Advocacy and You: LinkedIn & Google+

We have looked at how to build your advocacy efforts into your facebook and twitter accounts. This week we will look at how to amp up your LinkedIn profile and Google+ account.

For LinkedIn:

• Connect: Build your network and make sure it includes people outside of the music therapy or creative arts therapies. People who do what you do, know the importance of it. In order to be an effective advocate, you need to teach as many people as you can.
• Let your profile speak: Put as much information as you can on your profile that relates to what music therapy, art therapy, etc. can accomplish. Make sure you don’t publish anything that would violate HIPPA. But the more you can put that explains what you really experience and accomplish for clients, the better you can spread the power of your profession.

For Google+

Google+ is a tricky social media site. For month’s it was private and you could only get in with an invitation. Then it was opened to the public and many people didn’t find a use for it. But there are some advantages to being on Google+ and how you can use them to be a better advocate.

• Google+ is a Google product. This means Google will naturally favor it in their search engine algorithm. Having any type of presence on Google+ will help your organization and advocacy efforts get higher rankings in Google searches.
• Use the Circles: If you don’t know what circles are, they are ways you can group your Google+ connections. You can easily create lists of people you can advocate to and how people fit into different advocacy outreaches.
• +1: This is like the Facebook “like” button but it works directly with Google searches. You can build the +1 button into your website or encourage people to plus when searching. The more “plus 1s” you get the higher you will show up in searches as well.

I hope you now have the tools to increase your advocacy efforts on social media. Feel free to share your success stories and efforts in the comments below. Join us on Wednesday to learn more about branding and marketing and why it IS important for your private practice.

Advocacy and You: Facebook

So how do you become an effective advocate? There are so many ways you can fight for the things you believe in and with the power of social media you can expand your efforts.  In honor of #MTADVOCACY month, we want to show you how you can expand your advocacy efforts with your social media profiles to achieve your goals.

Facebook is a great tool for advocacy. With over 800 million active users, you have an attentive audience to preach to. Here are some ways you can expand your advocacy efforts with Facebook:

• Gather the troops: In order to be an effective advocate you need to have a variety of people who support your cause. Facebook is a great tool to do this. People actively use the site and spend a majority of their time there.  You can create a page in support of your cause and spread it through your network. Encourage people to like the page and share it with others who will support the cause. The more “likes” you get, the farther your advocacy megaphone will reach. You will have more success getting people to join a Facebook page than subscribing to another newsletter.
• Encourage conversation: What better way to get people motivated? Use your wall to strike up a conversation about your cause. Share your passions and thoughts and encourage others to do the same. The more people talk about your cause, the more support you will get. One great example I have of this is of a Music Therapist who took to advocating for their profession on a blog where people were criticizing it. Her passionate comments caused her to be contacted by people who were moved by the power of Music Therapy and wanted to be a part of it. She not only educated outsiders, but also was able to move people to make a change in their life. (Another benefit of having a running conversation on your wall is that you will have a record of who is extremely passionate. You can reach out to the most active people to get them more involved.)
• Digital Petitions: Ahh, the petition. Going door-to-door collecting signatures to encourage your government to take action on your cause, who has time for that anymore? You can use Facebook to get your petition in front of more people in less time. I highly recommend the site CARE2 (http://www.thepetitionsite.com/create.html). You can create a digital petition and automatically have it available on Facebook. You can easily share it with your own network, your active advocacy page, and encourage people to spread the petition for you. It will help you spend less time on collecting signatures and allow you to actually advocate for your cause.
• Expand: You can’t get complacent with your Facebook advocacy efforts. Too often we encourage people to get involved with a cause on Facebook but that is it. We don’t give them any sort of follow up or action they can take to the real world. Use your Facebook page as a central hub for your efforts on-line, but provide resources to help people get involved offline. Facebook is a vast landscape and people can easily forget about your cause if you don’t get them interested. If Facebook was a country, it would be the 3^rd largest in the world. With so many other distractions, don’t let people get lost in the crowd and forget about your cause.

Try to start incorporating the tips into your Facebook advocacy efforts. Remember to never give up. It takes a long time to grow support for your cause, and the best way to ensure success is to keep moving forward. Check back on Friday to see how to optimize your Twitter account for your advocacy efforts.

Networking 101: Everything I wish I knew before I got my degree

One question I never thought to ask myself when I was going through my undergraduate degree was “Should I network outside of “_Fill_in_your_location_here”". Now that I am merely days away from putting my stuff into a volkswagen beetle and driving from Buffalo, NY to San Diego, Ca I am really wishing I would have networked a little more on a national level.

So I urge all of those individuals out there to get involved with your professional organization not only on a local level but on the national level as well. For instance, PRSA offers an international conference every year where hundreds of professionals meet to learn about whats new in the field. That is a great venue to be able to network and just get to know who is in your field and meet those connections with professionals all over the country and world. If your a student, I suggest getting involved with PRSSA. They have a national conference that goes along with the International Professional Level conference, and its a great opportunity to get your name out in the field before you actually enter it.

Another great networking tool to expand your reach outside of your zip code, is Twitter. Twitter was just getting popular by the time I was finishing my degree and was useful then. Now with the widespread popularity of the site, you can use it to expand your network with little effort. Use twitter to search professionals in cities you might be interested in living in one day (or possibly might be a good place to have connections) and follow them. Respond to their tweets, retweet, and @mention them to get their attention (but please not excessively, then you just look like a stalker). Build a relationship.

One thing many people don’t think about in networking is the other individuals benefit. DONT let your first interaction with someone be to reach out and ask for a job or help finding a job. If you can build a relationship through a dialogue about your field, then you can get to a level where you have connections that will help you when you mention you are moving. Also, try to connect with your digital friends if you get the chance. Tweet ups at conferences, or maybe meeting for coffee while driving through their city is a great way to strengthen your network.

Finally, use LinkedIn. I started with a LinkedIn account when the site was first created and really did not realize what benefit it would have to me. Being able to connect with someone in a professional environment online is a great way to show your professional you. Facebook is great, but as we all know you may not want a picture of you drinking last saturday to be your first impression to a colleague. LinkedIn allows you to get that first impression out of the way with a professional feeling before they check out what you were doing last weekend.

One last piece of advice to any college students out there that really helped me when I was an undergrad was that take advantage of being a student. Ask to shadow at a company that you really want to work with. The worst they can say is no because they are to busy. Professionals (99% of the time) will say yes, because we don’t feel threatened by you and also want a chance to impress the next generation. We can take you around and give you a chance to look at what we do all day because it is a learning opportunity for you, after you graduate you might be vying for my job so I will be less likely to give you an open pass into my organization. Take your chance and see if you can walk around the offices and get to meet some of the other higher ups. You never know who you will meet and where that relationship will take you.

The Last Five Years

The other day I got home from the office and opened my mail to find a letter from my high school. My life has been in fast forward mode lately, and I haven’t spent much time thinking about the past, so when I received a letter telling me that my 5-year reunion is coming up in June I couldn’t believe it. I started to think that in five years I started college, helped start an IMC Firm, graduated college, and have been working for two years, among the other events in my life.

That wasn’t what inspired me to write this article though. What really got me thinking was that back in 2006, when I was deciding on what college I would go to, I couldn’t imagine what I would be doing now. I mean I literally couldn’t imagine what I would be doing because it didn’t exist. Social Media was just beginning to take off and it wasn’t even a possibility for a business to advertise on them. Facebook was still college e-mail only and youtube was just taking off. I can even remember sitting in my Comm 100 class freshman year and watching the news coverage of Youtube being bought by Google. My professor said that you will remember this day for the rest of your lives because it is the start of something new. And it was.

I then had the benefit of taking all of my Public Relations classes with a professor who was tuned into this “new possibility” of PR and was immersed in the possibilities of these technologies before they became mainstream. I can even remember signing up for a twitter account when no one really knew what it could be used for and now even grandma’s are tweeting. I’ve been aware of the term early adopter for a long time, but you never really know that you were one until you reflect back.

I also find it fascinating that even know I didn’t know I could make a career out of Social Media, I was able to store major events of this field into my brain before I knew they were super important. It makes me wonder if these events (youtube sale, facebook going completely open, launch of twitter, Ashton beating CNN) really hold a strong place for people in other fields or not.

It also amazes me on my moment of nostalgia, how fast we have advanced in 20 years. I remember when my family got our own first personal computer, then a year later we signed up for extremely slow dial-up through AOL, but today I can get the internet on a device that fits in my pocket even in the middle of nowhere. This niche field of Social Media Expert that I love and call home in the broader field of PR was created basically overnight. Who knows what the new thing will be tomorrow, or next year but always be looking for that next great thing, because you never know what you can make into a job.

One final thought:

I wonder if those people who said “Facebook? That won’t be around in a few years! Why would I even bother getting into that?” are shamefully jumping on the band wagon or still sitting in the “stone age” of technology, waving their first at this new way of doing things, hoping one day they will be able to say they were right.

Technology and Music: Part 2: Social Media and You

Now that you have your brand figured out, it is time to start putting your brand to work for you. You have to live into your brand. Every time you meet with a new client or a potential employer, make sure you take some time to reflect on that meeting after it happens. Did your Brand Essence come into play during that meeting? Do you think that Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So walked out of there thinking you were “fill in the blanks?”. When you are giving your therapy session, did you keep your brand promise to that client? It is going to be tough but to have a solid brand you really have to eat, breath, and sleep it. But remember, you don’t announce what the details of your brand are to the world, so don’t think that if you can announce your brand promise to make it easier for your clients or audience to see where you are coming from.

Now that you have your Brand and are living into it, it is now time to begin building your brand into your Social Media sites. In the section below, I am going to walk you through a variety of Social Media tools that you can use to strengthen your Brand Presence and get noticed in the world. You can use bits and pieces of each, or you can decide that one tool is best for you. That is the great and frustrating thing about Social Media, there is no right way of doing it but there can be wrong ways.

Facebook:

Facebook is probably the one place you want to be involved with on-line, no matter what your goals are. There are over 500 Million active users on Facebook, and it is reported that 50% of those people log on each day. That is 250 Million people that you can potentially influence on a given day. Now for a Music Therapist, you will want to concentrate on the city you are in, but for a musician you might want to gain exposure over a state or a country or even the world. For more stats on the usage of facebook, click here.

The key to expanding your brand and advertising is hitting people where they currently are. That is why billboards are placed on popular highways. People drive past them, they see them without actively going to see them. Every time you post a message to your wall, your friends get that message on theirs. They are already sitting there, using the site, so why not take advantage of their active attention.

Now for your options. You have two general options when deciding what direction to go with Facebook. The first option is to create a page for your professional self. This way people aren’t linked directly to your personal profile when looking for you on this site. The benefits of this are that you can still have your private space where you can maintain personal relationships without getting friend requested from every person looking at you professionally.  You can flood the airwaves with professional links and information without pushing it on your college buddies, unless they want to go like your page. The cons of using this technique are that you have to go to the page to update, and you have to update. I would say if you don’t provide 1 new (USEFUL) post a day, then you will loose your audience.

Your other option is to convert your personal page to your professional persona. This allows you to be connected to your professional digital self without having to click over to a different page. Every update and wall post can be conveniently pushed to your smart phone and you can be connected everywhere. I love this option for the solo professional who is making a career out of themselves. If you are your brand, then everything you do should be that brand. It leaves a big loophole if you say I live into my brand during the 9 to 5 hours and then I am Nega-Scott during nights and weekends. The cons to this are that you no longer are away from your business (might also be a pro), and you have to live like your brand. If you don’t want potential clients seeing your drunken side, then you might want to keep those photos on your iPhoto and not on the web.

Twitter:

Twitter is a great site to get a part of, but if you want it to work for you be prepared to be logged in. If you want to use twitter effectively then you have to be prepared to update it a few times a day, with meaningful posts or links. Let people know what your doing as far as professional purposes go. We want to hear if you are working on a new song or if you are giving a presentation to the board at a hospital to advocate for music therapy. We don’t want to hear that your bagel with jam was super delicious this morning and now you are on your way to yoga. Also, feel free to send out relevant links about your profession. Let people know that you are connected to what other are doing in your field and not just yourself. The real challenge is trying to make you brand personality apparent through each tweet. If you say your creative, then make your tweets creative. If you say you are a strict professional, don’t be cracking jokes everyday.  So as far as pros and cons go of using twitter, a pro is that you can reach another massive group of active viewers, and you can link it to your facebook so both update with one message. A con is that you have to actively update, twitter is so quickly updated that you can easily be forgotten if you aren’t an active presence.

Bandcamp:

Here is a great social media site that performance musicians can really use to benefit themselves. For those of you that record your own music, do you ever dream of having it sold? Well now you can, but it might not be in the way you think. First of all, I would stop dreaming about having your cd carried in an FYE or a BEST BUY because FYE is going out of business and Best Buy will have to keep changing to adapt to the ever digital market. Also, it can be difficult to get your music on iTunes, and then unless they have heard of you people might not find you. This site allows you to sell your music digitally to your fans and lets them do most of the work. Some of the features are that you set your price, people are able to share your music via other social networking sites (which gives you a wider brand presence), and a custom design to really make your brand shine. For a full list of features, click here.  Pros is that it gives you a chance to network and share your music while you get a profit, and I can’t really find any relevant cons.

There are hundreds of other sites that I can talk about that can benefit your brand. I feel that this is a good start to get an online presence that represents your brand and they can all link together. I do want to warn you though, that it doesn’t happen overnight and if you really want to use this technology to your benefit you have to put the work in to get the results out. So just stay active, make sure your brand is being properly identified on-line and stay positive.

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*This is Part 2 of 3 in a series about branding and networking your career on-line for musicians.

Google …. Facebook … Twitter … What’s the next great idea?

I just finished watching my Collectors Edition Blu Ray copy of the Social Network for the second time, on top of seeing it in theaters, and I have to say it is one of my favorite movies and I always have this crazy urge to sit down and massively code for hours after I finish watching it. But I always think of two things when the credits start to roll. First, is why couldn’t I have invented Facebook or at least been friends with Mark Zuckerberg before he did. Second thing is, what is going to be the next big thing.

Facebook was invented in 2004, just about the time I was deciding what college to go to. I like everyone else couldn’t wait to get my college e-mail to sign up for the site. Little did I know that as Zuckerberg sat in Boston developing this amazing site, I would eventually find a way to make a career of using it. Crazy, huh? Fast forward a few years. I was sitting in my college Public Relations class, and we were talking about what possibilities this new site could have. It wasn’t very popular at the time, and it wasn’t being used regularly. It was called Twitter. With in months the site exploded, and then it showed up on CNN with Ashton’s challenge. Now it is as popular as facebook, and also something I use in my career. Crazy once again, huh?

Well, as I sit here, wondering if I could come up with the next great idea, I really wonder what will be next. I mean it is time. We haven’t had a breakthrough revolutionary idea in a few years now. The last decade was filled with these revolutionary technology thinkers, and what happened? Did we run dry, or are people just being lazy because they don’t think they can top Facebook or Twitter. I want to put out a challenge out there, that we get off our asses and make this decade as revolutionary as the last, if not more. How can we progress if we live into this thought that we can’t one up what the last guy did. We can’t depend on Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs to do all of the work. Who is going to be the next name added to that list. I am rooting for mine, but I feel that I am a few years off. But I am going to keep working at it.

So, send me your suggestions. Are there any little sites out there, that are on the verge of eruption. What is going to be next?

Any sites you send my way, I will check out and put reviews of them on here, and send them out among my groups. Hopefully, we can be the one of the early adopters of this new site, and can say we had a helping hand in making the next ….

So Google, Facebook, Twitter, (your site name here),

Remember if you want to be successful you have to Do It In Public,

Jim

Egypt, Technology, and Wisdom: What can we learn from this?

As the days have progressed, we have seen the situation in Egypt go from bad to worse, to almost hitting rock bottom. It started earlier this week when the Egyptian government “allegedly” banned the Twitter service in their country. Some Egyptian companies stated that this was probably a service failure on the largest ISP in Egypt and had nothing to do with the fact that Egyptian citizens are in the midst of a protest to overthrow their leader.

I just think that the all too convenient failure of one social communication site was just a really bad attempt at a Public Relations cover up. As we have progressed through the week, we have seen that there is no chance that it was just a system failure.  We have seen the Egyptian Government shut down internet communications beyond twitter, and even start a ban on cell phone service. They know that the strength in the masses is through communication. Which, in their minds, without these major social community sites, and basic technologies like phones, people won’t be able to communicate as efficiently and support for protest might be slowed down to where the Government can handle it.

I don’t blame the Egyptian government for being afraid of this uprising, especially when earlier this month Social Media was attributed with helping the Tunisian government be overthrown. Check out NPR’s story, Social Media Gets Credit for Tunisian Overthrow. But as I said in a previous post, Revolutions were happening way before electricity. The sentiment is out there, as we saw, nearly 20,000 protestors filled the streets to combat this. They sure weren’t sitting there voicing their opinion’s on facebook or twitter. I think by trying to silence them at this point, is just adding to the fire.

We can talk about these situations all we want, because they are across the ocean, and we luckily can just sit back and watch the chaos ensue. But as we are distracted, we should be concerned with our own country as well. Back in September of 2010, there was a bill proposed, S. 3804 (111th). This act is titled “Combating  Online Infringement and Counterfeits Acts, and basically makes a law where the government has two lists of domain names that have to be blocked by ISP’s by law, which is controlled completely by the government. Yes, their intentions are noble, to cut back on counterfeits online, to protect property, blah blah blah. But do you realize that with the ambiguity of this act, the entire internet could be blocked, and we can be no better off than CHINA? We could loose YouTube, because they allow people to post videos with songs that they don’t own. Facebook could probably find it’s way onto that list, because how many of us post a video or a song that we don’t “own”. This is absurd to think that anyone in their right mind would even consider proposing an act like this. I am not to worried that something like this will pass currently, but lets just be conscious that people in power have the thoughts and capabilities to really diminish our freedom.

So after hearing that, I just want to put this thought out there into people’s minds, especially when we can compare the situation in Egypt to the fear of social media in some circles here in America. I don’t mean that we are going to revolt, or anything like that, but when Corporations still hold a tight fist around information that is shared on public sites, and to even get to the point where people loose their jobs due to a photo or a status update, we are having a little bit of a Big Brother Complex. It isn’t working well for Egypt or Tunisia, so lets try to reform are approach here.

We understand you (big companies) don’t like to have your brand tarnished, especially by someone on the inside. And obviously, you shouldn’t allow a disgruntled employee to destroy your hard earned rep, but to cause fear in employees that if anything slightly negative goes on-line they can loose their job, is outrageous. We even have to worry about a friend tagging us in a photo from a drunken party last weekend, even know we can untag it, we can’t untag it fast enough when we are all tuned in. Even if we set our profiles to private, we live in the fear that you think we are hiding something so bad we can’t let you see it. We are in a loose/loose situation. Lets stop living in a world of do’s and dont’s and let everyone be proactive/reactive, and talk.

What I mean is don’t discourage or block people from being involved with these sites. I mean if you really treat your employees great, they can be your best source of advertising, and you don’t have to pay them extra. Instead, let people know that you appreciate their interest to talk about work on these sites, but encourage them to come to an actual person with a problem. Let them know that they can complain about their job all they want on-line, but are their friends really going to help them in that area? Nope! and you should let them know that. If they keep complaining to their friends, they will get frustrated because the problem won’t be solved and then the company will also have a negative connotation because they might not know the problem exists. If they come to the management, the problem can be solved quickly, with no harm on either end. Also, instead of blocking these sites from work computers, maybe offer a one-day training seminar on how to effectively use these tools to get work done, and be a model for the company.

There are many ways we can work together to avoid volatile situations, and I think the bottom line is to realize that Social Media isn’t the cause, it is just a tool. Let me know your thoughts on this, and let’s keep Egypt in our thoughts as they suffer through this situation.

The Theology of Facebook, an Online Alter

This week I decided to flip it around a little bit. I am doing my Watchful Wednesday post on Tuesday and my Tech Tuesday on Wednesday. The reason why I am doing this is because I saw an article on CNN that I found very interesting and wanted to share and it definitly isn’t a tech story.

Now I am not a religious man, but since I do currently work for a religion, I check the media for related stories to see what is out there. I found an article about how Facebook can be similiar to a religious presence in our lives. We basically worship it, it stays open on our iPhones or desktops all day and is usually the first thing we check in the morning and we can’t forget to check it before we go to sleep. It also caught my attention because the author of the article had a revelation about Facebook’s religious-like qualities after the series finale of LOST. Which was one of my favorite shows.

So here is the article, Please let me know your thoughts.

The theology of Facebook, an online ‘altar’

Editors Note: Omar L. Gallaga is a technology contributor to NPR’s All Tech Considered segment on “All Things Considered.” He writes about technology for the Austin American-Statesman and for the newspaper’s tech blog, Digital Savant.

(CNN) — I grew up an Air Force brat who typically moved to a new place every three years. I switched schools, made friends, then had to write letters to stay in touch when I inevitably left. Except for a precious few, most of those friends went away forever, lost to memory, fading and eventually anonymous in aging photos.

But in the recurring dreams I had in my teenage years, they were all together. My friends from Oklahoma went to school with my classmates in Biloxi, Mississippi. My favorite teacher from my years in Germany got to see me grow up alongside my cousins from South Texas.

It wasn’t until many years later, when Facebook shot past its first 100 million users, that I began to get that sensation again, the one most frequent users are now well familiar with. It’s that sense of worlds colliding, of unlikely paths crossing; your work life, home life, past life and present all mashing together, commented upon and decorated with photos from here and from there, from then and in the now.

Facebook’s enormous membership makes it a more likely spot than any other place on the English-language Web to connect with a multitude of family members, friends, former co-workers, old classmates and anyone else you haven’t seen in the flesh for decades.

It wasn’t until the May series finale “Lost,” however, that I made another connection — that this idea of people coming into your life and never going away is a lot like what many people believe the afterlife is like.

Could it be that Facebook, the digital Tower of Babel built by a cocky Harvard student, is — to paraphrase singer Belinda Carlisle — sort of like what would happen if heaven were a place on earth?

The thought led me to a theological search for the spirituality of Facebook connections. Amid the recent flood of political rants, children’s Halloween photos and YouTube videos, many of us have seen status updates from friends offering Bible passages, spiritual quotes or information on upcoming religious services.

Along with a few alarming blog posts (“Facebook killed the church,” one bluntly proclaimed), I found a lot of theologians struggling to figure out whether mobile phones, social networks and text-messaging harm their religions or help reinvent them in positive ways.

There’s even debate on whether being so constantly connected to so many people is good or bad, spiritually speaking.

Bruce Epperly, a theology professor, author and co-pastor in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, wrote a thoughtful piece about so-called “Facebook theology,” likening the “intricate web of relationships” in our lives to our online social network. He acknowledged that even the lowly, short-form status update can carry a profound holiness.

“It might surprise my high school friends to discover that I often pray for them as I read their posts,” Epperly writes. “I believe that Facebook can be an altar on the Internet and a place of spiritual awakening.”

That seems to gibe with what Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed earlier this year. In January, the pontiff suggested that priests should embrace new digital communication mediums. But he stopped short of blessing Facebook itself as a virtual holy land.

Facebook, which recently passed the 500-million-user mark, grew so quickly in such a short span of time that even its creators likely haven’t been able to stop and examine the spiritual significance of its near-constant presence in so many lives.

To what do we owe our continually growing house of “friends,” the ones we never see, never call, never write to, but who contribute to our digital chatter, our daily chorus. Don’t those connections count for some kind of community? Wouldn’t we miss it if all these non-strangers were lost to us again?

What if Facebook itself, which digitally houses not only the living but also the “memorial page” dead, is a kind of pre-afterlife training where all those personal connections are forever maintained, even after you’ve shuffled off this analog coil?

And if the afterlife exists, and it’s anything like Facebook, does it have an “Unfriend” option? Because as much as I love all the connectedness, eternity sounds like a really long time to spend reading everyone’s status updates.

Kenny Powers … World Class Athlete or World Class Spokesperson

So I signed on to twitter today, and like any other day I looked at the trending topics. I was first off glad to see that Morgan Freeman was no longer trending, because when an older actor trends you automatically think the worst. But today I was noticing that #KSWISSANDKPOWERS was trending. I knew that K Swiss is the shoe company but I had no clue what KPowers was. So I decided to investigate.

Turns out that KPOWERS stands for Kenny Powers, Danny McBrides wonderful screw up baseball character from the HBO show East Bound and Down, which is in its second season. So apparently Danny McBrides’ character Kenny Powers is doing the ads for K Swiss’ new shoe the TUBE.

Which I have to say they are doing a few things right here. I am not an athletic person nor do I have any interests in athletics or athletic equipment. On top of it I am not a fan of East Bound and Down, but I like the comedic stylings of Danny McBride, so it kept my attention.

First of all, K-Swiss is not only constantly updating their twitter account and responding to individual tweets about them, they are doing it in the style of Kenny Powers. Not to say they are pretending to be Powers, but that they comment with the voice of someone that would be Power’s best friend. When I see a company take on a brand personality that is different and risky, it makes me incredibly happy. It means the are willing to be different. I mean when you think of athletic shoe commercials, you probably immediately think of a bunch of people running and sweating and the NIKE Swoosh popping up. But to see this represent K-Swiss’ brand, makes not only athletic people but people who are into comedy relate to their brand.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8kXCVtQgL0]

I mean, not only do you get an entertaining commercial where you are amused, but in each commercial you find out something new about the shoe’s capabilities, in some taunting message Kenny Powers says to intimidate the other person.

Then they have a facebook page where you learn about their company and also have the opportunity to get this amazing app. Kenny Powers will actually respond to your friend’s post on Facebook as you work out.

Then the brand recognition carries out through their Youtube channel. This just tells me that companies realize Social Media is the next place to really focus on. People used to go to your website to find out about your company. Now they don’t want to leave their social networking sites, and they definitely don’t want to just be redirected. They want to be infotained. I know other companies are very responsive on Social Media sites, especially athletic companies. Gatorade has people who monitor twitter and facebook all day. But I don’t think I have seen another ad campaign this involved with building their brand persona around a character from a TV show.

Let me know if you have any other examples.

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C is for Cookie…

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving.

Now onto our Trending Thursday article for this week. So I logged onto twitter this morning and decided to look at what was trending to see how I can relate it to social media and communications. I wasn’t too surprised when #blackfriday or #rememberwhen was right at the top of the list. What shocked me was to see Cookie Monster right at number 3. So I decided to investigate, and to my surprise it seems that cookie monster has launched a viral campaign to become the next host of Saturday night live. Most of the comments in the trending section were people showing their support for this beloved cookie glutton’s campaign to branch out his career. But then I found a link. A link that sold me on his campaign. That linked brought me from Twitter over to YouTube

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/?v=C-PkQRh3QXA&feature=youtu.be]

Then after viewing this video I was intrigued to find out where I can pledge my support for this Cookie fiend, and clicked along over to Cookie Monster’s facebook group.

We all remember Betty White’s successful add campaign to get the SNL Hosting gig a few months ago. This is a great thing and it is amazing to see how something like Sesame Street is launching a cross platform viral campaign to get one of its characters as a host on SNL. I just hope this isn’t going to give any other celebrities any ideas. I don’t want to see Bob Saget start a campaign in a few months to be the next host of SNL. Social media offers a lot of opportunities, so for all you celebrities out there get creative. Launch a campaign to get you elected as a mayor or a governor, especially since we no longer have the governator. Or what about a fan launching a campaign to see Jonah Hill be the star of an adaptation of your favorite children’s book. Let’s keep it fresh and moving forward. It doesn’t matter if you get a million followers because Ashton did it first.

Have a great turkey day with your family and friends,

Jim