Brand Central Station

(from Ragan Communications)

When:  Thursday, June 24, 2010
Time:  3-4:15 pm EDT
Where:  Online
Cost:  $209

It’s a new decade in a new century … surely strategic communication must have evolved over the past several years? Yes—and no. While the explosion of social media—and the critical role it plays in reaching our audiences—has added new powers to our communication programs and campaigns, many of us still put far too much emphasis on tactics. Strategy is still you thinking in the biggest way possible about your business, and you don’t need a social media networking poll to tell you that.

Join Shonali Burke, Principal of Shonali Burke Consulting, as she gives an overview of why strategy is still important and how to demystify it. You’ll learn how to frame your communication strategy with the end-results in mind, and tie that strategy to your organization’s business objectives which is, after all, the reason our profession exists.

You will learn:

• The difference between strategy and tactics
• How social media should fit into your overall communication strategy
• How to connect your efforts to your organization’s KPIs
• How the 5W’s and H of public relations can help you frame your strategy
• Why good measurement is critical to the success of your communication program
• And more!

Register Now

This infographic appeared on Mashable this morning and I thought it was worth sharing.  Where do you fall?

Count me among the 11%.

Application Platform Enables Brands To Create a Custom Facebook Fan Page In Minutes At Minimal Cost

June 14, 2010 – Oakland, Calif. – Today, any brand can create an engaging, robust Facebook fan page within minutes and at a cost that is less than one tank of gas, with a new, disruptive platform launched by North Social (www.northsocial.com), an offshoot of Oakland-based Incubator North Venture Partners.

The powerfully simple suite of applications for Facebook enables any brand, big or small, to run viral social media-based promotions, upload photo showcases, create a unique landing page, connect to Twitter and Yelp, link to e-commerce sites, offer coupons and sweepstakes, and more. The North Social Facebook platform launches with fifteen applications, which can all be installed with a single user account, starting at only $29/month.

“Facebook has become the most powerful way for brands to reach their audience, but not every brand has the budget or technical expertise to harness its capabilities,” said Alex Bernstein, Partner, North Venture Partners. “We’re pleased to give brands, agencies and consultants simple tools that remove all obstacles to jumping into the social media revolution.”

The easy-to-use North Social Facebook platform allows any brand with a fan page to install all fifteen custom page applications within minutes. Each application comes with a control panel which allows the features and content on the page to be quickly customized by the user. This unique content management interface enables users to create, update, and manage multi-tab promotional pages at a fraction of the cost of what web developers typically charge to create a single static page.

To see the North Social applications in action, visit their website.

About North Venture Partners
North is a brand-centric incubator that builds, launches, and accelerates the growth of innovative brands, products, and spin out companies. To learn more about North and how they identify and capture disruptive growth opportunities, visit their corporate website.

Besides when you’re at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, of course.

The answer is when you’re trying to drag your business (or your client) into the realm of social media and/or online marketing (no, they’re not exactly the same thing – but that’s a topic for another post at another time). 

(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.

One of the great things about online marketing is the ability to breakdown results to the most “granular” level.  It sounds great – but the biggest problem with all of the great measurement technology is that most marketers are still operating with a pre-online marketing set of expectations.  As a result, the assumptions they make about the impact their online marketing program will have can be way off.

Gary Stein, writing for ClickZ, outlined the five biggest mistakes people make when it comes to their social media campaigns.  I’ll summarize them here, but strongly recommend you read the whole article.

Gary points out that success in the world of social media requires more than just showing up.  The assumptions they bring into the new media marketplace can lead to some disappointing (and sometimes non-existant) results.  Gary’s list of big mistakes:

1. Don’t assume your fans/followers will see a post.  An occassional post from you will get lost in the wash of other tweets, status updates, notes, shared content and more.
2. Be careful not to double-count people as fans or followers.  Some of the folks who follow you on Twitter may also be a connected to you via LinkedIn.  But they’re still just one person – don’t count them as two.
3. Driving traffic to your site via Twitter, Facebook, et al requires more than just dropping in links on your updates … COUNT THE CLICKS!
4. Pay attention to how your brand comes up in search on social networks.  Tools like SocialSeek are very helpful when it comes to doing this.
5. Don’t get caught up in how many followers or fans you have – focus on the folks who engage with your brand.

Gary sums it up this way:

The bottom line with social media measurement: we’re in some really early stages and there are plenty of bright lights to distract us. The biggest mistake of all, of course, is not to measure. With the effort you’re putting into social media, it’s like that famous bumper sticker: “If you’re not concerned, you’re not paying attention.”

Check out the entire article here.

by Mike Bawden
President & CEO; Brand Central Station

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has dropped out of the Twitterverse a time or two. Right now, I’m on a Facebook diet – only updating my status in the morning and checking on “friends” at lunch and before I turn out the lights in my office at the end of the day.

I’m blogging again, but only at night. I cue up the posts for the next day and if I don’t get much into the pipeline, I deal with it.

I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with social media that only my Bowflex and treadmill enjoy. I know these things can be good for me, but they take up soooooo much time.

Of course, I don’t work up a sweat with my Bloglines account like I do when I run for 40 minutes. And my wife and family seem to appreciate my time spent at the home gym more than they do on YouTube.

But I need to be here. I need to work on my business’ cyber-presence in small, digestable chunks. Not because my life depends on it, but because my livelihood does.

It’s important for PR practitioners, advertising creatives and marketing consultants to spend time in the social web – learning about what’s new and, more importantly, what can’t (or shouldn’t) be done. We have to learn how to manage the overlap between time spent in the real world and time spent in the virtual one, for one very important reason:

Someone has to explain to clients how it’s all done. And we need to be credible when we do.

I can’t tell you how many times I”ve sat through presentations where people started pitching Web 2.0 ideas to a client who didn’t have a clue. There’s nothing worse than the pit that develops in the bottom of your stomach when that client turns to you and asks for confirmation of a half-baked idea from some marketing pinhead who doesn’t know his widget from a hole in the ground.

But even if you know about all the cool technology, soon-to-be-coming applications, theories on WOM Marketing, stories about guerilla marketing, legends of buzz building … whatever. If you don’t know how to do it and keep it from overtaking your life, your advice to a client is nearly worthless.

The client will get that. They’ll re-trench back into older, 20th-century marketing tactics that won’t ever work like they used to. And worst of all, you’ll lose credbility in their eyes.

Dropping out of the social web is a bit asocial for a marketing guy. Having a client fall off the social media bandwagon can hurt you far worse than it hurts them.

So, I’ve re-emerged. Climbed back on. We’ll see how far we can go – and enjoy the ride in the process.

Ad Age Global reported that more than 400 “hooligans” crashed Georgina Hobday’s 16th birthday party in Brighton, England after she advertised it on Facebook.  The report in the UK’s Daily Express, said the group of party crashers included a 20-strong gang of thugs known as the Facebook Republican Army.

(more…)

All the marketing pundits are starting to weigh in on the problems businesses are having in converting social media eyeballs into cold, hard dollars and cents.  In his article on the “Inconvenient Truth about Social Media Marketing,” marketing pro Aaron Wall says:

“There’s just one — major — problem with spending so much time and effort on capturing the eyeballs of social media users. Social media is easy to hype because there is a lot of traffic on social media sites. But if you try to do anything with social media traffic to convert it to revenue, you will be hard-pressed — unless you are selling CPM-based advertising.”

But that may, in fact, be just the problem. (more…)

I caught onto this article during my daily scan through blogs and articles.  It seems the effectiveness of ads run in social networking spaces (like Facebook, bebo and MySpace) aren’t as lucrative as originally thought.  But the real news isn’t the statement that Google’s $900 million guaranteed ad deal doesn’t look like it will pan out – the real news is that “the MySpace Generation may be getting annoyed with ads and a bit bored with profile pages.”

Yikes

(more…)