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Dec 13 2010

Three Folks to Watch in 2011

There are the famous and the uber-connected, this post is NOT about them. It’s about three really genuine cool people who are smart, funny, and make stuff happen. Meet them…

Francisco Rosales. Social Mouths. This guy is just plain neat – he helped us with the kicking Thesis theme trickout you see. But he says some smart things – like claiming that it’s NOT about the numbers in social media – it’s about actual connections.

Has that right brain/left brain combo that’s tough to find.

Visit his site and learn a little more about him here: Social Mouths.

Shelly Kramer. v3 Integrated Marketing. Straight-shooter – and would you want your marketing expert to be anything else?

And just about every time she opens her mouth on behalf of the company, it’s spot-on. (When she opens her mouth on behalf of herself, it’s snarky.) Her site is here and she’s also speaking at the 2011 Blissdom Conference.

Another cool thing about Shelly: well, earlier this year she called us out here at Area 224 HQ. Privately, suggesting we were in the process of doing something stupid. She was absolutely correct – and her direct but kind suggestion got us to change our thinking on the concept of Social Media Automation. (Some of it – okay, but must be done correctly. Lots of it, bad.)

Katie Felten. MKE Live. One thing that’s really likable about Katie – besides her energy, her devotion to an underrated town like Milwaukee, and her deep domain expertise in the LinkedIn category – is that she actually left a corporate gig to make this MKE Live thing work.

Which, in this economy, is really really counter-intuitive.

But it’s that sort of thinking – zig when others zag – that can really pay off. Worth seeing what she’s up to – on Twitter (@KatieFelten) and elsewhere.

Our Three to Watch…

Who are yours?

Dec 06 2010

Still Time to Get $35 Webinar Tix

Underground Strategies. The Webinar. Thursday. 12/9. 1 ET, 12 Noon CT, 11 MT, 10 PT.

This marks, if our addition is correct, our 27th webinar since the beginning of 2009. Cool, huh?

Oh, and this one shares Underground Strategies – nifty things that, honestly, it took us a lot of time, effort, and money to learn.

IN FACT – some of the tricks we’ll teach you will save you THOUSANDS. (Seriously.)

One more thing – price goes up to $49 after Monday night.

And every attendee gets the Underground Strategies E-Book, too. What are you waiting for – learn the things that the Big Boys (and Girls) are doing with their marketing – and how you can do them, too!

Nov 30 2010

A Valuable Special Report, Yours For the Taking

From the intersection of “Small Business” and “Marketing”…

We’ve worked with dozens of businesses over the years – big and small, startup and established. Solo practitioners. Realtors. Insurance Agents. Etc. We’ve watched them make some mistakes – and we’ve made a few of our own, too.

We’ve kept track of some notables, and we’ve got the 5 Biggest Mistakes in Small Business Marketing.

You can download it here – it’s the type of stuff we share on webinars and in workshops, and people pay us for it. However, you can pull it down off our site, and we don’t even need your email address.

Area 224 Special Report – 5 Biggest Mistakes with Small Business Marketing

Nov 29 2010

Objectives: Your Social Time Needs Them

What Business Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

Clarity around objectives can make your “social” time much more palatable. Seriously: if the boss knows why you need to do this – or if YOU are the boss and you know why you need to do this – you can better justify the hours spent blogging, tweeting or updating the world on Facebook.

So how DO you set objectives? And can those objectives be purely social?

Some thoughts from here…

1. Awareness – good place to start. But knowing where you want to increase awareness is an even better place to start. Local? Hyper-local? Industry-focused?

We’ve met folks who said, simply, where they are right now is “eyeball acquisition.” Some tweets on a regular schedule, a hundred Facebook “likes” so they have an audience to speak to. Actually, not a bad objective.

2. Measuring can be a soft science. The obsession to measure everything – the obsession with the word “metrics” – has taken a lot of the “social” out of social media.

We made a concerted effort beginning October 1 at Area 224 HQ to blog regularly. By regularly, we said “once a day during the week, give or take.” We missed a few days, we double-posted a couple other days. But the result was a traffic spike – but also an awareness spike. In that we got calls, we got emails, and the inbound marketing machine was, well, working.

3. You work for the boss. If you’re inside Corporate America somewhere, you need to find out who that boss is. You might be in corporate communications, but if it’s the CEO who gets to be the social face of the enterprise, then your objectives are gonna be different.

And you may have to have a heart-to-heart talk with your actual boss: executive positioning and industry thought leadership have just become your objectives as a team.

4. Being social can be an objective. Reconnecting with friends, old classmates, old colleagues – strengthening your actual social network – this is a great use of time. And you can be up front about it to the boss: “having a better LinkedIn network helps us showcase our organization’s expertise, and opens us all up to more business opportunities.”