Building Authentic Customer Communities: American Express & Meetup

During the WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas last week, I attended a session with American Express OPEN to learn about their nation-wide Meetups geared toward bringing small business owners together to learn, share and grow.

With over 7 million registered users, American Express OPEN Forum is an online "trading post" bringing together small business owners to share advice, insights and ideas to facilitate the types of connections needed to re-energize the economy. Of course, the more small businesses grow, the better American Express fares, too.

Despite featuring content by Guy Kawasaki, Anita Campbell and Mashable, OPEN Forum wasn't seeing large adoption among its target audience, so American Express partnered with Meetup to provide 30 local small business Meetup groups across the country with curriculum and financial support to help them perform better in a down economy.

My first week at OgilvyPR

As I look at the calendar, my first week at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide is long gone. I've already been with the firm for just over two weeks, and it already feels like I've worked there for six months. Here's why:

1. The people at Ogilvy are really amazing. I've received an incredibly warm welcome that has helped me ramp up fast. (In particular, I especially have to thank @rachelpolish and @christinengo for their guidance and mentorship.)

2. I've been thrown right into the mix, and I love it. From Day 1, it's been go, go, go!

3. Between multiple in depth trainings, dinner with @jbell99 last week and lots of creative brainstorms, I feel like I've been a Digital Strategist for much longer than 12 days.

7 Ways to Live Better Online

No matter how organized and put together I feel in my professional life, managing my personal life can be a real struggle. I'm talking about staying on top of finances, exercising, eating right, sleeping well, running errands, etc., etc. There’s always more to be done and it’s hard to reach 100% productivity when you just want to relax after work and on weekend.

There is plenty of advice out there about how to manage or share things like photos, videos, and hobby lists with friends and family and how to catalogue your life with a blog or vlog, but what about all of that normal day-to-day "stuff" that can easily fall off the radar and out of order? If you're one of those 76% of Americans with Internet access, here are seven ways you can live better online:

1) Groove to music with DropPlay – Self-acclaimed as the free online equivalent to iTunes, DropPlay lets you stream music from YouTube and share songs and playlists with your friends through Facebook. Although YouTube audio quality isn't always the best (particularly with regards to live performance recordings), Drop Play can help make recommendations based on other recent selections and you don't have to download a desktop client to use it. Even better, it's completely free!

Will Social Media Enable the Digital Panopticon?

I attended a webcast, "Reconsidering Social Media," last week hosted by the O'Reilly media team and found myself pleasantly surprised at the philosophical turn of the conversation. I bet the Enlightenment philosophes turned over in their graves as we had a webcast "salon."

How did I get from social media to the Age of Enlightment? Trust me, the parallel is there. For starters, Joshua-Michele Ross brought up how the Enlightenment movement advocated freedom, liberty and progress at the very same time as the birth of prisons and asylums. In other words, the Enlightenment championed progressive ideals while institutions began to lockdown individuals and develop ways to control and manipulate society.

The panopticon is a prison 'in the round,' where the guard tower is at the center of a circle of cells (see above image). The idea is that prisoners can't tell when they're being watched and will therefore self-regulate their behavior to avoid additional punishment.

Marketing to your loved ones: The Ultimate Women's Hormone Guide

I found this really funny and decided it had to be shared! Of course, I would vote to replace "Here, have some wine," with "Please, thank you, sorry!" Let me know what you think.

The Hormone Guide
Women will understand this!
Men should memorize it!

Every woman knows that there are days in the month when all a man has to do is open his mouth and he takes his life in his hands! This is a handy guide that should be as common as a driver's license in the wallet of every husband, boyfriend, co-worker or significant other!

DANGEROUS	SAFER	SAFEST	ULTRA SAFE
What's for dinner?	Can I help you with dinner?	Where would you like to go for dinner?	Here, have some wine.
Are you wearing that?	You sure look good in brown!	WOW! Look at you!	Here, have some wine
What are you so worked up about?	Could we be overreacting?	Here's my paycheck.	Here, have some wine.
Should you be eating that?	You know, there are a lot of apples left.	Can I get you a piece of chocolate with that?	Here, have some wine.
What did you DO all day?	I hope you didn't over-do it today.	I've always loved you in that robe!	Here, have some wine.

Blogging Air Force Style

I recently contributed a post to The Page Wonders blog called "5 Things You Need to Know About Social Media Marketing and PR," which discusses the "underbelly" of social media and offers some humble tips for how to prepare yourself (and your company) for stepping into social media.

One point I make is that using social media for PR and marketing can easily take 2.5x the time a traditional PR campaign would along. If you're wondering how social media can possibly be so time-consuming, take a glance at the diagram at the left (thank you to Jerry Owyang for publicly posting this). This elegant flowchart outlines how the Air Force conducts blog monitoring and response (one of the social media programs we also run at Page One PR on behalf of many clients).

Case in point, just as you might monitor print and online news publications for coverage of your business or organization, when you delve into the realm of blogs and blog comments, the gloves come off. Not only do you have to determine whether to respond, but you have to determine how and consider the consequences.

Lisa Hoover at Computerworld wrote about "The newcomer's guide to social networking" today and also discussed the various intricacies that come along with social media for business. One of her takeaways: not every business needs to use social networking tools to communicate and/or promote itself effectively. I don't know that I agree with this, but I think it is less about the tools you use and more about whether you want to conduct business transparently or not.

One thing I will say - social media requires a lot of content. When I say this, I mean both producing and digesting content. Of course, you don't have to monitor social media channels to see what others out there are saying about you, your industry or other things that will pertain to your business. But then, why invest time in social media if you're not going to at least dedicate some time and resources to being social?

The Summer (or Spring) of Link Love

Ahhh, I haven't blogged in a while! Shame on me, but I promise, I've been off learning some really great things. What, you ask? Well, for one, I now know how to snowboard. I've been twice already and will venture up to Tahoe for a day this weekend. Hopefully I'll come back fully about to carve.

And, while the other stuff I've been learning has been mostly for work, it's really mind-blowing overall. I'm talking about the huge mount of link love going on around me. It's like the summer of love, but for links and it's actually spring.

Despite the corny joke, I'm serious. When I started out in PR, I was a little skeptical about online news articles. At least, with regards to valuing any placed for clients. After all, isn't a tangible article in print much more legit?

I now know the answer: no. It's not more legit, it's more antiquated. Everything is online - that's where people get there information and the trends will only increase. But, along with the death of the print media industry comes new ways to consume and share information and, along with that, comes new ways to think about PR, marketing and sales.

You might think I'm stating the obvious here and, if so, fine, I am. What I'm really trying to get at is that in shifting focus to publicizing a company online, you have to value your website. Not in the way where you try to make it spiffy and attractive, but in a way where you focus on driving traffic to it. If you don't, then you're wasting money designing your website. As I've gotten more looped into various social media campaigns, it's become apparent that beyond wanting to have more followers on Twitter, more fans on Facebook and more corporate mentions in the blogosphere, it's increasingly important to drive and measure traffic back to your website. If you're not doing this, then you're not on the right path.

Yes, it is still good to shoot for getting into what you might have normally considered a "tier one" publication, but at least consider looking at your Google Analytics to see what impact that publicity has on your website. If not much, maybe consider taking your news elsewhere, or at least putting some resources into finding and influencing other outlets.

Okay - that's my tirade for now. My excuse for not blogging is learning about how to turn interesting and useful information into content and how to distribute that content across the Web in a way that will increase a company's public relations awareness and drive people back to their website, or rather, their sales funnel. The economy will no doubt speed up the pace at which more people learn the lessons I'm in the midst of learning, but what I can say for now is that this is very strategic and exciting and I look forward to learning more!