Erin Albert’s Blog

As I recently posted, Crush It! is one of my favorite newer books by author and wine social media guru, Gary Vaynerchuk.  He’s got an interesting video post and point on his site this week, which is this.  Big corporate America is faced with the massive power of the internet, yet, they don’t really get it.  Or at least they don’t get it yet.

If you’ve ever worked for a big company, you probably already know what I’m talking about - it takes a meeting before a meeting to have another meeting about what the company is going to say to the media at yet another meeting.  Then there will be 15 iterations of that message along the way before it ever reaches the real world.  Friends, as Gary (correctly) states, this is going to be a major problem for big companies on how they operate.  Gary argues the big monster companies need Ninja Teams to literally go out and dare to talk to customers through social media about products and services real time and at the speed of the net.

What is a Ninja Team?  In concept, what I think Gary’s getting to is there needs to be flexible and nimble responses to social media channeling and messages from big corporate America.  Here are some companies that I think get it:  Tiffany & Company, H&M, Sarah Fisher, and a few colleges and universities (offering students to turn in a video rather than just a resume to apply to a college or university).  H&M has social media blurbs on new products at Facebook.  Tiffany also has messages in social media.  Sarah has a following on Twitter just to get her fans to get Ellen (the Ellen) to come out to the Indy 500 next May.

What I think larger companies needs to do is not shy away from social media, but embrace it.  An excellent example or case in this is Dell Hell, and Dell’s response to it (I’ll let you google that on your own).  This entire Chatroulette phenomenon is only going to shrink our social media world even more too.

This is a little company advantage, and a wake up call for the big companies.  Ninjas out there - we’ll look forward to watching YOU crush it!