I’ve recently started a quest; Find social media success stories that have nothing to do with Motrin Moms or Domino’s Pizza. Face it, though these are interesting examples of the importance of listening and reacting to the conversation,these examples are just plain old! By the way, if you’re doing a presentation on social media and brands any time after today, please delete any reference to these two brands or you will be officially labeled, by the official Labeling Office of the Web (LOW), as “old school”.
As part of said quest I called the folks at Best Buy to check on the health and/or success of Twelpforce.
For the sake of transparency I count many at Best Buy as friends. That said, my first of impression of the name of this initiative and it’s marketing campaign around the Twelpforce didn’t rank high on my cool-o-meter. To me social media is all about one-to-one contact and I didn’t necessarily think a TV add depicting a stadium of Blue Shirts (Best Buy employees) yelling out answers as the best way to showcase a concept and effort that is so darned positive and forward thinking…just sayin’.
I was curious and anxious to have the conversation. John Bernier, a Social Media Manager at Best Buy, and the one overseeing the Twelpforce initiative was happy to spend some time talking about it. This in itself is a good sign that a level of success is being attained. … [Read More…]
Phenomenal discussion at
One of the Twin Cities most active social media participants, Lisa Grimm (
Got a nickel? Then you have a server for an hour, my friend.
The seminar featured talks by Mike Sowada, CEO of Visi, shown here on stage. (Photo courtesy of Charles Robinson.) Visi is the state’s largest Internet services and hosting firm, with data centers in both St. Paul and Eden Prairie. A talk followed entitled “Cloud Computing as a Business Advantage” by Chris Howard, a VP at analyst/research firm 

If you’re a TV news station, newspaper, or online news site, you probably should get to know Minnesota startup
As you might expect, DoApp is touting its Mobile Local News as a tool for “citizen journalism.” Get this: it says 50% of internet users will be generating content by 2010, and that 100 million Americans now get their news from a mobile device. They don’t cite a source for those numbers, but they square with what I’m hearing elsewhere.
I have been using a Windows Mobile phone for the past 18 months and have been looking for a way to sync my data wirelessly for some time. A while back I installed the beta of Microsoft’s