An Bui, Spelled An With 1 N

Now that I’m blogging again, I thought it’d be a good idea to join a group blog (to keep me honest!) so I’m also blogging at another blog, focusing on restaurants, social media and community. It’s not launched quite yet. We’re having a tough time coming up with a name. Maybe you can help us. We’d love it.

So far, I’ve submitted three posts:

PCC - You’re doing [Social Media] Right! explains PCC Natural Markets’ use of social media to build and maintain relationships with its customers and community. Thank you, PCC for sharing your stories and the success you’ve had leveraging Twitter and Facebook to participate in the local community, both in real life and digitally.

Customer - Brand Relationship Building integrates Gary Vaynerchuk’s points about brand building and Mack Collier’s perspective on Social Media before applying these principles to restaurants.

The Power of the PF Chang’s Brand Promise discusses a specific example of one possible reason national chains can be successful. There’s even a scatterplot of Yelp reviews, comparing the three relevant cities on that particular trip.

I’m writing with Jim Benson, CEO of Modus Cooperandi, and Ken Batali of Batali Associates. I look forward to writing with them both, learning from them both and contributing my voice.

If you have any suggestions for what such a blog might be named, please leave them in the comments. Otherwise, you might read about my writings at Entrees and Eyeballs.

Craig Sutton sent me an email last night, letting me know that he’s about to start a challenge and asked me to to click a link. So I clicked the link (because Craig has yet to send me an email I didn’t want to get) and saw that Craig is blogging and tweeting his process of losing 100lbs to benefit the 2nd Harvest of TriCities, Washington.

You can follow his progress on Twitter, #lose100.

That got me thinking about the various #twit2fit tweets I’ve been seeing in my twitter feed:

95 lbs lost three months later... #twit2fit

Yes, please: How to lose 95 pounds in 3 months

Another interesting tweet I saw compared #twit2fit and Weight Watchers:

Weight Watchers Opportunity?

Is Weight Watchers on Twitter? Twitter could provide another channel for Weight Watchers to connect with those who attend meetings and for the Weight Watchers community to connect with each other in between meetings. Weight Watchers hosts its community, and I hope to see @weightwatchers (or some variation thereof) developing relationships in other parts of the social web.

ps - Twitter Weight Watchers fan group is an excellent channel for a brand manager/marketer/evangelist to interact with a relevant community.

Last week I spent three days in Mountain View, at the Computer History Museum, at the Internet Identity Workshop or in common parlance, IIW. As I have already been thinking about online identity for quite some time, I took the opportunity to learn what others are doing/thinking/advancing.

One of the burning questions driving the conference that came from the conference was “How do we get to the ‘Big Bang’ of identity?” I found myself in a discussion group full of… technologists. Whoa. We went around and around, discussing technology’s role to verify and secure individuals’ online credentials in various business contexts. With pages and pages of notes, we boiled it down to: “When users care.”

How to Get to the Big Bang of Identity (thanks to Alex M. Rosen)

Joseph Smarr of Plaxo gave a talk on a New Open Stack, John McCrea blogged about it (with pictures!) and Joseph, John, and David Recordon also shot a live episode of TheSocialWeb.TV at IIW. I discovered Poken, a token that enables people who meet in real life to exchange contact information and reconnect on social networking applications via a hardware token and web based app. Melding the physical and digital worlds in as seamless an experience as possible is happening not only in online communities but also in individual-centric contexts.

What about my questions about online identity? I learned so much my first two days, I decided to moderate a panel, Exploring the Construction of the Online Identity, to facilitate discussion. We all had so much to say, I filled up an entire whiteboard with others’ comments:

Exploration of the Construction of the Online Identity (thanks to An Bui)

The next Internet Identity Workshop will be May 18-19, 2009. Will you be there?

Last night, @briancarter asked an interesting question:

@briancarter asking about the brandjacked profile of Orrick, the law firm

Hrm. Interesting. I had seen it earlier this year, but thought it had gotten yanked. Apparently I was wrong, as a quick jump over to @orrick’s profile showed:

Not much action, based on the last tweet’s date, BUT the brand-inconsistent statements could be problematic, given Orrick’s reputation and its view of itself:

Orrick has dedicated itself to two interdependent goals: serving our clients and building an enduring institution. Today, we have more than 1,100 lawyers in 21 offices worldwide working together to pursue these objectives. We are proud of the service we have delivered and the firm we have built, and we are excited about our future.

Contrast Orrick’s Twitter profile with Skadden Arps’ profile:

Skadden

While Skadden doesn’t say much via Twitter, its use of the application isn’t off brand strategy, from what I observe.

Key Takeaways for Social Media Monitoring:

Google alerts would have been a good tool to use in this case, as the first tweet appeared May 14th, and the last tweet came out in July 16th, over two months later. Google alerts may have enabled the Orrick brand manager to take action and minimize the time frame during which damage was possible.

Another strategy is to check username registration, via a tool like UserName Check, and proactively register your brand as a username to prevent brandjacking.

Let’s take proaction another step further. What if Skadden wants to join in on the conversation? How should it start? For more resources on legal blogging or law blogs, check out LexBlog.

Thanks to @briancarter, for the tweet that inspired this post.

I spent the last week in Eastern Washington, at Learn About Web. Craig Sutton of Network Task and BrightWeb Marketing did an amazing job pulling together an event that spawned many conversations and enabled everyone, even the speakers, to learn at least one new thing.

Learn About Web, a conference for small and medium business owners, marketers, and consultants, focuses on leveraging web technologies and various applications to achieve various business goals and benefit the bottom line.

I spoke about Marketing to Generation Y, and got a great refresher on link building from Jennifer Laycock.

A highly informative overview of site architecture from Stoney DeGeyter and local search from Matt McGee. Mack Collier also shared an interesting business case of building a brand, which Tim Jackson did for Masi Bicycles with zero marketing dollars.

Learn About Web was a steal at $129.00 - lots of implementable action items, such as checking out what people are saying about you in Yelp, using the blogs to host conversations and understand the customer, or using Google alerts to know when someone has written about your company.

The next Learn About Web will be in either the spring or early fall - come out to Eastern Washington, the heart of the Washington wine country, and learn something new about using the web to increase revenue and/or cultivate your customer base.