Kaleidos Marketing is a marketing, advertising and public relations agency. So, how did this blog, which was created to talk about marketing, end up seemingly focused on social media?

The terms social media, social business and social commerce may be the buzz for 2010, but though the terms may be new the technology been about in some form (list serves, forums & chat rooms) for several years. It has been in the past five years that more and more technologies have been developed to harness the power of social media, making it mainstream. Facebook has reached a critical mass, now having 400 million users. Blogs, ratings, reviews, forums, wiki’s and other types of user-generated content are taking over the web, and customers are more likely to pay attention to (and trust) that content over marketing-speak according to a Bazaarvoice white paper.

This is transforming not only the way that we talk and interact with customers, but also the way we do business. Customers now have the ability to shape a brand. It is imperative that businesses revisit their marketing plans and determine if and how to incorporate social media and to become a social business. Marketing plans can no longer be successful without an evaluation of what types of social media may be appropriate for their business. This is why this blog has come to focus on social media and will continue to do so.

For the past fifteen years Fineman PR has been publishing a list of the Top 10 PR Blunders for the year. What is different about this year’s list is that many of the blunders happened in the social media sphere, either directly by the organization or by a slow response to something published in the social media sphere. Two of these blunders were people who were actually able to right wrongs by using social media and the web to publicize the issue.

In an interview with Bulldog Reporter’s Daily ‘Dog, Michael Fineman, President, Fineman PR said, “In the old days, you had to get on top of a crisis in the first 48 hours. Now, it’s the first 48 minutes. In those minutes, you have a responsibility to contain the crisis and alert any audiences that may be in danger or are being impacted by the crisis. Your response must be instantaneous.” Social media has pushed PR professionals to consistently monitor the news, blogs and social media outlets, and it has drastically changed the time frame within which we have to react.

Anyone who knows anything about social media will tell you that to succeed you must be transparent. While we would always advise client to be so, it is more important now than ever. Everyone makes mistakes and the best advice is to be transparent, take responsibility and/or set the record straight, as appropriate.

What is also made clear by this list is that an employee’s actions represent the company (United Airlines and Dominos). Today it is easier than every for those actions to be apparent to the public and communicated to the public quickly and in scale. Customer service and public relations may be making a movement to be intertwined more than ever. Some of the more prominent Twitter success stories (Comcast and Dell) are companies who have used the service to proactively addressed customer dissatisfaction. Maybe CCSO, Chief Customer Service Officer, will even become a new job function.

2009 was the year of the non-profit for Kaleidos Marketing. We had the pleasure of working with three non-profits who contribute to their communities in diverse but important ways. It was truly our pleasure to be able to help them launch new brands to best represent their organizations and services.

Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival

2009 Bravo Brand

As a summer music festival, Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival is in a position to launch a new look and feel (or brand) each season. Their logo remains the same as does the product, but the look and feel is unique to the season. The 2009 season collateral was the product of a unique partnership between, Bravo, Glyphics and Kaleidos Marketing. In our possibly biased opinion, the end result was the most beautiful collateral of the past twenty-two years, and a happy client. The 2009 season collateral included a newsletter, ticket brochure, pocket calendar, education brochure, poster, cards, invitations, bookmarks and program book. Both the design and the product (FSC and recycled paper and printing process) represented the Festival’s dedication to the future of our world and the quality for which the Festival is known.

Roundup River Ranch

Social media is evolving at the speed of light. We have only had a glimpse of what potential it may eventually have to marketers and public relations professionals. Twitter just recently added the ability to create lists to organize the torrents of data available. This will have an impact on the industry in ways that we are just coming to understand. We have ourselves implemented lists on our Twitter account in order to organize data and be able to read information by topic rather than when it was posted. In doing so we also discovered that it is a great way to find other relevant people to follow. A recent post at Mashable.com gives you ideas how others are using this new functionality.

A recent study tells us that employers place more value on social media skills than traditional public relations skills. According to the 2009 Digital Readiness Report, a study produced by iPressroom, Korn/Ferry International and PRSA, public relations leads marketing in the management of social media communications channels whereas marketing leads in managing e-mail marketing and SEO. Most social media activities revolve around communicating with audiences, producing content, and serving as a spokesperson for an organization, as do public relations activities, So this makes sense to us. It is and will continue to be very important for public relations and marketing professionals to hone their social media skills and knowledge.

As we have only seen a glimpse of the potential gains, we have also only seen a glimpse of the potential pitfalls and dangers of social media. It is important for companies and marketing and PR professionals to educate themselves about social media and to strategize and experiment as their budgets and time constraints allow for both of these reasons.

Though social media has revolutionized available communications channels, we believe that it will remain one of many marketing channels available to business and one that needs to be seamlessly integrated with the others.

There are a lot of resources out on the web and it takes some time to sort through them all and decide which are most relevant to your business. We have a few websites that we follow for professional reasons and thought that we’d share these.

For Social Media

Mashable: This is a great site for quick overviews of anything going on related to social media. It contains short articles with tips for using social media channels and more.

For Public Relations

Help a Reporter Out: As a PR professional you can sign up to receive leads from reporters looking for sources. It is a lot to sort through, so for business may be best left to your PR agency, but interesting none the less.

Pitch Engine: This is a great site for getting your press releases out to bloggers.

For Marketing

Seth Godin’s Blog: These are Seth Godin’s thoughts on marketing related topics. We find it interesting and relevant.

For Article Publication:

Ezine Articles: This is a good site for publishing articles. We write articles and then submit them here for both our business and our clients’ businesses.

For E-Mail Marketing

iContact: We like iContact for e-mail marketing because it is affordable and offers the ability for us to design and program branded templates for our customers. They can then manage their e-mail marketing campaigns once we set up their template.

For Short URLs
bit.ly: If you use Twitter, you know you need to shorten websites urls when positing links. This is our favorite though there are several others with similar capabilities.

Enjoy!

This summer as part of our PR strategy for Roundup River Ranch we focused on the local market and one of our many tactics was submitting photos of the children with life-threatening illnesses attending camp through the “On the Road” program to Town Talk in the local paper. These ran once or twice a month as groups of campers left for or returned from camp. Halfway through the summer a woman walked in to the Roundup River Ranch offices, having never heard of the organization but saw a photo in the paper, and wrote a check on the spot to send a child to camp. Every PR effort, whether small or large can have an impact on your business. It is important to keep momentum going and have consistency. Not every effort will pay off, but those that do make all the others well worth it.