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

Count me among the 11%.

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.

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.

Listen: It is very important to “listen” to what people are talking about your brand, your competitors and the industry as a whole. People and their opinions influence your customers. Watch out for any complaints against you or your competitors, as it is the best opportunity to showcase your customer service to them and show that you care and value customers.
Potential customers also look for others opinions before they make the purchase decision.

Participate: It not about just listening, you need to get engaged and converse with people. If you respond timely to any of the questions it reassures the faith in your brand among the people. Even if your brand is not talked about its essential to know the key influencers and what are they talking about. Make a plan and start conversation at relevant places and establish your footprint so that you are equipped for any future talks of your brand.

Respond: When you are monitoring the conversations you know the happenings and can implement relevant responses. A proper response goes a long way in spreading the good about your brand in these times of the ripple effect like Twitter.

Tools: There are many paid and free tools to keep a tab on the conversations. It could be as simple as setting an alert through Google, Yahoo etc, searching for your brand name or the relevant keywords on Twitter, Social Media aggregators like Social Mention, Same Point, Backtype.

There are paid tools, which help in monitoring and analyzing the brand such as radian6, Collective intellect, TechrigySM2 to name a few.

About Position2
Position2 is a leading Search & Social Media Marketing firm that delivers continuous growth for its customers through its proprietary “Surround & Intent Marketing” methodology. The company’s adaptive technology solutions are customizable to customers’ evolving marketing needs. It delivers integrated Search & Social Media Marketing solutions that engages prospects at multiple touch-points in the online environment. For more details, Please visit http://www.position2.com

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.

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.

That was until the Internet and attendant technologies made measurement of every customer interaction with a commercial message a measurable event. Clients, sitting along side their agencies and the media reps who sold them the space, could see exactly what was working and what wasn’t.

And not much was.

Not all of the conventional marketing and advertising wisdom had to be thrown out the window – but a lot of things had to change in order to make sense of the new realities of an interactive and completely measurable medium. The marketing profession – both on the client side and on the agency/media side – has been scrambling to find ways to produce results from online campaigns that meet reasonable expectations of management.

Traditional display advertising, like print ads in newspapers and magazines, seem to take up plenty of real estate on the web page, but no matter how many impressions the web site is able to guarantee, there has not been a reliable methodology in place for associating the media inventory purchased with the customer transactions that result.

PR efforts – attempts to tell the client’s story in the form of editorial content – are helpful in forming opinion but usually lack a significant or engaging call to action. Consumers may be educated, but the ability to act on that education is an issue.

There are a lot of possible solutions out there. And one of them debuted this last Spring (on April 20th) at ad:Tech in San Francisco. Hydra, one of the largest CPA ad services in the country announced its partnership with OnDialog, Inc. Leveraging the combined resources of OnDialog (and its partnership with landing page optimization company, Site Tuners), Hydra now claims an ability to increase conversion rates of online ad campaigns by as much as 80%.

But first, a little background on Hydra. Hydra is the largest and fastest-growing, pure performance-based, CPA affiliate network. For those of you not familiar with Internet ad-speak, that means that Hydra produces and manages online ad campaigns for clients and gets paid only when a customer is captured by the campaign. This is the same premise as the old “per inquiry” television ads that allowed television stations running the ads (usually late at night) to receive a fee for each sale made as a result of the broadcast of the ad.  Similar campaigns in magazines required the advertiser paid the magazine a percentage of the orders received using the order form from the magazine.

As a performance-based, CPA network, it’s in Hydra’s best interest to make sure the landing pages customers click-through to are effective and hard-working.

Enter OnDialog/Site Tuners.

The Site Tuners engine allows OnDialog to create customized landing pages from a set of variable elements. As customers click and interact with the landing pages, OnDialog learns what elements perform the best and serve the most effective content accordingly. At any given point in a campaign, the OnDialog/Site Tuners system can test up to 10,000 different combinations of elements sewn together in various combinations to create a myriad of landing pages.

As time goes on, the effectiveness of the landing pages continues to improve and additional customer data is fed back to the creative team for the on-going development of more and more effective page elements. For a company like Hydra, shortening the “learning curve” of what makes a landing page effective is paramount. The partnership with OnDialog/Site Tuners does that in a big way.

In my conversation with Mason Wiley, SVP of Marketing at Hydra, he explained why the OnDialog/Site Tuners relationship is so important to Hydra:

“We have a lot of entrepreneurial clients who need to make sure every dollar they spend online is working as hard as possible for them. Our model offers clients an opportunity to run a high-impact, online campaign with no upfront expense because clients pay on the back-end.”

“Only the biggest companies could run campaigns like this before – now anybody can. Our CPA model helps make things accessible.”

The technology can also be used in the creation of display ads to be placed in web sites as part of a larger campaign. Those ads, like the landing pages, can be built on the fly from a database of elements hosted by OnDialog/Site Tuners and placed via Hydra. The more successful ads (and elements) are then used and enhanced for future placements over the duration of the campaign.

Hydra’s partnership with OnDialog positions the ad network as one of the first adopters of this kind of technology. “We’re thrilled to be working with OnDialog as this partnership further builds on Hydra’s suite of services for maximizing campaign performance,” said Zac Brandenberg, CEO of Hydra.

So, what does all this mean for marketers? Well, it looks like it could be a significant breakthrough in the world of online advertising. The ability to test literally thousands of variations of your landing pages and ads and then review the data and make creative decisions as a result is significant. The thought that this kind of service would be offered on a “use it first, pay us when we perform” basis is outstanding.

One word of caution, though. Companies that provide marketing services on a “per inquiry” basis don’t do it out of the goodness of their heart. They’re experts at what it takes to make things work and they expect to be compensated appropriately for it. This caveat is issued in two, primary areas:

• Creative ownership of campaigns and landing pages is too often given to people who don’t understand how or why things work in the world of advertising or web development. Hydra, for example, has their own creative team who understand how to get customers to engage, where links and buttons should go, etc. Let them do their job!
• From a cost standpoint, remember that nothing is ever, really free. The back-end fees for a CPA campaign like this may appear large when compared to other ad options – but remember, you’re paying for results here. Be prepared to provide some money into an escrow account (in some cases) to reassure the service provider (no matter who it is) that you have the funds to make payment in the event of success.
• Also, I’ve run “per inquiry” campaigns where a “minimum fee” was expected in the event the campaign under-performed. Realize that there are fixed costs to any campaign and some providers may require it.As a special note – I did not discuss either of these financial points with the folks from Hydra, so please don’t misconstrue my observations as a reflection of their policies or practices.
   
• And finally, if you’re considering using a service like Hydra or any other kind of “per inquiry” marketing program, it’s vitally important you understand what the “lifetime value” is of a customer relationship.

Do you know what a customer is really worth to you?

If you don’t know how to figure that out then it looks like I’ve got more blogging to do, doesn’t it. We’ll cover that later on next week.

Nope.  Probably not.

Fun parody, though.

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.

Let’s take a step back for a second and recognize some of the institutional barriers to effective organizational communication inside your local charity/non-profit.  From my experience, there seem to be three or four problems existing simultaneously in almost every non-profit organization:

1. A conflict of “mission” over “survival” that often results in moral dilemas turning on doing the right thing for those being served or doing the right thing to keep the enterprise functioning.
2. A tendancy for “mission creep” in good years and a reluctance to cut back on programs or initiatives when the money dries up or – heaven forbid – the problem is solved.
3. A failure to plan for leadership succession within the organization which – eventually – leads to insulation of a key group of volunteers who “do all the work” while everyone else attracted to the charity are alienated and/or driven away.
4. A reluctance to try anything new or to try a different approach to an existing program because of a perceived lack of funds, personnel or knowledge when it comes to implementation. 

Any one of these obstacles can present an almost impossible to overcome scenario for a Web 2.0 program – but that’s where the savvy marketer needs to explain the ultimate benefit of a social marketing solution to the problems faced by the charity:

Social marketing is all about engaging people and getting them to become rabid fans of your cause.  And with a group of people rallied around us (and what we stand for), there isn’t anything we can’t do.

It seems a key ingredient for success of a charity or non-profit organization is the engagement (and encouragement) of its members and the public at-large. 

Does that sound at all familar?  It should.

A vast majority of the tools available to people, businesses and brands using the social web to reach out, rally and remind fans and friends are intended to engage the public on one level or another.

It appears (to me, anyway) the key to social engagement is to draw them in, listen to what they have to say, respect divergent points of view and bravely state your thoughts and opinions.  It’s really all about good social ettiquite, after all.

Here are a few things to remember about creating social engagement among the members of your charity/non-profit:

1. Remember that social media is a conversation between people.  If you want to be a brilliant conversationalist and truly capture peoples’ hearts and minds on behalf of your cause, you need to ask people what they think and actually listen to what they have to say.
2. Involve your followers in the decision-making process for your charity/non-profit.
3. Work on establishing a personal connection between the values of your charity/non-profit and the people you meet online.  If people see a natural fit between how they see themselves (self-values) and how they percieve the mission of a specific charity, they’re more likely to become die-hard fans (or possibly even brand evangelists).
4. Keep the conversation going with your followers by being active.  Keep your information up-to-date, your status updates fresh and if you’re on Twitter, send out a handful of tweets every day.
5. A part of the keeping the conversation going is responding to contact in a timely manner.  If your cause has a Facebook page, a Twitter account or a blog, you need to make sure all of that content is refreshed and current.
6. Limit your channels of communication to keep all of the conversations and updates to a managable level.
7. Make sure your social marketing effort is a reponsibility shared by everyone.  It should become part of the daily routine for paid staff and key volunteers should be able to access those same resources and support the brand on their own.

So is your charity or non-profit considering adopting a more agressive social media marketing program?  If so, you may want to make sure you have taken the time to think through how that program should look and the resource demands that will result.

Want to learn more, please feel free to contact me directly for a no-obligation telephone consultation.