Jun 17

Written by: VolumePR
6/17/2008 10:42 AM

The June 2nd BusinessWeek cover story (link below) is a must read for marketing and PR professionals, providing a great synopsis of the current landscape and applicability of social media to business and marketing.

Beyond Blogs - What Businesses Need to Know

Peppered with lovely little gems such as the Twitter ID's for key reporters (co-authors Stephen Baker = stevebaker, and Heather Green = heatherlgreen, the article is great on its own, but the online version includes an added bonus well worth a visit to the site - a video of Stephen Baker discussing other little known tools such as www.Many-Eyes.com.

www.Many-Eyes.com has clear implications for communication professionals. Just imagine being able to visualize your data – showing words that are repeated throughout a press interview for instance - in a Tag Cloud which makes content of any kind – a press release, a blog posting, interview notes, etc. instantly visual. Words regularly repeated show up larger, etc. Talk about something that can increase the effectiveness of your message delivery... help one of your company spokespersons see how well they delivered their key messages... or how well they didn’t....

The BusinessWeek online video shows an example stemming from a 5 hour interview with IBM, and how he quickly sifted through the notes of the interview to bubble to the surface the key phrases that lead the conversation: social software, beehive, people...

Will Twitter replace Google, and blogs eliminate press releases? Likely not. But the value behind these social media forums should not be overlooked.

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