Randall Helms dot COM

Sometimes late is better than never …

Last year I published 51 posts on this blog, so I thought that it would be useful to do a recap of my ten favourite posts from the year.

Hopefully these posts will be interesting, useful, and thought-provoking, so without further ado, here are my 10 from 2010:

01. Suitably Social: How FMCG Brands Can Best Use Social Media for Engaging with their Customers – No question as to what my most important post was last year! This was the post where I published my MBA dissertation, the culmination of months of work. Drawing on a massive programme of secondary reading as well as the results of 18 interviews conducted with brand managers, academics, consultants, and people at digital and marketing agencies, this paper provided some common sense best practice principles for any brand working with social media. A must-read.

02. Interview: Brett Keintz, Head of Social, Groupon – One of the hottest social media companies of 2010 was Groupon, the social discount service; indeed, before the year was over Groupon had turned down a $6 billion offer from Google! Therefore, I was very fortunate to be able to interview Brett Keintz right after he had become the Head of Social there. It’s definitely worth reading if you would like to know what one of the leading practitioners thinks about social media marketing.

03. A few thoughts on group buying – Having read my interview with Brett Keintz, it’s worth turning next to this post, where I lay out my thoughts about the Groupon model as well as a few predictions for the future of it and similar services.

04. Why should companies blog? – Blogging may have become less fashionable as newer forms of social media have emerged in recent years, but that doesn’t mean that blogs can’t help companies to achieve their marketing goals. In this post I went through some of the reasons why companies should blog, and how to achieve success with blogging.

05. Who’s listening? – One service that has attracted a lot of hype is Twitter, but how do you actually measure how influential your tweets are, or can you actually do so? In this post I looked at some recent research and hinted at some of the key questions that anyone hoping to use Twitter for marketing purposes needs to remember.

06. Branding – the Olympics vs the World Cup – Written during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, this was my look at some of the different branding issues facing the two major global sporting competitions.

07. Interview: Tim Murphy, Associate Brand Manager, General Mills – Another fascinating interview transcript from my dissertation research, this time with Tim Murphy of General Mills, the major US food manufacturer.

08. A great example of what not to do with social media – My recap of a particularly ill-advised social media campaign by Dr. Pepper.

09. People will share anything – When people will share every aspect of their lives online, what does privacy mean?

10. The limits of anonymity – Building an online community inevitably means dealing with trolls, those people who are determined to wreck the conversation through being rude, argumentative, and generally unpleasant. How do you deal with them and still build a successful, self-sustaining community?