Congrats to Tandberg on Social Media Award

I spent a fun evening at the K Street Lounge last night. No, I wasn't there to see and be seen with the cool people here in DC. One of our clients, TANDBERG, now part of Cisco, was there to receive an award from the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC)- "Best Use of a Corporate Blog."

The blog, "Break Down the Walls," has evolved greatly from an experimental pilot project to see if a blog could help support its public sector telepresence business to a successful social media portal integrated into the overall sales and marketing infrastructure. The Strategic team member who leads the account for Strategic wrote a post about working with TANDBERG back in March- read it here: http://cparente.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/breaking-down-walls-with-tandberg/. Here is a quick but illuminating quote:

Social media initiatives must demonstrate measurable value to earn their place in marketing budgets during tough economic times. Grounded in strategy and executed properly, social media can build audiences that directly support the bottom line of an organization.

Hear, hear. And I'm happy to see that strategic approach validated and recognized by local tech community...but its really a great pat on the back for the TANDBERG marketing team for taking a "risk" on social media and seeing it through to success.

Follow them on Twitter- @TANDBERG_FED

Should I Automate My Social Media Marketing?

Well, are you stupid? Then by all means.

If you aren't, then you are going to have to think deeply about what kinds of activity is value added by the fact of its being non-scalable. A lot of social media stuff (tweets, posts, etc) can be scheduled in advance, especially the promotional type actions. But the core value of a social media marketing campaign is the content you create and use to connect with and build your audience.

There are no short cuts. Spamming or posting meaningless, valueless marketing content will not generate you a credible audience of the right kind of targeted individuals.

Content creation is expensive and time consuming. Yes, you can re-purpose already created content. Yes, you can and should aggregate content you create with that you find through your network of peers and on the Internet. But the core of your social media marketing program has to be the entertaining, engaging and educational content you create yourself. And it can't suck.

All marketers need to start thinking like publishers.