made a splash a few months back by directing visitors to its entries and feeds on various social media sites, including Wikepedia , Facebook , Delicious , and NetVibes. BooneOakley, a North-Carolina based agency, has gotten a lot of attention in the last few days by essentially shifting its corporate site to YouTube. Embedded links in the main video connect viewers to additional company information, including a cute video thanking the Obama family for naming its new dog Bo after the company's initials. Modernista! And any number of small firms use their blog as their main site. MORE >>

Several Facebook-centered initiatives are in the works as well, including one to help companies distribute social responsibility funds by encouraging Facebook members to choose the recipients. Powered by Facebook and other social media outreach efforts, the first Carrotmob in San Francisco brought hundreds of people to a small market in the Mission neighborhood, and brought the market almost $10,000 in purchases which yielded almost $2,000 in green upgrades. Triple Pundit almost always brings a smile to my face, and for that reason is one of my favorite blogs by far. MORE >>

And this was all years before anyone ever heard of blogging , YouTube , Facebook , or Twitter. Seth Godin today marked the tenth anniversary of his hugely influential book, Permission Marketing. Along with Cluetrain Manifesto , Godin's first book captured perfectly the seismic shift in marketing that was just then (1999) beginning to be understood: markets are conversations, interruption marketing is dying, buyers are in control, marketers abuse customer trust at their own peril, the Web opens up everything. Thanks Seth! MORE >>

Tactically, though, the campaign covers a lot of useful ground in a well-designed and integrated way: a focused audience, an educational approach, a combination of live road show events and a resource microsite, a presence n Twitter ,  Facebook and YouTube , a set of webcasts, etc. The buzz in marketing is all about social media, with Twitter as the flavor of the month and maybe even a tipping point in getting laggard companies to finally take the promise of social media seriously.  I'm all for it, of course. But social media was "new" in marketing five years ago. responses. MORE >>

What should we be doing with Twitter or Facebook or online video), but less about strategy, objectives, organization, and culture. The skepticism about social media for B2B is pretty much gone by now. It's still pretty new for a great many companies, but the combination of legitimate success stories, overwhelming hype, and the desperate search for new ways to reach customers when the old ways work less and less has convinced all but the most recalcitrant among us that social media is at least worth a try. How do we get their attention? Do we have the skills? Can we sustain the effort?  MORE >>