Goodness Gracious, Great Blogs of Fire!

Author: Marinel Mones

The ongoing fundraising for Haiti is very present in social media. Chris Baggott shares how he and his colleague Karen Jung from ExactTarget created Haiti-Aid.org in light of the earthquake. Karen once “lived and worked among the Haitians, gaining firsthand knowledge of the difficulties of simple, everyday life.” Chris says, “With her guidance, we have assembled a list of charities that need your help today!” Chris and Karen also ask for the support of the entire social media community to pass this site on and “leverage what we all do best….quickly building a network of concerned marketers supporting this incredible cause.” Please visit Chris Baggott’s Email Marketing and Best Practices for more information about the cause and don’t forget to follow @Haiti_Aid.

Peter Shankman of Shankman.com and founder of HARO (Help A Reporter Out - a social media PR and marketing company serving reporters, entrepreneurs and small businesses) announced the “dawn of a new HARO” today. The new and improved HARO now allows “Vertical HAROs” - a chance for subscribers to select what topic queries they want to receive. Other new features include advertising via the HARO site (versus directly to Peter) and reporter emails are now masked. Visit HARO and tell us and the HARO team what you think about the new changes.

Are you planning an event this year? Event Coup’s Samuel J. Smith lists 10 ways social media will transform events in 2010. He says, “As attendees become more comfortable with these new two-way communication experiences, they are going to start demanding similar experiences from their face-to-face events.”  Two of the ways he lists include: events will become communities that last for weeks and months rather than a few short days and attendees will want a voice in the discussion, learning and decision making process. Read the rest of the ways social media will transform events  and don’t forget to add your own input.

Meryl K. Evans shares how to make the most of your social media time. According to Meryl, “while social media is [her] primary marketing tool, plenty of others spend more hours social networking than [she] does and for different reasons.” Meryl spends her social media time comprised of a mix of social networking at the same time every day, posting tweets throughout the day using a scheduling application, joining the right Twitter chats, reviewing Facebook updates once a day, updating her LinkedIn status a few times a week, writing at least two blog post entries per week and reading other people’s blogs. How do you spend your social media time? Share your responses at Web Worker Daily.

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Goodness Gracious, Great Blogs of Fire!

Author: Marinel Mones

Matt J. McDonald named six bloggers he hopes will write digital marketing and social media books sometime in the future. The six are David Armano for a book about ’synthesizing complex ideas into easy visuals’; Jason Falls for a primer on social media; Whitney Hess because of her style of writing and current blog posts; Scott Monty for his experience with social media in a large organization; Bill Green for his commentary and advertising; and Alan Wolk for his high level strategy and thought process. Which bloggers do you want to write a book? Share your opinions at A New Marketing.

Mobile applications are on fire, which is why more and more companies should think about mobile marketing. Christina “CK” Kerley of CK’s Blog provides a 10-step starter guide for integrating mobile into the B2b marketing mix slideshow. She says, “Why the marketing crusade? Because business professionals, which are B2Bs’ target audience, not only use mobile devices to stay connected, they rely on them to stay informed and make business decisions when not located at their place of business.” Check out Christina’s starter guide and don’t forget to add your insights about mobile marketing.

1 Good Reason - Social Marketing’s Chris Kieff discusses “Getting” Twitter. Chris explains why some people don’t “Get” Twitter. He attributes the reason to ‘a basic signal to noise ratio problem’. Signals provide useful and meaningful content while noise is useless and empty. Chris’s recommendation to fix this bad signal is for ‘all newbies to follow at least 200-250 people.’ He says, “But if you’re not “Getting Twitter” it’s not because of anything in you, or the people that you follow, it’s most likely just because you’re not following enough of them yet. So give it a shot and try to follow 200 and see what happens.” What do you think of Chris’s Twitter recommendation?

Michael Blankenship of PepperDigital asks, “How will you manage social media customer engagement in 2010?” He lists TweetDeck, Klout, HootSuite and FiltrBox as ‘four of the potential difference makers of 2010 that are worth considering by brand managers and PR agencies for customer communication and engagement’. What tools do you plan to use this year to manage your social media customer engagement?

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The Game to Watch

Author: Christian Munson

Anyone see Texas quarterback Garrett Gilbert get sacked last week?

The influence of budget shortfalls and technology advancements will make higher education a great game to watch this year. Photo credit: djwudi via flickr.

Here’s the replay.

If you look closely (and transform from college football fan to higher education professional), Alabama’s Eryk Anders kind of looks like a 2010 budget nightmare demolishing the ivory tower.

What a hit!

Many state supported colleges and universities are going to feel it this year. Watching how they dust themselves off,  adapt and get back in the game will be fun to watch.

I anticipate pain for higher ed, but I also think we’ll see  innovations emerge that reform and improve how campus communities deliver their education product. I’ll be looking for those innovations this year, and I’ll note them here when I see them.

Technology’s influence on delivering higher education also promises to continue hitting hard in 2010. Two stories caught my eye last week.

First, Inside Higher Education reported Jan. 8 that college libraries are increasingly open to text messaging as a channel for connecting research librarians with students.

OMG!

Second, just imagine what new touch screen tablet computers might do to libraries, text books, lectures, note taking and studying. This Jan. 4 video at the Wall Street Journal takes a glimpse at the future according to one book publisher. Check it out.

I’m looking forward to how it all plays out, and will try to provide some play-by-play commentary as it does.

Now, I think I’ll watch Garrett get creamed again.

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Old Dogs

Author: Genevieve Gaddy

When I was in high school, my mom was one of the least computer-savvy people I knew. She pecked at the keys, barely knew how to send an email and got frustrated trying to open a Word document.  She hated the computer so much that she wrote invoices for her interior design business by hand and used white-out when she made a mistake.  Fast forward ten years later.  That same woman is video-chatting with me while I’m on a flight from Atlanta to New York.  She tells me to hold on for a second because she has to text my dad from her iPhone, and then we talk about a picture she has just seen on Facebook.

There was a point in time where my mom was either going to check out of technology completely, or make an effort to learn how to use it.  In the beginning, my brother, sister and I would just do whatever it was that she didn’t understand -  “Move out of the way, I’ll attach that for you,” “Scoot over, I’ll download the pictures from your camera.”  But she told us she needed to learn it herself, and that’s when things began to change.  She had the tools (new computer, iPhone, digital camera, etc.), but she needed our patient instruction and then to play around with things herself until she knew how to use them.

In a lot of ways, my mom was like an old-school client averse to social media.  When people don’t understand something new, they don’t see the value and develop a distaste for it.  But it’s our job to teach them.  If we do everything ourselves, our clients will never understand or start interacting on their own. 

The current shift in media is perhaps the toughest transition we will see in our lifetime, and it is our responsibility as PR professionals not to shove our clients out of the way so we can do it ourselves, but to show them, patiently and effectively, how to play in the new sandbox.  Social media will be most powerful when the company’s interaction is integrated and everyone knows how to participate – from the CEO to the summer intern.

Old dogs can in fact learn new tricks.  You just have to teach them.

PS: If you read this, Mom, you’re the most youthful looking old dog I know.

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Goodness Gracious, Great Blogs of Fire!

Author: Marinel Mones

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you enjoy the first of 2010’s Blogs of Fire.

Dave Fleet of davefleet.com shares his 2010 Social Media Marketing Ecosystem based on a post about the differences between owned media, paid media and earned media by Forrester Research and analyst Sean Corcoran. In his diagrams, Dave provides key elements of each type of media. He also notes “that the different elements work best when we succeed in breaking out of communications silos and integrating our communications strategies.” Read more about Dave’s marketing ecosystem and share your thoughts at his blog.

For the first time in 23 years football fans will not see TV spots of Pepsi during this year’s Super Bowl. Instead, the company decided to spend $20M on a social media program called Pepsi Refresh. Augie Ray lists some of the ramifications and non-ramifications of Pepsi’s new marketing decision including a fight for marketing dollars between traditional (aka TV) and social/interactive tactics. Read more about Pepsi Refresh and Augie’s assessment of the company’s marketing tactic on The Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals. What do you think this will mean for marketers in 2010?

Speaking of TV and social media, Tim Difford of The Next Web asks, “Will 2010 be the Year of Social TV?” According to Tim, “Social Media and TV fanatics are ahead of the game right now and bending the rules to their will.  It remains to be seen whether the broadcasters, perhaps spurred on by advertisers eyeing a potentially motivated and engaged audience, will be able to serve up an enticing interactive broadcast experience during the forthcoming year.” Read the examples Tim shares and don’t forget to answer whether or not you think 2010 will be the year of Social TV.

Brian Solis shares results from an updated annual study on the adoption of social media by the Inc. 500 companies. He says, “The essence of the report shares the tools that are carving the evolution of the fittest. At a minimum, Social Media is affecting and shaping the pillars of business.” Results show that 91 percent of companies reporting the incorporation of at least one social media service or tool in 2009. Other results show an impressive drop of 43 percent to 9 percent of Inc. 500 companies not using social media. Check out the rest of the results at Brian Solis.  What are your thoughts about the increase in social media usage by Inc. 500 companies?

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