UB School of Management Talk: Social Media in Business

Last night I had the pleasure to speak to a class from the University at Buffalo School of Management about social media use in business. It gave me an opportunity to distill my experiences with clients and as a consumer into a far-reaching discussion in under three hours. Hardly any of them fell asleep.

Given how quickly the world of social media changes, I wanted to discuss examples in the real world that aren’t just fads or otherwise out of date in fifteen minutes. I wanted to find some grounded examples and discussions. While we covered a lot of territory, the links below represent some examples I brought that, being older than 6 months, have stood some minimum test of time in an otherwise constantly evolving industry.

Corporate Social Media Policies at Adrian Roselli’s blog (that’s me!), September 21, 2009. Pay attention to how the US Air Force wrote a policy for addressing blog posts that mention the USAF.

Conference Humiliation: They’re Tweeting Behind Your Back at The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2009. A terrible PowerPoint slide starts the chaos, a tipping point takes it to a trending topic on Twitter, Cafe Press shirts are up for sale within 1.5 hours — while the speaker is still on stage.

Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees… Nothing written by me (again) at evolt.org, January 5, 2010. If you count success by who follows you, then you cannot count.

ROI: How to Measure Return on Investment in Social Media at Social Media Today, February 22, 2010. Same rules, different metrics.

Expanding Connections with Customers Through Social Media, from the Dell blog (December 8, 2009). Thanks to Twitter use, Dell pulled in an additional $6.5 million globally as of December.

NetSetJet, built by a local All-You-Can-Jetter, supporting the #AYCJ Jet Blue community. Jet Blue pays nothing for this service, showing it can leverage social media well enough to enable a community to spring up on its own.

@BPCares is an example of British Petroleum having to make a tough decision (for traditional companies) — let the fake account stand, or try to sue it into oblivion.

If you were in the class last night, then you might have already seen the Social Media Revolution video, so up top I have dropped in the What the F**k is Social Media NOW? slide show. Just in case you were wondering.