Our first workshop is “Think Like an Editor” on February 16 in London. It’s is specially tailored to help companies and agencies understand the editorial skills and thinking that will help them successfully publish on Facebook, Twitter and brand blogs and social media magazines.

PepsiCo’s head of social media B. Bonin Bough explains to SMI in this one-on-one video the key to implementing an organization-wide social media structure: it’s getting buy-in from the highest level of the organization. “That’s the win,” he says. And here’s what it means:

We’ve written a lot here about PepsiCo’s philosophy on social media, a philosophy that starts with using the public’s feedback to not only connect with its customers’ likes and dislikes, but to make better products and to possibly bring about some worthwhile change to the communities where we live. What’s next for PepsiCo’s social brand crusade? Crowd-sourcing the perfect Pepsi mobile application, apparently.

So much of digital brand marketing these days resembles a kind of Blitzkrieg mentality. The marketing team enthusiastically jumps into social media channels, sets up a clever Facebook fan page, for example, and loads it with advertising goodies for their thousands of fans to digest. What happens next? The financial quarter ends and the marketing guys pull out, abandoning everyone. Facebook is littered with dead campaigns like this MTV and Honda joint promotion for the once loved “Roadies” TV program. When will marketers learn?

The Olympic Games sell itself, right? Nope. Alex Balfour, Head of New Media for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), promises to bring the latest social platforms to mankind’s oldest sporting event.

El presidente himself, Hugo Chávez, has joined this week the people’s movement, Twitter. Brandishing the very presidential handle @chavezcandanga, Chávez has amassed an impressive 85,900 followers after a single “victorious” tweet. I don’t want to let this occasion of Chávez’s triumphant arrival to Twitter pass without a similar welcome, so here are a few tips that he, or any CEO or jefe ought to consider once they make the plunge.

While its still working out a few post-release kinks in functionality, Twitter’s @anywhere feature is slowly trying to find its place through its “for the tweeters, by the tweeters” approach.

A few years ago, following a wave of bad publicity from the film “Super Size Me,” McDonald’s did something bold: it went out and hired mommy bloggers to serve as roving correspondents tasked with checking up on the quality of the food served at franchises in cities around the country, and then blogging about it.

I’ve spent some time over the last couple of days at a large social media conference/exhibition (no not that one…this was Social Media World Forum in London) and it’s hard not to conclude …

Here’s a fresh new presentation, hot off the Slideshare presses, by LaSandra Brill, a senior manager on Cisco’s Global Social Media team.
It documents the company’s embrace of social media participation, whether it is active and …