Ella Bee Social Media & PR

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER- New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.
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You want to get your company and your brand out there. You want people to know who you are and you want consumers to be influenced through some channel or medium to buy from you and only you. When it comes to directing your spending dollars, you may get stuck wondering, where should we start, with PR or advertising?

This great article from PR Squared provides some thinking points:

In the new era [of media], ADVERTISING COMES LAST.

Advertising comes AFTER the corporation has created an ecosystem for its owned media channels (e.g., a blog, a Twitter handle, a Facebook Fan Page).

Advertising comes AFTER the corporation has an established rapport with its fan base, bloggers, and traditional media contacts.

Advertising comes AFTER relationships.

Tellingly, the “Challenges” regarding Paid Media — “clutter, declining response rates and poor credibility” are all ameliorated if the brand takes the Awareness Scale approach in which Social Media feeds both PR and Advertising, both of which then serve to catalyze fresh brand conversations, amongst people who are predisposed to do so.

With consumer and media relationships in place, the advertisements are not rebuffed but are embraced and carried forward by online enthusiasts. Sayonara, “clutter.” So long, “declining response rates.” Bon voyage, “poor credibility.”

I’ll admit — if I were running an Advertising Agency, I’d be nonplussed by the breezy way in which a Forrester Research analyst essentially downgraded my industry from “foundational” to, let’s face it, a secondary role. But we all have our challenges to face, eh? This one’s not insurmountable!

While everyone is talking about their new year’s resolution, I’m continuously working on ways to help companies and businesses understand the social media revolution.

Social Media Revolution: Is social media a fad or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.

Here are your weekly updates of Twitter applications to consider using for your marketing needs. The theme for these Twitter applications are to show similarities in the latest Twitter tools to things you may already use or be familiar with.
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By Kathy Cabrera

Planning your B2B social media program is only the first step in a long process. Once you have clearly defined your social media objectives, there are a few other steps that can put you on the right footing for success. Here is a simple social media checklist for B2B marketers you can use to get things started in the right direction:

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Whether it is for a grassroots campaign or a presidential campaign, social media networking can help you get the point across while gathering support. With online sharing, it makes it even easier to reach larger demographics and markets. Online petitions are easy and convenient.

In the first hour of this petition, there were 60 signatures with very little promotion. That means one signature per minute. WOW, that’s fast.