A great reminder of why social media was a success to begin with, is AnnMarie Walsh, a homeless woman from Chicago. She recently used Twitter to tweet to over 4,800 followers about her experiences in being homeless. Her insights allowed her to offer pieces of advice for others that may be suffering as well.

AnnMarie currently has over 5,800 followers.

How did a homeless woman manage to tweet? She used her cell phone and computers from a local library. She was intrigued by Twitter as it enabled her to interact with people that would not normally listen to her. People were moved by her situation and even offered her as much as two laptops, to pay her cell phone bill, and bus passes.

As this was taking place, a filmmaker reached out to her via Twitter and asked her to be part of his documentary about the homeless. This was just the beginning of her positive experiences, as AnnMarie was invited to some of Twitter’s, 140 Characters Conferences as a guest speaker regarding her homelessness experiences. During one of these sessions, she encountered a case worker who was able to help her find temporary residence.

This is just one recent example. Many will remember the story of Ted Williams, the homeless man whose unique voice went viral on YouTube. He was soon able to find a job and residence after his story made headlines.

The trend seems to just be catching on. A charity in New York aims to give the homeless another chance at life, by giving them pre-paid cell phones and setting them up with Twitter accounts. This organization helps the homeless stay in touch with a world that sometimes forgets them, through Social Media.

These are just some examples of Social Media reinforcing the position that its level of interaction can be used to solve real life problems and effectively communicates the needs to one to another, enabling an action. Within the 7 Pillars, social media is integrated with other forms of communication to replicate this pattern, and enable conversions, whatever that may mean for each business or individual.

In this case, social media allowed individuals were overlooked or looked down upon on the streets, passed by thousands each day, and gave them a voice on a level playing field, where her residential status didn’t matter; where her class or appearance didn’t matter. Social media allows the world to take in a message and to grab onto it – to spread the word for the benefit for the source, in a world where we sometimes forget that the message may be all that matters.

You will be able to find the “Subscribe” button right on user’s profiles, on the right side next to the profile name.

When you press the button Subscribe, you can choose which updates you want to receive, and Facebook gives you 1) All Updates, 2) Most Updates, 3) Only Important as main options, with filters available per update category (life events, status updates, photos, videos, games…).

And of course the subscription option doesn’t work for every status update you publish, but only for the updates that you make public.

To active this new feature, head out here.

Whittaker’s Chocolate, a New Zealand chocolatier and the Portuguese Sagres Preta, maker of chocolate stout beer, bravely decided to create their website only using chocolate, their main ingredient.

Everything from the interface design to the navigation and the social icons on their website is made of chocolate!

The idea is brilliant, and with this approach these two companies are showing that advertising should be fun and honest, not boring, false or evil.

To better promote this initiative, the companies also accompanied the campaign with videos of how the websites were done – from idea to execution. Check out one of the videos that went viral on the web:

Delicious, isn’t it!?
If you would like to reinvent your own website and find a creative way to promote your products like these two brave companies, feel free to get in touch with us.

As a final thought, I’ll just share this excellent quote from the great Jerry Della Femina, who said:

“I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

Social Media has become one of the most powerful tools in Communications, PR, and Marketing. As the use of social media is ever expanding, it is now beginning to be used to influence immigration trends and has began to have a great influence in the medical world.

Australia is a prime example. This country has a unique problem. With a population of 20 million, many describe Australia as being under-populated. This can be attributed to the long distance that people have to travel from their native countries to Australia, and the violence against the native aboriginal people.

Slowly, Australia has begun to “convince” people from different cultures not only to visit as tourists, but also to become Australian citizens. In order to attract more people, Australia has implemented media. They have created television ads to promote the benefits of becoming an Australian citizen. This trend took off in 2010, when SBS, a local TV channel launched an online interactive series of documentaries celebrating the successful stories of the African people who came and built a new life in Australia.

What about medicine? How can Twitter be your Doctor?

Computer Scientists from John Hopkins University have observed that over 1.5 million tweets from 2009-2010 were inquiring about self diagnosis and self treatment for varying illnesses. Incorrect self diagnoses followed by feedback from millions of unqualified followers have created a sea of misinformation. This year the common misconception that antibiotics combat the flu became even more prevalent due to this form of communication. (In fact, antibiotics have little to no effect on the flu, they simply build the virus’ immunity to this type of treatment). The topic of medicine has found a convenient niche in modern social media. Currently, qualified specialists are creating special Twitter channels to give advice on healthcare inquiries regarding widespread ailments like headaches and the stomach bug.

It is amazing how social media has started not only providing basic information but influencing fundamental decisions people make, drastically affecting their daily lives.

Inspired By: http://socialmediatoday.com/node/315625?utm_source=smt_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter     July 8, 2011

I’ve noticed that web domains have begun to create their own unique link shortened URL taglines. I vacillate between bit.ly and tinyurl.com normally. David Teicher talks a little about the vision behind Bre.ad and its potential as an online advertiser with Ad Age.  He notes that Twitter continues to have trouble scaling the value of their content.  If Bre.ad becomes successful, then revenue baking is just the start of digital content’s glorious scent. The video below will show how to share your content online and spread the butter.

What is Bre.ad? from Bre.ad on Vimeo.

Anita Campbell is the Founder, CEO and Editor in Chief of the Small Business Trends website and newsletter. Campbell is also the host of Small Business Trends Radio.

Anita Campbell is an entrepreneur. She graduated from law school and has a wide range of interests. These interested are often reflected in her varied work background, including banking, information technology, human resources, marketing, and e-commerce.

Campbell is a professional speaker, analyst and a writer. She is regarded as being one of the leading small business experts.  She has gained this reputation by publishing several successful online media properties that reach over 1.5 million small business owners per year, among several other things.

Prior to starting her own venture, Campbell was the CEO for several corporations, including the Bell & Howell Company. This work experience combined with her education helped Anita Campbell to become a tremendous speaker with an expertise for small businesses. This has gained her notoriety. Campbell has been featured the “Wall Street Journal”, “New York Times”, “U.S. News” and “World Report”, “Entrepreneur Magazine”, “CIO Magazine”, “Entrepreneur Radio”, “BusinessTVChannel.com”, and other several more.

In 2005 and 2008, Campbell’s “Small Business Trends” won Forbe’s “Best of the Web” distinction for small business blogs. The site also has been highlighted in the “Wall Street Journal”, on MSNBC’s “Your Business” show as Website of the Week, and twice in “the New York Times” in 2005 and 2008, and was a CODIE 2007 Finalist.

Anita Campbell gains and capitalizes on her success through the use of social media. On 8/27/10, Anita Campbell declared on “Postlisting.com”:

During the same interview, when asked which the most effective social media for small businesses are, Anita Campbell advised:

Not only is Anita Campbell speaking at small business events, but she is the host of her own radio show called “Small Business Trends Radio,” which broadcasts over the Internet each week and is podcasted. The show features interviews of small business owners as well as corporate executives with useful information for the small business market.

Anita Campbell deserves to be recognized as a woman entrepreneur who should be followed in life and… on Twitter.

The primary objective of social media is sharing great content and developing strong relationships with your readers. In 2010, a whopping $1.7 billion was invested in social media
marketing. With investments in social media marketing skyrocketing, it becomes highly essential to efficiently manage content and measure your efforts. There are now a variety of tools available in the market to help you reach out to your audience and measure your performance.

Upcoming Social media tools for managing content:

1. Trunk.ly: Are you an active social media user? Do you frequently tweet, re-tweet, like and share links? You create a digital persona of yourself through the messages you share and the type of content you like, and keeping track of such activity on the social web can be quite a task without a dedicated tool. But now with the help of trunk.ly which can connect to your social networks, you can collect all the links that interest you and even have those web pages indexed. Trunk.ly works towards creating a personal search engine, thus saving you the task of tagging or specifying those links again. It can capture links from Twitter, Facebook, delicious, tumblr, posterous, WordPress, Instapaper and RSS feeds.

Courtesy: http://trunk.ly/

2. Storify: Tell your story to the world on storify.com. Take advantage of its easy and simple to use features such as the drag and drop of links, photos and tweets into your story,
and thereby eliminate the upheaval task of cut and paste of text, loading and reloading of photos and alternating between previews and edit modes. Businesses can create stories revolving around their products and customer views. You can embed your stories into any website, self-hosted WordPress blogs, tumblr, posterous and others. Your story also becomes a platform of communication where readers can respond or retweet elements of your story. Copyright issues have been taken care of by using publicly available content and notifying a creator if his/her content has been used in a story. A story on Storify.com is also SEO optimized as all the sources used are linked to.

Courtesy: http://storify.com/

3. Posterous: Manage all your social accounts from one place, and share photos, videos, blogs and even podcasts via email! For small businesses that do not have the time and financial ability to create content in various places, Posterous has developed this tool to help them reach out to their readers and customers via emails and social networks in one shot. A powerful feature of this tool is the ability to reply to a company’s newsletter. This way a business can really connect with its customers by getting feedback or comments via replies.

Courtesy: http://posterous.com

Few of the Upcoming Tools to measure and track results of your social media effort:

1. Argyle Social: A platform to publish, engage with your customers and understand social analytics. Argyle social provides a variety of advanced features such as Advanced Social Publishing, Streamlined Social Engagement, Social Conversion Tracking and Social Media Analytics. It has enough metrics and tools to track performance of every click, view, interaction and even a conversation and provide results in the form of spreadsheets. It can also integrate with Google Analytics, Tweetdeck and others.

Courtesy: http://argylesocial.com/

2. TwentyFeet : Get all your metrics consolidated and in one place. TwentyFeet currently monitors and tracks Facebook, twitter and bit.ly. The advantages of using this service is you can get all your daily stats via email, view and compare all your metrics in one place and identify interdependencies amongst them. TwentyFeet is working towards providing various data export formats including a fully functional API that can export results into other web applications. Very soon it can also be used as a middleware tool for your web service and users.

Courtesy: www.twentyfeet.com

3. PostRank and PostRank Analytics: This tool keeps a track of where and when users communicate and measures such activity in real time. PostRank can help you identify your target audience or “influencers” as they call it, measure your off-site engagement performance, set yourself benchmarks against your competitors and analyze any type of online content. Get your content thoroughly analyzed with the help of Industry Reports, Brand Reports, Industry snapshots and Custom Analysis.

Courtesy: www.postrank.com

4. Sysomos: A provider of “Business Intelligence for Social Media”, Sysomos offers an easy way to track your social media activities over various social media platforms and forums. Their flagship product “Media Analytics Platform (MAP)” comes with sophisticated features such as Automated Sentiment, Key Influencer Tracking, Geography and Demographics and Real-Time with Historical Activities. Sysomos monitors social media for the Public Relations sector, Word of Mouth Marketers, Advertisers, Corporations and API/Data Partners.

Courtesy: www.sysomos.com

Most fascinating is their past, because this campaign has as main goal besides inspiration – life, marketing and many other lessons that each of us should learn….

Alexandria Brown or the “E-Zine Queen” as she has been called acts as a consultant for several different companies and entrepreneurs, helping them increase sales, effectively build customer relationships, and attract new clients. The advice she has shared on her Online Blueprint System, has allowed businesses to triple their web traffic and increase sales up to 100%.

Brown has been featured in countless Business and Marketing publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Sales and Marketing Excellence, Nikkei Weekly), and on TV shows like ABC’s “Secret Millionaire”. Brown was awarded Ernst&Young’s Winning Women Entrepreneurs as well as named one of of Forbe’s Women to Watch among many others.

Brown worked for three years as an Account Executive at Mosby Consumer Health in Boston. Managing newsletter publications for several clients, she was able to form her Marketing and Communications background. She later moved to New York City, where she worked as the head of a new publishing division of, Oxygen Advertising.

For Brown, the desire to be her own destiny builder was prominent. She started her first venture when she settled in New York City; becoming a freelance writer.  She confessed, “I naively thought that I could start a business just by being good at something. In my case, it was writing reports, newsletters, and brochures for companies”. While being good at something is surely the start for any entrepreneur, Brown quickly learned that it would take much more than this.

She had no clients, and started thinking of a powerful tool to help her bring in customers – Marketing. Consequently, she joined several networking clubs and exchange groups, and tried selling herself in Manhattan by presenting her business idea, services, her skills, etc. Through these efforts, she received a minimal amount of clients, without any notable success. In debt and less than $20 in her bank account, she conjured up more courage than ever and continued her business journey.

Her first step was an e-mail newsletter. She started with a 10 person list and a website promoting her services. This helped Brown understand Online Marketing principles and how to interact with larger numbers of people at the same time.

What should have been called a humble start transformed itself into a huge success as she gained numerous clients every day. When asked about her secret to success, her first thought was to pen an e-book. She presented her process in an online book called “Boost Business with Your Own Ezine” that was sold for $27. The e-book was a tremendous success and had a definitive impact on her entrepreneurial and inspirational career.

Thirteen years later, she admits that all she was looking for at the time was a comprehensive technique to increase sales by advertising her company’s website worldwide. She was unable to find a company with a perfected system capable of providing the services she required.

Brown spent thousands of hours reading everything she could about marketing, and in turn worked thousands of hours to conceive a marketing system in order to promote her business venture.

We face this challenge every day – not having the tools or systems required at a certain time. This frustrating situation can be turned around to our advantage every day hard work and a strategic thinking process.

Brown  is a millionaire and her company is ranked as one of the fastest growing in the United States. Alexandria Brown proves not only to be untired in empowering women and other entrepreneurs worldwide but also in demonstrates that any career dream can be accomplished.

Digital Marketing Techniques

Digital Marketing techniques are often a mix of social media, campaign management and mobile marketing. These day’s marketers use digital channels as a part of their campaign management strategy.

There are different techniques used in digital marketing. The key here is which one is most effective to reaching and producing action from the target demographic. The techniques which we choose should be integrated into an overall marketing and communications strategy.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is about interaction. Interaction creates relationships and those relationships open up the opportunity for you to share information about your products and services.

The diagram below shows an approach to a digital marketing strategy; where online investment should be made and how to use social media in context of an overall digital marketing strategy. Build channel partners online. Provide information to the target audience, those who shop online (in this case) and also driving prospective buyers to channel partner stores. This also educates both consumers and your sales staff the value of your brand.

A sales funnel concept is used for turning prospects into new customers.  It’s helped countless businesses to identify opportunities to refine their marketing processes and build their customer base.

Below are some digital strategies used to attract the attention of consumers within a potential market.

• Create a Facebook fan page.
• Run a Google AdWords campaign.
• Ask current customers for referrals, incentivized by discounts.
• Start an e-newsletter.
• Prepare a social media calendar.
• Advertise your business in relevant industry trade magazines.
• Regularly release quality press releases.
• Attend local networking events.
• Start a networking event.
• Start a rewards program for networking partners.
• Start a rewards program for loyal customers.
• Register your business with Foursquare.
• Reward Foursquare mayors and frequent customers.
• Write an e-book.
• Create videos on how to use your product or service.
• Create videos related to new or unique ways to use your product.
• Create exclusive content for those that have joined your social networks.
• Start a blog.
• Create a Twitter account.
• Create a LinkedIn account.
• Look for target companies on LinkedIn.
• Create a direct mail campaign.
• Create custom landing pages for all your marketing efforts.
• Use Social Mention to monitor the conversation about your brand.
• Optimize a Web page specifically for Yahoo search.
• Optimize a Web page specifically for Bing search.
• Write a white paper about your industry.
• Leave pens with your logo and information on them in strategic locations.
• Review books on your industry on Amazon.
• Offer coupons.
• Leave helpful comments on industry blogs.
• Open and use Google reader (or any RSS reader).
• Subscribe to RSS feeds and organize the feeds related to industry and interest.
• Create lists on Twitter of people in your target market.
• Use Google Wave to collaborate in real time.
• Submit your information to Google local.
• And Many More!

Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization are 2 of the “7 Pillars of Digital Strategy”. They are also arguably the most important. Many companies have built entire marketing strategies based solely on the establishment and maintenance of these 2 pillars.

Social Media Marketing promises remain significant for the years to come. It’s instant communication, and now available at the pockets of millions of consumers. It allows for a direct dialogue unlike anything businesses had the ability to practice on a mass level in the past. Retention, Lead Generation, Reputation Management, the possibilities are endless.

SEO is by far the most desired Pillar. It is the difference between coming up on the 1st page of a Google search and the 28th. Every website needs to be optimized for specific keywords to be found on the internet. With search engines always changing, getting smarter, SEO is also changing and getting smarter. At Blueliner, we take pride in our great SEO work.

Blueliner invites you to an online presentation to learn about setting up marketing plans and best practices for tackling these essential pillars.

When: Thursday May 19th @ 2pm EST

Where: Online Web Conference

Cost: Free

Registration for this Event is now Closed

THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING!