The Vincent Van Gogh Gallery posts daily on Van Gogh related news, events, exhibitions, books, quotes, FAQs and more. The posts often link to other sites like museums, news articles and artist galleries. Occasionally, The Van Gogh Gallery It is successful because of the loyal and dedicated base of Van Gogh fans who use the Facebook page as a forum to discuss all things Van Gogh.

Luckily, we don’t have to work too hard to get a lot of great user generated content. A lot of fans and contemporary artists influenced by Van Gogh will post messages and share photos.

Depending on the subject matter of your Facebook fan page, it may be easier or more difficult to achieve a fan base of this size. It’s not the same for everyone. Just make sure your content is relevant, focusing on the most identifiable and “conversation-sparking” aspect of your company. Think intuitively about whether or not what you’re posting is actually good fodder for conversation.

Thank you to those who joined The Net Impact and Reel Impact for “Watch This”: Video Marketing That Search Engines Love. Adam Crosley and Steve Thomas presented some great video creating and video posting tips and we just couldn’t wait to share what we learned!

Key Takeaways from “Watch This”: Video Marketing That Search Engines Love

1. Video is an art form but it helps to think of it as a communication tool. Create with the end result in mind. What action, understanding or feeling do you want to communicate to the audience?

2. ONE good, clearly written communication objective is a great blueprint for a marketing video. Do not overwhelm your audience by trying to communicate too many things with one video.

3. There is no “magic, right length” for a video; the shorter the better. 44% of audiences abandon a video within the first 60 seconds  (Adam Crosley, Reel Impact).

4. Even with just a few views, a video can rank high on search engines when optimized properly.

5. Don’t just produce video; pass it around, search for it and use it to connect with your customers and potential customers via social media. Video is a great trust agent if created and shared properly, so be creative!!

We hope you join The Net Impact team for our next monthly seminar at the end of June. More details to come. Stay posted!

Watch the full podcast below:

We encourage you to link to Tariq on the web. Here are just a few suggestions of where to find him in cyber space:

Twitter: @tariq_ahmad
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tariqahmad1
Website: http://tariq.me
Link to Tariq’s SXSW presentation on Social Media and NBA
Participate in Tariq’s sports fans and location-based services survey

Video Transcription:

Liz: Hi and welcome to the first TNI podcast where we interview a fascinating web social media or interactive marketer. Today, we will be interviewing Tariq Ahmad. He is a Social Media and Sports Researcher currently pursuing his Doctorate in Sports Administration at the University of Northern Colorado. Tariq is currently looking at the NBA, studying and looking at their fans and the teams to see how they interact on social media and how they use social media. So, let’s welcome Tariq.

We know that you have been doing a deep dive into social media and the NBA. Can you just tell us a little bit about that project? How you got started? What you’ve been working on? What you are hoping to find out? Just kind out cover what you’ve been doing.

Tariq: Sure. Well, I’ve been working on the project for, say, about the last year or so. Last July of 2010, I conducted a survey on how NBA fans use social media, so specifically Facebook and Twitter to support their favorite teams through those mediums. I got interested in it probably a couple of months before. I am seeing how the NBA did such a great job with social media and that I like using social media.

So that way, I just decided to go ahead and put the both of them together. In general, there’s been a lot of research done on sports in general. But some social media is such a new entity coming up and becoming so popular in the last few years. Not a lot of research has been done on social media. So, I went ahead and decided to meet at the intersection of the NBA and social media, and do some research on this.

Research has been going good, like I said. Last July I focused on more of the fans, how the fans use social media to support their favorite teams. Now, probably coming up this summer I am going to flip the script and see how teams use it to connect with fans. Do the teams offer fans anything, any kind of specials, tangible or intangible benefits through social media?

How many people went with a social media team before each team thinks along those lines. I wanted to get more of the full picture because there is only two sides to a story. The fans might see it one way, but the teams see it a completely different way. So, I think this summer I am going to focus on the other side to try to get more of a complete picture on how social media NBA works with fans and teams and then teams and fans as well.

Liz: Great. That sounds real interesting. And, since you haven’t looked into like the team interaction, what have you found out about the fan interaction that’s most interesting?

Tariq: It’s been really good. I have actually found a lot of good information, like why people follow it and use social media to connect with teams. I would say the most interesting finding that came through research was probably one of the most unexpected findings. I had a couple of questions on my survey that asked: why do you follow specific players?

So, the choices were, the player is my favorite player, he plays on my favorite team, I enjoy status updates etc., etc. That one there, I enjoy status updates, like by far and away, everybody loved that one. I think it was like, 78% of people said that I enjoy reading player status updates. So, they want to hear Shaq saying, “Hey I am going to go get a sandwich” or they want to hear LeBron James saying, “Hey I am about to do laundry”, things like that. People just love things like that.

Liz: They want to know they’re real people.

Tariq: What’s that?

Liz: They want to know that their sports idols are real people.

Tariq: Exactly, yeah. I think people just love that. Not only for the fact that they’re more like an idol but also just to let them know they’re humans. Just that, you know, hey Shaq has to do laundry, also. LeBron had to eat. Chris Paul has to pick up his kids, or if he has kids. So, I think that’s the nice thing about social media is it really breaks down that medium between a fan and athlete.

Because before you would have the fan read about somebody, we’ll say Dwayne Wade. So, if you wanted to hear about Dwayne Wade, you would have to read a website article or watch him on TV or see him in a commercial to hear about Dwayne Wade. Now, with social media that middle part is broken down, and now you can directly contact Dwayne Wade through Facebook, through Twitter. And, you can get an inside perspective on his life even if it’s something mundane. It’s like, hey that’s cool that he’s sharing that with us for now. It’s almost like I am there with him, and now I have a new connection with that athlete.

So, I really think that’s why social media is so good because it really breaks down that middle barrier and allows for you to get closer to your favorite athletes.

Liz: That’s fascinating. Tariq, it was my impression that as part of this project you were looking at location based services. Am I correct? Have you done your research on location based services yet?

Tariq: I am actually currently doing that. It’s actually separate from the NBA study. I actually have a research survey out on that right now. I can go ahead and pass along the survey to you as well. This one’s going to be more specifically for sports fans in general on how they use LBF like Foursquare, Facebook Faces, Gowalla, things like that. Not only in general use but if they use it in connection with sports teams.

And I want to see: are they receiving any kind of benefits from checking in. Like, hey, are you checking the game you are getting 20% off the concession stand or free T-shirt.

Liz: Which would be a lot of money at the NBA event.

Tariq: Exactly, exactly. I’m looking at that to see how fans are using it. Why are they using it? And why they aren’t using it? And seeing if there is some way that we can give people a reason to check in. Because some people can be kind of on the fence about checking in, like why should I let you know where I am at? Hey, if you check into Madison Square Garden and we’re now giving you 25% off on the nachos, then more and more people may be likely to check in.

What I am wanting to see is people, why they check in or why they don’t check in? Are they receiving any rewards? And would they be more likely to check in if they receive some sort of reward? Not only a physical reward or a tangible reward, but parking discount, concessions but intangible discounts as well, such as meeting the players after the game or media access, locker room access, things like that.

So currently I have the study out. I should probably have the results here in the next two to three weeks as well. I will be sure to pass them along to you as well.

Liz: And one of the questions that came to mind when you are talking about that is: was there a specific reason that you decided to focus on the NBA? Or why you didn’t decide to focus on any of the other major leagues?

Tariq: The reason I did NBA is because overall the NBA does the best jobs or one of the best jobs using social media. If you look at their numbers I think like, the NBA as a league has, I don’t know like over 11 million followers combined on Facebook and Twitter. If you take the NBA, NHL, and MLB combined, it doesn’t even equal the number of NBA followers. I think the NBA was not only a pioneer, but they are like really way ahead of the curve in social media as well.

I don’t know if you have seen that they have created an NBA Legend Game which is actually a Facebook game that you basically start off as a career, you start off as a rookie and then you build your way up throughout a career until you become an NBA legend. By building your team, by building strategy, by acquiring all these intangibles and that game is only available through Facebook. And NBA said they actually reached, I believe, they said that they’ve reached over one million users on that game only in a couple of months.

So, I think the NBA not only has the numbers, but they do things like that like creating Facebook only games that allows fans to use social media to connect with them.

Liz: And do you think that what you found could also apply if they ever did decide to get more involved in social media, that it could apply to the NFL, NHL, MLB or even college level sports teams?

Tariq: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I think the thing is that, social media in general, like I said, is just a new way to connect with fans to connect with teams. Overall, the thing is like is it’s scalable and it’s definitely transferable. So, even if the research is done on the NBA, it’s definitely applicable to NFL, NHL, Major League Soccer, Major League Baseball, all these other sports.

Because there are certain things about social media, like to me engagement is a big thing. It’s great if you have a million fans on Facebook. But if you are not engaging with any of them, it doesn’t do you any good. Or you may take another team which has only 10,000 fans on Facebook, but they are engaging with the majority of them: hey, thanks for coming for the game, thanks for being a fan etc., etc. I think that’s the key. It’s important to engage with your fans and with your users, and that’s definitely applicable across any sport.

Because every sport and every team is going to have fans and the fans appreciate the team. But the team must let the fan know that they appreciate them as well. Social media is a good way to do that.

Liz: Great. Tariq, those are all the questions that we have for you today. We really appreciate you sharing your information with us. Is there anything else you want to add before we sign off?

Tariq: I think social media is a great tool. Really, it’s only been prominent for the last five years. I really think you are going to start seeing a lot more growth and a lot more trends going in the next five to ten years as it keeps growing. I really think there’s going to be a big emphasis on the location based services, allowing fans to check in.

I think there is going to be big push on mobile devices as well through social media and probably see some bigger trends and some more trends coming through. Those two specific ones among other social media entities in the next few years.

Definitely, we’re still scratching the surface of social media. But, I am definitely excited to see what teams and leagues and fans and athletes are going to be offering in the future.

Liz: And I guess it’ll give social media experts a new reason to get involved in professional basketball and watch the NBA.

Tariq: Exactly, exactly or any sport, any sport they want.

Liz: Great. Well, thank you so much. That concludes our interview with Tariq Ahmad, Social Media and Sports Researcher from the University of Northern Colorado. Thank you so much and keep looking for our podcasts as they come. We’ll talk to you soon.

Watch the Reel Impact Video Demo to learn more and if you’re interested in attending this FREE event, Sign up on The Net Impact website!  See you there!

At The Net Impact, we conducted a short study pitting the SEO efforts of our local St. Louis non-profits against national powerhouse non-profits.  In other words, we graded their websites using HubSpot’s Website Grader tool. 

HOW WE DID IT

Through a Google search, we selected 10 recognizable St. Louis based non-profits for our St. Louis SEO sample.  Then we selected the top ten non-profits from a 2005 Forbes list of the Top 200 national charities (we verified that all 20 organizations in our sample still exist and have websites).

Using HubSpot’s Website Grader tool, we analyzed all 20 non-profit URLs.  Then we averaged all the statistics to compare St. Louis SEO to national SEO.  Here are the results:

WHAT WE MEASURED

Average Website Grade.  This is a HubSpot scale from 0 to 100 (100 being the best).  Hundreds of thousands of websites make the top 5% (scoring 95-100). An average score of 77.1 means there is a huge opportunity for St. Louis non-profits to improve their overall SEO efforts.

Average Indexed Pages.  This metric is the average number of pages that Google indexes from each website.  Google indexed as many 37,000 pages for the top indexing St. Louis non-profit in our sample and as low as 58 pages for the lowest indexing St. Louis non-profit in our sample.  Interestingly enough Google indexed only 32,000 pages for the top indexing national non-profit.  And the average page index of 5,742.2 pages nationally versus 4,552.1 pages here in St. Louis, is fairly comparable. 

Average Linking Domains.  Perhaps the largest gap in performance is the number of inbound links to St. Louis non-profit websites versus the average number of inbound links to national non-profit websites.  St. Louis SEO fell short with an average of 1,063 inbound links compared to the national average of 15,256.2 inbound links.

Best Traffic Rank.  Traffic rank is a statistic that defines a website’s overall rank in terms of site visitors compared to all indexed websites.  The top ranked website of our entire 20 website sample hailed from St. Louis as the 1,422^nd most visited website (which is actually pretty darn good).  The top national traffic rank was 8,547 (hint: it was the Red Cross). 

% Sites With Blogs.  Only 4 websites in our sample contained blogs that Google recognizes.  One non-profit in our St. Louis SEO sample had a recognized blog.  Three national non-profits hosted a recognized blog.  So on this metric, everybody gets a big fat…Eh….

MozRank.  Yet another linking measure.  The Moz Rank weights inbound links not only by quantity but by the popularity of the referring website.  For example, one referred link from CNN.com might be worth as much as many referred links from a small blog. 

Overall, St. Louis SEO is growing among local non-profits, but we can do better and we’re well on our way to competing with huge national non-profits.  If your non-profit is looking for an SEO solution or any other type of interactive marketing solution, check us out at http://www.thenetimpact.com/.

Free smart phone apps like Google Maps, KakaoTalk, YouTube, Facebook, and Pandora, all better our daily lives. But for Earth Day 2011, the team at Unidev and The Net Impact is putting aside our selfish technological whims and focusing on five free apps that better the environment by reducing wasted paper and other materials

Evernote is a simple note-taking application, which allows users to type, draw, capture or record notes and then sync those notes to their Evernote web account, a hard drive widget (PC or Mac) and a smart phone. Millions use Evernote each day to keep track of meeting notes, sideconversations and daily tasks. Evernote’s built-in OCR capabilities allow users to search image text as if it were typed text. No more wire bound Mead 5-Subject notebooks here.

Checklist Lite is free but comes with a few “in-app” ads.  As a devoted Post-it^® note user, this app helps me save a ton of Post-its.  It also allows me to create reusable checklists for grocery shopping, weekend trip packing and monthly “to-dos”.

Mobile Boarding Pass. Type the search term “boarding pass” into the Android Market search bar and it returns 11 airline mobile apps on the first page. The American Airlines, Delta and KLM apps top the list as the most downloaded airline apps.  Not only will these apps allow users to check-in remotely (avoiding those long hotel kiosk lines), they also display flight schedules, flight status, manage travel details and even download games.  Your carry-on just got a little more earth-friendly.

Expense Manager eliminates the need to collect receipts and stuff them in coffee mugs for later review (oh, you don’t do that?).  Whether you save receipts or not, Expense Manager makes it easy to track your income, expenses and account history.  Users can schedule payments and recurring transfers, set up custom expense categories and export important data.  This is mobile banking at its finest (and free-est).  And no thank you, I do not need a copy of the receipt.

iScrap, the final app on our list, allows users to locate nearby scrap yards, calculate scrap pick-up pricing, request containers at a specific site, take and send pictures of materials for asking disposal questions and more.  iScrap takes the guess work out of recycling and disposal research, so there is no question that materials have been disposed of in the most earth-friendly manner.

This concludes the Earth Day Mobile App post.  Interested in building your own mobile app?  Contact us on Twitter at @TheNetImpact or email us at info@thenetimpact.com.

Did you know there are already more people on earth who communicate via text messaging than with e-mail, and that there are  more people who own cell phones than own credit cards? In the world of Internet marketing, mobile is really taking off, and showing no signs of slowing down. Even Google’s CEO said mobile use is growing faster than even Google’s internal prediction.

Mobile marketing presents the opportunity for brands to connect with consumers at the right time, the right place and with the right message. As people around the globe have become familiar with mobile technology, marketers are beginning to take advantage of the growing medium. Lately, one of the most buzzed about mobile marketing strategies is mobile application development. With average smartphone users spending 667 minutes a month using mobile applications, these apps have the potential to put your business in front of a new, and rapid growing audience.

It may be hard to remember, but when the Apple’s iPhone debuted back in 2007, there were very few apps available—yes that means at a time there was no such thing as Angry Birds or UrbanSpoon. Today there are over 350,000 apps available for download on the iOS platform, and after the overnight success of that platform, down-loadable applications began popping up for almost every mobile platform, such as the Android and Blackberry. In fact, new estimates from ABI Research show that 7.9 billion mobile apps were downloaded in 2010. But what is the difference between an app that fails and one that climbs to the top ten?

In order to succeed in this growing marketplace, brands need to focus on the customer. Mobile apps need to be meaningful, and useful, otherwise they will quickly be downloaded and forgotten. When creating a mobile app you should remember to focus on ‘what’s the brand idea?’ and not ‘what’s the app idea’? A mobile app needs to be consistent with users’ expectations of the claims made by the company, while delivering a quality user experience. 

Mobile apps enable brands to be involved in a moment and deliver value at a time of  need. For instance, let’s look at one of the top pizza delivery chains nationwide, Domino’s. After launching the Domino’s iPhone application, which allows you to order pizza via your smartphone, the pizza chain drove over two million in sales to its stores in just three months.  The App helps the pizza giant create awareness for its stores when buyers are close by, driving viral social media sharing and giving people a way to personally interact with the Domino’s brand in a way never before thought possible.

The functional, yet highly creative, Domino’s mobile app works because it delivers instant value, has the power to attract new customers, enhances customer service, and, as the sales numbers speak for themselves, generates revenue. Ultimately, the mobile app transforms the potential customer’s pathway from awareness to purchase.

Should your company consider creating a mobile application? App-solutely. If you are seeking a convenient outlet to personalize your brand to the public, mobile marketing may just be what your brand needs to stand out among the competition. With smartphones expected to overtake feature phones in the United States by 2011, the popularity of mobile apps will only continue to rise. In fact, Forrester estimates that the revenue created from customers buying and downloading apps to smartphones and tablets will reach $38 billion by 2015.

Considering incorporating a mobile strategy into your Internet marketing efforts? Contact The Net Impact to learn more about our Mobile App Development services through our parent company, Unidev. Our team will work with you to explore innovative options for developing a mobile application as a mobile extension of your website or as a standalone product for your target market.

Download Unidev’s latest App, created for our friends at the The Van Gogh Gallery, to discover  the possibilities for custom mobile app development The Net Impact has to offer through our partnership with Unidev.

“Think Globally, Act Locally” –  This old age-old business adage is one global companies looking to maximize their marketing efforts should not ignore when it comes to social media marketing. In order to build credibility and earn significance within foreign social media, we must act locally when exploring opportunities globally. In order to reach target markets in different countries, international companies should deepen their knowledge of domestic social networking platforms and how different cultures use social media.

 “U.S. brands looking to leverage social networks internationally know that while their messages need to stay consistent regardless of the region, the language, cultural reference points, platform and tactics, all need to be tailored for each market,” said Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motor Company.

According to a study published at the end of January 2010, Nielsen observed the online social activity of consumers around the world and discovered an 82% increase in time spent on social networking sites in December 2009. But what social networks are these different countries using? As culture and behavior shift across countries, they also establish a new dynamic within each social network creating a universal population that adapts what they know to what they learn and experience.

Companies should learn how consumers around the world use social media and take advantage of the platforms to conduct consumer research, launch products, manage public relations crises and more. For instance, Facebookstands as the default social network, throughout much of the West, gathering all demographics. The same does not hold true in China, where Facebook was recently banned (much to the dislike of our friends at the Palo Alto headquarters), and a handful of social networks attract segmented audiences, ranging from urban youth to migrant workers. Think about it. Facebook is the largest social network globally with 500 million + active users, and China has 400 million social network profiles without having Facebook as its leader.

As we zoom in on social media usage in different countries, we see other established and emerging social networks that are unheard of, or not very popular in the United States. Let’s look at Brazil, the leading country in active social media usage, where Google’s Orkut dominates. In fact, over half of Orkut’s global traffic comes from Brazil, which equates to around 20 million monthly visits. And the decreasing in U.S. popularity, MySpace, has been Brazil’s third largest network for a few years. 

To get a good visual image of social media usage around the world, view Italian blogger, Vincenzo Cosenza’s  map below that portrays the most popular social networks  based on the most recent traffic data (December 2009) as measured by Alexa & Google Trends for Websites.

 
Different social media usage patterns and network popularity tells a great deal about the Internet and the country involved. For example, let’s look at the Chinese culture again. The Chinese use online video platforms quite differently from how Americans use YouTube. Rather than short, silly videos, which may be popular among YouTube watchers, China’s social video platforms, Youku and Tudou, are filled with longer content, up to 70 percent of which is professionally produced. Users in China spend up to an hour per day on the sites, compared with less than 15 minutes spent by Americans on YouTube. University students in China often express skepticism when told that their country has one of the highest levels of social media engagement in the world, because they expect that the United States would rank first.

In a demonstration conducted by Thomas Crampton and reported in an article on The China Business Review he tells of a demonstration he conducted with a classroom of students in China. He asked the students to raise their hands if they have watched China Central Television (CCTV) in the last week – no one raised their hand. When he asked who has watched a video on Youku or Tudou in the last 24 hours, every hand in the room goes up, accompanied by amused laughter.

As the anecdote above shows, a well-crafted television advertisement on could miss university students entirely. The transition to social media does more than demonstrate the popularity of emerging media—it shows new media’s affect on the advertising and marketing industry as a whole. If we fail to recognize that in other parts of the world, different platforms of media are preferred to what we here in the U.S. tend to consume, we are missing a big opportunity to reach a targeted audience. In China’s case, certain demographics can no longer be reached effectively via traditional media channels, such as television.

In conclusion, there is no doubt that we are in the middle of an international revolution in the way people communicate on the web, and marketers are continually figuring out what this means for their marketplaces around the globe. Your international social media strategy should take into account the most popular platforms in your target market. In order to effectively reach other cultures via social media, we need to understand that social media goes beyond Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and FlickR.

Don’t forget – regardless of country or social media platform; stay in line with your marketing objectives. Keep the consumer as a priority on every social network and in every market. That’s sound advice in any language.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and I logged on the ’net,
Where I was hoping, click-throughs, my website to get.
When an article on Time.com had me hooked,
 Zuckerberg is man of the year for creating Facebook!

While I was Tweeting instead of in my bed,
Facebook’s new photo feature recognized me by the shape of my head.
The online news forums were bustling with the Wikileak commotion,
as I had just settled down to check Groupon’s latest promotion.

When in my email inbox there arose such a buzz,
I logged off my Facebook page to see what this fuss was.
Then what to my tired eyes should appear,
But an inbox packed full of late holiday cheer!

O’ how my Google Analytics had flew,
So many hits to my site, I didn’t know what to do!
With visitors and goals increasing so quick,
I knew in a second it had to be the pay per click.

“Now Google, Yahoo and Bing searches are mounting!
My metrics are filled with clicks to be a counting!”

Now my search engine rankings on a daily basis fly,
I’ve never had so many potential clients interested to buy.
So many visitors my website did attract,
I knew all this online success was due to The Net Impact.

My web design looks great on every PC,
This has caused quite the jump in visit frequency.
TNI knows great customer experience is all in the details,
This is why I am bringing in the sales!

The Net Impact’s wish is this: may your site bring you gold,
And may all of your holiday wishes end up above the fold!

 View our Holiday Card on The Net Impact’s Facebook Page!

On Friday November 5th, I attended the Public Relations Society of St. Louis’ Technology Day at Maryville University. The sessions at this half-day workshop focused on how technology has impacted the changing landscape of the public relations industry and provided strategic views on how to leverage technology to boost your company’s public relations efforts.

With presentation topics ranging from social media marketing, blog marketing, web analytics, video production, email marketing and digital branding – it was tough to pick which three sessions I wanted to attend. Below is a quick rundown of the presentations I participated in and some useful tips and facts I acquired at PRSA Tech Day.

• “Leveraging Your Brand in a Digital World”- Michael Pranikoff ( @mpranikoff ) Global Director of Emerging Media for PR Newswire

With at least 72% of Internet users being a part of at least one social network and 57% of users sharing links to news stories via social channels; learning to leverage, monitor and measure social media to monitor your company’s brand is becoming vital. As learned in this very informational, and perhaps my favorite session of the conference, today in PR we are seeing a shift from brand voice to social voice (in other words, your brand is what others say it is). In using specific examples- such as Starbuck’s My Idea Campaign’s use of crowd sourcing, Pranikoff stressed the importance of PR, marketing and advertising working together to share one message. The most surprising fact I learned from this session was in 2010 there will be more content created than in the history of mankind! So how do you get your content found amongst the crowd online? Make sure your content is accessible, easy to view and easy to use – use social media to make your content directional!

Check out Pranikoff’s presentation on slideshare!

Presenter Michael Pranikoff of PR Newswire

• “Blogger Relations”-  Todd Jordan ( @Tojosan ), St. Louis Bloggers Guild

Creating quality relationships with bloggers is one of the most cost effective and beneficial Internet marketing strategies you can use in your public relations endeavors. So how do you find the right bloggers to connect with in the first place? On twitter and other social networks, google searches, blogging conferences, and through other sources. Make sure the selected bloggers are people who will care about your company and your news, or else you will just waste their time as well as your own. Don’t just pitch to bloggers like you would to a journalist – get in their inner circle by listening and participating. A great tip I learned to improve these relations: notify a blogger 24 hours before your news hits the wire. This is a great way to let the blogger know their opinion matters enough to you and your organization to notify them first. Remember – blogging is all about rewards, how will the blogger benefit from your relationship? Keep this important factor in mind when starting your outreach. The most impressive part of this presentation was Jordan’s evident passion for blogging. The tactics and strategies shared in this session to improve blogger relations came from an excellent source with a great deal of experience in the blogging world. As bloggers are becoming increasingly important influencers for brands all over the globe, maintaining good blogger relations can be critical to keeping your brand at the top of the mind of your consumers.

Check out some Tweets from Jordan’s audience at PRSA Tech Day!

• “Using Advanced Features of Facebook and Twitter”- Ed Mayuga ( @elmayuga ) AMM Communications

This informational session covered the less-known features of Social Networks. Mayuga opened the discussion with Facebook’s privacy settings. These settings are important to consistently check since Facebook changes them so frequently. Mayuga also went over how to add various groups to your Facebook account in order to share information with the correct audience, since in most cases – Facebook users want to direct their information to specific groups of people (such as  family, friends and work colleagues). Also covered in this session was FBML static pages. Mayuga suggested using @marismith as a good resource for FBML tip and other social media strategies. A few of the social media tools Mayuga suggested to test out are Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Listorious and PRlog. Learning more about this advanced features can help your business get ahead of the social media curve.

Thanks to sponsors PR Newswire and Maryville University for putting together this informative PRSA St. Louis event, looking forward to next year. In case you missed  PRSA- STL’s workshop on Friday – Check out the hashtag #PRSATECHDAY!