As you have probably heard already, Southwest Airlines recently made the unfortunate mistake of angering a passenger that harnesses a lot of power on Twitter.  According to reports, actor/director/writer/comedian Kevin Smith, best known for his role as Silent Bob, was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland to Burbank, CA, this past Valentine’s Day weekend due to his weight.  Since then, dozens of tweets have been posted by Kevin Smith — @ThatKevinSmith –(last time we checked, his Twitter page was overloaded and couldn’t be accessed via the Twitter website but we were able to check it out via TweetDeck).  To put it mildly, he is angry, and quickly gave Southwest Airlines a fast-moving social media crisis communications situation to deal with.

ZENZI HELPS COLORADO BUSINESSES ‘BE KNOWN’ AND ‘BE FOUND’

-Highly effective integrated agency opens office in Boulder focusing on digital marketing-

San Diego, CA, and Boulder, CO, February 1, 2010—Zenzi Communications, an award-winning agency that combines traditional marketing and PR with search engine optimization and social media for maximum impact, has expanded operations to Boulder, Colorado. Veteran marketer Anke Corbin will lead a local team focused on the digital aspects of helping companies ‘Be Known’™ and ‘Be Found’ through a creative and results driven approach.

Headquartered in San Diego, Zenzi is one of the city’s fastest growing companies and specializes in working with technology, B2B, consumer and hospitality clients. Among those on the firm’s roster include Boulder-based Parascript LLC, Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, Fresh Express Artisanal Salads, San Diego Botanic Garden, Palm Springs Bureau of Tourism, California State University-Northridge, Bank of Nevada, Mushroom Networks, Sandvine, Business OnLine, BeneTrac (a division of Paychex), and more.

In the context of communication overall, social media applications are a major innovation in general, though they aren’t exactly new or groundbreaking on their own anymore. We are keeping an eye out at Zenzi for cool new innovative ways that people and companies are using social media. There is no special code or guaranteed path to success or popularity with social media – much like viral videos — some of the biggest successes just happen because of a creative idea and an audience that catches on and takes it by storm. There are multiple elements that need to click into place to create a successful social media campaign, and one of the biggest elements, at least with the most exciting and unique examples out there, is innovative ideas.

One of our favorite classic examples of an incredibly successful social media campaign is the Kogi Korean BBQ Taco Truck in L.A., which was touted as “America’s first viral restaurant” by Newsweek. While their Twitter (@kogibbq) following is impressive with over 50,000 followers, it’s not just this number that makes them a ridiculously huge Twitter success story. It’s the fact that through Twitter and their website, within just a few months of opening for business there were often hundreds of people waiting on some street corner in L.A. for the Kogi BBQ truck to pull up. The trucks now make the rounds to the bar scene as well, tweeting about one of their two trucks’ next stops, where hungry people armed with iPhones and Blackberries eagerly await the arrival of their late night snack.

These stories are what have landed this fancy taco truck (the regular variety are a dime a dozen on the streets of L.A. during the lunch hour) in publications such as Time, Inc., GQ, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit and Gourmet. To start with, the food is delicious and different, and combine that with a savvy social media strategy designed to work in line with the company’s goals and business model, and you have a successful, innovative social media campaign that has truly taken on a life of its own. Twitter may have played a role in creating an entirely new fast food trend. Kogi BBQ has definitely set a new standard for a perfect recipe for success in social media through an innovative business model that has better served their customers by using Twitter to speak to their customers’ stomachs.

Here at Zenzi, we strive for excellence in all areas of the marketing matrix. We pride ourselves on keeping up with every new trend and delivering unprecedented PR results. In an effort to increase the quality of our PR efforts, we have launched the Zenzi SEO PR service.

Zenzi SEO PR is a new service that leverages blogs, online and traditional media, reviews, video search, photo search, events and social media networks to influence and optimize your Website results.

With Zenzi SEO PR, we have expanded the traditional definition and approach for SEO to include both Organic SEO and Universal SEO. Organic SEO is about optimizing your own site. Universal SEO optimizes links from influential sources such as reviews, video sites, social media and directories, which can either positively or negatively impact your website’s level of relevance.

We offer a variety of SEO PR plans to fit your individual needs. Please give us a call for more info!

Written by Sandvine’s Matt Tooley

Each year around January, the world waits in anticipation to see what big electronics companies have in store for the coming months in terms of the latest in computers, gadgets and home entertainment. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is akin to “Disney Land” for all gadget aficionados with a handful of new solutions grabbing a predominate portion of the media’s attention. This year the buzz centers on Google’s Nexus One, a new smart phone deemed by many as the “iPhone Killer” (doubtful it will knock iPhone off its perch – but we shall see). Flying a bit under the radar at this year’s show yet gaining tremendous traction in the real-world marketplace are solutions for blending the Internet with television.

Early talk about IPTV positioned the technology as the telco’s secret weapon for entry into a space cable operators have forever dominated. Now, cable operators themselves are looking towards Internet based television as an avenue for lucrative service offerings with many analysts and industry experts touting it as the next big thing in cable. Helping cultivate this push, equipment vendor Cisco Systems announced in late 2009 Cisco Blue, an interactive guide for cable-based IPTV set top boxes based on a Web-browser where widgets pull data from various sources such as Yahoo News or Twitter allowing subscribers to easily use their television to interact with the Internet. In addition, Arris demonstrated how IPTV- over-DOCSIS 3.0 can deliver more than 50 percent in bandwidth savings over traditional RF QAM channels.

Now that video and audio streaming already constitute 27 percent of all global Internet traffic (based on Sandvine’s 2009 report analyzing over 20 million broadband subscribers) the need for a much smarter and efficient Web will become even more critical as potentially millions of new Internet- enabled sets plug in. Internet-based TV has a great potential to not only modify the way the Web is managed, but to turn market sectors such as advertising on its head just by the very nature that people will watch their shows and interact with others online.

Much like how IP voice communications was slow to take off, and at one time even scoffed at due to quality of experience issues as a result of jitter and latency, Internet-based TV has experienced the same slow start. We are however at a tipping point where it is no longer a matter of “if” but “when” IPTV will surpass traditional television services – and that’s a story much more worthy of media buzz than the latest smart phone.