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)

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.

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

I highly recommend checking out this blog if you’re trying to figure out Twitter and micro-blogging in general.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

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). 

Specifically, we’re talking about companies contemplating – or trying to cope with – the following:

• Blogs
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Private social networks (i.e. Ning or Webs.com)
• eNewsletters
• Social Bookmarking Tools
• Virtual Couponing
• RSS-driven Content
• Webinars
• Social Media Monitoring
• Blogger Relations
• Discussion Boards
• Social Media Releases

… and the list goes on (and on).

If you’ve been there before, you know exactly what I mean.  The game-changing nature of these tools opens up a range of possibilities (and potential) for your business.  And because it’s so easy (and usually so cheap) to get into it, enthusiastic marketing people tend to fall all over themelves on their way in only to find themselves neck deep in a morasse of tweets, posts, updates and more that consumes a lot of time and doesn’t produce much in the way of results.

So, what’s my point? 

It’s this:

You have to take time out to figure out a mission for each message and each tool in your social marketing toolbox before you get to work.  Go in with a purpose and some idea of how you’re going to use each of these snazzy new applications to help you get there.

And most of all, don’t be afraid to leave something on the table for later.

I’ve been in a lot of meetings with clients and agencies where there’s interest in a new online service or application but noone has a clue as to where it fits in the mix.  The intentions may be right and honorable, but the execution is doomed to failure unless someone learns how, when, where and why that tool is the riht tool for the job.

If you don’t know what to do with a new technology or a new social media opportunity, you have to either be ready to fail the first few times out of the gate with it or to put it aside to see (and learn from) the mistakes others make.  There’s no lack of “early adopters” in this line of work, so all you have to do is wait and watch and then jump in after the smoke clears.

Making the mission fit the tool …
Key to making social media work for your business (or your client) is making sure you have a good, working understanding of what each piece in your social marketing toolbox can do and how that capability can help tell your brand’s story in a compelling and relevant way. 

It should seem obvious, but make sure you’ve spent time figuring out the best way to use Facebook, Twitter and the rest before you test things out on your brand or your client’s business.  Less obvious is the need to narrow the focus for each tool from what it can do to what it should do with respect to your brand’s story.

Just because you can get thousands of followers on Twitter doesn’t make it a good fit for your brand.  If, on the other hand, you’re able to identify key bloggers, writers and industry thought leaders’ Twitter ID’s you may want to consider using Tweets as an easy and convenient way to keep them in the loop and to alert them of new developments.

Taking that line of thinking to the next level, if your team decides you want to maintain several Twitter feeds as a core element of your social marketing program, you need to have some idea of which application will give you the control you need to manage and monitor activity on each feed.  And for heaven’s sake, don’t just go out there and recommend a social media strategy to a client (or your boss) without having tested it out on your own first!

Knowing the practical application of each social media tool is just as important as clearly defining the story you want to tell with it.  Just as I encourage clients to develop a message matrix – I insist we do the same thing when it comes to developing their social media marketing program.

If I don’t, I run the risk of being the “social media tool” at our next meeting.

Nope.  Probably not.

Fun parody, though.

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.

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.

They’re definitely worth checking out.

1. Twitority – authority based Twitter search that lets you find out is the most authoritative Twitter member based on specific keywords.
2. Tweetree - puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context.
3. JustTweetIt – Lets you find other Tweeters that share your interests, search for friends, and keep up with up with the latest Twitter tools.
4. Twitemperature – tells you whether you’re hot or cold on Twitter based on your Tweets and not based on the number of your followers
5. Twtpoll - create  a simple poll by entering your Twitter name, type of question, your question in 140 characters or less, and answer choices.
6. Twopolar – gives you the hottest and latest trends on Twitter for the last 2 and 8 hours, for the  day, for the week, for the month, and ever since Twitter was released.
7. DestroyToday – a new Twitter client built on Adobe AIR platform.
8. Twitterbuttons – Twitter button generator; lets you embed the buttons to your blogs, sites, and social networking profiles.
9. Twalala – a new Twitter client that lets you control what you and what you don’t see on your Twitter stream. 
10. TwitchBoard – serves as your Twitter switchboard for sending your Tweets to other social networking sites and media. Currently works with Delicious only. 
11. Twitvisor – an alternative  Twitter interface that also lets you reply to Tweets.
12. Retweetrank – shows your ranking in terms of retweets from other Twitter users of your Tweets. 
13. Twitrak - lets you select a Twitter member and Trak their basic profile AND their friends and followers on the same page.
14. MyCleenr – lets you sort your friends by their last tweets and allows you to get rid off all the inactive and useless accounts that you are following.
15. TwtCard – create and send a greeting card using Twitter.
16. BubbleTweet – lets you add videos to your Twitter page.
17. TwitterRibbons – allows you to generate follow me on Twitter ads shaped like a ribbon.
18. TwitOrNot – lets you rate your Twitter friends tweets whether hot or not, boring or exciting.
19. Twitterfall – real-time display of the latest Tweets literally falling from the top of the screen going down. 
20. Tweepler – gives you two ways of organizing your Twitter followers – those you want to follow and those whom you want to ignore.
21. Twtwlst – create your wish list 140 character or less on Twitter.
22. TweetEffect – lets you analyze why followers unfollow you through your most latest tweets.
23. Tweetube – share YouTube videos to your Twitter followers easily and quickly.
24. Tweet Replies – receive Twitter replies on your email, RSS or browser
25. Twwttrip – organize your travel itenerary via Tweets.
26. Twippr –  short for “TWItter Payment PRocedure”. It’s like PayPal the Twitter way.
27. Twiturm - store, stream and post  your music the Twitter stream.
28. Tweet3 - lets you manage multiple Twitter account in one interface.
29. TwTask - a sort of  To-do list tool you post on your Twitter updates and manage on the TwTask site.
30. TwitterSheep -  generates a word cloud of your Tweets.
31. NearbyTweets - lets you find other Tweeterers in your vicinity.
32. TweetBackup - should the worst thing happen to your account, this app lets you restore it if you use it before your account gets deleted.
33. CheapTweet - Find the best deals, coupons and sales that people are tweeting about.
34. 21Tweets - Tweet bad habits that you want to get rid of and the service will monitor your progress by reminding you via Tweets.
35. Twisten.FM – FM radio of sorts for Twitter users; it scans Twitter for music tweets.
36. Tweetj - lets you find music that other Twitter users are Tweeting about.
37. Tweetabix - compilation of interviews of Twitter users.
38. TweetBoxLive - receive Tweets via SMS to your mobile phone.
39. Twitter2FF - sync your Twitter and Friendfeed updates/streams.
40. TwittExperts - discover and follow  varies experts on different fields on Twitter.
41. Who Follows Whom – Find out who follows up to 5 Twitter users, as well as who these five users follow. 
42. Twittez - Ask the Twitter universe with the question “Does anyone knows…” and this app will try to find out the answers coming from Twitter users.
43. Twesent - send Twitter virtual presents to your friends. 
44. VacaTweet - set an automatic reply to your Twitter friends when you are out on vacation and could not access Twitter.

For an even larger directory of Twitter-related application directories (no kidding), click here.

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.

Enjoy the weekend.