play close attention to these rules. As a first step, if you have an internal legal department, have it take a look at your current online practices.  If you don’t have an internal team, you may want to check with your legal counsel. Testimonials and endorsements are powerful tools in any marketer’s arsenal.  When used ethically, they can add significant equity to your brand.  Read the new guidelines and make sure your company is onside. If you have already done so, please share your insights by leaving us a comment.

For an excellent post on this, check out New York Times best selling author Joel Comm’s blog at - http://www.joelcomm.com/new_ftc_rules_for_testimonials_1.html

We also hear regularly from clients who are considering initiatives but are still unsure about the effectiveness and staying power of this particular marketing channel.  One of the most frequent questions we hear:  Is this social media thing for real and should be deploying our resources to leverage it?  To answer this question I will direct you to some stats that were sent to us by a friend of ours, who herself is a savvy marketer. Check it out here: http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigger-than-you-think/

Read Robert Todd’s article in the Law Times, where AR Communications’  Michael Rabinovici is quoted here, or go to http://www.lawtimesnews.com/200910195631/Headline-News/CBA-offers-tips-on-legal-Tweeting.