Rewarding Social Media Leaders

Hello Online Social Media and the Brands that use the outlets,

When I look back at the beginning of online social media we were so confused as marketers and advertisers about how we were going to harness the power of the consumer to help our own cause. Ohhh the aches and pains we suffered and the number of PR disasters their were along the way.


Smoking Smarties. Too much of this is sure to cause Diabetes (bad joke)


Domino's Pizza. They should have had better employee incentives. I will say that this was handled really well by Domino's head office.

Those two are great examples of how Social Media can work against you. But as time goes on we continue to find new and innovative ways to yield this awesome power and use it for good not evil. All I can say is that when it works...it works really really well. Most recently I found a new example of a win for PF Chang:



Clearly PF Chang's head office gets how important their consumers are in the world of social media and has taken it to the next level by rewarding them for being brand advocates.

I think that this could be a very valuable model in the future of social media on how we can recognize our most valuable consumers. The only thing I am wary of is our ability to time and time again exploit these wins and diminish the credibility of these advocates as an extension of our own brands. I guess only time will tell.

Sincerely,