Friday, May 29, 2009

Is Twitter Addictive??

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If you can answer “no” to this question then tell me your secret. You probably post several status updates a day because you are fantastically addicted to letting others know what you are up to or whats on your mind. We are all starving writers at heart as Tweeters and the mico-blog format that lets you express your thoughts in 140 characters-not words, characters-is somewhat challenging and extremely addicting.

Basically, what I wanted to say was... follow @richter102media.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
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Aston Kutcher: Top Twitter User and Master at Public Relations.

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Ashton Kutcher is Twitters number one user (@aplusk) who has almost 2 million followers. Recently, the dedicated Ashton threatened to shut down his account if Twitter decided to partner in a reality TV series. Details about the show are scarce, but a statement from producers did say that "ordinary people" will be "put on the trail of celebrities in a competitive format."

So it seems like the Twitter show turned out to be a bad idea. Twitters are strongly protesting and as Kutcher wrote in a recent Twitter posting, "It's all fun and games until somebody gets stalked.”

Ashton definitely has Twitter in a headlock; no one wants to loose the top Twitter that sets the standards for Twitters all around; especially with almost 2 million followers and lots of updates on his new movie with behind the scence tweets.

Ashton demonstrates that setting good Public Relations on the web can be valuable.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
www.richter10point2.com

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Social Media will change your Business.

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Now, if you haven’t realized that a large amount of the communications of our world are rapidly turning over to the Social Media sites on the web, then you must not have a Twitter account, which means that you need to get one, I suggest as fast as possible, to be blunt, if you care at all about the sanctity of your reputation.

The New York Times has even recently hired a full time Social Media editor (@NYT_JenPreston) – this is a breakthrough. Easily one of the largest magazines in the world is realizing that they need to focus on the Social Media side of things to stay in print and keep the interest of their readers.

How do you fit into all of this? Getting yourself hooked up on Social Media is a start. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, and several more are sites that you should be actively participating in. You should have a corporate blogger typing away at articles, and maybe upload some pictures from a holiday office party so your clients can see the fun side of your company, and feel like they know who they are doing business with.

This is where we come in. Richter10.2 Media Group is a WebPR firm that deals in Social Media communications. We will make a campaign specially tailored for you and your company to really make it boom. The New York Times, The White House and many other companies across the globe are doing it-you can too

www.richter10point2.com

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
www.richter10point2.com

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Boston Police Department is on Twitter: We will let you know when the Zombies attack.

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While most of us were taking the long weekend off in celebration of Memorial Day, social media kept on going. There was no shortage of breaking news, amazing stories, and incredibly useful social resources.

Well let’s see how Social Media sites are extremely useful for news and updates. So much that even the Boston Police Department is using Twitter to “tweet” about incidents on the streets of Boston. Other citizens can interact this way easily and be up to date. Officers can warn their Twitter followers about an intersection to avoid because of an accident. Roads closed for construction, traffic, arrests, etc.

Sometimes they also reply to reader questions. A short conversation between a concerned citizen and the Boston Police Department revealed just how dedicated the boys in blue can be, as they pledged to inform the world of any zombie attacks they come across.

Boston_Police: INJURED OFFICER: Officer from district 4 transported to Beth Israel Hospital, human bite to arm, suspect in custody.

Twitter user willcady used the opportunity to ask the police a burning question:

@Boston_Police if that was a zombie bite, would you tell us?

The police, answerd him:

@willcady Yes, absolutely

Look for your local police department on Twitter. You never know, it could come in handy.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
www.richter10point2.com

Friday, May 22, 2009

Technorati

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Technorati Profile
Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
www.richter10point2.com

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Starbucks uses Twitter in their online/offline Social Media Campaign

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Since I’m on a roll with Starbucks and coffee, (I had my double cappuccino this morning with non-fat milk-see last blog), I thought I would research how Starbucks Coffee Company is using social media.

Starbucks already has a strong presence in social media. You can visit their Facebook, or if you are a Twitter fanatic you can find them there. Starbucks Twitter account has over 185,000 followers and the Facebook page has nearly 1.5 million fans.

Starbucks has recently launched “the biggest marketing effort it has undertaken,” according to the New York Times. The coffee company is displaying posters in major cities, and then challenging people to be the first to find and tweet a picture of their posters. Starbucks has other social media initiatives planned for this campaign. One is a contest for store employees to submit headlines for future ads and YouTube videos with coffee experts talking about Starbucks coffee. Starbucks’ social media presence gave it an advantage over competitors with gigantic ad budgets because its fans wanted to talk about it online. The idea for the Starbucks photo contest came from watching what people already do on Facebook and Twitter.

The reason for companies building this presence, I observed, is that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are ways of reaching many of your clients and building a relationship with them-and that’s what we call PR. It’s the building of a relationship with the public. You want to engage in interesting topics with blogging and microblogging using sites like Twitter where you have to express an entire thought in only 140 characters.

The largest coffee company in the world seems to be catching on.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
www.richter10point2.com

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Starbucks Latte Abuse: Enough already!

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We all know that hardly anyone can survive the workday without their morning coffee. For me and most of the people at the office, nine-thirty rolls around and it’s like clockwork that we get up and make our daily trip to Starbucks.

I was picking up a hazelnut cappuccino, not my normal order, but about once a week I decide to go all out and also added a cheese croissant on top of that. Anyways, I realized that I spend approximately $1,500.00 a year on coffee. That’s with only one cappuccino or latte a morning, if I add a cheese croissant one morning a week I end up spending an extra $200.00 a year. Now, some other people in the office are more dependent on the caffeine to get them going and end up having about three orders a day at Starbucks which winds up in them spending approximately $4,350.00 a year on coffee orders from Starbucks-cheese croissants not included.

There is also another point, and that is the calories that add up in these drinks. Weigh your options and keep in mind that a grande cappuccino with non-fat milk is only going to cost you 93 calories, compared to a grande latte with non-fat milk that is about 168 calories. Every pump of flavored syrup is 20 calories. So, by this point you may be thinking you will just go with an iced Tazo chai-think again. A grande iced Tazo chai with non-fat milk is going to be about 213 calories.

So, it’s not all bad, by cutting down to one order from Starbucks a day and being smart with your options, you can consume less than 100 calories and you can save.

The morale of this short story, and the real point of this all is: cut down on the caffeine, not only because it can be hazardous to your health, but also to your wallet.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
www.richter10point2.com

Monday, May 18, 2009

#Googlefail, get your news from Twitter!

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So yesterday in the office everyone was freaking out because the Internet wasn’t working. It was lagging and nobodys email was going though, and basically driving us all crazy because 99% of what we do is on the Internet. There are probably about ten or fifteen active computers in the Office and they were all having problems. So we thought, it must be something wrong with the connection. We tried turning on and off the Internet connection, resetting it a few times, thinking that it would help, but no luck. So when someone finally got onto their Twitter account they saw that the trending topic of the day was #googlefail.

Now, if any of you are reading this and you arent already Twitter fanatics, you are really out of the loop. (get a Twitter account, pronto!) Instead of messing around on our computers all morning and turining on and off the connection and being totally in mystery as to why it was so hard for everyone to send an emial from our Gmail accounts, we could have eaisly figured it out just by looking on our Twitter accounts at the status updates. “#googlefail.”

So, basically Im saying that Twitter is apparently becoming a source of breaking news, or at least it’s going to tell you when somethings wrong with your Internet connection.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

DREAM JOB: $70k to use Twitter and Facebook!

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I was reading this article…http://mashable.com/2009/05/09/twitter-facebook-job/

And, honestly, I’m not really surprised. A county in Oregon wants to pay someone $60k-$70k a year for a job that requires using facebook and twitter. Seems a bit outrageous, but take a look.

Nowadays there are so many social media butterflies around that Facebook, Myspace and Twitter have become a huge part of promotion. It is the most efficient way of reaching more target public in less time.

The most expensive method of advertising in America today is through television commercials, averaging about $400,000.00. Now, promotion of your business through television is obviously going to reach many people around the nation who happen to be watching TV at the moment of your commercial, so I'm not necessarily against it. But promotion of your business through the Social Media tools available to all of your target public on the web, internationally, is guaranteed to get a lot of people in the know about who you are and what you do.

Linkedin is the most popular tool right now for business and networking, with Facebook up and coming right behind. It has been predicted that 2009 is going to be a huge year for business networking. So, makes sense, right? And all this great PR for you and your business for a fraction of the cost of a television commercial.

This doesn’t mean that advertising and public relations through Social Media has to cost $70k a year, but for Oregon, it does. Don’t be surprised when you get a friend requested by Multnomah County in Oregon or any of the other Counties around America that have started creating Social Media sites as a way to keep you up to date.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
www.whywebpr.com

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

White House Embraces Social Media.

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What is Social Media? Wikipedia defines it. “At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content.”



With the success of Barack Obama’s campaign through the use of social media web tools to gain fund raising and support, the White House has officially launched pages on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. This transition keeps web savvy citizens up to date on the latest news and information. You can probably imagine that Obama himself is too busy lately to keep up with his old Twitter account, so this new account is the perfect way for others in the White House to “tweet” on his behalf and keep people informed about what’s going on.



In their ways of “old habits and stale thinking”, as stated by Obama, they are fundamentally changing the way that they do business in the White House. I believe the plan is to build a new foundation for the 21st century and the way to go about it is by reforming the government so it is more efficient and more creative-through social media.



In a recent blog post titled WhiteHouse 2.0, the White House says,
“In addition to WhiteHouse.gov, you can now find us in a number of other spots on the Web: Facebook .com/WhiteHouse, Myspace.com/WhiteHouse and Twitter.com/WhiteHouse.”



As you can see, technology has profoundly impacted how and where we gain information. These sites like Myspace, and Facebook have become the ways of communication to one another. If you look, you can see the demographics continue to shift. Now more than half of the Myspace visitors are age 35 or older. New users pour onto these sites every day, not only to keep up the communication with their friends but also to get insight on what’s happening around the world.



It seems the White House has noticed that WhiteHouse.gov is an important part of the Administrators effort to reach the public quickly and effectively-but it isn’t the only way.




Ali Magnano

Director of PR

Richter10.2 Media Group