Brand Central Station

(from Localeze)
Using Localeze Premium Listings, Feature Allows Consumers to Tag Location Details in Tweets

VIENNA, Va. (June 15, 2010) – Localeze, the largest business listings identity management company for local search, today announced its partnership with Twitter for its new Twitter Places feature. Localeze will provide Twitter with 14 million local search business listings, which allow users to tag tweets with locations, helping to establish a consistent and robust online identity for local businesses.

Localeze provides the standardization of local search listings needed to create a consistent anchor identity for businesses, including name, address and phone number (NAP), on local search and social platforms, including Twitter. Localeze’s process of managing and enhancing listings allows businesses to directly take control of their online identity by providing a new level of access, governance and consistency.

“Local search business listings are one of the foundational pieces of context adding insight to social media interaction as they give users critical information about nearby places,” said Jeff Beard, president, Localeze. “For exploding social platforms like Twitter, it is essential to share where conversations are taking place so that consumers can fully engage with local businesses.”

To access Twitter Places, users need to enable Twitter’s “tweet with your location” feature and click “add your location.” Selecting the location populates a list of nearby Twitter Places offered by Localeze.

Localeze currently provides 14 million local search business listings, including nearly 600,000 verified and managed by local businesses to more than 90 local search platform and application partners.

About Localeze
Localeze is the largest business listings identity management provider for local search.  As a trusted partner, Localeze maintains direct, authorized relationships with local search platforms, national and regional brands, channel partners and local businesses. The company provides businesses essential tools to verify, manage and enhance the identity of their local listings across the Web. Through these relationships and access to authoritative local business information, Localeze is the largest provider of trusted, enhanced online local business listings in the local search industry. Localeze is a privately held company headquartered in Vienna, Virginia. For more information visit www.localeze.com.

(Editor’s Note: This is one of my favorite blog posts – not just for the comments it generated but for the way it addressed a re-occuring theme: that, somehow, PR is dead and Social Media killed it.  C’mon people.  Get over it.)

I’m going to try and infuse something that’s been missing from this whole “Social Media is killing PR” meme that seems to be sweeping through the Blogosphere/Twitterverse lately. 

A little common sense.

This maelstrom has been whipped up, primarily, by PR’s and journalists/bloggers working in the technology space.  And the echo is practically deafening.

While there have been plenty of valid points raised about the nature of public relations, the profession’s current and future place in the enterprise, the role of blogging and other Web 2.0 apps in brand building, sales and CRM – I’ve come to one major conclusion:

Social media “experts” need to get over themselves and PR people need to stop looking over their shoulder to see who’s trying to do them in.

(more…)

I’ve seen this before, but it’s still cool and deserves to be shared …

I had an opportunity to interview with Matt Mickiewizc, the US representative for 99designs.  The site, a spinoff from Sitepoint, puts clients in direct contact with graphic designers from around the world.

Over 22,000 graphic designers from over 100 countries.

And the results can be pretty amazing.  So far, 99designs has helped broker over 14,000 projects, soliciting creative ideas from places like Africa, South America, Asia and all over Europe and North America.  Each project is presented as a “contest,” complete with prize money and a creative brief to provide direction. Each entry submitted by a designer is posted for public display (check out examples of contests here, here and here).

(more…)

Welcome to the world of nano-blogging.  Does Twitter have anything to fear from Flutter?

Nope.  Probably not.

Fun parody, though.

It started off inocently enough.  But Beth Brody from BrodyPR made a simple mistake.  She e-mailed the same pitch to a big list of contacts and included that contact list in the CC field which ignited a series of “Reply All” responses that, in tun, went to the same distribution list.

Over and over again.

It’s sort of like the media relations equivalent of being at a rock concert and the audience gets more caught up in keeping that damn beachball bouncing around in the crowd than they do in what’s going on onstage.  Then, the next thing you know, the grumpy musical purists start yelling for people to sit down and the kids start complaining that nobody ever lets them have any fun anymore …

Lucky for me (I guess) that I was at a client meeting while all this was going on and I just walked in on the carnage afterward.  Today there’s been a virtual pile-up on the social news media highway – and I’m viewing it as a first responder.

Maybe “pile up” isn’t nearly as accurate as “pile on” when you see how other PR professionals took advantage of Beth Brody’s lapse in judgement to cast dispersions, fluff up their own reputation and build blog traffic.

(more…)

Publishing your “great, American novel” just got easier.

Gone are the days of sitting in a little cottage overlooking a pond in the back yard.  Authors everywhere can now come out of seclusion (at least in a virtual sense) and get their work published much easier than ever before.  A press release from Fast Pencil (www.fastpencil.com) explains how the free service (for writers) now integrates social media into the mix.

(more…)

ReadWriteWeb had this great piece about how to improve your Facebook persona and author Richard MacManus boiled it down to five tips:

1. Update your status regularly.  I try to do it once a day, but Richard says even just once every few day is enough – just keep it up to date and interesting.
2. Use groups.  This is like inviting all your Facebook friends to a party and keeping the ones that know each other in the same rooms.  By grouping your friends, you can keep your focus on the conversations in each room rather than trying to hear one or another over the din of everyone else.
3. Add content from other sources.  But be careful how you do it. 
4. Brighten up your profile with pictures and videos.  Adding multimedia makes your Facebook profile interesting.

Search out the best Facebook applications.  Thousands of apps have been built over the last year and a half.  Searching through the app directory should help you identify apps you can add to your profile that helps keep your online persona focused and useful.

You can read the full text of Richard’s article here.

To read Richard’s article on how to make Facebook useful again (yes, truly useful), click here.

I received a queery from the folks at Trackle.com last week and have to say, it looks interesting.

The site purports to be a service like Google Alerts – but with lots of added features.  Here’s some of the info sent ahead to me:

A free Web app that acts as a standing search engine, Trackle searches the Internet for you, updating you on the news and events you want to know about. Unlike similar services, such as Google Alerts, Trackle doesn’t just search for keywords. It incorporates change into the keywords and provides real-time alerts on the subjects you choose – as often as you choose, and all in one place.

For example, if you see something on Amazon.com you’d like to buy, but only want to spend $50, Trackle can monitor the item and let you know when it reaches that designated price. You can also track things relevant to your location by inputting your address. Trackle will show you local activities, neighborhood crime and even home values.

Keyword searches make it easy to search any subject of interest to you, existing category searches also include: video games, social media, movie releases, politics, sports, health, travel and personal finance, among many others.

Trackle keeps all results on your personalized site, and sends you a daily email with new information, but you can also choose to receive real-time alerts via email, SMS text or RSS feed. Updates can also be shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Now, does it do everything it claims?  I don’t know.  I’m going to use it and report back.  In the meantime, if anyone else uses Trackle, hit me up off-blog and let me know about your experiences.

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Anheuser-Busch InBev NV is trying to reverse a slide in market share for Bud Light by ginning up another 15 ads for the brand. All this in response to the first drop in market share for Bud’s younger sibling in over 25 years.

The ads are set to break when the NFL football season kicks off.  The ads will continue to make people laugh, concentrating on bringing back the humor associated with the brand over the past generation.  What does this mean for the often-lame “Drinkability” campaign?  According to the article, it sounds like DDB is planning on sticking with the theme but will freshen things up a bit.

The ads will refine the company’s “Drinkability” campaign — which sought to persuade drinkers that Bud Light is neither too heavy nor too light in taste — that began last year and has struggled to gain traction.

Some creative executives at Omnicom Group‘s DDB Worldwide, an ad agency working on Bud Light, struggled with the “Drinkability” strategy while creating this year’s Super Bowl commercials, finding it difficult to fit in the “Drinkability” message without sacrificing humor, according to a person familiar with the matter.

So, don’t plan on the return of Spuds McKenzie – but for those of you who are jonesing for some classic Bud Light moments, check out this link.

by Mike Bawden
President & CEO; Brand Central Station

These are indeed interesting times in which we all live. The pace of life has picked up so dramatically in the last ten years, I question our society’s combined ability to adapt without some kind of major cultural meltdown occuring during the process. But still, I have faith.

With rapid change comes great opportunity, as well as terrible risk.

From society as a whole, there comes a desperate cry for sanity and creativity. For compassion and stewardship. For accountability and self-discipline.

As marketers, I think we all owe it to our customers, clients, communities, employees and partners to do the best we can with what we have. To make a positive difference in the world. And to encourage everyone – whether they’re our kids or our customers – to be smart and discriminating consumers of everything we’re told to believe.

In the past fifteen years, the Internet has evolved from a loose connection of crude email servers into an interactive, social network that connects us globally. For the most part, we’ve recognized that and call it Web 2.0.

Well folks, maybe it’s time we come up with Customer 2.0. They need to be better informed and capable of handling the ever-increasing flow of information, images and noise that comes their way.

As marketers, it’s our responsibility.

Bill Bernbach may have passed away from leukemia in 1982, but the work produced by DDB under his supervision in the 60′s and 70′s is the epitome of great advertising.  While every student of the business remembers the “Think Small” campaign for VW, we often forget how counter-intuitive VW’s entire positioning was to the automotive market of the day.

This classic ad explains why VW didn’t discount the Beatle the way other car manufacturers slashed prices to move stock each model year.

Politically incorrect – maybe so – but still another in the line of classic VW ads from Bill Bernbach’s book.