Obama's Still a Possibility at Chelsea Clinton Wedding

Obama's Still a Possibility at Chelsea Clinton Wedding According to a knowledgeable source with ties to the Clinton's and Obama's there has been no final decision on whether the President and First Lady, Barack and Michelle Obama will be at the marriage ceremony or reception of the upcoming Chelsea Clinton wedding (PRWEB) July 1, 2010 -- According to a knowledgeable source with ties to the Clinton’s and Obama’s there has been no final decision on whether the President and First Lady, Barack and Michelle Obama will be at the marriage ceremony or reception of the upcoming Chelsea Clinton wedding (http://www.chelseaclintonweddingwatch.com/). According to this source, while the public is being led to believe that it won’t happen, security plans are still being developed for such a possibility. What would it mean for the wedding, for history and for both the Obama’s and Clinton’s? Would the appearance of the Obama’s, even at the reception, upstage a private, family affair? Or would it add prestige and honor? In 1897, Frances “Fanny” Hayes, daughter of former president Rutherford B. Hayes, was married in Ohio. The newly elected president, William McKinley, and the entire cabinet made the pilgrimage, McKinley taking the presidential train, the Air Force One of its day. Did it overpower the Hayes wedding? After all, the nation was fascinated with its new president who had been in office only days. No, by all accounts, Fanny Hayes and her husband, Ensign Harry Eaton Smith, captured the day’s headlines. The public had been following Fanny since her adolescent years in her father’s White House. All of the distinguished guests only ensured that the event would be set in stone as one of the greatest social events in our short national history. According to some recent polls, the Clintons are now more popular than the Obamas. So it is not likely that any guest, including the president and first lady, would upstage her marriage to longtime, 31-year-old, boyfriend and Goldman Sachs banker, Marc Mezvinsky. News about the wedding has been a story in itself, with speculation that the public, media savvy Clinton's have purposely dropped disinformation to help shroud the event in privacy. Hints about the wedding last summer embarrassed news agencies when it didn’t happen. It is now set for July 31, 2010. Published accounts were also wrong about the dress. It will be a Vera Wang creation, not Oscar de la Renta as widely reported. And the location will not be at Martha's Vineyard but deep on the grounds of a Clinton supporter a few hours north of New York City. All of these efforts may not be enough to sufficiently dampen public interest. The Jenna Bush wedding took place during a low ebb in the popularity of President Bush and at a time when the war on terror counseled as little publicity as possible. Jenna was married at the Bush family, Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas, a rather remote location. But the Clinton wedding (http://www.chelseaclintonweddingwatch.com/) will be within driving distance of the media capital of the world. And at a time when the Clinton presidency is being viewed more favorably in comparison to his two successors. Weddings of presidential children, no matter how carefully planned and private they wish them to be, can prompt unexpected public reactions. When the president’s son, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. married Ethel DuPont on June 30, 1937, the couple had every expectation that their wedding would be a private, quiet affair. The ceremony took place deep in the DuPont family compound in Delaware, far from any public highway. But on the wedding day, several hundred thousand uninvited people lined the roads to wish the couple well. Three companies of soldiers were brought in to escort the president’s family. And the Army Corps of Engineers was asked to set up a makeshift kitchen. It is exactly such moments in presidential history that have made the modern presidency more savvy and less likely to be ambushed by either the media or the public. And it partially accounts for the Clinton sleight of hand on the details leading up to the event. Still, this is a polarizing presidential family, whose star is now more clearly visible in the historic firmament. With the Clinton's we experienced a roller coaster of emotions in public life. Some pundits predicted that it would be hard for Chelsea Clinton to ever trust a man or ever get married. So this wedding ceremony is a milestone that marks a marriage that has endured, a presidency that grows fonder by absence and a child who landed on her feet in spite of the odds. The media and public may demand to know more and celebrate it with more fanfare than Chelsea, the so called Garbo of presidential children, would like. With or without the Obama's it will be a moment in history. Press Release by Doug Wead, New York Times Bestselling author of "All the Presidents' Children", Presidential Historian and frequent guest of Fox News, CNBC, CBS, NBC and CNN. See his Chelsea Clinton Wedding Watch site for breaking news: http://www.ChelseaClintonWeddingWatch.com/ # # # Contact Information Doug Wead http://www.dougwead.com/ 206-202-8023

Olympus Pen Camera - The Picture Perfect Pick!

I have read a lot of articles and reviews on the new Olympus Pen Camera and I want one. Trying to find out how they can send me one an let me blog all about it to other novice photographers like myself. I think this will be my next BFF if I can get my hands on one. Check it out for yourself and I would love to know your thoughts too!

http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/product.asp?product=1461

NOT A POINT AND SHOOT. NOT AN SLR.
IT'S A PEN. WHAT WILL YOU CREATE?

Major new PEN firmware update available now!
> Click here to learn more.

The Olympus E-P1 marks an innovative new era in digital imaging. Our new Micro Four Thirds camera upholds the legacy of the celebrated PEN family of cameras, with the photographic optics of an SLR and the size and simplicity of a point and shoot. Combining the still image quality of a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) with the A/V quality of both a High Definition camcorder and high-end audio recorder, the E-P1 is a virtual full-service imaging studio in one ultra-portable and stylishly retro body. With dozens of advanced features, the E-P1 makes documenting and sharing your everyday life easier and more creative than ever before.

STEDMAN WANTS BETTER TREATMENT FOR OPRAH

STEDMAN WANTS BETTER TREATMENT FOR OPRAH

THE FACTS

Oprah’s longtime boyfriend shared his thoughts on the treatment Oprah receives from Chicago residents.

THE SPIN
I haven’t heard the name Stedman Graham in a long time, but he’s got something to say, ya’ll, and it pertains to the reason why most of us know his name.

In an interview with WFLD-Channel 32 news, Graham said he doesn’t appreciate how unappreciative Chicago folks are of Oprah.

He said:

“I really don’t think they appreciate her. I don’t think they understand the value of who she is as a human being and what she’s done. I’m just saying from an insider’s point of view that I don’t think she gets her just due based on who she really is and what she’s done for the Chicagoland area. It’s home for her, and it’s just natural for people to kind of take her for granted — until you leave.”

Graham also added, “A prophet has no honor in its own town.”

Well if they don’t love her enough now perhaps they will in a year or two’s time as Oprah makes her way to La La land to move forward with her new cable network.

Will Stedman be joining her? “I probably will be moving in that direction,” he said though he made sure to note the focus of his business will remain in the Chi.

Oh and get this, the interviewer asked if she could call him “Mr. Oprah Winfrey.”

Why do some journalists purposely say slick stuff they know will piss a person off?

Do better.

Live Feed of Oil Leek in the Gulf

The early estimates that BP and NOAA stood by that only 5k barrels were being leaked per day is not acccurate. One can see with their own eyes that more than 210,000 gallons of oil is flowing at full force daily.

This is beyond a leak. Today President Obama will address this crisis and hold BP accountable - I hope. Stay tuned and watch at 12;45.

Why Your Company Needs to Embrace Social CRM

Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or@attensity360, or find her musings on her personal blog and hercompany’s blog.

If you have been tracking conversations around social media for business, you have undoubtedly come across people talking about Social CRM. If you are anything like me, the first time you heard it, you probably rolled your eyes and said, “Ugh, another social media buzzword!” And while I do take issue with the jargon itself (and will discuss that later), Social CRM is a central concept that businesses need to understand deeply and integrate fully, in order to serve the social customer.

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Who Is the Social Customer?

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• The social customer consumes information in a different way, and learns about breaking news throughTwitter and Facebook, favoring what her network has curated and surfaced as important information.
• The social customer learns about new products and brands through social channels and trusts her social network to provide honest feedback about it, as opposed to a brand’s one-way advertising message.
• The social customer is savvy, doesn’t respond well to unsolicited SPAM in her social networks or overly promotional tweets, but is open to relevant information that meets her needs at that particular moment.
• The social customer expects brands to be present and active in the same social venues where she hangs out, listening to her feedback, whether it’s negative or positive.
• The social customer expects you to listen and engage with her, not only when it coincides with an e-mail blast or new feature release, but rather when she needs you. And you better respond fast, in real-time, or she will either move on to a competitor, or tell her friends about her bad experiences.
• Because the social customer can talk to a brand through many channels at the same time, she expects everyone she talks to from your company to have the same background on her issue. For example, if I complain about an airline on Twitter, I want the representative who engages me there to know my itinerary and the full history of our interaction through various channels.

Bottom line: The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn her trust.

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What is Social CRM?

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Paul Greenberg, and author and leading authority on SCRM, stated that Social CRM is “…designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide a mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company response to the customer’s owning of the relationship.”

Another great definition was put forward by Michael Fauschette: “Social CRM is the tools and processes that encourage better, more effective customer interaction and leverage the collective intelligence of the broader customer community with the intended result of increasing intimacy between an organization and its prospects and customers. The goal is to make the relationship with the customer more intimate and tied to the company by building a public ecosystem to better understand what they want and how they interact with the various company touchpoints like sales, customer service etc…”

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what you call Social CRM or how you define it, as long as you understand it and know how to apply it to your organization. It’s all about the execution. At Attensity, for example, we developed the “LARA” framework, which addresses the end-to-end process of Social CRM:

• Listen to customer conversations
• Analyze those conversations
• Relate this information to existing information within your enterprise
• Act on those customer conversations

Jacob Morgan of Chess Media has developed this pretty comprehensive diagram that I like to refer to:

As mentioned above, I don’t necessarily agree that Social CRM is the best name for this kind of process because CRM has typically enabled one-way conversations with customers, with a disproportionate focus on technology. The name CRM stands for “customer relationship management,” which is a misnomer because the company no longer controls or manages the relationship –- the customer does.

In one of my favorite quotes about Social CRM, Mitch Lieberman states that “Social CRM is about bringing “me” [the social customer] into the ecosystem… It is not about the technology, it is about the people, process and cultural shifts necessary to support and grow a business.” This is a very important notion to understand in order to avoid coming down with a case of “analysis paralysis.” We all have a tendency to over complicate things, and while SCRM is a big concept that takes a lot of savvy and planning to get right, it’s really very simple at its core. Companies that successfully execute on the Social CRM process share the following characteristics:

— Social engagement must be enterprise-wide. To achieve this goal, you need to “socialize” the organization. The larger and more entrenched your organization is in traditional ways of handling customer interactions (inbound or outbound), the more difficult this task will be.

How do you socialize the organization? Through proper training, alignment of objectives (the quintessential question of “what’s in it for me?”), and providing leadership and mentoring. Marketers within your organization need to understand that a brand is no longer what you tell your customers it is –- it is now what they say it is. Make sure the salespeople know how to use Twitter to build relationships without spamming their networks. Empower customer service to help, and product teams to gather and act on feedback.

Overall, the toughest task of “socialization” is conveying the notion that the more the brand lets go of its desire to control the message, the more they will be able to shape it collaboratively with its customers. This is where a social media director/manager becomes a crucial hire, because she will provide direction for the entire organization.

— To truly provide a “mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment,” per Paul Greenberg, the organization must be irrevocably oriented towards transparency and customer service. Why are companies like Zappos so successful, while others’ attempts at helping on Twitter resemble a “me too” strategy? Because transparency, taking risks, and providing a “no-matter-what-it-takes” kind of service are part of their corporate DNA.

If you don’t have the guts to truly commit to transparency and service, and if you don’t empower your people to act on behalf of the company (which will inevitably lead to some unintentional mistakes), you won’t get very far. You must embrace experimentation, take smart risks, and “fail fast.”

— I can’t stress enough the importance of putting the right processes in place to truly listen and engage. Because the sheer volume of social media conversations is staggering, you need a plan to triage, prioritize and activate the right people in the organization to engage properly. After you socialize the organization, take the time to figure out who the right internal resources are in at least these areas of the organization: Customer service, PR, marketing, sales, and product feedback.

Develop a process by which a social media message gets routed to one of the above groups and activate the right resources for an immediate response. There must also be a robust crowdsourcing component, which will empower customers to provide direct product feedback, and the organization to ensure that the feedback is heard and acted upon (UserVoice is a terrific platform for this).

The social customer may go to Twitter with a question, a user forum with a customer service query, Facebook with a compliment, or Yelp with a complaint. The processes you establish will largely determine your ability to respond quickly and with the relevant information, while uniting all of these interactions under one customer record.

At the end of the day, you must ask yourself if the steps above help you enrich the two-way relationship between the social customer and your social business.

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Use the Right Tools

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Even though Social CRM is mostly about people and processes, you do need the right tools to help you achieve the following:

• A 360 degree view of the customer must include not only the relevant interactions between your company and the customer across the networks where they originated, but also internal data from your own CRM system. This data must be rich and actionable, and the system must also retain all these interactions as part of the customer record. This is a win for the customer because she gets a personalized experience and never has to tell her story to three different reps, and a win for the company which now becomes more efficient.
• The ability for everyone to engage and be in alignment: Social media is not a silo, and no one department owns it. There must be a process in place by which each message gets automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type (question, complaint or compliment), content (what it actually said), sentiment, action needed, and influence. This helps automate the triage process, which until now has been mostly manual.
• Sophisticated workflow tools will ensure that information created by the 360 degree view of the customer is accessible to everyone in the organization in the same way, creating a context for each interaction and enabling the rich, intimate relationship with the social customer. Each person involved with the customer record receives a set of prioritized tasks and reminders. The ability to engage right from the app creates a virtual paper trail of the conversation.

Are you ready for enterprise-wide engagement? Can your organization support Social CRM? What are some of the steps you have taken to build a rich relationship with your social customer?

Nestle' backs down b4 the Facebook mob!!! Power of Social Media!

Nestlé backs down before the Facebook mob

Credit where credit is due? In March, I wrote a post about a Greenpeace-inspired Facebook revolt against Nestlé that protested the company's sourcing of palm oil from suppliers in Indonesia who were reportedly destroying rainforest habitat and driving the orangutan to extinction.

I was intrigued by the fact that Nestlé's Facebook representative had made the mistake of actually being a human being instead of a faceless marketing drone, thereby earning the great ire of the social media mob for his "rudeness." And I launched a little driveby attack on "people who imagine that they are engaging in some form of meaningful social protest by posting complaints about a company while sporting juvenile profile pictures on a Facebook fan page."

Well, shame on me. On Monday Nestlé announced that it would pursue the goal of a "no deforestation footprint" by working with the respected non-profitThe Forest Trust "to build responsible supply chains by identifying and addressing embedded social and environmental issues." While I'm not entirely sure how different this new promise is from Nestlé's previous pledge that 100 percent of the palm oil used by the company would come from sustainable sources by 2015, Greenpeace is declaring victory, with a big shout-out to social media.

With nearly 1.5m views of our Kit Kat advert, over 200,000 emails sent, hundreds of phone calls and countless Facebook comments, you made it clear to Nestlé that it had to address the problems with the palm oil and paper products it buys.

Publish Post

So maybe Facebook comments are a form of meaningful social protest -- at least insofar as they manage to generate lots and lots of media coverage.

• Publish Post

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New Marketing Summit: Social Media Marketing in Tough Times: Who Should Do What and What Should They Do?

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New Marketing Summit: Social Media Marketing in Tough Times: Who Should Do What and What Should They Do?

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