Social Media Tip of the Week #2 – What is Twitpic?

Recently, I found a really cool new Twitter tool that got me so excited I just had to write a blog about it! Twitpic. It’s how you Tweet pictures.

As you know, the thing about Twitter is that, unlike Facebook or Myspace, you can only have ONE picture, and that’s your default. How frustrating! Well, now with Twitpic, you have a whole album online that you can Tweet and share with other Tweeters.

Now, what kind of pictures would Tweeters most like to see tweeted? Breaking news, humorous ones and Twitpics by celebs were some of the top viewed. Like on-the-scene twitpics of a shuttle launch! (click here) Or the king of Twitter, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) tweeting his own photos, of course. (click here)

Now, you can start using Twitpic to expand your Twitter influence.

Ali Magnano

Director of PR

Richter10.2 Media Group

Visit our Site

Photos of Social Media Press Kits!

To learn more, click here and view the site.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group

Social Media Tip of the Week #1 - What's the Best Type of Photo to Have on Twitter?

I’ve been doing some research and have found that if you want the most traffic to your Twitter site, you need a good, eye-catching photograph of yourself.

What type of photo is eye-catching enough that you will be looked at first over other Tweeters?

When you first register on Twitter, you are provided with an avatar. Everyone gets the same avatar. What is all-too-common is that Tweeters will leave that up instead of providing a real picture. The Tweeter is then a “faceless entity” on a huge Social Media Site and easily gets lost in the crowd.

Your image is the first thing people see when they decide to follow you – or to not follow you. It should be, ideally, a recent photo of YOU. It can be your brand’s logo, but if you are going to be the sole person using the account, then you should have a picture of yourself. Seeing a real picture of you gives others the feeling that they know you. Also, don’t change your photo too often – other users tend to see the image before the name, and you can get lost if you change your image too frequently.

So the moral of the story is - get other Tweeters to notice you by providing a fresh and recent picture of yourself.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
Visit our Site

The World’s Most Dynamic Virtual Business Card

This is a Social Media Press Kit. It was created and designed by a top Web PR firm - Richter10.2 Media Group.

A Social Media Press Kit is a tool for maximizing your presence on the Web. With a cutting-edge image on the Web, you will find buzz, reach and interest being generated about your business.

A microsite that showcases you and your company to your target public audience, a Social Media Press Kit is the way for you to easily communicate with anyone, no matter their location.

Have you seen Skittles’ or Starbucks’ new Web campaigns? If not, take a look and see the value of a well-established Social Media campaign. If you have, then you would probably agree with me that Social Media is an integral part of expanding your business.

So, what IS this Social Media Press Kit? What does it look like? To find out, click here.

Ali Magnano

Director of PR

Richter10.2 Media Group

Visit our Site

What is a Social Media Press Kit??

What is a Social Media Press Kit?? It is a tool that will help you expand your business and your presence on the web.

To find out more-watch this short video! By clicking here.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group

"Web 2.0" declared the one-millionth English word!

The English language can be beautiful yet complicated . Tricky to learn-yet popular worldwide , and it also has the most words out of any language.
Yesterday, the word “Web 2.0” was declared the one millionth defined English word by the Global Language Monitor.

Web 2.0: “the second generation of the World Wide Web in which content is user-generated and dynamic, and software is offered that mimics desktop programs”

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
Visit our site

Win an iPhone via Twitter??

For 30 days, squarespace.com is giving away a 3G iPhone every day. The contest may be entered by anyone, and includes simply having a twitter account.

For the next 30 days, (actually, 28 now because the contest started on June 8^th) all you have to do is insert the hashtag "#squarespace" into one of your tweets, and one of those lucky winners will be chosen at random.

I'm sure it helps if you hashtag all your tweets in one day, and just keep tweeting "#squarespace, #squarspace, #squarespace." But the point of the contest is also for tweeters to get creative.

I see this whole thing as quite genius, really. Social Media is really taking on its reputation as a very popular marketing strategy, and is the way to gain presence on the web. Because-lets face it-if you’re reading this you most likely have a Twitter or a Facebook or a Myspace account. So using Social Media in Squarespaces’ new campaign to gain web presence is working-how could it not?

So if you don’t have a Twitter account, get one-pronto! And go get yourself an iPhone.

Ali Magnano

Director of PR

Richter10.2 Media Group

Visit our Site

The Fine Line Between Social Media Brilliance and Faux Pas

The lines between business and social media are becoming more and more blurred every day. People are realizing more and more that while this was once simply a way for the younger generation to wile away too much time, it is in fact becoming a vital and exciting part of our society.

As many have no doubt mentioned elsewhere, social media is breaking down the last barriers to information for people all over the world. An example of this is an aircraft making an emergency landing in the Hudson and the masses knowing about it before mainstream media could blink. How? All thanks to twitter.

One aspect of this is the fact that people using social media want to interact. Through avatars or not, they pour out their opinions, creations, likes, dislikes and so on.

So, let's get this straight. In social media we have a pool of 100's of millions of people who are sorted by demographic and who tell the world what they want ? This is a marketers dream come true!!!

Not.

Time for a dose of reality. Like any community, social media sites have etiquette. When you see the opportunity social media presents you are of course right, but if you go bulling into the china shop without knowing what you're doing you will end up the pariah you deserve to be.

Spam has been the awful, barbed thorn in the side of everyone's email program and internet browser since...well, since this whole internet thing began. Pop-up adds and emails from $upersexxxiii666 about enhancing this and losing that are in the very least irritating. So are friend requests containing a pitch for your product. Get it?

I'm not saying that people haven't tried this in social media. Build profiles as fast as possible, get a few friends and pitch before they get wiped out, rinse and repeat. But, unless you want you and your business to be thought about in the same breath as our friend $upersexxxiii666, don't be that stupid.

There is no trick, no silver bullet. Just use social media as it is intended, on a personal level.

You can take advantage of this amazing opportunity. In fact, if you do it right your presence online will position you as a force in your field and get thousands of people in the know about who you are and what you do. That leads to business, it just does.

First thing is first, choose the sites you wish to be on. Then, what is your area of expertise? What can you offer? Be thinking about this as you start to send out genuine friend requests, letting people know who you are and that you can help if they have questions regarding ____. You really don't even have to go that far, though. Just think, how would you introduce yourself in usual conversation when meeting someone new?

If you work at this, you will build up a network of people who will now talk to you in a little more depth. Build these connections, post things that aren't just about your product, but that you find interesting. Foster the relationships you have in the networks you build and you will achieve social media greatness in no time!

Remember, social media is all about people. No one wants to receive a sales pitch they didn't sign up for from you. Become someone who is a known expert on your subject in the communities you join online, help people, comment, message and all the time be yourself and you will achieve organically more than you ever could if you were just using your pages strictly to market.

Don't be a spammer, take social media by the horns and make it your own!

Spencer Barnes
Director of Delivery
Richter10.2 Media Group
spence@richter10point2.com

Two Minute Sales Video

How do you maximize your presence on the web, thus increasing your business?

Find out here.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
Visit our Site

Donut Giveaway! Dunkins plan for their Social Media Campaign.

Mark your calendars, June 5th in officially National Donut Day!

Dunkin Donuts is celebrating with a giveaway "we will give every customer a free donut of their choice, with the purchase of any beverage, limit one per customer."

The store has also been conducting its first ever “Create Dunkins Next Donut Contest”.
With over 130,000 submissions, and Dunkin plans to announce the $12,000 winner on
National Donut Day.

While we’re at in, let me mention that Dunkin Donuts has huge presence on social media sites. (@dunkindonuts has about 23,000 followers) Some of these huge brands like Starbucks are also starting to find creative ways to tie offline brand experiences with online social media promotion. Starbucks is currently experimenting with an online/offline social media challenge.

Now with Dunkin Donuts and the Keep it Coolatta Sweepstakes , fans of the brand on Facebook (there’s over 800,000 of them) can post a photo of themselves with any Coolatta beverage to the Fan Page wall with the caption #CoolattaGiveaway, and they’ll be entered to win a daily giveaway through June 24. Dunkin’ Donuts will randomly select winners, award the prizes, and update their official profile with the winning image.

Social Media and coffee and baked-goods chains are really hitting it off this summer. Good thing that Dunkin Donut Giveaway rules “one per customer”, so you can’t go too crazy.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
Visit our Site

Twitter: Male-dominated Social Media

We all know that Twitter has grown in over the past year. It is now one of the top 3 social media networking sites in the world. Ill admit it, im addicted to updating status messages, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you were too.

In a suprising recent study that took place in May 2009 by the Harvard Business Review, the activities of a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users were closely watched. The results were unexpected.

It was found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman.

Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Also, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity - both men and women tweet at the same rate.

Looks like Twitter is a male-dominated social media networking site, and more women are just not much of “tweeters”.

Ali Magnano

Director of PR

Richter10.2 Media Group

Visit our Site

Skittles tasting success with the latest Social Media experiment?

Skittles has relaunched their website so that it is essentially a Twitter search for the word "skittles".

Visitors to Skittles.com are now directed to the Twitter search result for the term “skittles” and invited to navigate their way about Skittles’ social web presence by using the flash navigation menu that overlays the page. (Their homepage is now a Facebook page.)

We have experienced a lot of controversy on the Skittles new Social Media campaign. Some think that the “colors of the rainbow” have experienced an epic fail on launching this new campaign but as reported by Marketing Pilgrim in a recent post, the Skittles web site traffic experienced a “1332% increase in web visitors on March 3rd.” Pretty impressive considering only one day had passed since Skittles launched this social media experiment, which was quite a risk.

A consideration that I am hearing a lot is that, what about the ordinary people that aren't as experienced with Social Media? And is Social Media really a way to represent a corporate website like Skittles?

Buying a piece of candy is an impulsive thing. You’re not buying a car or a house or something that you will need a lot of information on about the product and the price. Skittles is just a sweet, innocent and colorful candy, with a huge corporation. Do they really need an informative ad on their product? Not really. They are focusing on building their presence on the web, and Social Media has proved to be the way to do that. And are there really any regular web users who have never heard of social networking and the most common web apps?

I suspect not. So, after all, great work Skittles.

Ali Magnano
Director of PR
Richter10.2 Media Group
Visit our Site