Utah Public Relations Agency, Utah PR, Online PR, PR For Small Business, Utah Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing

I love this article from Collective-E. These gals are the best and truly support women-owned businesses.

How do you know if you are ready to have your product featured on a national television program?

Just this past week the producers at The View invited us to submit products for their program that would be included in both a segment as well as an audience giveaway. We immediately received fantastic responses from so many of you, but also several questions, which leads to this piece of advice. Here is what you must always be able to provide should national tv come knocking:

* Website - you must have a viable and professional looking website for the producers as well as viewers to find your product and find it quickly

* Sales - you should be able to sell online with a working and easy to use shopping cart

* Support the Buzz - Your site should be able to support heavy traffic for the first day, as well as the rest of the week that your product was on television

* Product - Not only will you be responsible for giving the audience product (they rarely use gift certificates), but you must be prepared to deal with high volumes of sales without delay! Audiences range from 150-225 members, and you will most likely want to gift the producer you worked with as well ( if they can accept gifts).

* Information - If the producers call you they will want your most recent product information, photos, and perhaps even a recent press release - have those all on hand before pitching!

* Positive & Helpful Attitude - Like it or not, even though you are giving the show a lot of product, THEY are the ones you should be thanking! Thus be easy to work with, reply quickly, and never expect something, thus you will always be pleasantly surprised! Even if you had a great call with them, until you actually see your product on the air, don’t count your chickens before they hatch! Be amicable, quick to respond, and don’t get upset if they don’t use your product or service, there is a reason they make all of their decisions and we cannot fault them. Besides, you want to be sure you are the first person to call on when they need a similar product again!

Last thought? GET OVER OPRAH! Send your pitch, follow up, but don’t spend every waking moment waiting for Oprah ’s producers to call when you could be missing out opportunities at other outlets!

Simple. It’s text message marketing. Research shows 96% of people who get a text message open it and read it. Chances are, if you send one out about your business they’re gonna read it.

This sort of marketing worked very well for Obama this last year. Campaign coordinators told people to text in different words for different campaigns. To receive campaign updates they told people to text “Obama”, for the pre-inauguration “day of service” updates they texted in “help”. Obama’s people were then able to message and motivate the masses using this technology. Some have even speculated that this sort of marketing is what helped tipped the presidential scales and won Obama the Whitehouse.

American Idol uses this same idea for voting in your favorite singer every week. You may have also heard your local radio station use the same thing for giveaways and music promos. And they continue to use it because it works very well for them.

You can use this same technology in your next event, press message, or even a sale at your store. It’s very effective and relatively inexpensive marketing…and the part I really like about this is that Utah happens to be the lucky state of the local company that can handle all these texts, M6 Marketing.

If you are thinking this would work for your business give Cory at M6 a call 801-941-5363.

By the way, Cory tells me you’ll get a whopping $50 discount if you mention my name, Utah News or Big Star PR when you call.

The general consensus is that Twitter accounts, though they can be corporate, should be more personal. The belief is that people want to get to know the person behind the business. The jury is still out on how I feel about this. On the one hand I get it. We do business with individuals, not necessarily corporations. However, to brand yourself and your company it is important to have that business presence.

Not on Twitter yet? Hope you get their soon. This place is a dynamo for driving active, interested participants to your site, blog or next event. It is also a great way to find out what people are saying about your company, to conduct corporate research and respond to customers in a faster, more personal way than ever before.

When you do finally join the Twitterverse…or if you are already on there, be sure to follow me twitter.com/sarahbuhr.

Start: 03/24/2009 - 6:30pm
End: 03/24/2009 - 8:00pm
Timezone: Etc/GMT-5

Twitter.com has spawned businesses, marketing strategies, relationships, and even helped win elections, so how can it help you? Twitter is a tool that can make a difference for your business (and your personal life) if you do it right, and really waste your time if you don’t. Our expert guides Katie Hellmuth (@ktjames) and Katja Presnal (@katjapresnal, yes, she has more than 7,500 followers) share a common love of Twitter, its followers, and have used it to propel their businesses and brands, hire co-workers, develop strategies and partnerships, and much more. Through her blogging and tweeting efforts, Katja has sold ladybug shoes that landed in Suri Cruise’s home locker, which then aired on Oprah’s show when she visited the Cruise family home in CO. Katja creates her own luck and has been courted by Disney for a free trip to the Enchanted Castle, picked by Walmart to be one of their 11 mommy bloggers, and more. What can you do with your Twitter account? The possibilities are endless.

Topics Covered:

* Dos and Don’ts of Twitter.
* How to find and connect with more people who want to help you.
* Why honesty matters in Twitter.
* What really is social media? We’ll discuss how social media is not about advertising, but about connecting and building relationships with people.
* Case studies of what worked and didn’t work on Twitter.
* Goal and strategy developing among the class participants.

COLLECTIVE-E MEMBER DISCOUNT: Core members receive a 25% discount, and Basic members receive a 10% discount. If you are a member and are logged in, the price you see below reflects your discount.
Price: $85.00
Location:
In Good Company Workplaces, 16 W. 23rd St., 4th Floor
Expert Guide:
Katie Hellmuth Martin

This is from http://www.social-media-optimization.com:

Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites

The number of social bookmarking sites has exploded in the last year, leaving someone new the space probably a bit overwhelmed at where to start. If you are new to social networking understand that each social networking site is different, it attracts a different audience with different interests. Thus what interests someone on Reddit might not appeal to anyone on Digg.

So who are the main players in the social bookmaking space? And what is the profile of the typical user of these social bookmarking sites? The answers below might surprise you!

Digg.com
Digg is the most popular and notable of the social bookmarking sites. Quantcast estimates that that Digg has about 25 million unique visitors a month. The audience is predominantly male (65%), between 25-34 years of age, with a household income between 30k and 100k. Digg’s demographics have changed as it has become more popular (mainstream). Not to long ago the Digg profile was male, under 25 who made less than 30k a year. Social media topics that do well on Digg include interesting photos, anything anti-Microsoft and lists (top 10, etc).

Propeller.com
Propeller (formely Netscape) is comfortable the second biggest social bookmarking site behind Digg with over 5.8 million monthly uniques, of which 3.6 million (62%) are in the U.S. Netscape also attracts a male biased audience (54) , that is slightly older (45-54 is biggest age group), and 55% of Propeller.com visitors have an household income over $60k.

StumbleUpon
Stumbleupon.com reports over 4.5 million members and Quantcast classifies it as a top 5,000 site that has about 1.5 million unique visitors a month from the U.S. The audience is male biased (56%) and between the ages of 45-54 (22% of visitors). The older demographic also skews the household income with 51% of visitors having a household income of over $60k.

Reddit.com
Reddit is becoming a very popular social bookmarking site with about 1.2 million unique visitors in the U.S., making it slightly larger than Del.icio.us. Reddit attracts a predominantly male (57%) audience that is between the ages of 35-44 (25%). With 65% of the audience having a household income of between $30 and $100k, Reddit is a mainstream social networking site. As a result, political, environmental, business and entertainment news does well with this audience.

Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is the oldest social bookmarking site and Quantcast classifies it as a top 5,000 site that gets about 1.1 million unique visitors a month from the U.S. The audience is male (53%) and about 47% of them are over 45. Similar to StumbleUpon, 51% of visitors having a household income of over $60k.

Newsvine.com
Newsvine is a top 10,000 site that reaches over 362K U.S. monthly uniques. The site attracts a slightly male slanted audience (54%) and 51% of the users have a household income under $60k.

Fark.com
Fark.com is a much more trafficked site than people expect. With 1,972,698 monthly unique visitors in the U.S., it is bigger than StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Reddit. The Fark audience is heavily male (69%), between the ages of 25-34 and a household income under $60k (52%). The Fark audience likes interesting, bizarre and amusing news stories, along with regular photo manipulation contests.

Blinklist.com
Blinklist.com is a top 10,000 site that reaches over 353K U.S. monthly uniques. The site appeals to a more male group (59%) who are between the age of 25 and 54. About 54% of the audience earns over $60k a year.

Clipmarks.com
Clipmarks reaches over 205K U.S. monthly uniques. The site appeals to a male biased audience (58%) with a household income of $30-60k. The site attracts almost equal amounts of people between 25 and 54.

Shoutwire.com
This site reaches approximately 70,742 U.S. monthly uniques. The site appeals to a more male (60%), younger audience (38% are under 24).

So what does the demographic data tells us? One is that the typical social bookmarking site user is male, between the ages of 35-54 with a household income of $60k or more a year. Is this your target audience? If it is not, then these are probable not the main social networking sites that you should be focusing on.

Note that Digg attracts more users than all the other social bookmarking sites combined. Similar to how MySpace dominates the social networking space (and gets the lion share of advertising dollars), Digg is the dominate social bookmarking site. If you are trying to reach this audience, then you have to include Digg in your marketing efforts, simply because the audience is so large, relative to everyone else in this space.