Yoshi, Viq & I just returned from BlogWell, an event we proudly sponsored and was organized by our friends at GasPedal in San Jose, CA. It was an amazing event where we had a chance to meet with senior execs from WalMart, Home Depot, Cisco, Intel, Wells Fargo, and many other large companies. These execs shared their experience with managing their brands in the new social media world. The general theme was that these early adopters (often mavericks) overcame legal/regulatory concerns to establish corporate blogs, engage external bloggers, create a presence, and engagement in consumer social networks (e.g. twitter, facebook, myspace, youtube, etc.).
WalMart has launched several initiatives for external communication including a site called elevenmoms. They are also doing some really cutting edge stuff with internal communication tools for their 2.2 million associates. Another compelling use of social media was how Home Depot uses twitter and weather micro-site to help consumers during severe weather conditions.
More and more enterprises will use social applications (such as Present.ly and SocialSpring) to better engage with their customers, partners, and employees.
