There’s been a lot of speculation about Google Caffeine. When will it launch? What will change? What will happen to my results?

The speculation needs to stop. Caffeine is almost certainly live right now—the next query you type into Google will probably reflect Caffeine’s changes.
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The whole idea of social media marketing can be a bit overwhelming. People are connected to each other more than ever on social media platforms, creating conversation about your brand and industry.

There are so many platforms, so many choices and so many misconceptions.

Companies that are smart and disciplined in all other areas of their business sometimes act irrationally due to their lack of expertise in this area.

Common mistakes include:

• Ignoring social media marketing because it is so foreign to them. Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites. On a daily basis, individuals are talking about your brand, so companies better listen.

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(source: Jason Nicholls)

Many companies are at a point where their brand identity in an on-line environment is static in an era of chaos. Things that used to work now don’t. Traditional branding has always been built on out-branding the competition in an ever-increasing advertising clutter-filled environment, media fragmentation, and the seemingly limitless choices that are offered in just about every product category.

Why do some companies “get it” and some are being left behind in the dust? Why are Nike, JetBlue, and Zappos the poster-children for companies that “get it”, and how are they achieving their social media success? Why is transparency so important? Will these things have a positive ROI and how do you measure it?

We have to remember that social media is just one piece of the puzzle and a component of branding. The following are things you have to remember when trying to build a strong brand interactively:

Listen:

I’ve mentioned numerous times that as a brand you have to actively listen. Create ego-centric searches on as many social media platforms as you can—Twitter, Facebook, Google Blogsearch, Friendfeed, Technorati. Read blogs and people’s comments—understand what people are saying, and always ask yourself why. Why are people saying what they say?
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We only use social media as a component of larger campaigns

With all the hype surrounding social media, it’s easy to forget that the big money has been made selling social media sites, not selling things through social media. For example, over a year and a half period, Dell got 0.0011% of its sales ($1 million divided by about $90 billion) through Twitter — and all they had to do was offer extra discounts! (During that time, Twitter raised $20 million from investors — and they weren’t exactly offering discounts on their stock).

So how do we help clients use Twitter without being used by discount-hungry fans and attention-craving social media mavens?

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(source: Mr. Kris)

Organizations are flocking to social media hubs to attempt to engage with their audience, and every organization has a different motive. Some are corporations attempting to rebrand themselves (@GMblogs, @Chrysler, @ComcastCares)  while others attempt to continue the conversation away from the brick-and-mortar standard of yesteryear. (more…)

(source: Matt Hamm)

Blue Fountain Media is working with the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation, and it has been a rewarding experience to know that we are helping them for an overall greater cause. Gift of Life is one of largest bone marrow registries in the United States. They focus on the Jewish community—finding a matching bone marrow donor is difficult, but since tissue type is genetic, a patient is most likely to find a matching donor of the same ethnic background.

The Madoff debacle affected the Gift of Life in more ways than one, and that’s where we come in. Blue Fountain Media has been doing Social Media Marketing for their bone marrow and donor campaigns.

When we started these campaigns, Gift of Life had some questions:

So how can social media help us?

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