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Monthly Archives: November 2010

Brands and Bloggers Social Media PR Party Recipe 10 Ingredients

Posted on November 30, 2010

In Chicago, the social media scene sparkles with tweetups, parties and events – year round. So that you can live and learn vicariously, I’ll be covering how social media comes alive for brands and bloggers at events like Sauza’s Chicago Ladies Night In.

Thanks to Beth Rosen of 4 Keys Media, this event’s organizer, for the invitation and the opportunity to cover the event here and on my food, event and travel photography site, thesociallens.com.

Disclosure: As a guest, I received limo transportation to and from the event, food and drinks at the event and Sauza gold and silver to take home. Guests appeared on the live broadcast with Chef Marcela.

Brands and Bloggers Social Media PR Party Recipe 10 Ingredients

1. Make an Irresistible Offer

How would attending a tequila party benefit my readers? I asked this question before I accepted the invitation. Because this is a business-based blog, there isn’t much occasion to mention alcohol of any kind here and in social media updates. When I found out that the event included cooking demonstrations, I – personally – was in. I love to cook and watch professional chefs in action. Now, how to bring in the business angle? That’s how I came up with the PR=Party Review concept. How would adding more details increase your event’s response rate?

2. Book a Celebrity

Chef Marcela Valladolid, host of Food Network’s show, Mexican Made Easy
is a rising star, yet is personable and approachable. Sauza sponsored the event and Chef Marcela’s appearance. Booking a celebrity brings a star quality to your event. Who would you invite?

3. Mix Education with Entertainment

Chef Marcela talked about the tones of tequila, elevating it from an ordinary margarita mix ingredient into a spirit with history, character, taste and purpose. I can’t count the number of people I told about Chef Marcel’s tequila turkey infusion recipe. How can you or your products go from ordinary to remarkable?

4. Make a Go-Getter Guest List

Think about who you would like to attend and cover your event. Who would be on your A-list? How would you find them?

5. Serve fabulous food and drinks

Starting with crunchy deep fried olives, my new favorite appetizer, Chef Marcela introduced her recipes in stages, demonstrated how to make them and answered questions about cooking techniques. How would you demonstrate what you do – and make it interactive?

6. Livestream on Facebook

A dedicated camera crew, and on set lighting throughout the location, took this event’s live stream to a more professional level. Although I invited my network, friends and family to watch online, I’m not sure if anyone did. Still, the concept of a live show on Facebook is really intriguing to me. This is one hot topic we’re talking about with our clients. What kind of show would you host?

7. Deliver Door-to-Door

Limos picked up guests in groups, allowing for time to chat, eliminating the need for a designated driver and insuring that guests would arrive and leave on time. Partnering with a limo company as a sponsor gives them visibility and offsets the transportation costs. What kinds of transportation would you arrange for your guests?

8. Niche Match

One of Sauza’s markets is women, make that women in book groups. Our book group sampled a Sauza drink at our meeting this month. How can you match a niche with your product?

9. Lavish Location

Thanks to Stacey Roney of Beauty on Call for inviting us into her fabulous home. Built by her husband, the home is an elegant modern masterpiece, which was the perfect backdrop for a Ladies Night In celebration. Where would you host your event?

10. Make it Spread-able

First, you need a hashtag, or an identifier that marks social mentions, like #ChiSauzaLadiesNtIn. Photographers will bring their cameras and create sets like this one,
Chicago Ladies Night In with Chef Marcela and Sauza #ChiSauzaLadiesNtIn

Food and entertaining editor Jen Luby of Second City Soiree wrote about the recipes and invited her readers to inject some Mexican flare into their holiday menus. MJ Tam of Chicagonista covered the girlfriend angle while Nicole Yeary Nicole Yeary‘s ladies night in storify coverage blends photography and social media updates into an all-in-one post.
Some #chisauzaladiesntin guests tweeted and others like Amy Hesser posted event updates on Facebook. Community contributions spread the word about the event in progress and posts like this one add post-event dimension.

This post’s image credit: c2010 Barbara Rozgonyi for thesociallens.com from the 2010 brands and bloggers collection.

How did these party recipe ingredients inspire you?

2 Comments - Posted in PR, Social Media Tagged with: , ,

Social Media Study Shows Brands How to Spice Up Facebook

Posted on November 29, 2010

Wondering how to make your brand stand out on Facebook? A new social media study about brands on Facebook condenses the success formula down to four steps: make offers, empower fans, add images and don’t obsess over negative comments.

Four Top Facebook Marketing Tips for Corporate Brands

These top four tips are from Beyond’s press release. Hat tip to Allfacebook.com for the post where I found the original mention.

1. Provide fans with offers and discounts (42% friend a brand to get a discount or offer; 33% do so because they love the product)
2. The reputational risk is lower than you think so don’t just focus on managing the negative (only 5% of all comments are negative)
3. Fans are better at responding than brands so empower them (Fans are nine times more likely to help another fan than the brand itself)
4. Fans prefer images over video (Posts that contained a mixture of media types (e.g., an image and text) tended to receive the most likes)

Conducted by Beyond, the results analyze over 14,000 posts on corporate Facebook Fan pages of the world’s 100 most valuable brands and include consumer poll results from nearly 4,000 UK and US consumers. Given that the research appears to focus on larger corporations, do you think the results would apply to small businesses and non-profits as well?

In this post, we’ll take a look at a few highlights from the study’s press release along with Beyond’s Brand Interaction Whitepaper.

According to David Hargreaves, CEO of Beyond, “Brands are clearly struggling to embrace the new rules of conversational marketing which requires them to act as catalysts of the conversation and not control it. This research clearly shows that those brands that focus on empowering fans, creating interesting content to spark conversations and providing a light corporate touch not only have more fans but those fans are more engaged.” Source: Beyond Facebook Brand Study Results Press Release

A highlight of the report, for me, was the listing of companies with both positive and negative comments. Ketchup, cars and jewelery topped the positive list while the consumer electronics tech sector led with negative comments. What brand Facebook Fan sites do you comment on?

Brands with the highest number of positive comments on Facebook
90% Heinz
89% Audi
89% Tiffany

Brands with the highest number of negative comments on Facebook
52% Dell
28% HP
19% Samsung

Top Six Marketing Recommendations for Brands on Facebook
Beyond offered marketing recommendations that are simple to implement and keep the conversation two-way while directed away from the company and towards the relationship between fans and the products they love.

1. Applications: include on your page
2. Posts: Use text and static images to stimulate fan engagement
3. Questions: encourage comments by asking for answers
4. Responses: negative and customer service posts are rare and don’t influence the number of fans on your page. Responding too frequently appears to decrease the number of fans.
5. Brand Fan Logic: people become fans to be the first to know and be rewarded for their loyalty.
6. Products versus company: brands like Apple create product fan pages; this works because people are more likely to love a product than a company.

A nice touch I don’t see often in press releases, Beyond offered these links to additional Facebook research:
Researchers study behavior in social networks
Understanding How Facebook Pages Grow
First-of-its-kind research: Facebook fan pages are effective marketing tool
Why do Facebook users “Like” brands and products?

Spices background image courtesy of shutterstock.com in exchange for photo credit.

Your Turn
How do you spice up your Facebook Fan experience?

0 Comments - Posted in Social Media Tagged with: ,

Facebook Adds Email and Modernizes Communications

Posted on November 15, 2010

350M people send 4B messages on FB – every day. Is it time to modernize communications? Facebook says yes. Want to know more? Here are my press conference notes and a few videos, including a video interview with Facebook’s director of engineering, Andrew Bosworth [who went to 14 proms, according to his profile].


Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, observed that email is too formal with weight, friction and cognitive load versus sms & Facebook chat. Code named Project Titan, Facebook‘s new messaging system’s three main features: seamless messaging, conversation history and a social inbox. Hat tip to FT.com for a first look at Facebook’s new messaging system with email.

Although they’re weren’t there, literally, Mom and Grandmother came up several times in the Facebook’s press conference. It’s clear the team values familial inter-generational communications. “One of the goals of Facebook is to make it easier to stay in touch with people you care about,” is a direct quote from the press conference. What do you think these changes mean for marketing and PR?

Reader’s Guide: Notes typed during the press conference. Accuracy is not guaranteed. Spelling and grammar are not perfect. Please feel free to correct any mistakes.

Watch live streaming video from facebookinnovations at livestream.com


Notes from November 15, 2010 Facebook Press Conference

Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the conference with an introduction to the three main features.


Facebook Communication System Adds Email

1. Seamless Messaging
across all ways people communicate, including email, but not only email

2. Conversation History
thinks emails threading model is so archaic, a lot of the more modern communication is one thread that has a lot of interesting properties in the course of one conversation

3. Social Inbox
Because we know who your friends are, we can do some really good filtering for you. There are a lot of different classes of junk. The real way to deal with spam and filtering is to build lists, but nobody wants to make lists, on Facebook you can do that automatically without ever having to do any work at all.

Andrew Bosworth, director of engineering, went into more detail.
1. Seamless Messaging
Facebook brings all together: text/sms, Im/chat and email. Technology should get out of the way. You only need two things: a person and a message. A conversation is between two people. Facebook will match their username. The system is definitely not email, it’s more modeled after chat.

iPhone application is launching with the rest of the product.

People should share however they want to share.

2. Conversation History
Powerful idea. His grandmother has this – she has a box of letters from his grandfather in the closet. Context isn’t wasted, individually messages may not be profound, but collectively they mean something.

Modern messaging has to support attachments, extended photosharing Haystack to support photos. The biggest engineering team Facebook has ever put together for a product, 15 people.

3. Social Inbox
Mom deserves better than being sandwiched between a message from a bank and a bill. By default, you will see messages from friends and friends of friends only. Can move people into messages, other and junk folder. Every row will be a conversation. Other folder is things you don’t care as much about. Will be looked at maybe once a day. One of the last things, and most powerful, is that people get control over who gets their attention. Without the social graph, you don’t have that control.

You can now pick up with friends right where you left off on any device.

“We’re really proud of this. It’s a huge problem, not just scaling huge system, but on top of that layering email and other systems. This is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as one part of that.” What we think is happening, what we expect is more people will IM and engage because it’s simpler, more valuable and more fun. 1-2 years out – people will think that shorter messages are the way to do it – we’re moving more towards simple and real time.

Rolled out over next few months – starting off with an invitation system.

Questions about Facebook and email from the press . . . .

What does the system not do that Facebook wants it to do?
We want to have IMap support. IT already speaks email protocol; want it to sync with email systems. A lot of things it doesn’t do – having subject lines with multiple threads. You have a single conversation history with each person.

How do you decide which contact point the message gets sent to?
This is one of the complicated things they had to work out. A person can trigger from the interface – sms to phone. Try to deliver stuff as quickly as possible. If you’re online, a message can be delivered as an IM. Goal: to have it feel like a conversation. There’s a lot of dial to turn here. Tried to make it so that people don’t have to think about this stuff.

Any plans to add a VOIP or video component?
Sms, im email and Facebook messages – all text. This is a pretty big step to take by itself.

Advertising plans – impact on rivalry with Google?
Advertising works the same way it does for the rest of Facebook. Their ad system os based on what you put in. You put in that you like Greenday and you’ll get ads for concert tickets. “I think Gmail is a really good product.” The code name for this project is Titan the last one was Gigabox. This isn’t a Gmail killer, this is a Gigabox killer. This simpler kind of messaging is how a lot more people will shift their communication. This project also works with gmail users.

Gmail has a nice off the record chat feature
Users can delete conversations or be off view. All the different channels are unified.
People can say I don’t want info stored, can delete threads. Converging systems integrate channels.

Was this the biggest technical challenge to Facebook to date? How do you see Facebook changing the way people communicate?
Big challenge, but don’t want to compare to others. If users are used to IM, chat, email, they all will work the same way, Hope – we would feel like we’re a lot of continuous conversations with people we care about.

How does system allow you to refine the social graph?
The way people communicate is really important, focusing on people you say are your friends. That’s all private, that’s just for you. Doesn’t matter if a person is not a Facebook user, you can still communicate with email.

How does Facebook interact with people who are not on Facebook?
Facebook users have three folders: main, other and junk. If you’re not a part of the Facebook system, your info goes into the other folder to start out with, then the person can move you into their main folder. You’re using your network around you to make your world better – z

When you’re communicating with email versus Facebook – do those email addresses become a part of a Facebook users’ graph and how are you using that?
Messages from outside Facebook go into the other folder first and then you can use move them into the mail box. The email address is stored – have to do that for the product to work.

What happens to corporate email addresses?
After a long discussion, the farmbureau has agreed to give them fb.com. This was a big conversation internally. That brand is so important to the users, we really should give up Facebook.com and be something else. [The question may have been about corporate email addresses outside of Facebook.]

Many friends are more casual, does this mean that they can now start sending me emails?
With social design we’re always counting on meaningful relationships. Email is totally optional. At the same time, anyone who is already your Facebook friend, can send you messages.

One of the goals of Facebook is to make it easier to stay in touch with people you care about. The goal was never to expand the social graph, it was to map it out.

How do you send messages?
You can select send via sms. If your friend is not configured, Facebook will send an invitation.

How much storage space will each user be given? Can you forward messages?
Yes, you can forward and can add people to the thread. No specific numbers on storage.

More questions? Email Press@ facebook.com

Hey, what’s that you’re thinking?
Let us know in the comment box below.

Image credit: c2010 Phoebe Svoboda for thesociallens.com from the Arboretum summer set. For more information about the photographer or this image, call or text 630.207.7530.

3 Comments - Posted in Marketing Tagged with: ,

Veterans Day Gratitude

Posted on November 10, 2010

Veterans Day is always a powerful day for me. Four of my mother’s brothers fought in World War II. The youngest brother never came back.

Surrounded by uncles who fought in the war on my father’s side as well, the American Legion served as our family’s community center.

But, my father didn’t belong there.

Due to a disability, he wasn’t eligible to join the service. And, he never got over being excluded from going to war.

Today, I remember all of them, all gone, including my father-in-law who served in the Air Force with gratitude. Every family has a military story.


Today, I’m inviting you to honor the 21.9 million US military veterans.

Businesses throughout the US are offering special deals for veterans, active-duty military personnel, and their families. To show my gratitude, I’m offering a $50 discount on the Sixty Minute Second Opinion consultation throughout the month of November to up to 10 veterans, more if my schedule allows. To schedule a time, click on the link and I’ll contact you to schedule a time to talk about a marketing idea, a blog publishing calendar, a PR campaign, social media strategies or anything you want. Here’s an example of the type of project my company produces. . .

Veteran’s Day Book Recommendation: The Tender Warrior by General Hal Moore

In 2009, my company had the honor of distributing an announcement about General Hal Moore’s book and accompanying movie, The Tender Warrior. Here’s an excerpt from the release . . .

Published by Simple Truths, the book is for serious leaders and speaks to corporate managers and all people, no matter where they are in their walk in life. A Tender Warrior: 5 Leadership Lessons to America captures Gen. Hal Moore’s approach to leadership, motivation and inspiration. A long time warrior for ethical leadership, Gen. Moore is the founder of The National Endowment for The Public Trust, based in Atlanta, Georgia, with Ambassador Andrew Young as Honorary Chair. General Moore is donating 100% of his royalties from this book to The National Endowment for The Public Trust. Watch “A Tender Warrior,” Simple Truths’ movie about Gen. Moore’s new book.

Gen. Moore co-authored the New York Times #1 bestseller, We Were Soldiers and We Were Young Once, which sold 3 million copies and became a movie starring Mel Gibson.

“To say that I’m honored to be a part of General Moore’s latest book project is an understatement. It is one of the highlights of my life. This is one book that I’m certain will live on long after I’m gone. These leadership principles from General Moore are timeless treasures that will be inspiring to future generations,” said Mac Anderson, the founder of Simple Truths.

Disclosure: Simple Truths engaged CoryWest Media to manage public relations projects like this one. You should know the links in this post pay affiliate commissions. That means I get compensated for making a recommendation and routing traffic that results in sale. If you purchase a product or service from this site, please let me know so I can send you a thank you gift.

Image: Monument Circle Taxi c2010 by Barbara Rozgonyi from the Indy Collection

What’s your/your family’s military service story?

0 Comments - Posted in Branding Tagged with: , ,

Persistence, PR and Customer Service

Posted on November 9, 2010

Not what you want on a new iPhone 4G: a diagonal crack connecting the upper and lower screen limits.

But . . .that’s what I saw when I pulled my iPhone out of my purse one morning. It wasn’t there when I put it in away on my way out of a social networking event the night before.

I’ll admit I can be hard on my equipment. I dropped my Canon G2 camera in a parking lot a few weeks after I got it. It was durable, but not indestructible.

Wondering how fragile the iPhone4G could be, I searched the web for fixes. I didn’t see many/any cracked screen reports. How unlucky could I be?

A few comments on a blog post about iPhone 3g suggested going to the Apple store to request a replacement. But, the Apple stores around us are a 15 minute drive. Yeah, that’s not really that far, but I decided to check in first at the at&t store where I ordered the phone.

Signed in as the third name on the list, we knew we were in for a wait. In our area, people like to make sales interactions into exchanges about life and such and so on. One couple I watched took at least 20 minutes telling the sales rep about their personal communication habits before they decided on a phone. It’s all about who we are out here. And, believe it or not, most of the time everybody’s okay with that.

Maybe it’s a Midwestern tendency or a DuPage County peculiarity, but we don’t mind telling people who we are and why we are doing what we’re doing. And, yes, it’s okay if you want to, too.

So, I was honest with Erik, the sales rep who greeted me and my youngest son aka the entertainer who’s a geek and kind of a bit obnoxious at times when he wants to be, which is almost always.

“I’m really sad and disappointed that the iPhone is so fragile,” I said. “I didn’t expect it to crack in my purse. My HTC/at&t tilt was much more durable.”

When I asked if was still covered under the 30 day return policy warranty, I knew the answer was almost certainly no – and it was, by 12 days.

Erik couldn’t exchange the phone, but he could ask his manager for an exception. He’d never seen a crack like this and thought maybe the phone might be defective.

His manager said I couldn’t return the phone. So, I was ready to take it back and live with the crack when Erik noticed something: a black particle from the case on the counter. Did the case break the screen?

He suggested that maybe his manager might consider exchanging the phone. Before he walked over, he found another piece of plastic from the case on the counter. Both pieces and the phone went over to his manager.

The youngest and I waited while Erik submitted the evidence.

A few minutes later, he came back and said that they’d determined that the case cracked the iPhone. And. . . they were going to replace it!

I wanted to replace the case, too. Ballistic HC for Hard Core with four layers of protection and Otter were the top choices. Safe and snug in it’s Otter Box, my iPhone looks like some odd device. Too small to be an Android and too big to be an iPhone, it looks clunky. But, that’s okay with me. I know I can a) find it and b) keep the screen protected.

Yay! I can close all of the iPhone 4G repair service windows.

And the PR part? Why it’s this post, of course. Thanks to Scott Stratten, who recently spoke at Social Media Club Chicago, for sharing a customer service story that inspired me to write this post.

Image credit: Louvre Apple from the Paris 2010 collection by Barbara Rozgonyi c2010 for thesociallens.com
Disclosure: Amazon links are affiliate links; if you purchase products through these links, I will receive a commission.

Come on and Comment

What’s your best or worst customer service story of the week?

0 Comments - Posted in PR Tagged with: ,