Social media

Using Social Media to Build Your Brand – my topic at the upcoming Conferences For Women in Pittsburgh, Houston and Boston

September 25, 2010 by Susan Getgood

: Image via Wikipedia

I’m really looking forward to speaking at the upcoming Pennsylvania Governor’s Conference for Women (10/14), the Texas Conference for Women (11/10) and the Massachusetts Conference for Women (12/9).

At each conference, I’ll be teaching a workshop on Using Social Media to Build Your Brand. Here’s the abstract:

In this tough economy, it’s more important than ever to develop a brand and set yourself apart from the rest of the masses. Whether you have a job and are looking to advance, in the midst of a job search or working to build a business, social media provides the skills, network and energy to create a serious career advantage. This interactive workshop will explore ways to master social media to help create and reinvent your brand, reputation and thought leadership. Attendees will learn how to utilize social media to:

Establish access to new networks

Leverage Facebook and Twitter as a practical professional tool

Create a blog to align with and help you achieve your short-and-long-term professional goals

Break into new industries, professions and business opportunities

I’ll be arriving in each town the day before the conference and generally taking off sometime in the late afternoon of the conference, but would love to connect with as many folks as I can while I am in town. If you are planning to attend one of the conferences, or just live locally, please email or dm me and let’s see if we can’t get a meet-up/tweet-up going the night before the conference.

The exception to this is Boston. While I hope to have a home base in Connecticut by then, we’ll still be living in Mass. as well. The plan is to see the calendar year out here, and then transfer my son to his new school after the December break. So I won’t be scramming after the Boston conference with quite the same speed!

I’ve already given away my pass to the Pennsylvania Conference, but I have a pass to give away to each of the other two conferences as well. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post. Be sure to let me know which conference you’d like to attend, Texas or Mass. I’ll use a random number generator to pick the winning comments. The first comment number generated will get the pass for her conference of choice, and then I will generate numbers until I get a comment for the other conference. Please post your comment by midnight EST Sunday October 17, 2010. I’ll pick the winners early the following week.

Also, if you have a copy of Professional Blogging For Dummies and you’d like me to sign it, please feel free to bring it with you. I always have time for that!

Update 8 October: I will be doing book signings at the Conferences for Women bookstore so if you don’t have a copy yet, you will be able to buy one there.

A refreshing change from Super Bowl ads – the Pepsi Refresh Project

February 5, 2010 by Susan Getgood

cross posted to Snapshot Chronicles

The Super Bowl is pretty much the only athletic contest in the world where the television advertisements during the event get nearly as much media coverage as the event itself. Likewise the run-up and hype of the commercials. Will the network will sell all the space? Who will run ads, how much will they pay and what will they promote?

Before the ads even run, the pundits are postulating and after, they dissect them.

It’s a bit obscene really — and full disclosure, I’ve played the game on my blog in past years.

This year, though, the real news is who is NOT advertising during the Super Bowl. Instead of spending a hefty chunk of change on a few spots during the football game, Pepsi launched the Pepsi Refresh Project. For the next year, the company is giving away $1.3 million dollars per month to community development projects submitted and selected online by the public.

Anyone can submit a grant. Pepsi will accept 1000 every month, and the public can vote for up to 10 projects every day.

Of course, the company is getting a lot of media, and social media, coverage for the campaign, and I imagine they are also spending a pretty penny on the infrastructure to support the project with their ad, PR and interactive agencies. I’m sure they have high expectations for positive revenue as well as brand awareness results from the project.

What makes this campaign so exciting is the scale of the grants. Other companies have done similar projects to fund charities through community submission and vote. For example American Express. But I can’t think of anything from corporate America that matches the scale of Pepsi Refresh.

It is truly refreshing to see a company do so much potential good. I’ve got no problem if they “do good” as a result.

In fact, I’d love to see more copycats.

Who’s next?

Good advertising makes all the difference: Ad Club Hatch Awards

October 9, 2009 by Susan Getgood

Advertising.

It is often said that consumers don’t like or pay attention to advertising.

Not true.

What consumers don’t like is BAD advertising. Lazy copy. Poor targeting. Offensive stereotypes.

We also don’t like crummy products. No matter how good the ad, it cannot make a crummy product excellent or a dangerous product safe. Regardless of what they say on Mad Men.

We do like — even love — good advertising. Ads that tell a story. Make us feel. Make us laugh. If we’re in marketing, make us wish we’d thought of that.

Tuesday night, I was privileged to attend the 49th Annual Hatch Awards as a guest of the AdClub and got to see a lot of great advertising without having to watch TV or read a magazine.

There’s no way I can do justice to all the award winners in a single post, but here’s a random sampling of the ones I liked most.

My favorite TV spots were Mullen‘s Bruins Hockey Rules commercials. The campaign won a gold as did this commercial “Date.”

If you want more, I posted all the spots over at Snapshot Chronicles.

I also liked Arnold‘s TV spots for the American Legacy Foundation and Hill Holliday‘s series for Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project.

It’s harder to appreciate print advertising in the award show format. You miss the look and feel of the ad in the chosen vehicle. How well it fits (or doesn’t) in the publication. Even so, it was easy to like Mullen’s work for the New England Aquarium and Kelliher Samets Volk/Boston’s newspaper ads for WMBR radio.

Finally, as much as I do not believe in personal branding, I have to commend the silver winner in the personal branding category for the sheer balls of his campaign, malecopywriter.com

You may have noticed I did not mention any of the award winners in the social media or website/microsite categories. Not because the work wasn’t excellent. It was. But my strongest impression was that advertising agencies see, and execute, social media very differently than PR agencies and marketing shops (internal and external) focused on interactive media. Yes, I am about to make a generalization, and welcome respectful disagreement, but the ad agency work seemed to be about production values, not relationships.

In other words, engagement means very different things to the different groups.

Now, I didn’t actually find this surprising. I’ve written before that I have noticed that PR and advertising folks definitely approach engagement through different lenses.

Public relations folks — good PR folks — understand the importance of building relationships with customers. That blogger engagement is a commitment, not a one-night stand. Where sometimes they have difficulty is engaging with emotion and enthusiasm. Their training teaches them to be objective, factual. Storytellers, not promoters. It can be difficult (although not impossible) to shed that skin and engage around emotion and shared values, versus news, facts and benefits.

Advertising professionals, on the other hand, have no problem understanding the importance of emotion in eliciting engagement. Good advertising taps into our emotions to evoke an action. It’s rarely about what a product does. It’s all about how it makes us feel. Where advertising pros can miss in social media is that they don’t dial it down to more personal terms. The message is hype, not human. It’s about producing a slick “viral video,” not about finding a shared value with the customer that encourages her to pass the message on.

That’s where marketing generalists (like me) can help the process. We embrace both approaches – relationship and emotion – and can help organizations best leverage their advertising and PR specialists to develop well-rounded programs and campaigns that truly engage the customer.