Your roving reporter roved out to another one of Socialmedia.org’s fantastic Blogwell events, this time in NYC. As Central Park and incredible weather beckoned, some of the biggest brand names in the world gathered to talk about how they’re incorporating social into marketing and CRM, as well as extending social across their entire organizations internally.

Below we present a collection of the live tweets from many of the key sessions

GE @generalelectric
Jon Lombardo, Leader of Social Media COE

How GE builds and extends emotional connections with consumers around health and reaps the benefits of increased brand equity in the process.

GE has a social platform around Healthyimagination to create better health for people.

If you and a friend are trying to get healthy together, you’ll do better. Health is inherently.

Get health challenges via Facebook and share with friends to achieve goals together.

They’re creating an emotional connection around the health context.

You don’t influence people at large. Your sphere of real influence is around 5-10 people.

They find relevant conversations about health on Twitter and engage sounding like a friend, not a brand.

Why would people share on behalf of a brand? Because you tapped into an activity and emotion they’re already having.

To create better habits in health, GE gave away inexpensive, relevant gifts related to their goals.

Create the context, give the relevant gift, get social acknowledgment for giving it.

What you get when you get acknowledgment for your engagement and gift is user generated microcontent.

GE got 12,000 unique users engaged and 1400 organic posts with the healthy gift campaign.

The Dow Chemical Company @DowChemical
Abby Klanecky, Director of Digital & Social Media

Learn how Dow Chemical is finding, training, and empowering their scientists to be their storytellers in social media.

There are 1m jobs coming open in science. Only 200k are qualified for them.

Dow Chemical wanted to use social to attract and talk to scientists.

Dow Chemical decided to use real scientists as their storytellers.

Scientists are incredibly passionate, the key ingredient of a great storyteller.

Step 1 was getting scientists to focus on a few platforms, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn.

Dow Chemical social flow is Core Digital Team - #CMs – ambassadors – advocates.

The scientists were trained in social etiquette via practice scenarios.

It’s not just about sales. It’s about growing influence and the business.

Dow Chemical trained about 100 scientists, 55 are active and there’s a waiting list for the next sessions.

In person social training produced faster results and better participation.

Sometimes you have to tell pieces of the story instead of selling your execs on the whole vision.

Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of Trouble
Andy Sernovitz, CEO @SocialMediaOrg

How do we get people to share our message for us? We have to have their trust.

The difference between being honest and being sleazy is disclosure.

Disclosure does not hurt the effectiveness of your marketing. No one will get mad if you tell them up front you’re a paid spokesperson for a company.

It’s a legal requirement by the FTC, it’s the law, to disclose if you’re being paid for an endorsement.

Require disclosure and truthfulness in all your social media outreach. Don’t lie to people.

Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements.

Create social media policies and training programs.

If you want to stay safe, never pay cash for social media. Money changes everything. As soon as you pay, it’s not social media, it’s advertising.

Disclosure, to the feds, means clear, conspicuous, and understandable to the average reader.

This phrase will keep you in the clear, “I work for ___ and this is my personal opinion.”

Who are you? Were you paid? Are you giving an honest opinion based on a real experience?

You as a brand are responsible for what an agency or employee or contactor does in your behalf.

SocialMedia.org makes available a Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. Socialmedia.org/disclosure.

The point is to not ethically mess up and taint social media as happened to e-mail.

Not only is the FTC cracking down, so is Google and Facebook.

Visa @VisaNews
Lucas Mast, Senior Business Leader, Global Corporate Social Media

Visa built a mobile studio for the Olympics for execs and athletes.

They wanted to do postcard style real time coverage of Visa’s Olympics sponsorships, and on a shoestring.

Challenges included Olympic rules, difficulty getting interviews, time zone trouble, and resourcing.

Another problem was they got bogged down with their own internal approval processes.

Despite all the restrictions, they created and published a variety of and fair amount of content.

They amassed 1000+ views of videos posted to the Visa Communication YouTube channel.

Less corporate content yields more interest from media outlets and bloggers.

They did real world video demos of how their products work in the field vs. an exec doing a demo in a studio.

Don’t make exec interview videos dull and corporate. Keep answers short, shoot it in an interesting place, do takes until they’re comfortable and natural.

Not everything will work. Not everything will get a retweet. But like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play.

Promoting content is as important as creating it.

McGraw-Hill Companies @McGrawHillCos
Patrick Durando, Senior Director of Global New Media

McGraw-Hill has 26,000 employees.

McGraw-Hill created a social intranet called Buzz.

Intranets create operational efficiency, help product dev, facilitate crowdsourcing, and breaks down geo silos.

Intranets help with talent development, acquisition, retention.

They replaced the corporate directory with their own version of LinkedIn.

The company intranet has really cut down on the use of email. Long email threats become organized, permanent social discussions.

The intranet is particularly useful in HR for researching and getting answers surrounding benefits and policies.

Using a profile on your company intranet can establish and promote your internal professional brand.

If you’re going to make an intranet, it has to look great, work great, and employees are going have to want to go there. You can’t order them to like it.