Talking recently with Cheryl Burgess ( @ckburgess )—partner and CMO at Blue Focus Marketing, a B2B social branding consultancy firm in Bridgewater, New Jersey; 2011 & 2010 winner of the Twitter Shorty Awards in Marketing; and author of the Blue Focus Marketing Blog —we were both struck by how many of the same people we know through social media (and we both learned about some interesting new people to follow as well). Jenara is an Asia-based filmmaker, organic farmer, and freelance journalist for Fast Company magazine and CNNGo, as well as a Harvard and Berkeley grad. aaker. MORE >>

Shruti Shah Goradia is Social Media Marketing Manager: Content and Community at Kodak. G: Where is the best place to build the community? Thus was born the Tips & Projects Exchange – Kodak’s branded online community. would recommend having a branded community site or blog as the home base and use the content from those to feed Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other social media platforms. Wall posts and tweets disappear into oblivion whereas bog posts and community articles live forever. G: What do you have to provide the community to make it work? MORE >>

We all know the usual names of companies that are doing well in social media. Unisys uses social media internally for effective collaboration and a boost to company productivity. Are there other companies that are doing some interesting things with social media that are worth talking about? infographic communities customer relations social media enterpriseThis infographic was created by Voltier Digital , a content marketing agency based in Florida, specializing on the creation and promotion of impactful content marketing campaigns for businesses of all sizes. MORE >>

Whilst some big retailers are still sitting on the sidelines considering whether social media has a role in their business, one of our biggest retailers has acquired its own social media company. Yesterday it was announced that Tesco has bought US word-of-mouth social media company BzzAgent for a reported $60 million. The company has 800,000 volunteers, working across brands like Unilever and L’Oreal , who spend their time describing their product experience online. By purchasing BzzAgent, Tesco clearly want to better connect social media with product marketing. MORE >>

We urgently need to rethink how we hire community managers. At the moment too many organizations, with little idea of what makes a great community manager, are hiring people who are either great at technology, have irrelevant community or social media experience, or have far too much free time.    This is a tragedy that's sabotaging their community efforts.   How are community managers being hired? Knowledge and experience might be more tangible to assess, but they have little impact upon the community being a success. Attitude. MORE >>