From the monthly archives:

June 2011

Southwest Airlines and Social Media Strategy: 5 Lessons for Marketers

by Mark Ivey · June 30, 2011

One challenge I’ve had with many corporate clients is getting employees to blog. Most corporate folks feel like they don’t have the time or skills. So it piqued my interest when I found out Southwest Airlines has a slew of employees writing their Nuts about Southwest blog. I was drawn in by the energy and spirit of the blog: All homegrown.

Curious, I sat down (virtually) with Christi McNeill, who manages SW’s corporate social media strategy to discuss the blog and social media program.  Turns out they’re doing a lot right down in Dallas. The social media program, started in 2006, is showing impressive results: 12 million monthly visits to its website, 1 million Twitter followers, 1.3 million Facebook likers.

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30 comments

5 Steps to Becoming a Twitter Champion

by Angela Maiers · June 29, 2011

There are still a large number of folks who believe that Twitter is a very amateur and even entertaining task. After all, how hard could 140 characters be? Who needs a strategy for telling people what you had for breakfast?

Champion Tweeters think differently. They approach Twitter and their time in the Twitter community with a different behavior set, mindset and belief system. Their  Twitter Habitudes separate them from the pack.

If you seek to be more successful on Twitter, reach out to more people, get noticed, and make a bigger impact; you must be willing and ready to think and act like a Twitter Champion!

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20 comments

That Website Ain’t Gonna Visit Itself

by Andrew Hanelly · June 28, 2011

If you build it, they will, well, probably go somewhere else.

Your target audience probably doesn’t share the same level of enthusiasm that you have toward your new website/redesign/mobile app/digital venture. More than likely, they won’t even notice. They’ll go about visiting their normal destinations online; checking Facebook, maybe Twitter, and dipping into their pool of RSS subscriptions.

But your target audience almost definitely won’t just come to your website because it happens to be there.

Launching your endeavor is a big first step. But it’s just the beginning of a long, long marathon.

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69 comments

Not the Best Thing Since Sliced Bre.ad

by Adam Helweh · June 27, 2011

About two weeks ago a new online service called “Bre.ad” was made publicly available. At first glance, Bre.ad seems like a run of the mill link shortener, but it goes quite a bit beyond that. The service enables users to upload graphics and ad some text to create what they call your “digital billboard”. When you shorten a link with Bre.ad, visitors are first presented with your graphic and written message for 5 seconds before being taken to whatever web address your link was meant to go to in the first place.

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23 comments

Hiring a Social Media Agency? Read this First!

by Nichole Kelly · June 24, 2011

News Flash: Not everyone who says they understand or have used social media actually knows what they are talking about.

I know, that’s not much of a news flash for many of us. We’ve been watching as this tremendous growth of social media has created a mass-market of companies selling huge lines of BS to brands who honestly don’t know the right questions to ask. They are like really smooth men with pick up lines that are so brilliant you don’t even see them coming. They know if a company is looking for help with social media, it is likely because they don’t understand it themselves. Therefore, if they talk in buzz words and “fake it ‘till they make it” the company will never realize they are clueless.

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218 comments

Checking In: A Mobile Marketing Infographic

by Jason Falls · June 23, 2011

My friends at Lucid Agency in Tempe, Ariz., have been doing a lot of work and thinking around mobile platforms and technology. They’re certainly not alone, but in their activity, they thought it would be useful to put together an interesting infographic to illustrate the use of mobile applications, location-based services and devices to give their clients, and the greater marketing community, a base of information as we think about mobile moving forward.

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18 comments

Parents Can Fight Summer Learning Loss On Twitter

by Jason Falls · June 23, 2011

Did you know that summer break produces an average of one month learning loss in average children? It’s even more pronounced in lower income families. That’s according to a study by Harris Cooper, a psychology professor at Duke University, formerly of the University of Missouri where his research took place. Parents today juggle a thousand things and while summer has to be chock full of activities for their kids, often times learning is forgotten. If the school isn’t doing it, then the parents sure don’t have time, right?

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8 comments

What Motivates Bloggers?

by Stephanie Schwab · June 23, 2011

If you’re a public relations or communications person who works with bloggers, you’ve probably figured out by now that every blogger is unique. Pitching bloggers is not the same as pitching traditional journalists, because every blogger is motivated differently, whereas journalists are generally motivated to write because they’re being paid to do so and with a (usually) clear editorial direction.

Bloggers, on the other hand, work mainly for themselves. (For the purposes of this post, we’re talking about non-corporate bloggers – those that create and maintain blogs for their own personal use, or as a small business in and of itself.) So determining the motivation of an individual blogger is the key to pitching them successfully, because if you can address their needs, you can often get them to write about your product or service.

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15 comments

6 Components of a Successful Digital Marketing Audit

by Mark Smiciklas · June 22, 2011

As digital communication continues to explode more organizations are recognizing its importance within the marketing mix. In order to develop strategy and allocate resources business leaders need to understand the effectiveness of their existing digital initiatives. A great way to do this is to conduct a digital audit – a study of your brand’s digital presence (on its own and in relation to your competitor set) across six key areas: Reach, Architecture, Content, Conversion, Integration and Measurement.

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28 comments

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