Bigelow Tea, our client, has been featured in John C. Havens’ and Shel Holtz’s book Tactical Transparency.  It’s not out yet but the two authors spoke about it at the most recent New Media Expo in Las Vegas.  Attendees were more fired up than ever to get their clients or themselves into the social media mix.

Read more from the Trafcomm News blog by Donna Papacosta here.

We were recently meeting with a potential client who has a strong consumer base, a solid history and great products.  They approached us because we know how to guide corporate through the social media maze and we can help build community with their most valued present and future consumers.

They were excited to get going, they had already worked with an agency that said they could build up MySpace, Facebook and a blog but couldn’t and they seemed pretty savy about social media and their need to use these tools to help broaden their reach.

We got into the meeting, presented all that we could do and the value that social media brings to any company and suddenly and without warning the conversation turned to ROI.  Now I love ROI and believe in trying to track ROI and I appreciate the conversation.  We have amazing reports that we have built that can show the story of these online channels so the client can understand what is working and what isn’t.  Couple our reports with their website and sales stats and you have the whole picture. 

Somehow, the message was lost, though, and the fear set in that these efforts won’t help their bottom line numbers.  I hope and believe that despite their fears, they will take a chance and jump in (or fear more in the not so distant future that they will be left behind)! 

Social media is an amazing tool that every company can and should utilize.  Not every moment may be linked to a sale but the last phone call with your client where you asked them about their family may not be tracked either but it has great value! 

Mashable also talks about the ROI of social media for business here.

Jackie Peters over at heavyBlog makes the case here for changing the ”job description” of marketers who use social media as a tool to reach a clients’ conmmunity.  Many great points made.  The biggest point is that social media is way beyond marketing because it is about starting a two way conversation which means a solid message along with listenting vs. pushing out a message to people who you think want the product or service.  Brian Solis also contributes to this concept here.

We at Creative Concepts have also worked hard to define what we do and explain it to the client so they understand the difference between an ad campaign and what we do when we enter the social networks, produce a video or build a blog.  If I get a client old enough to remember the days of TQM (Total Quality Management) then I am good to go (my father was a big TQM guy pushing it out to any company who was interested on behalf of Corning Inc….he was also a Baldridge judge so I know this stuff like the back of my hand!) but if we have someone who is hearing about social media and wants to know more, we have to define it in a way that makes sense today.

I work at this messaging every day for Creative Concepts because I firmly believe that social media is important to the future of every company.  To find a tool that helps you define your business and helps to explain what you do in your own words, to share with all who are interested the goings on of how you do business which allows greater trust from your customer, to hear direclty and immediately from the customer, to respond to that customer immediately and to get help from the customer when it comes to developing new products and more is way beyond marketing.  It is doing business smartly and the ROI is customers that last a lifetime!

Morgan Brown of The Ad Age Web Video Report talks about the dos and don’ts of video advertising.  Good stuff and makes sense.   Just like any other social media, keep it real, keep out the actual advertising and provide solid useable content.  Also keep it short and don’t over produce. 

We believe in this ourselves…we have Bigelow Tea to prove it and some new clients and their newly shot videos to show you soon!

See more of the article here.

Check out this article, Andrew Cohen on CBS News Sunday Morning reports on the White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan debacle and ultimately claims in the article that all PR people are liars.  Mr. Cohen says, “show me a PR person who is “accurate” and “truthful” and I will show you a PR person who is unemployed. 

I suppose we could say the same about reporters but I wouldn’t go there because to make a generalization is a sibling to lying and not telling the whole story based on facts.

I don’t believe this anyway.  Social media (blogs, videos, social networks, twitter….) has transformed how we do business and keeps most of the untruths hidden for only a short time.  The consumer now has access to facts and history like never before and with our global community available as fact checkers, “liars” have a short life.

Just for the record, Creative Concepts is far from unemployed.  Ethical behavior, as mentioned in our mission statement, is our first value and our clients love it!

Back in 2005, BusinessWeek changed Creative Concepts forever.  The article “Blogs Will Change Your Business” moved us from a traditional PR and Marketing firm to a PR, Marketing and Social Media Consultancy where we have lots of fun with our clients in creating blogs, videos and communities on the social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

Kudos to Stephen Baker and Heather Green for producing another top notch aricle that is simply an update to the first.  Read “Beyond Blogs, What Business Needs to Know” and understand that social media is not going anywhere…it’s here to stay!

Nothing better than a well done interview! 

Nothing better than a well done interview featuring our client (Bigelow Tea)! 

Nothing better than a well done interview featuring our client who talks about having a ball with social media (where we at Creative Concepts support all of their efforts!)!

Interview here.

Have a great weekend!

You know I want to like PRSA! I want to support what they do and be proud of being a member but I just can’t do it!! From the local meetings of elders who are unfriendly at the door to the guy (no names) who plans most of the speakers, it is one of the most unfriendly and inflexible groups of people I have ever met…this is “Public Relations?” Crazy!

I have heard many say these kinds of things before. One great speaker who I came to see (kudos for getting a smart well versed PR/Social Media expert) said that he has spoken at thousands of venues around the U.S. (and the world) and that the PRSA members as a whole are lacking zeal, to say the least, in trying to understand how the internet can help them do their jobs better even though social media is a natural extention to what I call traditional PR.

So no news here that PRSA does not comprise creative out of the box thinkers, so why am I writing today? Because of their next speaker, Andrew (first names only), who will be showing up at our local meeting. This is a guy I know well. He claims to love social media and understand it and he was a sponsor of the Business Smart Tools conference where he worked on the website and he was a speaker. Besides the fact that I don’t think he is an ethical person, he has minimal working knowledge of social media but claims to be a “world renown expert” which PRSA is supporting. This is a guy who doesn’t know how to set up blogs for his clients, has no blog of his own, and has a profile on facebook but no friends, no picture and no content….he isn’t even on Linkedin which is barely a social media tool in my mind.

You know that a trend (social media) has made it when “experts” like Andrew are bubbling to the surface and speaking about their “knowledge.” Watch out for people like this but celebrate the fact that the PR industry and business as a whole has a new yet solid communication channel that works for our clients and ourselves!

Five years ago, I knew that I wanted to run my own company and do PR, Marketing and Events….and so I did it. Four years ago, I had a feeling about blogs, knew nothing, went to a seminar, knew a tad more, and worked until I understood the blog world and how business could fit in. With the fun and the effectiveness of blogs, I knew we needed to expand into social networking (myspace, facebook and others) and online videos…and so we did it and have helped our clients increase sales and win awards.

This is a great story but the question to ask today is, with all that Creative Concepts offers, can we withstand a recession…more importantly can we help our clients through a period of flat or declining sales. The first answer is we are in great shape and the second answer is yes, we can help our clients not only muster through a possible recession but we can help them come out on top by using PR and social media as a way to reach new customers.

Taking the recession element away for the moment, there have been many studies that say advertising is not as effective as it once was. ZenithOptmedia says that ad spend growth is predicted to be up by 2.5% only for 2008 compared to 3.3% in 2007. Traditional PR still works but based on who you are trying to reach, you need to hit many channels before you get a customer’s attention. Channels would include print, radio and TV, events, and the word of mouth (WOM) sectors. WOM spending which includes social networks, blogs, videos and more is expected to increase 30.4% annually through 2011 to $3.70 billion as noted by Keller Fay Group which means that the corporate world has recognized that working the internet is an effective and successful way to reach your present and new customers.

Now putting the possibility of a recession back into the mix, the next question is where do you, a business, put your money so you get the biggest bang for the buck? Well I can give you the answer but you probably have already figured it out. Talking and sharing information within the online social networks or creating a new community for your customer is easier on the budget than paying for a TV spot or a glossy ad in a magazine!

Common sense will guide you (and so will Forrester Research as reported by Mark Walsh here) to wise spending for future PR and Marketing campaigns…a recession may just force the hand sooner rather than later.

Had a great time speaking at HVDMA (Hudson Valley Direct Marketing Association) yesterday. They had a President’s panel where Joe Feigenbaum from TDO, Fern Galperin, independent web consultant, and Matt Staudt from interactive marketing group and myself sat on a podium and answered questions about the web…everything from social media (big topic) to print, email marketing, direct marketing and more.

Interesting format. We met prior to the meeting and chatted and then were thrown lots of questions which for sure kept us on our toes…I was in very good company because Joe, Fern and Matt were confident and knowledgeable about their experiences on the web and how they have been innovators for their clients!

To sum up, we all agreed that the web/internet marketing is one of many powerful channels to use when reaching out to your customers.

Get a good rundown here from Tim Parry of multichannel merchant.