Digital Digest: Just the Basics, Please!

Digital Digest: What Edelman Canada is reading in digital communications, technology and strategy. Fresh links served up Fridays.

How we talk about social media can sometimes be more confusing than clarifying. Velocity of conversation? Share of voice? Earned Media Value? Cadence of amplification? In this week’s edition of Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest we strip away the ornamentation and look at the fundamentals. Just the basics, please!

Interview: How to implement a social media strategy

Companies that use social media effectively have an agreed governance model and clearly assigned responsibilities between and within departments for each aspect of their social media plan. In this Globe and Mail live chat, Michael Brito, senior vice-president of Social Business Planning at Edelman Digital, explains how companies big and small can lay the foundation for social media success.

Globe and Mail: Implementing a social media strategy 

Case Study: How to be authentic on Twitter

The marketing team at Warner Music Group, which handles artists like Bruno Mars (3.7 million Twitter folllowers), has found the most success by getting out of the way and freeing their artists to speak directly to fans. “”Social media is collaborative, more so than any other medium for us,” says Eric Paul Snowden, VP of creative and technology.”Our most successful campaigns start with us asking an artist: ‘What do you like to do?’ and helping them amplify what they are already doing naturally.”

ClickZ: The Art, Science, and Common Sense of Marketing

Case Study: How to deal with a social media blunder

When a Red Cross employee accidentally tweeted “something about beer and getting slizzered” from the organization’s account, the social media team knew they had to act fast. Rather than hiding from the mistweet, they owned the mistake with humility and humour. In this article Josh Morgan, Vice President of Edelman Digital Sacramento, and Lori Bertelli, Public Relations Manager of Augustine Ideas explain how the Red Cross and other brands used best practices for responding to a social media firestorm.

News10: 10 ways to handle a social media blunder

Case Study: How to use Foursquare and Gowalla to grow

Shane Reed, a coffee shop owner in Starkville, Mississippi, says that location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla trump both Facebook and Twitter for generating walk-in traffic to his store. As these services grow in popularity, communicators and marketers can wrap location-based marketing into their campaigns, events, pop-up shops and store locations. Foursquare has implemented a ‘merchant dashboard’ summarizing check-ins, demographic information about visitors, social reach, and data on the when people are checking-in the most, making it even easier to understand the value of these services.

New York Times: Location-Based Services Can Put Businesses on the Map

How to pitch bloggers

It can be hard out there for bloggers and PR professionals alike. In this rant, blogger Jay Dolan lays down six laws for successfully pitching bloggers without invoking their wrath.

The Anti-Social Media: 6 Ways to Avoid Blogger Outreach Failure

Case Study: How to manage communities

In this article on ManagingCommunities.com, Patrick O’Keefe writes about the lessons he’s learned from managing KarateForums.com for more than 10 years. The best part? He is not and never has been a martial artist. But subject matter expertise, he argues, is secondary to strong community management if you want your community to flourish.

ManagingCommunities.com: I’ve Run KarateForums.com for 10+ Years and I’m Not a Martial Artist

Edelman Canada’s Digital Digest is a weekly bundle of links, served up on Edelman Canada’s Our Ideas blog on Fridays. It’s also available by email. If you know someone who would like to be added to the mailing list, have any questions or just want to share some thoughts on anything you read here, email me. Let’s get a conversation going. 

Digital Digest is edited by Matthew Hayles and Kareena Coelho. Follow us on Twitter: @midnighthaircut, @Kareena_Coelho