Jasper is now working as a consultant for Social-smart LLC , as well as freelance. Dude Blog Your Business will continue to accept inquiries, especially if you are based in Santa Fe, New Mexico where I recently moved to. However, I won’t be updating this site any more. There is a lot of really good information within these blog posts and we hope they will continue to be useful. If you wish to follow the ongoing conversation about all things Social Media then please join our Social-smart Group on LinkedIn, or visit the Social-smart blog. If you arrive at these pages and are looking for a social media solution to your marketing then please check out our Social-smart application -
Social-smart is addressing the brand, research, marketing, and online sales needs of businesses with a social network engagement funnel. It is a multi-channel social networking solution for driving awareness, conversation, insight, and web traffic. Social-smart makes social media marketing more affordable and efficient.
Its web-based Dashboard integrates what is usually fragmented across different web sites and services into one convenient place – with a single sign-in. If you are a marketer, it makes coordinating and managing a campaign in-house, easier. If you are a small agency or consultant, it streamlines campaign launch and management so you can focus on profitable content-development and moderating services.
I have often talked about the power of video in promoting a business of whatever size. This is a great example. Tom Hinchey and I recently made this video for Christy Miller. Her business, Desert Flower Does, provides a service similar to those reality TV shows ‘Queer Eye‘ and ‘What Not to Wear‘ – except for the free $5000 credit card to spend of clothes of course! Rather, Christy helps you to make the most of the wardrobe you already have. If you are trying to ‘power-dress’ on a budget and want to maximize the effectiveness of what you have, or want to add a few pieces that will increase your credibility with your clients or business partners, then Christy is certainly the person to call. We wanted to create a video for her that would be entertaining while effectively getting across to prospective clients what it is she can do. We are very pleased with the result. It is certainly much more effective than the text and photos she currently has on her website – and the video can be on her site and working for her 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The ‘Reality TV’ comparison is actually a very good one. The easy and cheapness of video on the web effectively makes it possible for anyone to market themselves via their own online ‘Reality TV Show’. Love them or hate them, and a lot of people love them – just check their ratings – they can make for compelling viewing, and what better way to attract potential customers to what you are offering than by people being able to see it? It can be effective for virtually any business, even if it is just to help prospective customers get to know you better and make you more approachable. Any Phoenix-based business should give either us, or Tom a call and see what video could do for your business.
Tom and I made this viral video ad for Jones Soda as part of a zooppa.com competition this weekend – despite the rain!
Check it out, and if you like it sign up for free at zooppa.com and vote for us – there’s a $7k prize up for grabs!
We thought we stood a good chance of winning when we first came up with the idea but we probably left it a bit late to enter - the closing date is this coming Sunday, and it was a bit more of a rush to get it done than we would have liked. Also, there are some very good entries & some very talented people out there competing. We had fun doing it though – check out the blooper video on Tom’s blog.
A few weeks ago Tom and I did an impromptu interactive social media seminar at the 3000 Club Friday networking meeting. It went so well that we decided to get together with our friend, Christine Springer, an expert and teacher on all things LinkedIn, and create a seminar series on social media.
The first of that series – ‘Social Media Idol‘ starts on April 20th. Jasper is the seminars’ Simon Cowell character and the event and series have been designed to be interactive – in other words, you do all the work and we stand there and give our critique! Only kidding – don’t worry, Jasper isn’t nearly as harsh as Simon Cowell can be! This first seminar is based on the premise that you need to know what the job is before you choose which tools you are going to use, and covers lots of interesting subjects like ‘purple cows‘, ‘buyer personas‘, ’inbound marketing‘ and Web 2.0!
This first seminar provides the groundwork for the later seminars in which we look at some of the specific tools of social media, such as Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, and Video Blogging – yes, even the video blogging will be interactive!
Join Christine, Tom Hinchey and myself on Monday, April 20th OR Monday, April 27th from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. at Catch 22 Sports Grill in Phoenix . (Food and drink specials will be available!) The cost is $34 in advance for the initial seminar – register here or at Christine’s site www.LinkForSuccess.com.
