Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency

Tweet Your Senator is a new Twitter-Google Maps application that seeks to build community by harnessing the social Web.

Let’s start out by making it perfectly clear that the views expressed below do not reflect the opinions of 360i or the company as a whole, but are solely my own.

And @raleighbulmer. As well as @Tlov224, @KLoomis, @Hayath1, @mcpern and thousands of others tweeting their own opinions every second on a new Twitter-Google Maps application hosted on barackobama.com called “Tweet Your Senator” (and it’s lesser-known companion, “Tweet Your Representative”).

Team Obama is no stranger to social marketing, having developed a groundswell of popular support and campaign contributions within digital communities to help him get elected in the first place. His Facebook page has nearly 7 million fans, second only to Michael Jackson (Source: InsideFacebook.com), a number which is nearly 10% of the total votes he got in the 2008 election.

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Seth Godin just launched a new service Brands in Public build on his previous content creating company Squidoo, in partnership with BzzAgent. It aggregates conversations about a given brand that take place on blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and elsewhere. Brands can pay $400 a month to moderate their own pages. [Update: TechCrunch reported on Seth Godin's reversal where he will only create Brands in Public pages for brands upon request, so it's now fully opt-in. That makes this far less urgent for brands to consider.] You can read much more about this in Ad Age.

Should you subscribe to Brands in Public? Here are three questions to ask when considering whether to claim your brand page:

1. Do you have the resources to manage it? I note in the Ad Age article, “…The $400 fee is just a start. The bigger cost is the manpower involved in maintaining the pages, which is true of any social-media campaign.”
2. Will anyone notice it? Try searching for the page. Look at any keywords that pop out on the page, try to conduct some specific long tail searches, and see what it takes for it to come up in search results. If you can’t find the page, odds are your consumers can’t either, but make a note to repeat the exercise once a month or so. If the page comes up prominently, you may want to do something about it.
3. How will it fit in with your social media architecture? Odds are you won’t get to do enough with the page, from a branding or a content standpoint, to make it a hub for your digital presence. Should it even be a spoke though? Would you want to direct consumers there? Does it provide value for your target audience, whether current customers or prospects?

At the very least, there’s one thing you should do: monitor the page. If you’re not monitoring these sources already, this is a good way to get started. If you are monitoring these sources individually, this may be an easier interface than how you’re currently doing it. The question is whether to curate and moderate these conversations, and if you should do it here.

When I was younger, like most other school-age kids I dreaded the end of the summer. I was sad to leave behind the freedom and fun of my long summer days. However, there was also something I looked forward to come September that helped to ease the transition, and that was back to school shopping. I looked forward to the start of a new school year coupled with a fresh look – and brand new assortment of clothing, shoes, bags and accessories.

As a marketer wouldn’t it be great to have access to almost real-time intelligence on what shoppers are seeking and what they are telling others about? With the end of summer still fresh on everyone’s mind, we decided to take a look at the online conversations surrounding back to school fashion shopping, and uncover the most sought after items this year.

We analyzed posts from more than 16,600 conversations on Twitter, blogs and message boards related to back to school shopping. Conversations were organized by category of fashion item discussed, and we then took a deeper dive to find out what specific types and styles of clothes, shoes, bags and accessories were most buzzed about. Following are the results of our analysis:

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360i’s SVP of Emerging Media and Client Strategy Sarah Hofstetter spoke on a mainstage panel at OMMA Global this week, “The Mommy Bloggers – What It’s Like When Marketers Really, Really Want You.” Below are excerpts from the session.

Moderator
Catharine P. Taylor, Columnist, MediaPost

Panelists

• Carol Cain, Travel Writer, Managing Editor, NYCityMama.com
• Yvonne DiVita, President, Windsor Media Enterprises, LLC.
• Liz Gumbinner, Publisher, Editor-in-chief, Cool Mom Picks
• Sarah Hofstetter, SVP, Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i
• Kate Thorp, CEO, Real Girls Media

Cathy: What do you like or dislike about the term “mommy blogger?”

Liz: It feels like it’s a diminutive, but it’s the only term that describes the author and not the audience. Tech bloggers and gaming bloggers describe what they write about. I call myself a parenting blogger. In a way it does us a disservice because it’s a very complex and very different audience.

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Not your parents four square: Mobile apps like Foursquare and Yelp are changing the way consumers use social media (image via Flickr).

Not all mobile applications are social, but those with social elements will keep pushing social media’s boundaries forward.

Last week, we took a look at how consumers use mobile social networks. This week, we’ll look at four mobile applications, and to keep things focused we’ll stick with the iPhone. One thing these apps have in common is that they were used as examples at 360i’s Digital Marketing Summit last week, covered on the agency’s Digital Connections blog, either during my presentation on emerging media or in roundtable discussions.

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Mediaweek has named Bryan Wiener, 360i CEO, as a Top 50 person in the media industry for the second year in a row and describes 360i as a “pioneer in its embrace of social marketing.” Mediaweek’s 50 list captures the “the most important movers in the media and media agency business are the ones who get their hands dirty, who wield the marketplace clout and who come up with the ideas that end up making bazillions for their companies.” 360i was one of only seven digital companies on the list with the others being : Hulu, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Publicis Vivaki and Quantcast. The complete write-up can be viewed on the Mediaweek Web site.

HARO’s Peter Shankman: When entering the social revolution, it’s better to listen first – then talk (image via bu.edu)

Peter Shankman is largely known as the creator of HARO – that’s Help a Reporter Out – a free email distribution list that connects PR practitioners with journalists up to three times each day. Shankman’s project began as a Facebook group in 2007, but since then it has evolved into an 100,000+ strong community of media professionals. 360i recently interviewed Shankman to learn a bit more about HARO (which he describes as a “social media business”) and the social strategy he employs to ensure its continued success.

360i: How did you come up with the idea for HARO?

Shankman: I’ve always been someone who enjoys helping people. It’s good karma. HARO was founded as a Facebook group in October 2007. We outgrew the group because Facebook caps the numbers of members at 1,200. We turned it into a full-fledged Web service in March 2008. Essentially, the premise of HARO began because journalists would call me and ask if I knew anyone for stories they were working on. Over time, this occurred more often, which led to the Facebook group, and eventually, the full-fledge HARO Web site, reporter-source matching service and direct marketing platform for small businesses, which is the iteration of HARO you see now.

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