Fortune 500 Series: FedEx delivers success through social media …
By Jennifer Leggio
Blogger, Jennifer Leggio showcases The FedEx Citizenship blog that provides insights from their employees into FedEx global citizenship programs and the The FedEx Cares Week blog is an internal blog that chronicles the annual global philanthropy event by having team members share their stories about the community service projects. …
Hill and Knowlton’s New Blogging Code of Conduct
Hill and Knowlton publish their blogging “Code of Conduct.” This is a nice model for other organizations to use.
The Top Six Reasons Companies are Still Scared of Social Media
This article showcases the reasons why companies are afraid of social media. Whereas they are typical reasons that make sense, the article is good at aggregating the most common reasons. The hurdles for companies are getting lowered by organizations like SAS who take on the risk, trusting and encouraging their employees to blog and prove that it is still better to be “out there” than to hide behind corporate walls.
My Take
I spoke with a couple of social media experts this week and found that, once again, myopia is still alive, well and living in peoples’ minds still. By this I mean that many see social networking as their ticket to great success. They think that because there are so are confused how to make social networking work that there is a huge market out there and that they can just put a shingle out that states they are social media experts overnight. Recently someone shared they had a construction worker friend who is now teaching LinkedIn.
I’ve been teaching people social networking for more than a decade and up until last year many still didn’t understand the basics of business networking. Now there are five times the number of experts on the subject than there were even three months ago. What a strange time this is! It will be interesting to see how all this shakes out in the next couple of years. I remember when I use to hold networking events and there was an over abundance of bankers; then came the plethora of coaches. Now everyone is a social networking and new media expert. Hmmmmm.
I got this message in my email today. I just had to publish it. What a class act CrowdSPRING (www.crowdspring.com) is. Now this is what doing good business looks like both in front and behind the curtain:
Dear friends,
As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve run into a series of technical problems over the past 7-10 days. Because of that, we wanted to take a break from our normal newsletter to bring you a personal message from both of us. So let us start by stating it as plainly as we can: we’re sorry.
There’s no way to sugar coat it – the site’s performance as of late has been poor. We’ve failed to provide you the crowdSPRING experience you’ve learned to love and we are both disappointed and humbled as a result. Please rest assured that we’re aware of these problems, and we are doing our very best to fix them promptly. Everyone at crowdSPRING is focused on these issues and we won’t rest until we have them resolved. Period.
We’ll spare you the technical explanation of the problems we’re having but, in the end, they’re almost entirely related to the increased usage that the site is experiencing and they’ve had a cascading effect, touching everything from our database servers all the way down to our email notifications. We should have foreseen this possibility and built things with more flexibility in the event that we needed to scale more quickly than we anticipated. We were so focused on our refactoring project (which will have us roll out completely new code in the coming weeks) that we underestimated the extent of our growth. As you know, we’ve added more hardware servers, but this didn’t address all of the issues with which we are now dealing. And we’re now paying the price. This is undeniably a lesson hard learned and one we do NOT intend to repeat or ever forget. And most importantly we’re embarrassed that we’ve put our credibility on the line with you.
We’ll give you an update within the next 48 hours on where things stand and, in the mean time, we’re certain that many of you may have questions about these issues and how they affect your projects. We encourage you to talk to us – we’ll do everything we reasonably can to make sure that our failure does not impact you, so don’t hesitate to reply to this email, write us personally, or contact us through the site. We consider everyone who has supported us this first year a friend and it’s never fun to disappoint your friends. You have our personal promise, and the promise of every person who works at crowdSPRING, that we will work tirelessly to make things right and to regain your trust.
Ross and Mike
co-Founders
You’re receiving this email as a friend of crowdSPRING. Feel free to unsubscribe at any time.
