Good Social Media Engagement While Social Distancing

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Education and Training, Interactive Media, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy  
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Engaging brands on Twitter and Facebook and other various social media channels have a unique challenge when it comes to truly building community and support behind their brands.  Do brand managers monitoring their social media experience engage every tweet and post that mentions their name, product, service or industry? How appropriate is it to “chime in” on conversation streams with advice and “promotions?” And when is the line crossed from Good Social Media Practice to Something Dangerous? Below, we’ve put together four helpful tips to remember when it comes to being a good steward of your social media brand. While

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Midwest Marketer’s Birthday – With Cattle?

By on   /   Blog, SPOKE News, Web Video  
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Midwest Marketer or not, what do most of you do for your birthday? Party? Sure. Gather with friends and celebrate another successful year of living? Of course! But how many of you get to walk the beautiful fields of Iowa shooting video of Corriente cattle? Just us select few Midwest marketers, that’s who! Birthday’s aside, I was so impressed with the Yoke S Ranch’s facilities and their cattle, I wanted to make a quick video about it. If you’re looking for outstanding flavor and nutrition in your beef as well having the advantage of being grass fed and antibiotic-free; the

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Weibo: The Biggest Unknown Social Media Platform

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Education and Training, Interactive Media, Social Media Marketing  

Weibo. Unless you’ve lived in China for some period of time, I’d wager that this is an unfamiliar term for you, yet as a business professional, it’s time you two become acquainted. Weibo (微薄) is the stylized Mandarin term for “microblog”, a service native to China that in recent years has ignited like a wildfire across mainland netizens, akin to how Twitter has become so common-place in the United States. By “wildfire,” I mean the most popular Weibo platform, Sina Weibo (www.weibo.com), sees over 100 million posts per day (with 503 million registered users). Since 2009, most “Western” social media

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Social Media Marketing CAN Help SEO!

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Education and Training, Social Media Marketing  

The argument continues about the value of your social media marketing on SEO. I’m here to say it once and for all, Social Media Marketing CAN Help SEO! Having accounts in FaceBook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest et al., isn’t the end all and be all for your social media marketing efforts. That, at best is a “Level 1” effort of a good 4-Level potential program.  With strategy, content and the right marketing communications partners (yes, you need help and CAN NOT do it alone), the integration of social media into your marketing plans can boost Search Engine Page Positions (SEPP) as well

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Marketing 101 – Testing Is Imperative

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Education and Training  

One of my colleagues recently asked me,”…out of all the categories of marketing, including online marketing, marketing strategy, ‘Web 2.0,’” yes he used “Air Quotes,” “…market research, etc., what was the most important?” Without hesitation I burst with, “Man, it’s Marketing 101 – Testing is imperative!” Many of my marketing friends might argue and profess that if you don’t have the right positioning statement, reach the target audience, timing, or have the right offer, you won’t succeed. And to that I say SURE! In fact, those are the very elements of a successful campaign that can be identified through proper

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Facebook’s Graph Search Just Made Content Marketing More Powerful

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Interactive Media, Social Media Marketing  

If you missed the announcement, today, Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook introduced a new search query function for Facebook called Graph Search. In a nutshell, Graph Search gives the search option in Facebook more of an honest “query-style” approach – wherein it will search for your specific terms as usual, but also suggest related results based on varying degrees of separation between your query and the related returns. So, from a content marketing standpoint, if you have been strategically building relevant content through your posts on and to Facebook, Facebook’s Graph Search just made your content marketing more powerful! From NBCNews.com:

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How to Control Your Facebook Page Feed

By on   /   Blog, Interactive Media, Social Media Marketing  

So, we’ve been asked about the news feed on Facebook and how to assure that the pages you “Like” are showing on your wall. While it’s a simple fix, Facebook has certainly gone through some extensive efforts to make it confusing to the “general” user… Once you “Like” the page, you’ll see their posts on your wall for a short time, but if you do not engage for a period of time, Facebook’s programming assumes you’re no longer interested and takes it from your wall. This DOES NOT mean you no longer “Like” the page, but that Facebook thinks the

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Use Video To Generate Interest In Your Brand

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Education and Training, Social Media Marketing  

A client asked me the other day, because I work quite a bit in video, if I encouraged others to use video to generate stronger interest in their brand.  Generally… YES.  But why? At the time, I couldn’t give him a definitive answer. I use many sources to create interest in the brands I manage, so to single out video made it difficult to communicate the sole benefit to their brand. Eventually, the conversation diverted to other topics, but I just couldn’t forget the question. So, out of curiosity, I clicked on the YouTube link on one of that customer’s

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Occasionally, The King Needs Good Damage Control

By on   /   Blog, Brand Marketing, Education and Training, Social Media Marketing  

Yes. For those of you that might have been hiding under a rock on Monday, there was a HUGE disturbance in the force. It was like the voices of millions of websites cried out and were suddenly silenced all at once. Our King, our Mohamed atop the mountain was … down. For hours on Monday the King of all web domains, GoDaddy, was nowhere to be found, on the web or anywhere else for that matter. Well, at least it seemed like it. With that, millions of websites and interactive outposts such as email accounts, e-commerce sites and blogs were

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Leadership & Parenting: “Just Do Your Best?”

By on   /   Blog, Education and Training  

My parents told me, from kindergarten through college as well as all of my years in competitive sports, “Just do your best,” and with that, I went on into the world a “fairly well-adjusted, happy kid.” I never quite excelled in school. I never quite excelled in sports. Sure, I was a good student and student-athlete, but was “good” really my best? Just do your best? While I love my parents, I have to say it was a mistake to tell me (an incredibly insecure, sensitive, creative child) to “Just do your best.” Think about it.  What are the benchmarks?

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