Here’s a great video that WebPro News did when we were at Blog World Expo last October. It captures a lot of what Ford is doing in the space.

I keep a clipsheet of coverage of our social media efforts (using Profilactic), which is helpful when speaking to reporters or digital media and they’re looking for examples of how our work has resonated. I simply refer them to our links and they can sort through the filters to find what they’re looking for.

On his blog, Jeff Bullas gave away The 7 Secrets to Ford’s Social Media Marketing Success last month. There are some great takeaways there for any company that’s interested in social media and some that are specific to Ford and our efforts. And Slate.com’s The Big Money covered the success we’ve seen from the first wave of the Fiesta Movement.

We’re working on a lot more – notably Chapter 2 of the Fiesta Movement, in which there are 20 teams of two in 16 cities across the country, creating mini marketing campaigns through social media as well as offline events and media. And our social media strategy is global, reflecting the growing interest from many areas around the company and around the world.

And we maintain profiles on a number of social networks, including profiles on Twitter: @Ford, @FordCustService, @FordFiesta, @FordAutoShows, @FordLatino, @FordEU, @FordAPA and more. In addition, we’ve got some employees on Twitter. You can find the full list at http://twitter.com/ScottMonty/ford.

We also have a number of Facebook pages, the most prominent of which are Ford and Mustang. All of our pages are favorited on the Ford page, so you can pick which ones you’d like to become a fan of.

In addition, we’re active on Flickr for photo sharing, YouTube for videos, Plancast and Upcoming for events, Delicious for public bookmarking, and Scribd for document sharing (where we’re the #5 most followed profile). And if you’re ever in doubt where to find us, you can see our profiles on the front of Ford.com or on The Ford Story.

Lots of stuff going on right now that’s keeping us really busy. Just thought you’d like a window into what some of it is and why we’re doing it.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/4

The Social Media Marketing Blog

At first it will be tedious and mundane to add people to lists you have made friends with on Facebook; however, it will be worth your wild going forward with all that you do on Facebook. You can create lists such as; “people I work with”, “online friends” or “friends and family”. These lists can become a great networking tool and help you target the exact people you want to share various content, events, or to even have a peek at what their up to without having to sort through your uncategorized newsfeed.

Here’s how you can create your Facebook Lists Today:

1. Once logged into Facebook you will want to go to the top left where it shows the shadow of a person (where it shows people who want to be friends with you) and click on it. A drop down will appear and you will want to click on the link “Find Your Friends”.

2. After clicking on “Find Your Friends” a new page will appear with a button close to the right-hand side that reads, “Create a list”.

3. Click the button “Create a List” and a popup of all of your friends and pages that you have liked will appear. At the top you can name your list and then click on the faces of your friends that you would like to add to the list – you are able to add the same people to a variety of lists if you choose. – When you have added the people to fit the list, click on the button “create list”.

4. Now that your Facebook lists have been created go to the left column on your newsfeed and click on “friends” to see the list of your lists. When you click on the name of your chosen list – the people you added to the list will be seen in your newsfeed. P.S. You can create Facebook Lists for your pages that you own or are admin to as well.

Facebook Lists can serve a great purpose when you want to see what is happening with your friends and family. It’s an easy way to target events, and will save you tons of time from clicking friends one by one. Make your Facebook lists today and take control over who you want to see in your newsfeed, when you want to.

Soshable | Social Media Blog

The implosion of Digg is happening. It is an unstoppable conclusion to events that have been in motion since last week and will continue until the full implosion event similar to to the final shrinking of the universe.

Then, today, it changed. Digg’s front page algorithm started resembling the old promotion algorithm. Familiar sources absent from the Digg front page for a week came back.

Everything went better than expected.

As promised, time-stamps have returned to stories, including how long a story has been in Top News and when a story was actually submitter.

The axles seem to be breaking less and less.

Users are almost frolicking, submitting content to Digg rather than Reddit, Mixx, and anywhere else that would have them.

Today, things almost seem normal for Digg.

We’ll monitor the situation. There’s still a certain level of trepidation. Could it be real? Only time will tell.

Soshable | Social Media Blog

A new CEO. Kevin Rose making promises of upcoming changes. A brand new ox-related error page. Things are looking up for Digg.

Then again, they couldn’t look any worse than they have been for the last few days.

Several things have happened today.

• Digg announced its new CEO
• Kevin Rose announced upcoming changes to Digg
• Reddit has not broken double-digit front page stories on Digg today (yet).

While all of this may be humorous and somewhat sad, the first quote by the new Digg CEO is possibly telling as it’s the first time anyone at Digg acknowledged “content curation” as a need at Digg.

“The launch of version 4 was a big moment for Digg and I believe in the potential of this new platform. There is so much innovation yet to come — being the best in the world at curating news means solving the information overload we all experience every day. The Digg team has already made great strides in this direction and there is much more ahead. I’m excited to join such a talented team and such a vibrant Digg community.”

Is this double-speak for “our publisher-driven algorithm is going to be force-fed to you as the content curator,” or is he really listening to MrBabyMan’s plea?

Only time will tell.

Soshable | Social Media Blog

After getting 20 stories to the front page of Digg through their publisher’s account (often with less than 30 Diggs prior to promotion), Mashable finally seems to have struck out. There’s a story that has nearly 200 Diggs at the 11 hour mark. Does this mean that Digg is finally being fair with its algorithm, or is there a certain level of mysterious timing with this particular story not hitting:

Wait, NOW you’re going to make Mashable get more than 20 Diggs before hitting the front page? Come on, Digg. The only thing you have going for you right now is consistency.

Soshable | Social Media Blog

My guess is that Footstamp will suffer the same fate but not before a few lucky users find out who their biggest stalkers are. Trakzor was the first to launch a profile tracking application back in 2007, however the service became less useful as Facebook began forcing the developers to add more restrictions to the application, the most significant of which was requiring users to opt-in to use the service.

Since Trakzor launched, a number of other applications attempted to surface profile visit data, however they’ve all been shut down quickly. If you happen to know the developer behind Footstamp, you may want to get an invite quickly before Facebook eliminates it from existence.

6 publishers and 1 “celebrity” have controlled the Digg Top News section for the past 3 days. This story over at Media Caffeine called Digg: The Broken Covenant (aka Selling Out to “The Man”) gives a clear indication that the shortcomings of Digg v4 go well beyond the bugs, beyond the fake positive press, and beyond the end of content curation.

It’s uglier than we thought.

Soshable | Social Media Blog

The art of communications and marketing is largely one of storytelling. As someone with small children, I can appreciate the necessity of images to help tell stories. Images can help to set expectations, evoke emotional responses, draw attention, provoke laughter, or symbolize irony, among hundreds of other things.

So you see, the cavalier approach to image selection simply won’t do for blogging. Or shouldn’t. Similarly, the sources and the rights of images needs to be taken just as seriously as choosing an image. This post is designed to help you think about where and how you choose images for your blog (or site, or brochure, or whatever), with some bonus content thrown in.

Finding Images
Let’s start with the basics. You need an image for a blog post. Where should you look? There are a number of great resources that are either low-cost or free:

• Flickr The grand-daddy of all image sites. Flickr is a very powerful community with millions of photos at your disposal. There’s an advanced search capability that makes it easy to pinpoint what you’re looking for. Check out their Outstanding Shots, 
• everystockphoto.com Is just that. A full range of free images with various levels of licensing.
• StockVault, according to its site, is a stock photo sharing site where photographers, designers and students can share their photographs and images with each other. Its sole purpose is to collect and archive medium and high resolution photos that designers and students can share and use for personal and non-commercial designs.
• OpenPhoto A little more barebones than the other sites, but with a variety of content that is sourced in a wiki-like way.

Two great tools to help refine the image searching process:

• Compfight will help you find images by text or by tag and will allow you to change the settings on licensing, original photos and safe search. The visual layout of the images is impressive and will help you more quickly assess what works and what doesn’t.
• FlickrStorm is a brainstorming tool that lays out the images based on a search term that you enter and that also lets you change the settings on image rights. You can add images to your tray as you’re browsing, so you can compare them later.

What’s all this talk about rights?
Just because an image appears on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s yours for the taking. Many images have copyrights associated with them. In fact, there have even been examples of companies that have gotten into trouble, as they didn’t seek permission to use Flickr-hosted images before they used them in official advertising.

I’m not a lawyer (I don’t even play one on TV), but I can tell you that many online images are covered by a Creative Commons license. What’s Creative Commons? It’s a nonprofit organization that offers free tools that help to increase collaboration and sharing. You can find out more about them here.

If you learn anything about Creative Commons, it’s that they have a number of levels of licenses that authors, designers, bloggers, photographers and others can assign to their work. The categories basically come down to Attribution (giving credit), Share Alike (distribution), Non-Commercial, Derivatives (original vs. changed material). There are symbols that signify each category, and taken as a whole, you can tell what they mean. In my case, this site is governed by an Attribution-Non-Commerical-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

Attribution
cc by
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

Attribution Share-Alike
cc by-sa
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

Attribution No Derivatives
cc by-nd
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution Non-Commerical
cc by-nc
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
cc by-nc-sa
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
cc by-nc-nd
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

It’s important to understand how CC works and how it applies to your own content as well as to others’.

Editing tools
If you want a few quick suggestions for editing and other useful tools, check these out.

• Picnik Use this tool for quick editing of your Flickr photos, directly online.
• Splashup An online alternative to Photoshop or the GIMP
• FotoFlexer Self-branded as “the world’s most advanced online photo editor.” And highly recommedned by me.
• ResizR Powerful and easy to use tool that will resize your .jpg images online.
• And if that’s not enough, this Mashable article lists 20 Great Online Image Editors

I hope these resources are helpful. If you have other suggestions or favorite sites, please leave a comment so we can all benefit from each other’s collective knowledge.

Image credit: alpha du centaure (Flickr)

The Social Media Marketing Blog

Last month, Fortune Magazine named Apple’s Steve Jobs CEO of the Decade. Today, the Harvard Business Review has released its list of the best-performing CEOs in the world and unsurprisingly, Jobs tops the list.

Looking at just the strict financial results, Jobs’s influence on Apple is astounding. Since 1997, Jobs has delivered an industry-adjusted return of 3,188 percent (which is 34 percent compounded annually) for shareholders and increased Apple’s market value by $150 billion.

How the List Was Created

The Harvard Business Review has included a rundown of all of the factors that influenced their rankings. First, it identified the CEOs of all publicly traded companies listed on the S&P Global 1200 or BRIC 40 since 1997.

Additionally, CEOs had to have assumed the job no earlier than 1995 and no later than December 2007. That’s why luminaries like Warren Buffett and Jack Welch aren’t on the list. Performance was then tracked until the end of the CEOs’ tenure at the company or September 2009, whichever was later.

HBR then calculated the daily company returns for the entire length of a CEO’s tenure, using country-adjusted and industry-adjusted returns, as well as market capitalization changes. CEOs were then ranked based on each metric and those rankings were averaged for the final number.

Looking at the final list, you can see that Jeff Bezos from Amazon has actually achieved a higher country- and industry-adjusted TSR than Steve Jobs, but his market cap is more than $100 billion less.

Other High Ranking Tech CEOs

In addition to El Jobso, other high-profile tech CEOs on the list included John T. Chambers from Cisco (#4), Bezos from Amazon (#7), Meg Whitman from eBay (#8) and Eric Schmidt from Google (#9).

Tags: apple, Harvard Business Review, steve jobs