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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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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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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Increasingly, companies hire only by <b>social media</b>

A couple of weeks ago, Josh Shea started a new job as a senior web developer with Brayton Graphics, a design firm in Schenectady. But if it weren't for Shea's use of social media, he never would have heard about the position. It, like many jobs these days, was advertised solely on social networking sites -- specifically Twitter and Facebook.

With more than 500 million users on Facebook, 160 million on Twitter and 75 million on LinkedIn, social media are a growing avenue for employers to reach out to fill open positions and for potential employees to find jobs. Those statistics, combined with the competitive job market and the 6.8 percent local unemployment rate, add up to a new mandate for career-minded men and women: Get a Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn account and learn how to use it.

"These social networking tools are no longer considered a 'maybe' when it comes to job search and are a must-have for being noticed, building visibility and credibility and for ongoing career management," says Diane Crompton, a senior career management consultant with Right Management in Atlanta. "At least 50 percent of our landed candidates are now using social media as a critical part of being noticed, getting introductions and leads for their next position."

Crompton says more than 80 percent of people now find jobs through networking -- including in-person and online. A recent survey from Jobvite, a maker of recruiting software, found that nearly 75 percent of employers now use social media in their recruiting efforts.

Shea has been using social media -- primarily Facebook and Twitter -- to build his professional brand for nearly three years. Facebook has opened several freelance opportunities, while Twitter led to his new position.

He and Elizabeth Delos, the owner of Brayton, connected on Twitter more than a year ago. They started following each other because of their shared professional interests.

"When I started following them ... I didn't know I'd end up working there," says Shea. "I follow people because they're interesting, not because of an opportunity, but because I want to read what they have to say."

Shea is careful about what he says -- and the images he posts -- on any social networking site. His motto: "You never know who your next client is or who your next contact is."

Having a positive professional presence online through social media sites such as LinkedIn can help a job seeker compete in a crowded candidate pool, says Allison Keibel, the assistant director at the Center for Career Development at Adelphi University. Employers, she says, can find more information online about candidates before bringing them in for an interview -- as Delos did.

This can work to job seekers' advantage, she says, helping them develop a marketing strategy and "brand" their image online by displaying samples of their work on a personal website or by creating profiles with recommendations from colleagues -- a feature that is especially popular on LinkedIn.

As for Shea, the web guru wasn't looking for a job when Delos contacted him. He was working for LifeChurch.TV as a web developer, and enjoying his work, but he was familiar with Delos and her company and admired what they did.

The admiration was mutual. Delos and Shea had been following each other on Twitter for about a year and, while they didn't "talk" regularly, Delos was familiar with -- and impressed by -- Shea's work. So, after Tweeting the position (for those of you who aren't on Twitter, this is the equivalent of standing on a mountain top and shouting to whoever may be listening at the time), she contacted Shea on the social networking site.

Twitter was the only means of advertising she used to fill the spot.

The last time Delos had an opening, she had relied on craigslist, but the influx of unqualified candidates ended up being a waste of time, says Delos, who has never used newspapers or career-specific websites in her searches.

With Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, she can find potential candidates she knows, thanks to previous contact or interaction through the social networking sites. Using the sites also lets employers such as Delos get a feel for the personality of potential employees. She can gauge whether they may fit into the office culture, a key part of employee retention.

This time around, she received little spam and few unqualified or mistargeted applicants through her social media search. What she did get was a pool of about eight solid candidates -- a blend of people who contacted her, and those like Shea, whom she approached.

"A lot of businesses that are established and have been in business for 20 years are used to the print and see social media as an additional added benefit, but for me, this is the only way to go," says Delos, who is 27 and started her company four years ago. "I won't go back."

Kristi Gustafson can be reached at 454-5494 or by e-mail at kgustafson@timesunion.com. Follow her at Facebook.com/JustKristiOnline or Twitter.com/JustKristi

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Business success requires <b>social media</b>

The Churchill Economic Development Authority's Small Business and Government Contracting workshop covered the importance of social media.

“We're currently in a communication revolution,” said instructor Ben Tedore of the Nevada Small Business Development Center. “The way people are getting information used to be different.”

Attendees were surprised to see social media as one of the available seminars but with its popularity, several were curious.

“I need to find out what social media has to do with government contracting,” said Leslie Martin, owner of MSE Welding and Fabrication LLC. “I'm kind of in awe of how much it's being used.”

Gail Kerr, owner of Squeezy's Cafe, agreed that it is important to pursue because everyone else is.

“I have a cafe where probably the (majority of my customers) are in their 50s, but it is amazing the number of people who are on the computer now,” Kerr said. “I'm sure there's some advantage for us if we find out about it. Economically right now you have to take advantage of everything that can work.”

New forms of advertising

Tedore said social media has changed the way people make purchasing decisions. He said consumers now learn about products and services from other consumers. Meanwhile, advertising seems less trustworthy.

“They want to hear what real people say about these products, not what the products say about themselves,” Tedore said. “They don't trust traditional marketing as much. People are becoming more self empowered. They trust their peers more than what businesses tell them.”

Information sharing occurs mostly through social networking sites, like Facebook, websites and blogs. Blogs are successful because they naturally rank high on search engines. Tedore said search engines look at different web pages and rank them based on key words, new content, content relevancy and the number of page visits. Tedore said blogs produce new content regularly, and they are full of key words on the related topic.

Getting started

Tedore said there are many social networking sites that use different methods to reach people. In addition to Facebook, there are sites like Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Yelp, LinkedIn, FourSquare and many more. Creating a page is as simple as visiting the website and following the directions to join.

To start a website or blog, Tedore recommended www.wordpress.org, which provides free website templates.

For those who are new to social media, Tedore recommended starting out slow by creating a personal page on a site like Facebook and looking at how other businesses use it.

“You can learn a lot just by watching what other people do,” Tedore said.

Once a business page or blog is set up, Tedore recommended people increase their fan base by advertising their presence on merchandise like coffee cups or business cards.

He also said it is key to provide relevant content that will benefit the reader, such as sales. He said advertising content will drive readers away.

“Don't spam,” Tedore said. “You always have to provide valuable content to the people who are following you.”

More change to come

Tedore added online advertising is already beginning to change. More and more companies are using personalized advertising software that reads a person's profile on a site like Facebook and tailors the ad to them. Tedore said there is talk of this technology moving from simple website adds to digital billboards.

He said there are also ideas like microchipping products to allow cell phones to scan for coupons. These are just some of the changes to come in the next 10-20 years.

“You can't wait for it to change or you'll be behind on that as well,” Tedore said.

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Valley arts embracing <b>social media</b>

by Kerry Lengel - Oct. 1, 2010 01:18 PM
The Arizona Republic

From the top institutions to the grass roots, Valley artists and performers are jumping on the social-media bandwagon, using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to interact with their audiences, and maybe even to grow them.

But for Jennifer Spencer, marketing director for Arizona Theatre Company, the latter would just be icing on the cake.

"I don't care how many followers we have or how many people 'like' us," she says. "People who are liking us or fanning us on Facebook already know us. They're already interested. So it's not always just a sales message. You want to get them talking."

Conversation is the buzzword. ATC, with nearly 1,200 friends on Facebook, uses the platform to link to videos or photos taking fans backstage for its next show or to invite patrons to chat about news bits from the theater world.

"It's so easy to just throw a generic marketing message up there, but how do you have a presence without being boring?" Spencer says. "It's exciting when this conversation gets going. It affirms the fact that we're doing something that people care about. And we do pay attention to what people say."

That's exactly the right approach, says Lorrie Thomas, CEO of Web Marketing Therapy, a California consulting firm.

"Social media is a way to serve and to support," she says. "You may get some sales off it, but if you enter the social Web with the idea that you're going to push propaganda, you're going to fail. You use the social Web as a way to offer quality information.

"We live in an era of mass collaboration, and we're looking for things that are useful and relevant."

Over at Phoenix Theatre (750-plus friends), public-relations rep Theresa Dickerson agrees that interacting with audiences is key, but she's convinced networking technologies have been gold for good old-fashioned sales as well.

"Word of mouth is one of our biggest tools to sell tickets, and social media makes that so much easier," she says.

The Valley arts group with the largest social-media following has to be the Phoenix Art Museum.

"We had a Facebook page for a while and it kind of sat there," museum director James Ballinger says. "So we went to a much more casual kind of language in our postings. We solicited feedback, so we've tried to have an active voice with our audience on Facebook. We try to change the message every few days, and the result is, over the past 12 or 14 months, we went from over 1,000 Facebook friends to over 16,000."

Furthermore, he's confident that online success has strengthened the institution's bottom line.

"I can't tell you that 7 percent of our attendance last year came from Facebook interaction," he says, "but I can tell you . . . it's clear that we have a much younger audience than we used to. Visibly, on a daily basis, you can tell. And attendance went up 10 percent last year, 10 percent again this year."

Individual artists are having success on social media as well, such as female impersonator Richard Stevens, better known as Barbra Seville, who is on Facebook throughout the day to keep her 3,000 friends amused.

"It's an extension of what I do onstage," Stevens says. "It's entertaining my audience."

Having a sizable online following helped Seville "go viral" with a video spoof of Gov. Jan Brewer last month that has racked up more than 67,000 views on YouTube. And that in turn brought more interest to the Facebook page.

"I was picking up five friend requests an hour for a while," Stevens says. "It was really crazy."

 

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