Everyone has seen the good, the bad, and the really, really bad on basically every online platform. The Twitter feed that reads:
“We’re having a sale 50% off”
“Stop in today – big sale”
“35% off everything”
It’s like someone taking out a huge cartoon Acme sledgehammer and hitting you over the head while calling you dumb. It’s annoying and the brand typically has under 100 followers to show for their efforts. I kind of feel bad, they’re trying…..
So since we don’t want to hit our clients and beloved customers over …

photo credit – from moon to moon
When I saw author of “Eat,Pray,Love” Elizabeth Gilbert speak this spring she said “every afternoon I take a silence bath” in which she basically just sits in a room quietly and hangs out with her cat or falls asleep.  “Rough life” I thought “must be nice to be an author with a gazillion readers so that you can take silence baths every day”.  Sometimes I don’t even get to take a real bath every day and  the only silence I get is after …

Photo by Erin Dollar
The topic of Facebook Fan Pages is coming up more and more regularly as people and brands try to decide whether they should spend a lot of time and money to have an amazing fan page and how they are going to get it above 6 fans that aren’t married to or otherwise related to them.
Now there’s research out there that suggests that people that fan your brand are also much more likely to recommend or buy from you.  Then there’s research that tries to figure out …

Having an event used to involve getting out the stamps and sending invitations but now there are so many online resources that help you manage your guest list (and some even make them look really pretty) that it’s difficult to imagine life without them.  With summer in full swing and events galore I thought it might be helpful to do a quick overview of the tools out there that I have used to coordinate an event (wish I had these when I had an actual events company).  Here’s the cream …

I create social media strategies for a living.  I have clients that are big companies, small companies, and everything in between and one of my jobs is usually helping brands figure out where they should spend their money online.  We look for specific sites and online audiences, spend a lot of brainpower on how we might be able to help or be a resource, convince CEO’s that conversations online are important, and then collect our budgets to ask these communities how we can help them.
One of the BIGGEST roadblocks to …

photo from The Small Object
I have been talking with a lot of bloggers lately that are interested in working with brands but aren’t so sure about how to go about it. Since I come from the other side and help brands find partners online (bloggers, communities, events, etc) I have some good tips for you when you are ready to actually ask a someone to work with you. Here they come:
1) Make a list of people you’d want to work with. This can and should be your dream list. …

(This is Part 2 of my Realtors Series)
Since my last realtor post I’ve been on more real estate sites than I care to admit in hopes of helping some of my new realtor friends with their social media presence online.  I wanted to get a good idea of what the typical realtor has in terms of content because in your brand, your content is really, really important.  Your audience is online, on Facebook, sending pictures of homes they might buy, and judging you by your site and by your picture.   …

I happened to be in Las Vegas last week for a horse show and while I was steadily losing money one night at the casino I was thinking about how people can fit paid media into their social media campaigns better.  I had to think of that because if I didn’t I would notice that at one point the guy next to me won $150 on a penny slot and the lady two machines down won $900.  I would look down as they won and say “hey, that’s great!” and …

I used to watch Cribs.  Remember that show?  Everyone kind of liked it because you’d follow people like Mariah Carey around her house and she’d show us things like a diamond encrusted toilet or whatever she had in her house that we didn’t.  It was a great because a lot of people like to peek into other people’s lives.  Just think of all the people that go to open houses with no intention of buying a house.  Just look at how much time I spend on Craigslist for no reason.
Anyway, …

photo credit: dieyoungforeverpretty
Philidelphia Cream Cheese has been extremely active in the social media world lately.  They launched a large outreach about 6 months ago in which they sent out Philly recipe books and encouraged  people to make something and write them back about it.  I got the recipe book but the outreach was really close to Christmas, I got busy,  I’m not a great cook, and I prefer my cream cheese loaded on a bagel with nothing cooked about it.  I doubt they wanted that recipe…. it’s pretty easy.
Anyway, Philly …