LaTron B. Unwrap'd: A Personal Development Blog to Kick Some Amazing Butt in Business and Life

Someone asked me the other day. Why do I need to utilize social media marketing in my business?  My response was, “it is a huge part of marketing your business!”  In all honesty, I continue to wonder why people are still asking this question!A lot of times, when people are interested in something they go online to read reviews  and brand ambassadors’ communications before making a decision.

By now, you have read tirelessly about what is social media.  You might get different responses, but I am going to sum it up into one basic definition. Social Media marketing (or new media marketing) is a quickly emerging avenue for individuals and businesses to engage in two-way communications with their audiences. When individuals begin to market themselves using social media, it is called personal branding. Personal branding can also expand to the offline realm as well. Businesses that engage in social media marketing are simply utilizing another method of expanding their market and discovering newly-defined targets and quality leads.

As the conversation continued, I discovered some common arguments  made by those who are either resistant to get on board, or by those who simply cannot grasp the concept.  Most notable is the argument, ‘what is the ROI of social media?’  When I hear this question, I normally respond by asking, ‘when you create a commercial on your local television channel, what is the ROI?’  They usually proceed by stumbling over an answer, and end by telling me the number of potential viewers that might have seen the commercial.

Is mass marketing dead? No, but it just suffered a stroke! With innovation of Tivo, I don’t have to look at commercials anymore!  In stark contrast to mass marketing tactics, I believe social media is more targeted and trackable-especially with the web market research and analytics. What is even more powerful is when businesses integrate new media with traditional marketing.  For example, at the end of commercial, you prompt the audience to text to a specific number. So what are the benefits of engagement? I see Five major benefits to engaging in social media marketing.

Increased number of clients.
You must be diligent and concise in your communications to attract the attention of new clients and keep your business top-of-mind with customers and potential customers. If you are constantly sending out  well-written, attractive communications, they will eventually check your business with the online community of bloggers and reviewers. If they are impressed, they will buy from you!

Increased number of referrals.

Referrals can come from from a number of sources. In new media marketing, referrals can come from past clients who blog or tweet positively about your business, people who subscribe to your communications, and anyone else who have seen your business mentioned discussed positively multiple times.

Connection and mentorships with top experts.
Not only should you connect with your customers, but you can connect with the experts in your industry to monitor trends, forecasts, and constantly look for new opportunities to expand business.

Connection with customers and creating brand ambassadors.
When you connect with your customers, you build trust and loyalty. Regularly engaging with your customers will allow you to spot issues and discover new product ideas or uses.   When you are able to answer a question for them that no one has answered or can answer, or  if you are able to help them trouble shoot technical problems, it means a lot!

Job leads
Recruiters and human resource departments are now going beyond the basic resume to determine if a candidate is right for a position. Individuals should be careful what they post and continually monitor what other’s post about them.  Your personal brand must be consistent across all platforms that one utilizes. It would be a great travesty if a recruiter is about to contact you to offer you a $100,000 Chief Marketing Officer position, and they see pictures of you chugging away using some alcoholic apparatus in a toga on multiple occasions.

Speaking engagements.
Once you position yourself as an expert in your industry, people will look to you as a knowledgeable person. They will desire your mentorship. As you increase your influence, this will bring more clients to your business.

Now is the time to jump on board an already moving train.  Consumers are using the social web to make buying decisions. Journalists and news organizations are using it to learn new stories and communicate. Businesses are utilizing it to gain a competitive advantage through this cost effective means of communication. Now is the time to jump on board!

This morning on the CBS News,  there was story about Rice Crispy’s new health claims.  The product line has a banner in the bottom left hand corner of its packaging that says it support children’s immunity. This claim has parents outraged and officials crying foul.

Almost a year ago,  Kellogg rolled out a revamped Rice Krispies product line that boosts the amount of vitamins A, B, C and E. The products are supposed to increase the amount of vitamins by 15%  to 25% of the recommended daily value.  According to Suzzane Norwitz, director of brand public relations, studies show that these vitamins “play an important role” in the body’s immune system and “nutritionists and dietitians generally recommend that at least 25% of nutrient intake occur at breakfast.” Despite the skeptics, Norwitz argues this is a structure function claim versus a health claim that they are including on the packaging. This claim describes how a substance maintains a particular bodily function while a health claim states that the substance prevents or improves a disease.

Still these claims are not readily accepted by parents and officials. Is this based on data or based on marketer’s tactic to sell a product? Many parents does not believe that there are not enough vitamins in the cereal. Officials are demanding evidence for the claims.  The top ingredients in the product is fructose syrup, partially hydrogenated oils also known as trans fats. Additionally the product is approximately 40% its own weight in sugar. The overall idea of the a “junk” food being sprayed with a bunch of vitamins, does not necessarily make it a healthy product.

On Tuesday afternoon, Congress to one closer step to  to achieving the goal set in motion sixty-four years ago by President Harry Truman. President Bill Clinton pushed for it and now President Obama.  All three have demanded endlessly the assured the rights  to sufficient medical care and protection from the economic loss due to sickness.

On a margin of 14 to 9, the Senate Finance Committee voted in favor of a health care reform plan sponsored by Max Baucus. The Congressional Budget Office says this bill is supposed to insure 94 percent of eligible Americans. Although costing just under $900 billion over 10 years, Baucus says it will lower the federal deficit and will end insurance industry discrimination. Additionally, it will bring the much needed quality of healthcare delivery.

Opposition to the bill say, that even with the newly covered individuals, there will still be 25Million people without insurance. This will greatly affect Skilled Nursing Facilities, Nursing Homes,  hospice, and home health providers, in addition to hospitals. It will make huge cuts in medicare and lead to health care rationing. In lieu of the public option, the bill calls for co-ops to compete with private insurers to keep them honest.

This bill is gained bipartisan support as Senator Snowe began to work with the committee to from and debate the elements of the bill. President Obama praised her efforts.

Now, there are two reform bill in the Senate. The other is the version from the Health committee  passed earlier this year. To tackle the confusion seen in many postings, Healthcare Reform has not been passed for implementation. It has just passed out of the committee.

Although Max Baucus is against it, the two bills could be combined and debated soon, perhaps in about two weeks.

Today, I finished day second of a two-day seminar on Adult Learning. This class is intended for adults returning back to school.  Although, I just graduated last year, I still found the seminar insightful. As the program is designed for working adults, it covered the information such as time-management and learning styles. It built the foundation for understanding and preventing  plagiarism, writing APA style, conveying MBA  class structures, and working in teams. The latter is highly important since majority of the group collaborations will occur in the study teams that were formed on day one of the seminar.  My team works extremely well together and the degree of knowledge possessed my team will be mutually beneficial in our success for the next two years.  Our aim is to challenge each other to stay in the same team throughout the course of our MBA. Though the decision was a long and arduous one, I am quite pleased that I have decided to embark on this adventure! I can speak the language of science, now its time to learn the language of business  more in depth! Major classes begin in September; I’m excited!

Are traffic cameras that effective?

Roanoke Times issued an article, “Driving Through Red Lights in Roanoke Might soon get you caught on tape“. Although the intention might seem good, the impact that this will make is minimal. People will still run the lights! We see that now at the locations that do have cameras. Based on the numbers in this article, the cost effectiveness is extremely poor. Some of the data presented in this article raised a few questions and concerns.

Last year the report says 81 crashes occurred in those 10 locations. How many people total, ran stop lights in each location? Just calculating a basic average, that’s 8.1 crashes per location. Are the crashes due to running a stop light, or putting on breaks to avoid running the stop light causing the person behind them to hit the vehicle?

Jones says that they must catch 56 violators per day to recoup the cost of $84,000 per month! (reminder: 380 summons were given last year for violations) Assuming that there were on average 56 violations per day for 2008 (20,440) and 81 crashes in those 10 locations, less that 1% (.39%) of violations that resulted in a crash. Would the camera still have stopped these?

Are the 380 summons issued in 2008, from the locations that are being considered now or in total for Roanoke? Considering 380*$50= $19,000/yr minimally OR 380*$100=$38,000/yr maximally(if you fight and fail) recouped from the summoned violators…..far from 1million/yr–the cost to purchase, install and continually maintain the cameras, and I’m sure they must be more police to monitor the location which is an additional cost not mentioned since “huge number of red light violations go unenforced simply because there can’t be an officer at every intersection.”

At first I thought the $84,000 would be the one time cost, but this is a monthly amount to be met to just break even! If it were, then it would be a good way for to make some money–but it’s not. Based of the information gathered from the article, I believe it is not either a very cost effective or smart idea. There may be some gaps in the article too.

Lastly, my reasoning process inquires what is the percentage of intersection wrecks due to running a light in comparison to wrecks caused by other negligliences in non-intersection areas. Should efforts be extended in other these areas too?

The million dollar question remains unsolved…

Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta, recently launched a new platform in public beta that fundamentally changes the way people find and access information on the web. It’s an aggregator that finds the right content across the traditional Web and Social Media. This technology enables your brand manager to know what people are saying about your company, or a particular topic you are researching, in real time! With that information, he or she can organize and engage in these conversations. Microblogging platforms, like Twitter, have shown that people want access to the immediacy of conversations that are based on keywords and not by the authority, page rank, and SEO. Unlike other aggregator or search tools that are simply a hodgepodge of information built on top Search, Collecta has built an entire cyber-ecosystem its architecture is based on the open messaging standard XMPP.

Collecta enables Internet search to finally keep pace with the real-time information streams on blogs, microblogs such as Twitter and FriendFeed, traditional news sites, Web sites, and social networks such as Flickr, YouTube, and Digg. It then centralizes the search results in easy to read, continually updating streams. This is a stark contrast to the traditional search where information is ranked low, not even giving it a chance be seen.

This is something that I have been waiting on! I believe it’s a god-send to map the social landscape as a way of discovering immediate insight into the conversations occurring across social networks peeling back the layers of society, focusing the our attention to enhance and amplify listening, and plugging us directly into the conversations that shape impressions and perceptions. Check out Collecta!

In sum, here are major ways I see companies utilizing Collecta:

1. Monitoring See what people are Saying about the product or company.
2. Metrics: Count the number of Comments.  The comments are stored, so you can break it down by the hour and minute. For example, I typed in “Panera” in the first 10 minutes, there were 22 people saying something about Panera. In the last 50 minutes there were 61 results at the rate of 1 comment per minute. Every time a new mention is made, it appears on the results.
3. Real-time engagement: The brand monitor can go directly to the location of the comment and respond. We know that the imediacy of responses to any situation is a key to solidifying a lasting relationship with your consumer.

As social media director, VP of Marketing or PR, you have worked tirelessly to build up a case for Social media—corporate and employee blogging in particular. You’ve listened to the criticisms and excuses for not getting on board. But your persistence has paid off, and you have received the okay, but on the condition that you set a standard blogging policy.

What the heck, do I do now? You ask yourself, not realizing that you had not thought this part through.  Have no fear. I am going to give you the some advice to help you get started in creating a darn good corporate blogging policy. In fact, it’s going to be so good, people will ask you for advice! So prepare to collect your consultation fees!

Although employee blogging is strictly voluntary in most companies, guidelines will help you set ongoing standards, and employees can go into this with a respectful and knowledgeable understanding of what is expected, regardless to whether they are writing for the company or personally.  As the manager in your field you or whoever you designate must still manage and monitor your brand. Typically, the public relations dept. will be the ones doing the monitoring, but not all companies have the luxury. Nevertheless, you or the person in charge of this must be prepared to respond to any potentially negative inquires or postings. There are plenty of sites and software that will allow you to monitor what is being said over the internet. A free one is from Google called Google Alerts. I personally use this for most things that I monitor.  However, to no longer delay, here are the top things that you should include in your corporate blogging policy.

1. Employee Bloggers (EBs) should create disclaimer with a statement that mentions that they are an employee of XYZ company and the views that they express are theirs and do not represent the views of the company.
2. EBs should inform their immediate supervisor, more preferably, the director of the respective area (be it public relations or marketing), that they will be mentioning the company from time to time. So, there will not be any surprises in the future.
3. You should respect their point of view if you go to the site to check out its content. However, you should comment on their blogs especially if something is leaning toward the negative end of the communications spectrum.  Periodically reading  and commenting on their blog will not only foster respectful communication, but let the employee know that you are listening and value their point of view.
4. EBs should not share information that is restricted, rumors, company secrets, or anything that might give the competitor an advantage. For instance, the number of patients, referrals, products sold,  number of employees, attrition rates, company strategies, or anything not publicly released through the established PR process.
5. Company logos should not be placed on the website without out permission from the company.
6. EBs should write respectfully about the company and any employees or consultants. You should not include that copyrighted material, unfounded accusations, or misrepresentations, or statements   that are viewed unfavorably by the company. This should result in disciplinary action and/or termination.  Encourage EBs to write knowledgeably, accurately, and professionally when referring to the company because there will be opinions being formed about your company and its employees.
7. Should the media contact the EB, he or she should inform the media that he or she is not authorized to speak or email on behalf of the company, and the media should direct all questions to your public relations/marketing department. Public relations managers should be sure to put a statement in their online media kits that states that you have EBs and they are not authorized to speak on behalf of the company and refer them to whom one should direct questions.

In sum, the major components of a corporate blogging policy should include clauses that ensure confidentiality, company rights, respect of rights and privacy of insider information, competitive disadvantage, a legal liability, media direction. These are some of the most important things that you should add into the corporate blogging policy.  You should extrapolate and tailor the information to the fit your company. This policy should be posted on the corporate website and distributed to each employee. Remember to be eco-friendly and use email!