Project: Create a marketing strategy to support the Prime Radicals TV show and games-filled website. The show “edutains” 6-12 year olds with a wonky crew showing how math is useful, fun and helps solve every day challenges. The website has a whole series of Flash-based games to further educate+entertain kids with math.

Challenge: Create a Facebook campaign that targets parents of younger children within a specific geographic target (Canada, and Ontario).

Services: Marketing, Web Strategy, Advertising, SEO

In Partnership With: GAPC, Waterwood Communications

Delivered: The first few thousand fans of a Facebook page are the most difficult to get, but the site achieved this with a low per fan acquisition cost. We went on to develop a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy focused on a B2B audience to help generate interest for licensing the show and web games in other markets.

Equine Canada Social Media Seminar - Bruce Spur

A big thank you to all the participants – great questions, energy in the room, and some lovely feedback you provided.

If you attended these talks, and would like to receive a report summarizing the talks and providing links to all the resources mentioned – this is my big thank you for being such a great audience!  Please send me an email to BruceSpurr@webofimpact.com with your full name, email address and organization URL and I’ll make sure you receive it.

I will be selecting 3 people for a one hour free social media consultation – ask any questions, provide your plans and I’ll give you feedback, or help you get started!

Please also drop me a line and tell me what you thought of the talks – a testimonial and/or feedback is always welcome!

Friday we focused on defining social media, how it can be used in nearly every part of an organization for both external marketing and internal communication and collaboration. We then zeroed in on using social media for external marketing by providing details for creating your own social media marketing strategy. Tips included how to decide what platforms to use, creating a marketing funnel, tips on content creation and sharing, writing policies and guidelines, and much more.

Saturday’s session was equally interesting – but this time instead of focusing on use of social media for marketing externally to the organization, we turned the lens inwards, and zoomed in on tools that could be used for managing, organizing, collaborating, and communicating. The “Codes of Practice Renewal” project was used as a case study; this project spans 2 years, involves seeking input from a core group of stakeholders as well as thousands of individuals in the equine industry.

Hopefully you were there – if not, I hope to see you next time!

Bruce

An update to the goings on with our organization is in order as some clients have heard we are setting up a separate business to manage our training courses, workshops, and seminars. The website will be launching within the next couple of weeks.

Courses currently in our roster:

Writing for the Web – 2 day course – practical exercises, best practices, and lots of tips shared on how to write well for the web.

Social Media Marketing – 2 day course – walk out with a complete strategy ready to implement.

SEO for Writers – 1 day course – Search Engine Optimization is the ability for Google to find your site when people search for keywords relevant to you. Content writers play a significant role in improving SEO. Learn all about it.

Plain Language – 1 and 2 day courses available – writing clearly and plainly can boost every aspect of productivity, understanding, and improve clarity in communication. The benefits are endless.

We have seminars and talks about Web Strategy, Social Media, Article Marketing, PPC and Banner Advertising, and so on. Each talk is full of tips, best practices, and a few case studies depending on length.

Our courses and talks are all customizable – use examples and case studies relevant to your industry.

And finally, the Socail Media book I’ve been working on for the past few months will be published later this year. We’ll be giving away copies to all our clients.  Our work is founded on the precept of knowledge-transfer and education, the more you know, the better we can help you create winning web, social media, and online marketing campaigns!

[wpaudio url="http://www.webofimpact.com/media/BBBinterviewSmall.mp3" text="Radio intervew on social media" dl="0"]

Bruce

What lesson to take from this? Two:

1. Understand the risk – what’s bigger, pot or a guy who’s a hero to millions, a dedicated athlete, symbol of American pride, and winner of 8 (EIGHT) Olympic gold medals?

2. Understand your audience – are they the kind of people to connect closer to their idols when they do something that humanizes them (for example, make a mistake)?

The backlash against Phelps’ critics is amazing – and in today’s self-publishing, easy-to-access soapbox that can reach millions instantly – you have to be very very careful which side you are on.

What’s interesting is that “Web 2.0” connects directly to society’s true sentiment by accessing individual commentary.

So understand your audience and balance the risk with this insight to ensure you find yourself on the winning side of the marketing game.

This website offers you to connect with other industry insiders and manage your movie production project:

http://www.reelclever.com/

They also have a facebook page with nearly 1,500 fans. Nice job Reel Clever on bringing together a niche group of people. Not sure what your business model is, but hey, it’s a Web 2.0 world, I’m sure you’ll come up with a money making schema after you’ve built a huge (niche) audience..

In less than 5,000 days, the Web has gone from the linking of a few computers in a lab to satellite images of the earth at our fingertips. Today, the Web has 100 billion clicks and 55 trillion links and carries 2 million e-mails per second. There are 1 billion PC chips in use, 65 billion phone calls made per year, and 600 billion RFID tags being used. Every second, we move the equivalent of half the Library of Congress across the Web. All that in less than 5,000 days.

So what will the next 5,000 days bring?

In the same inbox I just received an invitation by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle for the Web 2.0 Summit taking place in San Francisco Nov 5-7th. So what’s next indeed..!? Hopefully I’ll find out at the Summit and share it with you.

Bruce

Here are highlights from my notes, but the best parts I wasn’t writing or Twittering, so below my highlights is the link to the full transcript.

Where are we finding all this new “extra” time for playing with Social Media sites (Facebook, etc)? Well… “Human’s now have a cognitive surplus that TV has been masking for 50 years..”

We spend “200 billion hourrs of thought per year in the USA watching TV”. Or to put it another way “now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television…”

Web 2.0 is developing an “architecture of participation” – best, and most succinct Web 2.0 definition yet, this is quoted from Tim O’Reilly actually, so he gets the cred.

“The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here…those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.”

“… someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, … enough of the collective goodwill of citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.”

On speaking to a TV producer about World of Warcraft, “I could see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.” At least they’re doing something. Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? Yeah, I saw that one too….However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, from personal experience, it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter..”

Traditional media was about consumption, the new paradigm is about consumer consuming, producing and sharing; so if it is “targeted at you but does not include you, it is by definition broken.”

Transcript:
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

[addendum] Video:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/04/web2expo-clay-shirky.html

What do you think? Which of the last three do you think will draw the most interest? (see the last two posts for the other proposals)

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What do a 19^th century Italian economist who accidentally defined a pseudo-law of nature, a post World War II American statistician who is responsible for today’s dominance by Japanese car manufacturers, and the 80’s poster boy for glam rock Boy George, have to do with Web 2.0?

Better yet, how can these diverse individuals help your organization leap frog the competition, create consistent and constant innovation, and drive your marketing so hard and fast that your operational people hate you?

So many questions! Come, listen, and participate. I may not have your answers, but I do have tools for you to use to come up with your own. Learn lessons exemplified by popular Web 2.0 successes (and failures).

Who should come: you are a bricks and mortar organization selling products on shelves, you are selling services at the boardroom table, you are a non-profit raising awareness, you are a pure Web company trying to manage its meteoric success, you are a corporation trying to find new ways to be nimble. Everyone can take something away and apply it immediately to their organization.

This talk can be personalized to use the audience to provide examples of how Web 2.0 success principles can be applied to your organization. If you’re interested in having me personalize the talk for your organization, please email me ahead of time with your organization’s background and I’ll see if I can fit you into the presentation. Take advantage, this is free consulting!

Tags: Business Strategy Innovation Audience Participation

Technical expertise: Low