More Companies Are Turning to Social Media!

David Ranii of McClatchy Newspapers is out with a new article about how many companies are turning to social media, and it's striking when you put it all together!

During the summer Olympics, PC maker Lenovo gave laptops and digital cameras to 100 athletes. The athletes published more than 1,500 posts. Fans responded with 8,000-plus comments.

Companies such as SAS, Red Hat, Blue Cross and others recognize are using blogs, online video, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and more.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina started a Web site promoting a healthful lifestyle. It featured a company executive and an author blogging as they walked 650 miles from Asheville to Wilmington, conducting fitness rallies along the way. More than 6,600 people registered at the site, walk.millionstepmarch.com, and reported walking a total of 350,000 miles.

SAS has made social media part of its standard practice for marketing and communication. SAS employees are posting on blogs, social networking sites, iTunes, YouTube and more. A video featuring Santa posted this month on YouTube is generating some buzz.

Johnson Automotive in Raleigh uses a modern mix of advertising. Its print ads tout that its TV ads - featuring a nasty car salesman who’s a stuffed badger - have gotten millions of hits on YouTube, and include a Web address to the short videos.

Red Hat, the Linux software company, has posted more than a dozen videos on YouTube.

Read the full story here.