Brand Central Station

(From Bulldog Reporter’s PR University)
When:   July 21, 2010
Time:  1-5pm EDT
Location:  Online
Cost:  $ 695 (early-bird discounts available)

Half-Day Webinar for Communicators at Food Manufacturers, Beverage Producers, Grocery Stores, Kitchen Suppliers, and Specialty Food Retailers.  Moderated by renowned social media expert, blogger, consultant and trainer, Sally Falkow, APR.

Use advanced social media marketing strategies to skyrocket visibility and sales— frontline practitioners reveal how to build loyalty, website traffic, press coverage, client satisfaction and sales

In just one-half day, you’ll cover:

• Best practices for using Twitter as a food and beverage marketing tool
• Key elements every food or beverage online newsroom must have to boost press coverage and Google search ranking
• Which social media promotions work best to boost trackable sales now?
• How to create communities of evangelists for your food or beverage
• How to track online conversations and mentions of your product—and how to respond when you don’t like what you hear
• How to create a cost-effective social media strategic plan “step-by-step”
• A bad review on food and beverage websites and blogs: What you can and should do about it
• Cultivating food and beverage bloggers and websites: What works and what doesn’t
• How to decide which social media are most valuable for your product . . . and which you can ignore
• What should your online messaging strategy be—and how can you communicate it in just 140 characters?
• To blog or not to blog: How to assess blogging costs vs. benefits
• How to build a large and loyal following on Facebook
• Most effective uses of online video—and what you need (and don’t need) to produce your own
• And many, many more tips, tricks, trends and inside approaches

Hear and confer with communicators from General Mills, Campbell Soup, and other food and beverage brands like yours, as well as other social media experts, who will share their “war stories” and valuable lessons learned.

Register Now (Early-Bird Discounts Available)

Plenty of media sources reported server crashes for some retailers hoping to cash in on a “Cyber Monday” sales bounce to kick off the holiday shopping season.  But while 404 messages were as common as slip-and-fall incidents in the parking lot of your local mall, the damage to concerned retailers (i.e. Victoria’s Secret, The Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Borders, Comp.USA and Home Depot to name a few) could be significant.

Here’s why:

This holiday season is brewing up a “perfect storm” for a financial disaster when it comes to Q4 sales for retailers.  Not only is 2008′s holiday shopping season five days shorter (thanks to the floating Thanksgiving holiday and leap year), it also has one fewer weekends than last year.  Add to that the fact that we’ve all just learned that the US has been in a financial recession since last December (still not clear as to what took so damn long to figure that one out) and a majority of consumers are saying they’re tightening their spending belt this year.

The result: it looks like the first few days of the holiday shopping season will be the only chance any retailer stands for making a “silk purse” out of the sow’s ear that is 2008.

Prelminary reports on Black Friday and the following weekend were that sales figures were up marginally over 2007 (+3%) – but none of the pundits are expecting that positive margin to hold.

Monday was a bad time to have your server go down.

I’m sure we’ll get plenty of explanations as to “why” things happened the way they did.  Let’s hope these retailers are around next year to put the lessons they’ve learned to good use.

Earlier this week, we ran an article that featured some brand-awareness research conducted by Mintel International.  We’ve had an opportunity to correspond with the Mintel folks again and they sent us this additional information on a consumer study they conducted that spotlights retail opportunities this “economically-challenged” holiday shopping season. 

For retailers of all size, this report is worth reading:

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