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
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.
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.
Editor’s Note: This is the first guest post by a contributing writer to the Brand Central Station Blog. Mary Ann Johnson is a member of Team Position2, experts in search and social media marketing and sent us this post on behalf of the team. You can learn more about Position2 by visiting their web site.
by Team Position2
Social Media Monitoring has become a hot topic of discussion over recent times. A brand makes or breaks its name by its users.
With the huge outbreak in the online media and platforms like, blogs, forums, microblogs and different types of social networking sites people have an effective place to express their opinions and influence others. In the online world people own the brand. Social Media Monitoring is to keep track of all the conversations happening in the online world.
Social Media Monitoring is all about figuring on what the objectives are, listening, refining the talks, analyzing and taking action.
Social Media Monitoring and analysis can be used by a brand to improve a product, get feedbacks, customer service, market research or any marketing and communication.
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).
For decades, advertising agencies and the media have operated under a shared myth about what they do. The canard runs something like this: “Create brilliant advertising that gets people’s attention, run it in enough places the consumers can’t get away from it and eventually you’ll see your share of market increase as a result.”
When it came to generating measurable performance, agencies and the media gave lip-service to “Return on Marketing Investment” and other things that sounded very measurable and analytical; but the hard truth of the matter was that advertising has always been a fairly imprecise endeavor – and everybody was fine with the smoke and mirrors of it all.
Web 2.0 marketing appeals on a number of levels to charities and non-profits. It can be inexpensive. It’s trendy. It can appear to be very democratic – allowing all with an opinion to chime in on issues they feel are important.
The truth is, however, that what makes the social web such an intriguing tool for charities and non-profits faces many of the same obstacles those charities and non-profits faced in their pre-technology days. Enthusiasm for a new medium can overcome some of those barriers initially; but in the long run, it’s the institutional thinking and long-established traditions and taboos that can doom a non-profit’s attempt to join the social web.
There’s a tug-of-war going on between traditional marketers and those who consider themselves on the vanguard of the social web. This post by Mitch Joel, about the end of THE BIG IDEA, is indicative of this battle.
Some consider it “old school” to pitch THE BIG IDEA to a client when, in the age of the Internet, the individual is the thing and success is only, really attainable through the successful implementation of a succession of smaller, more highly targeted and customer-reponsive ideas. Big ideas are a thing of the past and should be relegated to Mad Men (or Bewitched, I suppose). It’s all about the small ideas that can make a difference.
On the PR side we see the same thing happening. Big media, newswires, mass audiences are breaking down (either as part of their own strategy or by circumstance) into smaller, more focused publications, distribution channels that often bypass reporters and editors and go straight to the people who have the need to know. It’s the triumph of small over big.
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.
This is Brand Central Station - a place where marketers can find helpful information; discover new approaches to old problems; and make connections with other marketers and service providers.
The free document library on Brand Central Station has over 25 helpful downloads for you that don't require you to sign in and won't result in a follow-up sales call. Latest additions to the Library include:
Download a free copy of a summary report on international corporate values from the ECCO International Public Relations Network. As a member of ECCO, Brand Central Station is able to make this exclusive offer to our web visitors.
