Register here: http://ht.ly/1WODf, & use the code UTAHLOCALS for your special Utah Locals rate.

Even though the EVO Conference theme is about women in social media, I’m personally also inviting male and young entrepreneurs or business managers from the area to join us. Liz Strauss, Carol Roth, and myself will be presenting specifically about how business has been impacted by social media, and we’ll be giving specific strategies to leverage the groundswell. Here’s an description of our workshop:

EVO Workshop: Doing Business in a Social Media World
Ready to have your mind blown? Good. We’ve got just the trio of savvy businesswomen to walk you through this three-part session. Carol Roth (carolroth.com) will discuss what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur,  Liz Strauss (successful-blog.com) will explore the importance of being irresistible and creating the irresistible offer that will keep customers coming back, and Ghennipher Weeks http://www.ghennipher.net/ will help you identify the social tools that will make the biggest impact on your business.  Bring your ideas and your best questions.

Find out more about the EVO Conference here or register now and get your Local Love here.

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A while ago, I wrote a blog post on 5 ways to measure success with social media marketing. Today I ran across a great real-world example of the difficulties marketers have when setting up and measuring meaningful metrics in social marketing from Aliza Sherman at Web Worker Daily.

I agree wholeheartedly with Aliza Sherman’s point that we are “using antiquated ways of measuring online activity and interactions. We are also hamstrung by how each site, network and tool defines and dictates measurement in their own proprietary terms.”  Don’t I know it! In my consultancy, we’ve created and re-created custom dashboards to measure the specific interactions that are important to clients. We’re reinventing the wheel all the time in this regard because of the limitations of proprietary tools.

“Here are some key points I’d like to make about the problems with social media marketing measurement. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these, and any others that may come to mind as you read this:

1. Social media is nebulous. The term “social media” can encompass many tools from the Web 2.0 era, depending on who is using the term and what they are trying to communicate. There is no definitive, well-understood, totally agreed upon definition of social media, Wikipedia be damned. Lacking clearly defined and agreed-upon terms is a big barrier to measuring anything.
2. It’s not social media, stupid. I don’t think any of us are actually trying to “measure social media,” per se. We’re looking to measure the reach or”…read the rest of the blog post on the problems with measuring social marketing here.

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• Can You Measure Social Media Returns? (pamil-visions.net)

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Ever wonder about the value-chain of location-based services ? What are the successful business models and payment schemes for location-based services? What are the trends for the mobile location services market? I found a rather pricey, but very informative report on location-based services that I think all social media marketing firms should take a good look at. You can find it here.

As someone who has worked in internet marketing for over a decade, I’ve seen location-based marketing businesses come and go. With the huge growth of social media apps, these important services seem to have gotten a boost — not to mention the approval of a variety of patents in the location-based service space.

Consumers spend a lot more time on mobile devices than ever before, and social media marketing consultants need to understand this technology and its implications inside and out. It’s not only for large corporations and government anymore.

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• Dangerous: location-based services come with risks (matei.org)
• It’s hip to be where? (blogs.chron.com)
• What you need to know about location-based services (lostremote.com)

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Image by Choconancy1 via Flickr

You hear kind & loving voices on the boutique stereo speakers. Video from the CEO is playing telling you about the boutique, and all the wonderful things you’ll find there. You listen, and you’re entranced.

The visuals are heavenly and soothing, too…and just look! As you walk around, you see products from other women you recognize, or would like to get to know better, at least.

You’re so engaged, so impelled by the magnitude and quality of products at this boutique, you feel compelled to give kudos to management. So you search around a bit to find someone who works at the boutique.

No one yet.

You search a bit more.

Maybe if you open this door…Nothing.

Then it hits you. You’re there all by yourself in this huge boutique! Why aren’t there any sales people here, you wonder? You’d like to buy something here.

But wait! Did someone call your name? Yes! But it sounds very distant. You walk toward the sound and you find that it’s the owner. She’s calling to you from outside the store. She wants to talk to you. You tell her you were just inside enjoying the boutique, but she insists on talking to you outside of her lovely boutique. In fact, she prefers to talk to you from a competitor’s store!

Can you feel the frustration of this potential customer?

This may seem like the beginning to a short fiction story, but it’s a scenario I see carried out all to often with new social networks and online communities. The community manager of a new or recently updated social network community oftentimes prefers to chat with community members outside of the community entirely. Any contact with customers take place at other communities like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…all great networks, but competitors for your customer’s time. If your community manager is spending more time on these networks than your own, then your community is suffering.

In a recent Online Community Culture Survey, one of the top 5 most influential factors listed in a community’s culture was participation by the Host. And as women in social networks, this study agrees wholeheartedly with our viewpoints about the kind of networks we feel connected to. Network execs that instruct their community managers to pump out editorial information, then leave the brand community and convene elsewhere, yet expect community users to somehow feel connected with them have their heads buried in the sand.

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Image via Wikipedia

That, in itself, is not odd since I’ve been speaking at web conferences since 2002. What has been different this time is the types of conferences I’ve been asked to speak at lately. They’ve all been conferences directed at Women and particularly, Moms.

Why all of the seemingly sudden interest by corporations in marketing to multicultural women? Perhaps the stats can help tell the story:

• At $1 trillion, the purchasing power of women of color represent the 10th largest global economy — as large as Brazil’s GDP! (Source: World Bank Indicators Database, Sept 2004)
• The earning power of women of color is highest.
• Businesses owned by women of color represent the fastest growing segment of the U.S. economy.
• African-American women are the primary household decision makers.
• The ethnic beauty industry is expected to grow to $11.0 Billion by next year (2010)

Clearly, it’s easy to see why marketers are looking for ways to promote their products to a more diverse audience of women. The economic benefits are really exponential if marketers get it right and don’t market to stereotypes.

I’m honored to be considered an expert in marketing to women of color online, as a woman of color myself, who’s been involved in web marketing since 1999.

My overriding goal is to help marketers understand and target multicultural women better. I help marketers to nix stereotypes, nix generalities, engage better, build growth and loyalty.

Kudos and many thanks to the conference organizers who have asked me to speak to their largely female audiences about social media marketing on behalf of all women of color.

• Blissdom
• Touchpoint
• Blogaglicous

I’m looking forward to building a future with marketers who recognize this incredibly important market. If you’re a marketer who wants a bit more information on what multicultural women’s needs are, check out these key takeaways to our Blogalious panel on Social Media and the Woman of Color.

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In it, I share some of the best secrets I’ve learned about how bands are using social media to promote their tours and music.

If you have a band, or work in music promotion, get started using social media by using these secrets:

1. Your artist or band website: This is really your home base, the hub around which all of the other social media tools can revolve. If we were in the brick and mortar world, your own website might be the equivalent of your company’s main office. Some points you may want to consider for your site include:

• The site should be, among other things, user-friendly, creative in a way that is reflective of your band image, yet still as clear and uncluttered as possible.
• You want people who come to your site to easily find all of the vital information about your act (i.e. your bio, electronic press kit, show/tour schedule, email list sign-up, booking info, management contact, music, and merchandise, etc.). It needs to be a place for fans, yes, but also for the professionals to come for information access (for example, the press, booking agents, club and venue owners, labels, etc.).
• While you might create a blog or a conversation corner where fans can comment about your shows or whatever artist-related topic they’re up for, you might also direct them to your MySpace site instead and invite them to participate in your blog there. This will help create differentiation between those two sites.
• Your website can also be a great location for your band store. It can enable you to make your highest margins on your merchandise (T-shirts, posters, caps, etc.) and your CDs (you may want to consider having a third party handle the actual fulfillment of your CDs and merchandise, unless you have friends or fans who…continue reading here:

More about the article author, Christopher Harding: “Christopher Harding has spent 20 years as a songwriter, author, filmmaker, producer, and executive of film, TV, and music.”

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Twitter is yet another example of where brands have to accept a loss of control. In this case, it is not about putting the brand in the hands of the market but in the hands of the people for whom the brand is their livelihood. A certain amount of letting go is a necessity. We will undoubtedly see a few missteps in C-tweets, and we’ll learn and move on. Ultimately, the medium may change but basics of branding still apply — both for the brands themselves and for their executive stewards: Be true, be relevant, be transparent, respect your brand and your customers, don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

Check out the rest of the blog post about C-Level Tweeting at AdAge.

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Last week, Yahoo released a real-time Twitter monitoring tool called Sideline. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days, and though it’s no Radian6 monitoring tool, it does have some neat features your company may find useful.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Want to know what the cool kids on Twitter are tweeting about today? Check out Sideline’s Trending Topics screen. This is great for monitoring topic trending related to a conference, new product release, or any other much-talked-about situation that affects your brand name.

Engage Customers Better

You can also create and group custom queries by topics of interest. This allows you to create as many search groups as you’d like. Theres also a Favorites button, and you can reply directly from the Sideline interface to any tweet in your group.

Customer Attitudes Matter

My favorite feature on Sideline is the Advanced Search Builder. It allows you to build a Twitter Search based on Words, People, even Attitudes. Smart companies pay attention not only to mentions of their brand on Twitter, but how people feel about it. A huge credibility free-fall is when a company auto-follows any mention of their brand without taking the time to see if the tweet is bashing the product or praising it. Granted, for some companies, it’s a LOT of work to weed through mentions to ascertain the attitude of the person toward the brand — but this Sideline feature makes this very important job a little easier.

One more note about Sideline: It’s an open-source tool, so have your developers take a look at it.  It’s an Adobe Air app aimed at users looking for info from the Twitter public sideline. Definitely a tool worth taking a look at.

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There’s an interesting topic being discussed over on Web-Strategist.  Once again, Jeremiah Owyang challenges us to think of a new paradigm that could change the way companies relate and react to their customers.  Ultimately, I disagree with what he says although I think he’s onto something:  communities of customers, when banded together will have greater power in product development to the extent that companies will have to adjust their product strategies to meet these demands.DIGITAL STREET JOURNAL

You should read the whole article.

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Geoff Livingston posted a great list of 25 ways to know whether you’ve got a strong Social Media Consultant or Agency. This was in response to the recent influx of “social media experts” entering the space who are clearly unqualified and can cause more harm than good to your business.

Some salient points for Marketing/Communications Managers to consider from his post:

• “Integrates social media as part of larger marketing strategy(example: Razorfish)
• Understands that Radian6 and other monitoring tools are vastly superior tracking tools in comparison to Technorati (which really isn’t an indicator of much these days) (example: Fleishman’s Matt Dickman)
• Understands that social media expands beyond search engine optimization tactics that lead to Diggs, Stumbles (StumbleUpon) and link baiting (example: Key Relevance’s Li Evans)
• Knows that social networking works best when they are conversing, sharing, and being human (i.e. doesn’t self-promote) (example: Jason Falls)
• Understands that social media is more than just creating and delivering content or regurgitating existing promotional copy Joseph Jaffe”

If you’re ready to start communicating with your customers via social media, choose your social media consultant with care. Check out the full article here.

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