This INCREDIBLE campaign from Network Solutions features Cloris Leachman and is posted on YouTube with supporting outposts on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and probably elsewhere — and it’s unfolding as we speak and I am SO TOTALLY CAPTIVATED that it has pulled me out of my 6-month-long blog-posting block (see GrayMatter Mea Culpa below) and it has me writing the biggest run on sentence ever and I don’t care.

This is social media marketing on SuperBowl Sunday at its best — in real time — and I’m excited. More excited than I’ve been in months about social media (again, see GrayMatter Mea Culpa below). My advance apologies to the Packers and the Steelers, but Cloris has my vote for SuperBowl MVP already.

Enjoy the game and the campaign as it unfolds.

To get up to speed, check out the Network Solutions Go Granny blog post about the campaign and watch the Go Granny YouTube video.

(Click here if the video is not appearing below in your feed reader.)

Here’s the Twitter page for @Go_Granny featuring @Cloris_Leachman and hashtagging under #gogranny.

Here’s the Flickr page.

Here’s the Facebook page.

As of this posting, the Go Granny YouTube video has had 14,772 views, 4,948 Network Solutions Facebook fans/likes, 369 views to the Go Granny Flickr photoset and 366 @Go_Granny Twitter followers…can’t wait to check back on the numbers after the game.

Social segue…

GrayMatter Mea Culpa

So my month off (from blogging) last August turned into almost six. It happens.

Via The Circus Academy, UK

Got caught up in an office move, the back-to-school gauntlet and an all-around new routine that still doesn’t feel quite…well, routine.

This unintentional extended break presented a good opportunity to revisit the intentions of this blog, its audience and my personal objectives.

The net-net? Time is a challenge to us all. Some days you win, some days you lose. I can’t make promises about posting consistency, but I can promise that whenever I post, I’ll do my best to make sure it’s valuable and relevant to what this blog promises in the masthead, which is still the type of content that interests me most as a marketer.

So, to no one and everyone in particular, please accept my most sincere mea culpa on the blogging consistency fail. And thanks to Network Solutions for the long lost motivation to type something here.

Related articles

• Network Solutions Launches Go Granny Video Campaign as Prelude to Super Bowl (networksolutions.com)
• Super Bowl Digital Campaign Bypasses the Ad (mediabistro.com)
• Super Bowl Mockumercial With Cloris Leachman and LIsa Stone (adpulp.com)
• Network Solutions takes on Go Daddy with a more mature spokesmodel (techvibes.com)
• Watch Out Danica Patrick! Network Solutions has Hottie Cloris Leachman and Her “Sisters” (revenews.com)

Are you integrating LinkedIn productivity tools into your day-to-day workflow? They’re not new, but if they’re new to you…they’re worth the minute they’ll take to install in your Internet browser or your email client.

I’ve already talked about how you can integrate LinkedIn with Outlook (click here for the Outlook toolbar download). I’ve also talked about how important it is to make the most of your LinkedIn invitations to connect. (I know that’s not a tool, but I wanted to work it in up front because it’s just so darn important.)

But did you also know LinkedIn has browser toolbars for Internet Explorer 3.2 and Mozilla Firefox 3.3 that make LinkedIn even easier to access in a single click? It’s true. I wouldn’t kid ya. Check them out! If for nothing else, the toolbar across the top of your browser will remind you that LinkedIn is there for you to leverage.

Do you have an email signature setup? LinkedIn can help you create a customized email signature for Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird.

Are you smartphone equipped? Keep your digital LinkedIn rolodex at your fingertips.

Are you making the most of LinkedIn Apps? They’re free and they can automatically integrate with other tools you may be using to further enhance your profile. I just added the Legal Updates app by JD Supra to my LinkedIn homepage so I can stay informed of legal issues in the categories of interest to me.

If you’re job-hunting, then downloading the browser tool for LinkedIn Jobs Insider is a MUST. When you open any job posting at Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, Craigslist, SimplyHired, Dice or Vault, you’ll be able to instantly and automatically see the people in your network that work at the hiring company. You can then request an introduction to the hiring manager, get your resume to the right person or find out more about the company via LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Jobs Insider Sidebar box

It’s all there for you to use. And they all work to help you save time.

For the record, this isn’t a plug for LinkedIn. It’s a plug for WEB TOOLS! I try to keep my blog’s RESOURCES page up to date with all of the great web tools I come across, but every now and again, I come across a few that I find worthy of a little special attention. If you use LinkedIn at all — and, as of July 2010, 70 million professionals do — these tools are unquestionably handy to have in place.

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• You and the Power Players: Using LinkedIn to Build Your Network and Personal Brand (blogher.com)

Don’t think Social Media is built for B2B (business to business)? Think again. The Earnest Agency put together a great little video that should statslap you into another way of thinking.

(Click here if the video is not appearing below in your feed reader.)

Love the action at 0:52. I’ve actually seen people doing that in meetings when social media comes up.

Key takeaways?

• B2B is leading social media adoption (over B2C…Business To Consumer)
• The B2B buyer process is fundamentally changing: 93% of B2B buyers use SEARCH to begin the buying process
• If you don’t have a social media strategy, you should

I gave a presentation today and told the room of B2B folks that what I love about social media is that it is forcing B2B companies to look at their websites — and the web traffic that runs through them — in a whole new way. Marketing is communicating with the IT department again…and not just because their email isn’t working. Social media has breathed new life into how websites are being integrated into the overall marketing strategy and I, for one, think it’s rather refreshing. Now, if we could only get the whole “social media strategy” thing off the ground…

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• B2B buyer process fundamentally changing – video B2B stats (customerthink.com)
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There are people that backup and people that don’t. I’m cool with that. This isn’t a post about the merits of backing up your hard drive…but for those of us that do, we might also want to consider how we can back up all the content we’re publishing on the various social networks. What if everything you posted to Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn just vanished? Accounts get mysteriously deleted, hacked or suspended or whatever. It can happen, I’m just sayin’. So…what to do?

Here are a few social media backup solutions you might like to check out. Some free, some not. I use one or two of these myself. You may find, as I did, that the search functionality they offer is reason enough to set up an account.

Backupify

Backupify provides daily automatic backups, archiving and export for all your social media and SaaS (Software As A Service) data. You’ll get regular emails confirming when your backups have completed. They have a free basic plan or paid plans for more robust needs.

Here’s a look at backupify’s archive dashboard for Twitter:

Socialware Sync

Socialware Sync provides “marketing departments, power users and socially-enabled businesses” with “enterprise-class archiving.” Sounds good to me. I’m in. Here’s what I have with Socialware Sync: a 30-day free trial for backup/archiving support for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. This solution has some pretty cool search functionality if you’re into that sort of thing. You can search a term across all three of your profiles just by entering it into the search box. Easy breezy. Not sure if it’s worth the price of admission for an individual…but for a large organization I would think it would be rather handy in managing and monitoring multiple accounts.

Here’s a look at the Socialware Sync search dashboard. You can see where you enter the search term in the upper right and that you can select the profiles you wish to search with a little check box.

Need more basic backup for a single social profile?

Maybe you only want to focus your backup efforts on a single network. That’s cool, too. I’m not here to judge. There’s a few solutions I came across, but — disclaimer — I don’t use any of them because I prefer having one solution that covers multiple profiles. But that’s just me. Different strokes for different folks, right? That said, here are a few you might want to check out.

Back Up My Tweets

BackupMyTweets.com provides more control over your Twitter account. They also offer like-solutions for email, blogs and pictures (BackupMyMail, BackupMyBlog, BackupMyPics).

Tweet Backup

Tweetbackup.com provides a free, daily backup of your Twitter account.

Tweetake

Tweetake.com allows you to backup your Twitter account without revealing your name and password.

SocialSafe (For Facebook Backup)

SocialSafe will backup your Facebook Friends, photos, profile and wall status updates to your computer for a modest (one-time?) fee. I looked for the language “one-time” fee, but couldn’t find it. It seems to be a one-time license fee of $2.99 USD, but call me needy for wishing the copy were a bit more clear on this point. I actually had to click on “Buy” in order to satisfy my curiosity on this pricing issue. Perhaps that was the strategy, or maybe I’m just slower than most, or just very used to monthly fee plans. Halfway down the FAQ page, they mention that there might be an upgrade fee for a major version update. Really, we’re talking about a very reasonable fee here, I just was a little frustrated at how much time I had to spend to find all those pricing details as I’m trained, like most, to look for the fine print in today’s disclaimer culture. Would have been easier if that messaging were more clear on the homepage, IMHO.

ArchiveFacebook

ArchiveFacebook is a free Mozilla Firefox add-on tool that allows you to “save content from your Facebook account directly to your hard drive” so you can archive your photos, messages, activity stream, friends list, notes, events and groups. But you need to be using Firefox. If you’re using Internet Explorer (IE) or some other browser, you can’t use this cool add-on or any of the other supercool add-ons and plugins that the Firefox browser supports. (See that? I refrained from launching into a whole spiel on why I think Firefox is superior to IE. I’m maturing, I guess. To show just how objective I have become on the subject of browsers, I offer you this little test to see which browser is right for you.)

Want More Backup Solutions?

Get your Google on, friends. There’s a few out there for Flickr (Downloadr and FlickrEdit, for example) and I’m sure for other major networks. If you’re blogging, you naturally will need a backup solution there, as well. Make that priority one. If you’re looking for off-site backup storage, there’s a few “cloud storage” solutions, like Lifestream Backup, Mozy and Memopal that might be worth checking into.

Bottom line?

If you’re living a digital life, probably worth leveraging the digital tools to back it up, eh? No pressure. Just something to think about.

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• Examples of Backupify in Action (backupify.com)
• Are you backing up your blog and other social sites? Here’s how… (buildabetterblog.com)
• Smarsh and Socialware Partner to Offer Integrated Messaging and Social Media Compliance (eon.businesswire.com)