If you are not on Twitter, well, um, you should follow us: @sandrafathi, @lesliecampisi, @yasminbendror

And if you missed our tweets, I thought of summing up the best ones over the passed week. I hope you’ll find them useful:

- If the Twitter community was 100 people… see the picture. I love this…. http://om.ly/?DAFs

- Chart from @MarketingSherpa: Information Sources for Large Purchase Decisions Changing http://bit.ly/eiPDN

- Interesting article on Mommy Bloggers & swag – Why don’t folks begrudge celebs more for their free swag http://bit.ly/2mhcut

- Word of Mouth Research: Brand names that are easy to pronounce are worth 33% more on the NYSE http://is.gd/1SNjn

- Need a job? Show them you can Twitter http://bit.ly/18UL9p

- Why SM is critical to small businesses too – Managing an Online Reputation. Tips from NYT http://is.gd/1W34F

- How to Use Twitter for Business: An Official Guide Finally Arrives ReadWriteEnterprise http://bit.ly/Abwz3

- Do you think iPhone owners are happier than most folks? iPhone App tracks happiness for Harvard researcher http://bit.ly/5SSk5

- The Joy of Tech: Warning Labels for Bloggers http://bit.ly/32dhM0

- No one has a better take on the Zappos/Amazon deal than Seth Godin. Read his blog on this at http://bit.ly/wZ63I

- Twitter Cracks Down On Spam Accounts, People Lose Followers http://tcrn.ch/YIx

- Twitter isn’t for kids – Did you know 84% of Tweeps are 25 or older? And 20% are over 55! http://bit.ly/P60U1

- Great Lessons “5 Critical Lessons from a Social Media Campaign Gone Horribly Wrong” http://is.gd/1RiVK

There are over 175 people registered. I’m looking forward to hearing Jeff Pulver, Jeff Jarvis, Chris Brogan, David Kirkpatrick, Gary Vaynerchuk and all the other speakers cover all aspects of the social communications landscape.

Hey, it’s not too late to register – it will be worth it!

I’m also excited to be one of the 25 tweeters on the official SocComm Twitter Team: Follow us on Twitter #SocComm to get the latest updates and impressions from the event! FYI – Us tweeters will wearing blue wrist bands.

You can also follow me on Twitter at yasminbendor.

If you are going to be there, I would love to meet you – pwease tweet me!

See the new updated Agenda with a fantastic line of speakers and topics.

Sandra Fathi, President of Affect Strategies, will be talking with Rob Key from Converseon on “Social Media & Multiple Personality Disorder” from 4:00-4:25.

And I will be part of the SocComm “twitter team”: A dedicated group of people in the audience sharing content on Twitter so that the “Social Communications revolution will be seen on Twitter” – 140 characters at a time.

Follow me on Twitter: @yasminbendror

Also, get $50 off registration: Use coupon code ‘affectstrategies’

Hope to see you there, or follow the tweets…

I thought it was a great gathering: The keynote speaker was Ray Kerins, VP Worldwide Communications, Pfizer. The panel that followed was moderated by Melanie Milstein, author of Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution with Dave Armon, President PR Newswire, David Sacks, Founder of Yammer, Paul Gennaro, Chief Communication Officer, AECOM, Morgan Johnston, Corporate Communications Manager, JetBlue, and Marc Monseau, Director, Media Relations, Johnson & Johnson

The forum then broke out into roundtable sessions moderated by professionals in PR and Marketing who are involved and active in social media and real-time communications.

It was exciting to actually meet and talk to all of these good people that are the front-runners in embracing and using social media and real-time communications to strengthen their brand and connect and communicate with their customers.

I must say, it was mostly in a B2C context, but the forum tried to cover B2B as well.

Everyone was fired up; the room was abuzz with talk, questions, and networking. All the social media buzzwords you could find were flying around: Twitter, YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr, blogging, tweeting, video, RSS, IM, email, wikis and on and on…

I felt that people could not get enough information. Everybody was thirsty to learn more.

The questions seemed to be unanimous and ubiquitous:
How do I start?
What does it take from a tactical point of view? One person or a team of 10?
What are the risks?
What are the benefits?
Can I calculate ROI?
How do I get executive management on board?
How do I manage a crisis?
What is a fast response? Two days, two hours, 2 minutes or 2 seconds?
How do I control what’s out there?
How do I manage and aggregate all the different platforms for RTC?
What about traditional media?
How do I get buzz going for a small company that’s not a JetBlue or J&J?

Some questions were tackled and answered, some were not, some got an honest “we don’t know the answer to that yet”.

My key takeaways – and I hope this helps all of us – were:
- Start by discovering what conversations are going on in the social media space like Twitter, YouTube and blogs
- Monitor these everyday by getting RSS feeds through Google RSS or Google Alerts
- Make sure you understand and define your goals and what your communications strategy is
- Don’t be afraid to dip your toe into this fast-flowing social media river.
- Conversations are happening about your company anyway, so get involved
- Depending on your corporation or business, you should decide how to become part of these conversations and who should be answering
- Key: BE HONEST, BE TRANSPARENT
- Employees are spokespeople for the company – they are out there using Twitter and the likes, so they should be brought up to speed
- To do this, and do this right, in a big corporation, there needs to be a mind shift from the top down. Changes in the organization need to be made. Processes need to be streamlined. The social media spokespeople need to be empowered to reply quickly
- To quote Morgan Jonston from JefBlue, “This is about humanization of the brand!”
- Be careful not to seem like the overbearing “big brother”, don’t be intimidating
- Open up, LISTEN to your customers, be committed to change
- Remember and be aware: The line is thinning between traditional media and social media – many journalists have left traditional media and are now influential bloggers/tweeters

Lots of *stuff* to take in…

I look forward to a follow up event, which, in my opinion, could be a full day event, instead of half a day.

If you’d like to hear the two main sessions they are available here.

*Please* add your comments – I would love to hear your opinion and additions!

The controversial “negative” ad seriously offended “babywearers” and moms nationwide who felt that it implied moms wear babies in a carrier as a fashion accessory or to make them look like an “official” mom. The bonding, positive experience of the baby carrier was totally overlooked by J&J.

Watch the ad here – do you think it’s offensive?

Here’s the print version (click to enlarge) :

I’ve got to say, its pretty harsh, and yeah, I would say, offensive. I can think of a hundred ways to change the copy to make this ad so much more engaging, appealing, pleasing, and a little more sympathetic and sensitive to moms with small babies.

The VP of Marketing at McNeil Consumer Healthcare, Kathy Widmer, immediately issued her first official apology on the Motrin home page: “We have heard you. On behalf of McNeil Consumer Healthcare and all of us who work on the Motrin brand, please accept our sincere apology. We are in the process of removing this ad from all media. It will, unfortunately, take a bit of time to remove it from our magazine advertising, as it is on newsstands and in distribution.

There is now an updated message from Widmer on Motrin’s home page.

Tweets from both influential mom bloggers with hundreds of followers and regular moms were heard alike. The power of Twitter shows that you don’t have to have thousands of followers on Twitter to start the ball rolling. Tweeters with smaller networks have just as much influence as people with large networks. It works both ways.

Again, we are being shown the power and alacrity of online social networking and how quickly people’s opinions galvanize and proliferate, which in this case, brought down J&J’s national Motrin ad campaign.

Yes, Twitter is creeping into the mainstream, slowly but surely…

Arrington’s frustrating customer service phone calls that-get-nowhere with Comcast lead him to tweet and then blog about his frustration. Read it, it’s great.

But if Comcast has not wisened up to improve their customer service department, they have cleverly entered the social media realm and have appointed a specific person to monitor and track the “tweetosphere” and “blogsphere” to see what customers are saying, to communicate with them and take action.

So this CTO (Chief Twitter Officer, I love that term) guy caught Arrington’s tweet and within 20 minutes he got a call from Comcast who sent a team to Arrington’s house to fix his Internet connection. Viola!

How cool. I don’t know about you – I suspect your experiences may be pretty similar – but I have spent hours on many exasperating customer service calls to Verizon, Optimum, HP, Dell (to name a few) with a person who is either not qualified or knowledgeable enough to help me, or there is a communication gap between us, and understanding each other is quite a feat (thanks to the glories of global call center outsourcing). The problem can takes days to get sorted out.

And what d’ya know? Arrington’s story snowballed from a small Twitter tweet into a huge online conversation. Jeff Jarvis from Technorati Buzz Machine blog, the Techmeme blog and all Arrington’s other influential tech buddies picked up on this and, of course, blogged.

The story is also nicely covered in Catharine Taylor’s blog in the SocialMedia Insider.

So, corporations: Take note and prick up your ears, be proactive and jump into the social media world. This just may be the most burgeoning and powerful (and probably the cheapest) tool to:

(a) Communicate with your customers
(b) Mitigate negative PR
(c) Increase your branding
(d) Advertise
(e) Grow your business
(f) Improve customer support and satisfaction
(g) All of the above

Need I say more?

Well, I think I’m gonna be tweeting from now on – good and bad – on my next Verizon/Optimum/HP/Dell experience.

Maybe I’ll finally get some service. Although, granted, I’m not Michael Arrington…

This is a fascinating story in and of itself, however, it also underscores the power of Twitter. At the same time, I believe that it is critical that people avoid using Twitter to send useless information out regarding their whereabouts (i.e. “I’m in line at Starbucks waiting for my coffee” or “I am on a Jet Blue flight to Boston, Seat 22E”). I have been following quite a few people on Twitter and I am often frustrated by the pointless ‘tweets’ that they send out. (Yes, if I was in middle school, I’d like to know that my BFF was at the Mall buying a 50 Cent CD, however, I’m talking about grown business men and women – however immature.)

If James had been a frivolous tweeter, his one-word tweet “Arrested” might have gone unnoticed by his friends. Although Twitter makes it easy to tell your network of friends and colleagues what you are doing, at any given moment, maybe you should wait until you are doing something noteworthy, or people will start to tune out your tweets.