A friend of mine asked me to Tweet about a contest his coworker had entered. The guy and his fiancée are vying for the “Ultimate Wedding” from Crate & Barrel. I was happy to vote, which I did, but during the process, I noticed a few things that C&B could do in order to make this contest a little more effective and "engaging." (pun intended)

Voting

Personally, I am all in favor of contests that depend on user votes to determine a winner. It seems fairer, and it relies on entrants to utilize their own social networks to draw people to their entries. But here’s the thing that Crate & Barrel flubbed up: voting is a multistep process. In order to cast my vote, I not only had to enter my email address, but also create and verify a password, as well as click on a link in a confirmation email just to vote. As for the voting itself, there's a big fat (& pink) "Vote for this Entry" button in the middle of the page, but the actual number of votes is not very prevalent for some reason.

The votes will only get you so far, as the top 50 vote earners will be advance to the final round, which is then judged, presumably by Crate & Barrel's PR team. Voting will still weigh in, though, as the top 10 vote earners will receive some points, which count 20% toward the final score. (I think C&B left a digit out of their T's&C's, BTW: Entry’s Ranking in public voting (20%) as follows: 1st–10th place in public voting will receive points; 10th–20th place will receive 6 points; 20th–30th place will receive 4 points; and the remaining 20 Finalists will receive 0 points.)

Zappos is one of those companies that gets thrown around whenever social media case studies come up. If you have followed the industry over the last 2 years you have undoubtedly seen them come up in PowerPoint presentations and various speeches on the topic of ‘who's doing it right’ in social media. And, for good reason.  Zappos has really embraced social internally, and it shows.

Let's take a look at what Zappos has done over the past couple years in our last social media example, number 26.

Zappos Twitter

Zappos was one of the first companies to embrace a Twitter aggregation page: http://twitter.zappos.com/. Essentially they created a page on their site that pulls in all the mentions of the company. This is a great way to show the authority of a brand. If there are lots of people discussing your brand then that tends to convey a strong level of legitimacy.

Noah Everett stopped by the office a while back so I pulled him aside to get a bit of information on what sets Twitpic apart from other video sharing sites. Did you know the Hudson Plane Crash broke on Twitpic? Noah also gave us a little insight into just how much Twitpic has grown in the last year. Enjoy!

I was pretty excited to research Yoplait because I'm a big fan of the brand and its delicious flavors; just thinking about Yoplait Delights has me salivating. Num Num. Additionally, Yoplait is a major advocate for Breast Cancer Awareness which is a cause that is very important to me and many of my friends and family. So without further ado, let's dig in (pun intended)!

Yoplait.com

Yoplait's main website is informative, I'll give them that and is also very aesthetically pleasing. It provides fun recipes, information on how yogurt helps your digestive tract (did you know yogurt can help with lactose intolerance?) and provides information on the cause it supports, Breast Cancer Awareness.

Unfortunately, there is nothing social. Though a couple of its individual brands are on Facebook, Yoplait doesn't bother to link to these pages. And with all of this great information, where is the health and wellness blog I'd expect them to have? What a way to truly reach their audience, right? But no, sadly they are neglecting what feels like a great opportunity for this brand.

Brandon Prebynski recently sat down with our very own Jim Tobin to chat about Social Media Marketing on his show Web Trends. Jim and Brandon discuss Ignite Social Media's conception, the creation of Social Media is a Cocktail Party, measuring ROI, convincing clients of social media marketing and more. The show is a great opportunity to get a little insight into the way our company operates and thinks, so if you're one of the millions of people applying for a job here, it might give you a crash course in what we do.

One might imagine that a company such as Xerox Corp would be resentful toward the internet. I mean, before the world wide web, printing technology had been the "big cahoona" (the "Grand Poobah," if you will) in the world of document sharing since 1436.

But instead of playing the jealous big brother, Xerox has not only embraced internet technology into its product lines, but this fortune 500 corporation has plunged headstrong into the world of social media. From its slew of blogs to its active Twitter page, through the YouTube [channel] and back again, Xerox seriously impressed me with its outreach. I got the sense that  social media was really a team effort on the part of Xerox and its employees.

Blog(s)

Xerox has fourteen blogs. Fourteen. Yeah, In a time when so many other corporations are struggling to create even a single blog with a personal feel and frequent posts, this company has fourteen of its employees writing about their Xerox niche on a regular basis.

Take Scott Titus's "Ideas, Ideas, Ideas" blog. Scott has been blogging since July, 2007, about marketing in the print world. This post made me smile; his earnest devotion to Xerox is pretty obvious, but doesn't seem fake.

In addition, you can learn about "The Future of Documents" on Francois Ragnet's blog and "Information Sanity" with Mike Moeller. "But Wait, There's More!" That's another blog from Digital Production Specialist Roland Denzel. He promotes the primer he printed about Xerox and MS Word and webinar series he attends. There's even a blog in Portugeuse, "Novidades Xerox."

So some of these blogs have yet to amass a large following, and perhaps posts on webinars aren't the most engaging pieces of content, but with over a dozen RSS feeds out there, you can't claim that Xerox uses social media like a high-gloss finish.   Xerox blogs demonstrate such intimate knowledge of their industry, not to mention a certain pride and excitement about their careers. Encouraging leaders in your company to write about what they already do best is such a great way to show off your talent and prove to readers that your employees really do know their stuff.

Number 23 on our list of 26 Social Media Marketing Examples is Whirlpool Corporation.  Whirlpool is a Fortune 500 company and the global manufacturer and marketer of numerous major home appliances.  Although Whirlpool acts as an umbrella brand to many other name brands, in this post I will cover how Whirlpool markets itself in the social media space.  

Whirlpoolcorp.com

When I first looked at Whirlpool’s website, I was pleasantly surprised at its set-up.  I’ll admit I was expecting a landing page that had links to countless other pages from which you could purchase every kind of appliance available.  This, however, is not the case.  Whirlpoolcorp.com is a hub for finding any and all information you could need regarding Whirlpool and its brands.  That being said, the actual website isn’t very social media friendly.  

I'm finally getting a chance to post some of these videos from Internet Summit, starting with yesterday's video of my chat with Google's Rick Klau. Today I'm sharing a video of a talk I had with Digg's Matt Van Horn. In it, we chatted about how Digg took the "threat" of Facebook and made it an opportunity, which I found interesting. Similary, when Twitter turned the world's attention to real-time information sharing, Digg reacted with Digg Trends and even used Twitter to promote it with its own Twitter account. Take a look at how Matt describes it:

Just a short post to announce our new director of strategic partnerships, Kevin Briody. Kevin is new to Ignite as of today and new to North Carolina as of this month, as we poached him away from Seattle.

I had a chance to be on a panel at Internet Summit '09 with several interesting folks, among them Rick Klau, the Business Product Manager for Blogger at Google.

My very first blog, Life is Marketing, was a Blogger blog, but I had to wonder how Blogger was faring in an era of microblogging (like Twitter), location-based services (like FourSquare) and mini-blog services (like Posterous and Tumblr). And since Rick works for Google, I had to ask him exactly where Google Wave is going to take us. Take a look