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.
(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.
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
Jack Bastide, a Twitter tweeter extraordinaire, has just released a new blog that covers all things Twitter. It’s very helpful – especially to a Twitter-newbie like me. And this blog post and intro video helps get you started:
I highly recommend checking out this blog if you’re trying to figure out Twitter and micro-blogging in general.
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).
Posted by Mike Bawden under Marketing Comments Off
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:
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.
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.
Driving traffic to your site via Twitter, Facebook, et al requires more than just dropping in links on your updates … COUNT THE CLICKS!
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.
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.”
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.
So, what use is Twitter? It’s been labeled a chronic time-waster. And for some, it certainly is.
I use Twitter to keep track of marketing trends and business news. But you can do more. Thanks to Arnold Zafra for his post earlier this week to the RotorBlog, here are 44 Twitter-related applications. Some will enhance your productivity. Then again, some may not.
It seems like about half the PR-related tweets on Twitterare about … you guessed it, Twitter. Well, Twitter and social media.
But just like bloggers like to write about blogging, it seems Twitterers like to micro-blog about Twitter. Not that there isn’t some interesting things to note about the service or those who use it. Just from today’s traffic, I found the following articles of interest:
Who uses Twitter? According to this page in Quantcast, 53% of the Tweeps out there are female and more than 70% of them are between the ages of 18 and 49. Eight in ten Twitter users are white and three out of four make in excess of $30k a year.
Twitter currently ranks in the top 250 sites on the ‘net and reaches over 6.1 million people (uniques) every month who visit an average of eight times per month.
Social Media At Work reports that Twitter has now passed the New York Times in traffic.
And while Google’s mantra is to do good (or at leat not to do evil), there are apparenty a few folks who don’t carry that standard over to their Twitter usage – judging from the subject of this page on DiGorno’s plans to deliver pizzas to influential Tweeps. As blogger Matt Rhodes points out, it’s a little weird that the “not delivery” pizza is planning on delivering pizza to catch a buzz on Twitter.
Talk about half-baked.
And finally, there’s this broad look at social media (in general) and Twitter specifically defined as the “best”in social media marketing. This is an informative article, well worth the read. And the sites it links to are worth bookmarking in your browser for future use.
I’ve also been talking to some self-professed “Twitter experts” who have offered to answer your questions here at Brand Central Station, so if you have a Twitter question, send it to me and we’ll post the answers every Friday.
And don’t forget you can follow Brand Central Station on twitter by clicking our Twitter Feed in the right hand column and adding it to your RSS reader.
There seems to be a lot of death in the media business lately. There’s the deathwatch conducted daily via @themediaisdying on Twitter, there’s the whole “Social Media is killing PR”meme and my screed that actually Social Media is killing Journalism. Now Ken Dardis, blogger at Audio Graphics, weighs in on the death of radio as we knew it.
Ironically, Ken may be the “most right” out of all of us.
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There seems to be a lot of death in the media business lately. There’s the deathwatch conducted daily via 
