Powered Surrounds <b>Social Media</b> Atlanta 2010 with Two Author Events, A Panel <b>...</b>

Austin, TX (PRWEB) November 1, 2010

Powered, a focused social media agency, today detailed its involvement in Social Media Atlanta 2010, a week-long set of events to celebrate the technology and social media marketing achievements of the number two most wired city in the U.S. (according to Forbes). Powered executives and published book authors, Joseph Jaffe and Greg Verdino, will host Author Events, Verdino and Powered CMO Aaron Strout will moderate a panel on Social Media Innovations, and Powered will host a Meet Up, all during the Social Media Atlanta week, running November 8 - 12, 2010.

First up, on Tuesday, November 9, three time published book author and Powered Chief Interruptor, Joseph Jaffe, will host an Author Event, from 3-5 pm at the Newell Rubbbermaid headquarters. Jaffe will be discussing his latest book: Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones. Jaffe will follow the discussion with a Q&A and then book signings. http://socialmediaatlanta.org/jaffeverdino/

That same night, Tuesday, November 9, Powered will host a Meet Up, from 5-7 pm, at Wildfire in the Perimeter Mall area. Jaffe, along with other Powered executives in town for the week, will be in attendance. http://socialmediaatlanta.org/powered-meetup/

Thursday, November 11, another published author, Powered Vice President of Strategy and Solutions, Greg Verdino, will conduct his own Author Event, from 11 am – 12 pm, also at the Newell Rubbermaid headquarters. Verdino will discuss his book, microMARKETING: Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small. Verdino will follow the discussion with a Q&A and then book signings. http://socialmediaatlanta.org/gregverdino/

Immediately following Verdino’s Author Event, he and Powered CMO, Aaron Strout, will moderate a Social Media Innovations panel, hosted by Social Media Atlanta, to feature homegrown innovations. To be held Thursday, November 11th from 1:30-4 pm at InterContinental Hotels Group, the panel discussion will be followed by break-out sessions allowing attendees to interact with the local technologies. http://socialmediaatlanta.org/innovations/

“We are thrilled to have such an active role in Atlanta during its Social Media week,” said Jaffe.

“We have had the privilege of working with several of the great brands, multi national companies based in Atlanta, and look forward to growing partnerships with companies in the city, as more Atlanta-based brands embrace the power of social media to better connect with their customers.”

For more information on Social Media Atlanta 2010, or to register for any of these, and other, free events, please see http://socialmediaatlanta.org/

About Powered:
Powered is a focused social media agency that helps brands fully capitalize on their social initiatives, make them more relevant in an increasingly digital, connected and social world. Austin-based Powered took it’s A game up another notch in early 2010 with acquisitions of three other rock star social media firms: NY-based crayon and Drillteam, and Portland-based StepChange. Now with 70+ employees in its offices, Powered brings its clients "best-in-class" expertise across the social spectrum by offering a combination of strategy, planning, activation and management for social presence and programs including those centered on Facebook, location based/LBS, mobile applications, influencer activation and community building, content marketing and earned media, and experiential marketing.

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Three Tactics to Approach <b>Social Media Marketing</b>

In one sense, 'social media marketing' is an oxymoron, a self-contradictory term. Implicitly, it describes media that are personal and non-commercial. So how does marketing fit in? As the punch line in the joke about porcupines goes, "very carefully".

Nevertheless, there are tactics available that can maximize your social media marketing effectiveness.

If you have not yet created a Facebook page for your brand, you must do that first. You should also look at opportunities available on Twitter, MySpace and Linked In. With those in place, apply these three tactics.

Tactic #1: Create Your Own Social Media Marketing Profile

Who are you? What is your background? What are your objectives? What do you do or would like to do. Your profile can be as detailed or as fanciful as you like, remembering that credibility is critical in social media.

The social media profile can differ from social media site to site.

For example a LinkedIn personal profile might be more of an online resume, detailing all of the previous companies one has worked for in the past, where as the LinkedIn company profile can focus more on the company's products, services, vendors and customers. Facebook and Twitter profiles can be set up for a company to communicate effectively with the new generation of consumers who depend on social media marketing to make decisions.

Tactic #2: Reach As Many People As You Can

Sites such Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Linked In, are frequented everyday by millions of potential customers. Each has its own distinct approach to its subscribers. All, however, expect a degree of socially acceptable behavior.

Unfortunately, flat-out, unadorned advertising is not considered socially acceptable by most users. That said, almost every visitor to Facebook is there be entertained or informed. An approach to this audience that features a friendly tone and that promises a benefit has an excellent chance of making customers and brand evangelists out of visitors.

By learning the different ways to reach people on each site, you can reach a wide audience without ever purchasing an ad on the site. For example on Twitter, retweeting the top tweets (the insiders term for a Twitter message) of the day can attract people to your page through searches. Using URL link shortening services such as bit.ly allows you to track how many people actually clicked on your tweet or status update as opposed to clicking on the URL page directly.

Tactic #3: Build An Audience

Solicit friends, fans and followers through mutual contacts and other online and offline vehicles, in order to qualify prospects from among the millions who may be exposed to your Facebook messages, your tweets and your postings on LinkedIn.

Many companies promote their Facebook page on their web sites, in brochures or in ads. The point is to develop a core group of followers who will participate regularly in your social media communications. These are self-selecting prospects of high quality and high potential.

When you have this core group amassed, feed them as much helpful (and persuasive) information as you can as often as you can. Don't stint on pictures. One authority claims 550,000 images are presented on Facebook every second, with 220,000,000 photos added to Facebook every week. Use your postings as portals to your web site where visitors will get a more complete story about your brand, product or service, stories that generate leads and even, conceivably, close sales.

This may seem like a lot of work. Fact is, it is. Most companies already have full plates, so social media marketing including regularly posting Facebook status updates and tweeting on Twitter requires constant and consistent attention, can appear formidable before even starting.

One solution is to consult with experts in the field of social media and Facebook marketing. These companies have the software, the experience, the databases and the knack for making marketing in Facebook and other social media wo

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Society for New Communications Research Announces 2010 Fellows Choice Award <b>...</b>

The Society for New Communications Research (http://sncr.org), a global nonprofit research and education foundation and think tank focused on the latest developments in new media and communications, today announced the Society's 2010 Fellows Choice Award winners for the Visionary of the Year, Innovator of the Year, Brand of the Year and Humanitarian of the Year as part of the SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards program.

These prestigious awards honor organizations and individuals for their notable impact on business, media, culture and society through the use of new communications and social media tools and technologies. The 2010 SNCR Fellows Choice Award honorees are:

"The SNCR Fellows have chosen an impressive variety of individuals and organizations for this year's award winners. These special award winners have the vision and success to provide a valuable example to others and we are honored to be able to recognize them through this awards program," commented Jen McClure, president, SNCR.

"So much is happening in social media these days, that choosing the 'best of the best' is an awesome challenge," said Paul Gillin, a SNCR Senior Fellow and author of three books about social marketing. "These are the people and organizations that are taking the whole industry to the next level."

The SNCR Fellows Choice Award recipients will be honored at the 5th Annual Society for New Communications Research Symposium & Awards Gala, which will be held in Stanford, CA.

This event will also feature the presentation of the 2010 SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards. These prestigious awards honor the work of individuals, corporations, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and media outlets that are pioneering the use of social media, ICT, mobile media, online communities, virtual worlds and collaborative technologies in the areas of business, media and professional communications, including marketing, public relations, and advertising as well as entertainment, education, politics, and social initiatives. Awards are granted in 13 categories: Online Reputation Management; Behind the Firewall; Influencer Relations; External Communities; Collaboration & Co-creation; Online Audio / Video; Online Publishing and Blogging; Mobile Media; Microblogging; Social CRM; Social Commerce, Social Data and Measurement, and Use of Multiple Platforms / Integrated Initiatives. Entries are submitted as case studies, and the winning case studies will be published on SNCR.org.

For more information and to register to attend this event, visit http://sncr.org/awards/.

About the Society for New Communications Research
The Society for New Communications Research is a global nonprofit 501(c)(3) research and education foundation and think tank focused on the advanced study of the latest developments in new media and communications, and their effect on traditional media and business models, communications, culture and society. SNCR is dedicated to creating a bridge between the academic and theoretical pursuit of these topics and the pragmatic implementation of new media and communications tools and methodologies. The Society's Fellows include a leading group of futurists, scholars, business leaders, professional communicators, members of the media and technologists from around the globe - all collaborating together on research initiatives, educational offerings, and the establishment of standards and best practices. For more information, email us at info(at)sncr(dot)org or call +1 408.266.9658.

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Top 7 <b>Social Media Marketing</b> Tips for the Holiday Season 2010

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Building on from the recent theme of preparing for the holiday season sales rush, this week I’m delving into the world of social media marketing.

The numbers around social media at the moment are mind blowing, so it should definitely be a consideration of any business before heading into the holiday period.

Before I delve into the tips, here’s a video I shared during a social media presentation I gave last week. It helps set the scene for the importance of social media for modern businesses.

So now that you’re pumped about social media, here’s my top 7 tips for boosting your holiday season sales using social media marketing.

1. Give your social media profiles a makeover:

When was the last time you checked how engaging your social profile is? Social media is an extension of your brand. Use the holiday season to give your profiles a make over:

1. New twitter background: did you even realise you can customise your twitter background. Check out these backgrounds to get inspired.

50 great examples of business branded twitter pages: http://www.creativeopera.com/2010/corporate-branding-on-twitter-50-excellent-examples/

2. Business Pages on Facebook: Is it time to create a Facebook business page that is more interesting than just a feed of your business’ activity and discussions?

Look at some of these company pages to see how you can take your business page to the next level.

Here’s a list of 40 more: http://speckyboy.com/2010/08/15/40-highly-effective-facebook-business-pages/

3. Blog Design: Let’s not forget our good old blogs. Perhaps its time to add some new banners, change the template or even update our widgets on our blogs to give them a bit more sizzle.

2. Build your followers and connections

The size of your social media captive audience is a key influencer on the success of your campaigns. So it’s important to build your audience so that when you distribute content, engage in conversations and share offers – there’s enough people listening/watching.

1. Migrate existing clients across to social media

Use this as a time to try and encourage existing customers to connect with you via their social networks. It will provide you with another way to communicate with your clients outside of emails, the phone etc.

2. Encourage prospects and browsers to join your network

Even if you don’t convert a prospect or browser on first visit, persuading them to connect via social media gives you further opportunities to engage with them which can help you convert them later.

3. Get more reviews

Peer reviews are becoming more and more important in people’s buying process. So have you checked how many reviews your business and products have? Are they positive or negative.

It’s important to encourage your new customers to post reviews (preferably positive) on the major reviews sites. Make it easy for them and suggest where to go after the sale (either in person or via follow up marketing)

Here’s a list of the some of the review sites to focus on:

4. Special Offers for your followers

Use the holiday season as a chance to create social media specific campaigns and offers. IT’ll serve two purposes

Reward the people who have taken the time to connect with you in the social media sphereIt’ll give potential new social media followers a reason to connect with your company.

5. Engage in the Conversation

While social media is a great marketing tool, it’s often most effective when it’s used in a non direct marketing manner.

Commit to engaging in your social media sphere through conversations and contributions; comment, answer questions and posing opinions rather than just trying to promote products and services. You’ll be amazed at how effective this can be at driving new business if done effectively.

6. Integrate Social Media with other marketing

Social media is another one of the channels in your marketing mix. So use it in conjunction with other online and offline campaigns. It can help extend the reach of your marketing message, or alternatively provide another form of conversion from other campaigns.

7. Commit to creating some quality holiday valuable content

One the major strengths of social media is the viral nature of the medium. By creating and sharing valuable content (e.g. articles, videos, industry news, etc) – your social media audience can become your marketing force. They’ll share your content and ultimately promote your brand. The sort of marketing that money can’t buy!

So that’s my Top 7 Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses this holiday season. As with most of your holiday season marketing strategies, the sooner you get started, the better the results will be when it counts.

There’s plenty of other social media marketing strategies to leverage during the holiday season, so what will you be using this year? Share your tactics with our readers below.

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Use of <b>social media</b> to advance business requires supervision

Successful use of new media to build your business or organization requires engagement with others online using a constantly changing set of communication tools that deliver great content.

Some of these tools and networks are standalones, but most work together to enhance traditional marketing and advertising.

The success of any new media marketing plan for a business or organization trying to position itself in the marketplace depends heavily on a well-developed, well-optimized, serviceable website that can serve as a hub for all the company’s new media tools. Websites today must serve as the workhorses for marketing, advertising, public relations and all other organizational communications.

Today, they should no longer be about aesthetics and “cool” features such as Flash, but instead emphasize function and search engine optimization (how easily the website can be found when viewers use keywords to do a search in a browser program). This is a different website than the awe-inspiring, feature-filled ones we were all enamored by just a couple of years ago. New media facts to embrace:

— New media enhances traditional marketing and other vital corporate communication by building a brand using fresh, new networks and efforts such as viral marketing.

— New media efforts should in no way be considered a “campaign” but an ongoing dialogue that builds relationships over time. It requires keen writing skills, continual nurturing, daily management, updated tool sets and plenty of patience and perseverance.

— New media is not just social media, but it does include it.

— Building fruitful relationships with both current members and potential customers through new media requires transparency and authenticity of the highest order.

The old days of harboring “corporate secrets,” painting a rosy picture of things that aren’t, sweeping problems under the rug, sharing only parts of any given problem and obscuring the truth are gone, kaput. New media communication requires a special, highly authentic “voice” making it more like public relations than advertising.

— New media is much less expensive than traditional media, but not altogether free.

The tools and tactics of new media change or are updated continually, so small investments must be made along the way to stay current and relevant. The talent and know-how to manage new media also requires an investment in staffing.

Paige Henson is a new media consultant and certified inbound marketer.

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UM Digital Boom Conference; Industry experts discuss the future of digital <b>...</b>

UM, the leading MENA specialist media marketing consultancy firm tied in with Google, Nielsen Media Research, and Egypt's major website developer Digital Republic to host communications professionals from various media agencies and brands communications managers in Cairo.

Participants at the one-day event included Wael Ghoneim, Head of Marketing MENA and Wael Fakharany, Regional Manager from Google, Diego Semprun, MD of Nielsen Online, Omar Mandoor, GM of Coca Cola Egypt, and Rania Elbakry, Digital & Direct Communication Manager at Mobinil. In addition to Karim Khalifa, CEO of Digital Republic, Ahmed Osama, MD of TE Data, Con O'Donnell, MD of Sarmady Communications, Tim Baker, MD of Hug Digital, James Harris, Head of Digital, UM-EMEA and various industry experts from the MENA region.

Paul Katrib, Regional Managing Director, UM highlighted the importance of new and emerging media to reach out to different audiences and optimize investment for brands. "This conference falls within UM's regional initiatives to keep pushing the potential of the digital platform within our communication strategies, and exploring the ways it could help us strengthen the connections between our brands and the consumer," said Katrib.

Dina Hashem, UM Egypt Managing Director said: "the event organized for the first time in the Egypt aimed to bring industry experts together to discuss global best practices to optimize the usage of online and mobile technologies and facilitate access to and enable target audiences to interact with the brands and share with their peers."
Participants discussed the market dynamics especially the internet infrastructure in the region, mobile advertising revolution, viral marketing and the essential consumption habits and profiles of internet users in the region. And various successful case studies such as Coca-Cola and Mobinil were presented following an overview of the digital media scene in the Middle East and North Africa region.

Rania El Bakry, Manager, Digital and Direct Communication, at Mobinil said: "It was a pleasure to be part of this wonderful event. It was a great opportunity for idea exchange among parties involved in the field of Digital Communication and it was a much needed event to help this field evolve and grow."

In his closing presentation, Karim Khalifa, CEO Digital Republic Egypt re-emphasized that digital is not only about banner ads, but it is about creativity, entertainment, engagement and interactivity as well as building a two-way relationship with your consumer and rewarding them for their interaction with your brand. He called on communication professionals to get ready to take their brands to the next level to reach audiences through mobile advertising, online TV, and location based marketing.

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Use <b>social media</b> to build your brand

Q: What is social media and how can I use it to help my small business?

A: The term "social media" is used to describe interactive communities on the Web. There are a whole lot of different social media websites. Some of the more popular are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogs.

Social media marketing can help most small businesses boost sales. Small business owners use social media to build relationships, which indirectly increases sales. The practice of using social media builds a business's database of contacts and connections, increases visibility to prospective customers, and gets the word out about their products and services in creative ways. The first thing you can do to use social media to help your business is to get your toes wet. Start by finding a blog that you enjoy reading that is related in some way to your business and regularly post comments on it. What you are doing is starting a conversation with the blog owner and its readers. You're building relationships.

If you sign each of your posts with your name and Web address, you are marketing your business and hopefully driving new traffic to your website.

Another easy place to get started is to create an account at Facebook or LinkedIn.

With these types of accounts you can make friends, build relationships, talk about your business services and products, and direct people to your company website. Facebook, for example, has over 500 million active

users with more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. That is a very powerful platform on which to build a presence.

Another way is to start a blog for your business. In one action you can give your company a Web presence, start building relationships, and get the word out about your products and services.

How successful you are at marketing your business with social media will depend on how much you put into it. Social media marketing takes commitment, effort and passion to make it work.

Social media are all about relationships. To be successful, you need to understand how to build and use those relationships. In much the same way, you are already building relationships and networking in the physical world, networking in the digital world isn't really that big of a stretch.

Social media marketing can be a phenomenal marketing tool for small businesses.

Laurel Eriksen is owner of Eriksen Web Design (www.eriksenwebdesign.com), a small business Web design and marketing firm based in Ranch Cucamonga.

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Wanted: <b>Social Media</b> Sifters

By Ryan Flinn

Jonathan Spier, chief executive officer of social media analytics company NetBase, had the chance in early 2009 to win a multimillion-dollar contract for his 25-person firm if he could answer one question: Why do men sport stubble?

The query, posed by a consumer-products company to more than 100 research firms, had to be answered by mining millions of postings by men on social media sites. NetBase's software, which reads and analyzes 50,000 sentences a minute, found 77,000 mentions of stubble online in less than six seconds. Its researchers isolated all the positive comments, categorized them into themes, and built a chart in less than an hour ranking all the reasons. While the answer—most men wear stubble because they perceive it to be sexy—isn't that eye-opening, the ability to quickly collect and analyze all that Web data is. The process provides something marketers have long wanted: a way to pick up intelligence and trends from among all that chatter floating across the Net.

"It's all oriented around what businesses need and want from information," said Spier, whose Mountain View (Calif.)-based company now employs 50 people and works with Coca-Cola (KO), Kraft Foods (KFT), and Procter & Gamble (PG). "That's our selling point."

Companies are expected to more than double the amount they're spending for online data, to $840 million in 2012 from last year, according to marketing consultant Winterberry Group. The prospect of such fast-growing revenue is one reason social media monitoring outfits are being snapped up by larger software and market-research firms intent on improving their ability to use Twitter, Facebook, and blog postings as windows into the thinking of consumers.

"For years advertising was one-to-many, and then there was all this big hoopla about how to do one-to-one advertising, with the advent of the Web and Web metrics," said Debbie DeGabrielle, chief marketing officer of Visible Technologies, a social media analytics company that has grown 18-fold since 2006. "Social intelligence is the iteration beyond that—it is not mass personalization, it is personalization one-to-one."

Advertisers in the U.S. are getting the message. They will increase their spending on social media sites by 24 percent next year, to $2.09 billion, according to researcher eMarketer in New York.

Using the Web to collect information more quickly can help companies avoid product disasters. When Coca-Cola released New Coke in 1985, it committed one of the biggest blunders in marketing history, "spawning consumer angst the likes of which no business has ever seen," the company says on its website. Three months later, Coke returned its original soda to the market. Stan Sthanunathan, Coke's vice-president of marketing strategy and insights, doubts it would have taken that long to react in today's Web-connected world. "Back then, people had to write letters and send it to us, saying 'please bring back old Coke,' " Sthanunathan said. "It came out in large numbers, but it came after a few days. Right now, people will tell you that in a matter of two minutes on their Facebook page."

Gap (GPS) experienced such a reaction earlier this month when it briefly replaced its iconic blue box with a new logo. The design was widely panned online, and the retailer yanked it a week later. "We did not go about this in the right way," said Marka Hansen, the Gap president for North America. "We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community."

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