If you don’t know who Brian Solis is, perhaps you should take a closer look. Brian is one of the veterans of the communications space who has pushed the PR industry into new territory as an early adopter who fully embraced Web 2.0 and the changes it has brought. You may have seen Brian’s thinking in a slideshow near you—his Conversation Prism is ubiquitous social media frameworks. He’s also written a new book simply titled “Engage” which lays out in depth how organizations can better engage with multiple stakeholders in an era where participation rules and one way communication proves less effective. We recently had a moment to catch up with Brian in a casual setting where we discussed a variety of topics from metrics, to Old Spice to managing change brought upon by social technologies.

Enjoy.

Image credit: Brian Solis

Earlier today, we announced that Michael Slaby was joining Edelman as the new head of our global digital practice. He actually started on Tuesday, but he and I, along with more than 100 of our colleagues from Edelman’s global leadership team have been locked in a hotel conference room since then talking about the fiscal year that was (ours ends on June 30), and our plans for the year ahead. We snuck out to make the video above. Needless to say, we’re thrilled that he’s joined the firm; Mike’s inheriting an amazing leadership team that actually runs the digital businesses in each region, and a big challenge to work with that team, our clients and the firm’s total leadership to chart the next chapter of our digital journey at Edelman, worldwide. I couldn’t be leaving the business in a better set of hands.

Phil Gomes, Tom Chernaik and I recently sat down to discuss the growing need to disclose and identify involvement in social media programs. Tom created CMP.ly last year to respond to this need. CMP.ly provides bloggers and advertisers simple disclosure solutions, even if you are limited to only 140 characters.

How are you disclosing connections in social media programs?

Originally posted on The Steve Rubel Stream.

Later today Klout, an influence tracking tool, is going to launch a new Facebook app called Facebird that helps you understand overlaps in influence between your Twitter and Facebook friends. Facebird will be live later today over on the Klout Labs site. The team gave me a preview yesterday, which you can watch above or over on YouTube.

I recently had a chance to sit down with Joseph Jaffe, author of Flip The Funnel and Chief Interruptor at Powered. Joseph and I recently teamed up to do a series of talks with Symantec (client). We discussed the role of “thought leadership”–it’s relevancy and balancing both thinking and doing. Don’t let the poolside background fool you, we’re both working very hard at helping large organizations integrate social media into the way the do business. Enjoy the chat.

Small businesses make up the bulk of the global economy and yet most small business owners are challenged to run their businesses, let alone marketing those businesses to gain new customers and expand.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing has been a leading expert in assisting small and medium-sized business owners find creative ways to market their companies. His first book, aptly named “Duct Tape Marketing” has been a top-selling book since it was released in 2006.

John recently came to Austin, Texas, to talk to small business owners about what they can do to make their businesses “more referable” by their customers. He talked about the importance of referrals, and how making a referral of a business or service to a friend is risky. What if that business doesn’t live up to your hype? What if your friend doesn’t have the same experience you do? He touched briefly on how small business owners need to make themselves more referable – perhaps by having a unique value proposition, not by being boring.

He has a new book out entitled “The Referral Engine, Teaching Your Business to Market Itself” which is now available for pre-order at local bookstores and Amazon.

While much of what John talked about was directed at the small business owners in the audience, he explained that the concepts also translate to other types of organizations worldwide. John uploaded his slides from the discussion, which are now available on SlideShare.

Originally post on The Steve Rubel Stream.

Last week in LA I had a chance to visit Idealab, an incubator that pioneered pay-per-click advertising a decade ago. The purpose of my visit was to meet CEO Bill Gross and his team and to learn more about TweetUp, an innovative new service that, I believe, has a great shot of creating a demand-driven ad network around Twitter.

(Idealab, not TweetUp specifically, is an Edelman client.)

Unlike Twitter’s own ad platform, TweetUp will surface not only tweets but tweeters. What’s more, they will be integrated as widgets/columns in key ecosystem apps like TweetDeck and contextually via large sites like Business Insider.

To me, TweetUp’s greatest appeal lies in that it’s a mix of paid, earned and social. In order to receive the best position for your tweets, the TweetUp system needs to perceive that you are an expert in the topic/keywords you are bidding for.

We took a few moments with Jennifer Deming, Group Manager and Content Strategy for the Creative Suite Business Unit to chat about the Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) (client) launch on April 12th.

According to Deming, who led the Social Media efforts for this release, some key opportunities made it apparent that social media was the way to go, including:

• The excitement of the release – Creative professionals within the online community have been waiting with anticipation.
• The tools in place to measure – The acquisition of Omniture increased the potential to formalize how the efforts are measured.

The “aha” moment that really brought the power of this effort back to Deming was when Mike Saviage, Adobe’s Vice President of Investor Relations, called and said “let’s talk”. He wanted a briefing on the CS5 social media strategy. The efforts had reached Wall Street and came back to him through his peers.

As Deming states in the video, “There is no turning back.” From here on out Adobe is engaging and talking with customers in a way that will allow them to informally influence the product.

Following are just a few results from the pre-launch phase:

• Key Creative Suite accounts grew from 589,000 to 907,166 fans/followers as of April 5th, representing a growth rate of 54% from where they started.
• The first several days after the announcement, CS5 and Content-Aware Fill (a new feature in Photoshop CS5) made the Twitter trending topics in the United States and some parts of the world.
• In partnership with Gowalla, a global treasure hunt program called “The 12 Days of CS5″ gave creative professionals an opportunity to pick up a virtual copy of Creative Suite. @Creativesuite dropped hints about a location and the lucky person to arrive and check-in at the location at the time of the drop received a Creative Suite collection of their choice. The program garnered positive feedback from customers for the innovative approach.
• Adobe also seeded “sneak peek” videos, and the Content-Aware Fill video that showcases a highly beneficial innovation for the creative professional had more than 1.8 million views on YouTube (2.3 million views as of 4/12) and 40 million media impressions in less than one week.

Video Credit: Gary Goldhammer, Edelman Digital, Los Angeles

I had a chance to catch up with Brian Morrissey at the Marketing 2.0 Conference in Paris where he presented the Top 10 Social Media Myths. I, unfortunately, missed his presentation but caught up with him afterward to get this exclusive interview. Enjoy.

Michael Brito
Edelman Digital, Silicon Valley
http://www.britopian.com/
Follow on Twitter @britopian

Last week Edelman hosted a strategy session with our clients and partners at eBay and I had the opportunity to pull two of eBay’s social media leads aside for a quick chat. Richard Brewer-Hay has been with the company just over two years and has already brought a face to many of eBay’s social initiatives through his eBay Ink blog as well as his consistent engagement with eBay users in forums and nearly every community imaginable. Julie Haddon, a former Twitter employee who recently returned to eBay after working there from 2003-2006, has moved back to the iconic brand in a global social media strategy role.

While eBay already has a presence on social touchpoints such as Twitter, Youtube and Facebook, the day was focused on looking at how the brand can dial up engagement with buyers, sellers and employees in a meaningful and scalable way. We’re very excited to be a part of this as eBay boasts some of the most engaged users on the planet and this makes for fertile ground. Have a listen to what Julie and Richard have to say and think about how it applies to your own organization.