Despite the snow today in Pittsburgh, my thoughts turn to ice cream.  I love ice cream.  I’m very boring.  I like chocolate and vanilla.  I particularly like the ice cream as the herald of spring.  I know it is spring here in Pittsburgh because I watch my local ice cream stands open up.  It means winter is over and those summer birds of our community return.

So what can ice cream teach us about social media communities.  It rained hard one day last week and my neighborhood ice cream shop did not open.  It was sunny on Sat. and the lines stretched.  IT snowed today and again the shop was closed.  It is supposed to warm up later in the week and I’ll bet the shop will be open and serving treats.

Read more »

Have you altered your PR strategy?  Or, are you still relying on newspapers, tv, radio, trade pubs to publish your news.  If you answered yes to the latter, then you are missing potential outlets for your content.  As you are aware blogs have exploded in quantity and have become a legitimate news outlet.

In a conversation last week, a concern was brought up that bloggers do not follow the same journalistic standards.  That statement is very true in many cases.  However, it should not dissuade you from this news outlet.

Read more »

UniversalWit is pleased to announce the release of My StartUp Site as a public beta.  The My StartUp Site is a new community built for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs.  The site offers start up business a free profile and blog as part of the beta.  Community members have full control to edit their profile and make blog posts, moderate comments, add video, and link to the site.

Community members can also participate in the future developments of the site by leaving the developers feedback on things they want improved and services they would like added.  Join today for free and get started promoting your business.  Please also spread the word to other entrepreneurs.  

Help us get this started so we can help others get their visions started.

It has been a few weeks since I got a Fun Friday post up.  This week, I want to share a short hight opinionated view on my ideas for bringing about a good change.  Feel free to chime in with your recommendations.

1. Get back to community- Find ways to be more social, more trusting, and more connected in your community.  Say hello to others you pass.  Get to know your neighbors.  Share some time and your expertise with organizations that are assisting your community.

Read more »

Facebook recently made some changes to both an individuals’ profiles and business’ pages.  The jury is still out on the profiles change.  However the page changes make them far more powerful and dynamic.  

If you have not signed up for a page, now is a good time to do so.  It  will not be a magic bullet, and I highly recommend that you use both offline and online efforts to promote your presence on Facebook.  However, when you do start populating with fans of your pages, you will find communicating of them to be fluent and easy with the new changes.

Read more »

I think this is one of those lessons you learn in kindergarten.  Play nice with others.  Along the way in our quest to be the best marketers or business managers we can be, I think we might forget that lesson.  I am not suggesting you make nice with your biggest competitor.  However, you can find lessons in social media on how to play nice with others.

I can install the Twitter application on Facebook.  With these two networks playing together, my Facebook status is now up to date every time I tweet.  Hey that is time savings for me.  For the two networks they learned how to co-exist and make each other more successful.

Read more »

Last month was my grandmother’s 80th birthday.  I could not make the trip to Florida to celebrate in person, but I was the good grandson and sent flowers.  It was close to Valentines Day, and there were lots of flowers.  I had seen an advertisement for Pro Flowers and they had some nice promotions.  

The service was great.  The flowers arrived on time and according to grandma ‘were lovely’.  So why must I use Pro Flowers as a what not to do example?  Since that purchase I have been bombarded with emails at least 3 times a week.  It became annoying enough that I unsubscribed.

Read more »

I will spare you my Bob Vila impression today.  Today’s topic is a simple fix that can take your old 1.0 home page and switch it to a Web 2.0 page.  The fix – add an RSS feed.  That’s it and every home page should have a feed.

The difference in thinking revolves around taking your informational site and transforming it to a content rich site.  Adding the RSS won’t in itself deliver outstanding results.  Keeping your site up to date with fresh and engaging content will accomplish that task.  RSS will make it easy to let others know that this content is new.

Read more »

It is Monday, but this is not Monday crankiness.  This is more of a I just don’t get it.  Let’s just get right to it.  This chart was published by Marketing Sherpa last week:

Read more »

I was reminded yesterday of some good advice.  You can put lipstick on a pig and it will look better, but it will still be a pig.  In the transition to digital from traditional marketing, the same thing can happen.

Case in point is the great Skittles debate.  I am not going to rehash it here two days late.  I also hate to nail a company to the wall for trying digital marketing.  They definitely stirred a lot of debate with their recent move to add a Twitter feed to their home page.  Problem is they are not using Twitter themselves.  That is why it is just lipstick.

Read more »