NOVEMBER 10, 2008

Social Media Summary - 11/10/08

Starbucks Shared Planet is a new site aimed at promoting corporate responsibility and environmental stewardship. This is a great example of a company being directly inspired by consumers to be more transparent about its operations. Michelle Gass, the senior vice president of the company, even outlined specific goals the company hopes to achieve by 2015. By inviting customers to suggest ways for the company to become a better community leader, Starbucks is really investing in long-term relationships with them.

The presidential election this year was definitely a historic one in many ways, not the least of which was the use of social media to mobilize voters. Another example was PBS and YouTube’s collaboration on “video your vote”, a site for user-submitted videos documenting peoples’ experiences with voting. YouTube has been very active this year in collaborating with various companies to cover the election; it co-sponsored the first Democratic debate, formed an election center called YouChoose, and debuted many popular videos such as will.i.am’s “Yes We Can”. It’s no wonder than many people have dubbed this election the “YouTube Election”.

I’ve written about Barack Obama’s use of social media before. After the election, the Obama team set up a website at Change.gov to set the tone for the new administration. The website asks visitors to share their own experiences with the election, as well as their hopes for the future. Although the website does not have many social media components yet, it seems that some will be added in the future. Adam Ostrow from Mashable wrote an excellent post on the unprecedented potential of social media as a communication tool for the presidency; I particularly agree with his point that social media can encourage citizens to get more involved and informed about policy making.

Yammer is a new tool based on Twitter that won top prize at this year’s TechCrunch50, where 50 new tech start-ups were presented and officially launched before an audience of “influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs and press.” Like Twitter, Yammer allows people post short “tweets” to share links and hold brief exchanges, but it focuses on internal corporate communications. Every company on the Yammer network is a closed group; you must have a work email at that company to be able to talk in the group. It seems like there’s a very real need for an enterprise version of Twitter, as Yammer adopters have noted its usefulness for enhancing office culture. Maybe we’ll even try it out at TMG!