The EMBARQ Social Story

As some of you know, I work for EMBARQ , a regional telecommunications provider, in the corporate brand team. A few of you have asked that I share our social story on my blog. I typically don't talk shop so this is new territory for me...

Over the last two plus years, a cross-functional EMBARQ team has developed and begun implementing a corporate-wide social media roadmap which we recently shared at the NewComm conference, sponsored by the Society of New Communications Research (SNCR).

Integrating Social Media in a Fortune 500

View more OpenOffice presentations from Zena Weist.

Amber Nashlund, Radian6's Director of Community, interviewed our social media outreach team and created a comprehensive case study in handy PDF format of our social conversation endeavor.

We have several partners and internal teams that have helped us accomplish our key objectives. We wouldn't be where we are - helping our customers online daily as we do - without their efforts.

First and foremost, Dan Alcazar, EMBARQ Brand Vice President and Consumer Marketing Officer. Without Dan's executive support and advice, we wouldn't have passed go. Jerry Green, Brand Group Manager, helped lead the charge on our key online marketing initiative, the EMBARQ YouTube Brand Channel, with our customer-focused, Kevin Cobb masterminded "how-to" series. Our community manager Linda O'Neill championed the online customer outreach process under the direction of Mark Akason that Joey Harper (aka EMBARQ_Joey) leads fantastically everyday.

Also, much appreciation to Harry Campbell, EMBARQ Consumer President, who championed our roadmap through the enterprise and made it sync with his entire organization's vision. Our internal video team under the direction of Jerry Bova, y'all kicked serious bootie and continue to on the production of our "how-to" series! Our external communication team in partnership with their online communication agency, Metzger Associates, led an amazing online PR outreach campaign for our YouTube channel launch.

Our partners helped bring our social conversation vision to life. Google and YouTube provided us strategic guidance, best-in-channel direction, and key research findings while taking our feedback back to the engineers and getting vital changes made for our success. iCrossing developed our YouTube contest concept/creative and continue to lead the brand team's online creative, media, channel outreach strategy and search engine marketing. Metzger Associates continues to work in conjunction with Radian6 helping us keep on top of the social conversation.

I feel very fortunate to work with such passionate, knowledgeable individuals on evolving our social media story. Ok, that wasn't so tough of a post to write.

If you have written about your company's social story, please share the link in this post's comments.

Upcoming Conferences

Here's the upcoming events I'll be attending. Please let me know if you're going to any of them so we can meet up. First up, is The Society For New Communication's (SNCR - pronounced "snicker") 5th annual NewComm Forum April 27th - 29th in San Francisco, CA

NewComm Forum was my favorite '08 conference. It brings together thought leaders and decision makers to discuss the impact of social media and new communications on PR, marketing, advertising, media, journalism, business, culture and society. This year, I'm looking forward to the opening keynote conversation with Charles Best, founder of DonorsChoose.org.

I'm thrilled that our EMBARQ online outreach team will be sharing our socmed story as well.

NewComm is co-located with Chris Brogan's SF Inbound Marketing Summit. I haven't attended a Brogan conference yet and I'm really looking forward to this line up. I'm especially chomping at the bit to see @aaronstrout's Start Talking With Your Customers
presentation and the Listening and Monitoring session with an amazing socmed panel including @ambercadabra, @justinlevy and @spiral16.

Next up is SOBCon (Biz School for Bloggers) in Chicago, May 1-3. If you don't know Liz Strauss, I highly recommend you take in her blog and if you are on twitter, follow her. She is a quiet, wise soul in this frenzied industry. SOBCon is one of Chris Brogan's all time favorite conferences. I'm thrilled to be on a social web panel with three fabulous power bloggers Chris Garrett, Lucretia Pruitt, and Jason Falls.

On May 16, I have the honor of moderating a social media tools panel at Chicks Who Click in Kansas City and sharing my geeky marketing chick life over lunch. The first #CWC09 in Boulder was a heck of a networking conference. I was surrounded by inspirational women and a few brave men from diverse backgrounds, ranging in all ages and various aspirations but all passionate about online!

As for the Kansas City Clicks Who Click, do not feel like you need to be a power blogger, a twitter diva or a digg junkie to attend...as long as you are wanting to learn more about the social web, you are going to love this conference!

Deets on Pre-SNCR Boston Tweetup

Shel Holtz and John Wall organized the Pre-SNCR (Society of New Communication Research) Symposium tweetup.

Details:
7 pm, Thursday, November 13
Vox Populi
755 Boylston
Map | Directions

More info on Shel's blog.

SNCR's NewComm Forum

I'm starting this post out with a little background so the theme of it has some teeth to it. I've been in online marketing for 14 years (gulp, yep, ONE FOUR...no lie.)

I know that dates me, but I wanted to illustrate my years (along with blood, sweat, tears and bounced paychecks) invested in this industry, to let you know that I've had the time to attend several Internet, Web Marketing, and Tech conferences from Internet World to iMedia Summit to ad:tech to ITEC, etc.

And ya know, a conference, is a conference, is a conference with an exhibit hall and parties and some interesting keynotes. Lots of business cards exchanged, some information is relevant, some not - a good excuse to get out of the office and network. Overall for me, I haven't come across a must attend conference. They all kinda blend together.

At the beginning of this year, I spoke with an industry friend, Rick Murray, about my social-media-conference-with-a-slightly-different-lens search: more research based and a focus on conversation not marketing per se. He suggested I check out "snicker," explaining it's an acronym S N C R for a New Comm organization.

And that's how I ended up at last week's Society of New Communications Research's (SNCR) (again, pronounced Snicker) NewComm Forum. Given I'm in brand marketing, I thought this conference might be slanted toward PR or Corp Comm so I had my doubts going in, but Rick knows his stuff and I did asked for different. I definitely got different, but good different in the form of a social media conversational marketing recharge.

There were many tracks to choose from including separate ones for PR and Brand. I jumped around and was impressed with the depth of preparation, the timely case studies and the research findings shared at the sessions.

The keynotes were a mix of presentation, interview-style, and conversation. It was very "un-conferencey" and I know that's a term that's being thrown around quite a bit, but truly for a conference that is focused on research, it was very casual, adaptive and conversational.

The SNCR team lead by Jen McClure worked their booties off orchestrating the entire event flawlessly down to the minute details of introducing new attendees to speakers and tracking down extra drink tickets for the afterhours event.

And saving the best for last, SNCR was my first tweetup! I've heard so many twitterers talk about how amazing and surreal their first time meeting other twitters IRL is. And wow, words can't explain it...it's an overwhelming experience to connect with so many twitter buds at once in person.

I have a few more personal takes on SNCR that I'll save for another post. Bottom line, SNCR's NewComm is definitely my must attend conference.