By Nick Johnson - January 23rd, 2013

This week's roundup of news on corporate social media features a look at Skittles' use of Twitter, an interview with Bacardi's Head of Digital, another look at Facebook's new 'Graph Search' and more.

Welcome to our weekly Wednesday Update of all the corporate social media news you need to know. This week, we look at a brave use of social media to build brand, the death of the social media director (again), and another look at Facebook’s Graph Search.

What you can learn from Skittles’ use of social media to build their brand voice

Skittles have long innovated in social media - a couple of years ago they gave over their entire webpage to their Twitter feed.

This year, they’ve moved on from simply highlighting their Twitter feed to putting some real work into the messaging and persona they share on the network.

According to The Wall blog, their feed is “quite literally like its product and comes across as if it has ‘tasted the Rainbow”. Essentially, it is rather offbeat, strange - and pretty amusing.

It shows a certain level of confidence in both social media use, and in the strength of the Skittles brand. And the tweets get a level of engagement that most brands could only dream of. If you’re looking to convince your CMO of the value of a more ‘human’ social media presence, then show them Skittles

The death of the social media director - again?

A couple of weeks ago, we shared the news that the ‘social media director’ role was about to die out. This week, the news is no brighter, as Alan Kittle posits that ‘the end of digital marketing is nigh’ over at The Wall blog.

Kittle starts his piece linking to a Forrester report that predicts ‘digital marketing’ will simply merge into ‘marketing’ in 2013, and then weighs in on the ensuing debate on whether ‘digital’ should still be a separate silo to the rest of marketing.

His view is that considering ‘audiences don’t act in a neat, vertical way’, a brand simply can’t afford to run anything other than a truly integrated marketing campaign, which speaks to the customer in a consistent way, wherever they happen to discover the brand message.

It’s a fundamentally sound viewpoint, and one we wholeheartedly agree with over at Useful Social Media.

Bacardi on how social media must start proving ROI

Over at The Drum, Bacardi’s Head of Digital, Peter Clare, is sharing his views on corporate social media in 2013. He makes a few key points:

  1. 2013 will be the year of mobile - According to Clare, brands will be predominantly focusing on incorporating mobile into overarching marketing strategy this year
  2. The growth of digital and social is having an impact all the way up the food chain - Clare expects CEOs and CMOs to be forced to ‘get their hands dirty’ aligning their entire company with the new digital landscape
  3. Integrated marketing is about to get a lot harder - Interestingly, Clare suggests that as Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon and the like intensify their efforts to take market share from each other, your job in putting together an integrated campaign across all sites is about to get a whole lot harder.

You can see the full article at The Drum.

A second look at Facebook’s Graph Search

So, the news has been out for a week - Facebook have launched their new search product, ‘Graph Search’ (We pulled together some of the best articles and analysis last week).

This week, a couple of sideways looks at the service. First, Mashable highlight a video from Nick Douglas showing how use of the service can pretty quickly descend into something pretty creepy. Second, Dan Lyons pre-emptively groups Graph Search into a list of Facebook’s biggest flops in a sceptical look at the future of the new technology.

Two exciting pieces of Useful Social Media news

The more observant amongst you will have noticed our website looks a bit different this week. We've had a redesign. The aim is to put useful content in front of you - making it easy to find, easy to read (and easy to share). Over the last year or so we've published over 250 original articles of social media analysis, insight and interviews. The new site is designed to help you find it, and use it. Any feedback on the (currently beta, and very much unfinished) site, please let us know.

We're running a new (free) webinar: In the run up to our Corporate Social Media Summit in New York, we're putting together a webinar featuring three of our key speakers sharing practical insight on one of the biggest topics we'll be covering. If you want to learn more about embedding social across your company with the CMO of Sears, VP of Social at Wells Fargo and Senior Director of Digital from Thomson Reuters, then register for the webinar here.

That's all for this week. Until next time!

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