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Source:Mashable!

We’ve discussed some tactics to get your company better engaged with social media. Lest you think there’s a limit to how you can connect with business and customer facing audiences, we’ve assembled this list of more than 35 companies who are experimenting with social media in a host of different ways.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and it represents a wide variety of businesses, industries and social media tools. As you can see, engagement takes many forms. Some are likely to generate more discussions with the company while others might result better connections between customers. Some will fade away over the next 6-12 months while others will continue to grow and evolve.

There are no rules to what form your engagement has to take. Look at your company, identify its strengths, what types of conversations energize employees and determine how you can best grow/shape/build/join your own community.

If you have other examples of corporate social media engagement, please share them in the comments.

Blendtec is famous for its bevy of inexpensive “Will It Blend” videos posted on YouTube and shared by millions.

Adobe maintains a list of interesting company related websites and conversations on the social bookmarking site Delicious.

Best Western sponsors a blog,“On the Go with Amy,” where the author travels the country writing about her experiences.

Cadence recently relaunched its website that now prominently promotes the company’s community.

Cisco hosts 12 blogs addressing a variety of audiences for their global business.

Coca-Cola Conversations is a blog written by company historian Phil Mooney that focuses on Coke collectibles.

Dell leverages a variety of social media platforms for customer engagement, including an island in the virtual world of Second Life.

Ford publishes news releases with lots of multimedia content and employs a social media news release format to display them in their newsroom.

Fujifilm recently launched a social network to build a community of photo enthusiasts around its newest camera.

GM uses blogs to communicate directly with its customers around topics ranging from design to green tech.

H&R Block created a Facebook fan site to aggregate its social media activities, engage customers and offer tax advice/resources.

HP used Twitter to power a scavenger hunt at a recent conference.

HSBC built the HSBC Business Network to connect entrepreneurs using blogs, videos and forums.

IBM was the first large enterprise to embrace employee blogging and now boasts thousands of blogs related to every facet of its business.

Intel has also developed many social media touch points with its software communities, which includes blogs, Twitter and virtual worlds.

Intuit sponsors the Tax Almanac wiki, where anyone can find and contribute to this resource for tax information.

Jeep connects with customers via a community page with links to photos on Flickr, the company’s MySpace and Facebook pages and a list enthusiast groups.

JetBlue employs social media as part of its training for JetBlue University, as this video explains.

Johnson & Johnson uses this blog to show another side of the company, with frequent video posts and interviews.

Lenovo launched “Voices of the Olympics Games” to aggregate posts from the athletes competing in Beijing.

Marriott CEO Bill Marriott posts regular updates and stories from his travels to Marriott properties around the world to fuel the content for this entertaining blog.

McDonalds maintains a blog to highlight the company’s corporate social responsibility efforts.

National Geographic uses Google’s new virtual world, Lively, to bring people together around its new show, LA Hard Hats.

New York Times is beta testing a Firefox add-on that allows users to share and comment on stories through a decentralized social network.

Nike started a social community on Loopd to connect athletes interested in surfing, BMX bike racing and similar activities with the brand.

SAP sponsored a global survey of social media professionals to learn more about social media worldwide.

Sears partnered with MTV to create a social network around Back to School shopping.

Southwest Airlines employees share their stories and communicate directly with customers through the “Nuts About Southwest” blog.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog is the example most often cited for what the CEO blog can be.

Starbucks started MyStarbucksIdea so that customers can submit ideas for the company which are then voted on by other users, the best of which will be implemented by the company.

Toyota started its own virtual world to promote its products in Japan (site is in Japanese).

Visa launched The Visa Business Network application on Facebook to connect small business users and to help them promote their businesses to a larger community.

Wells-Fargo blogs target two audiences; one examines the company’s history and the other is for students interested in getting their finances in order.

WWE has a Facebook application, among other social networking tools and widgets, to bring fans closer to the action.

Xerox blogs address several of the company’s core B2B constituencies.

Zappos uses Twitter for employees to communicate with Zappos customers about their shared love of footwear.

[Disclosure: Aaron Uhrmacher works with several Fortune 1000 companies, some of which are included in this list.]

Aaron Uhrmacher is a social media consultant at Text 100 Public Relations. In addition to his posts for Mashable, he blogs at: www.disruptology.com.

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Source:Mashable!

Google has just launched Knol to the public, dubbed by many as the search giant’s Wikipedia killer. My first reaction: not so fast. While Knol offers a way for anyone to create content about any subject, there are a few big differences.

First and foremost, each “Knol” is created by a single author, who can then choose to either accept or reject edits made by others in what Google is calling “moderated collaboration.” Beyond that, Knol authors can insert AdSense on their Knols and earn revenue based on clicks. In reality, this sound less a lot less like the community collaborating on authoritative articles (Wikipedia) and a lot more like a potential land grab to create content for lucrative keywords.

However, Google does offer some options that should keep would-be opportunists at bay. Each Knol offers the ability for anyone to review or comment on it, which in turn raises or lowers the authority of the article. Google says that they “expect that there will be multiple knolls on the same subject, and we think that is good.”

In giving a single author control over each Knol and its edits, it’s hard to imagine the service will be as authoritative as Wikipedia (which, many would argue has its own biases). It seems more like Squidoo, where knowledgeable people can create good content and be rewarded for it, with the community at-large determining how valuable it is and recognizing that there may be some bias in the article.

Meanwhile, Knol could still be a huge traffic generator for Google and steal visitors from Wikipedia if it’s integrated in search results – something Google has not been shy about doing with other properties like YouTube.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:The Daily Poll: Is Google Knol a Wikipedia Killer?16 More Years (at least) of Brin, Page, and Schmidt at GoogleThe Daily Poll: Which of Google’s New Products Will Be the Most Successful?Google Knol - More Of The SameThe Daily Poll: Is Yahoo Shine Competing with YPN Publishers?The Daily Poll: What is Google?Google Introduces the ‘Knol’

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 2:05 pm and is filed under News, google, wikipedia, Squidoo, google knol. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.