Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past month, you’ve probably heard about the oil spill that had caused a fair amount of damage to the Gulf of Mexico and to British Petroleum’s reputation. In order to “rectify” the situation, BP has released a number of press statements over the past couple of weeks that have not satisfied an overwhelmingly disgruntled public. In response to BP’s lackluster statements, a man, who has dubbed himself as Leroy Stick, decided to take matters into his own hands; he created a Twitter account, cleverly named @BPGlobalPR, which pokes fun at how BP executives are dealing with the current situation. According to Stick, he started @BPGlobalPR because he believed that BP did not offer anything to ease the nation’s concerns. As a result, @BPGlobalPR has already accumulated over 150,000 followers since May 19, and it continues to grow on a daily basis. Leroy also supports the campaign that sells “bp cares” t-shirts to fund the activities of the Gulf Restoration Network, and his team recently made a $10,000 donation to the charity. All in all, he has become a celebrity within the social media community overnight and has molded BP’s brand into the punch line of his own joke.

His popularity or humor, however, is not what has captured my attention; it’s his message. Leroy Stick felt the need to create an entire web based strategy with @BPGlobalPR because BP wasn’t responding to the general public with urgency, sincerity, or solutions. Instead, Leroy argues that BP has been doing whatever it can to maintain a positive image and to keep making money. In other words, the executives are paying Internet marketing and PR representatives to promote a positive brand image that has been destroyed by employees of the company instead of trying to fix the problems at hand!

“So what is the point of all this?” Leroy asks. “The point is, FORGET YOUR BRAND. You don’t own it because it is literally nothing. You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion, but ultimately, that’s up to the public, now isn’t it?”

This is exactly what marketers do not want to hear, but it’s the truth. Companies can pay agencies tons of money to create marketing campaigns that represent integrity, quality, service, etc. But at the end of the day, none of this matters unless the client perceives the company (or the point of contact) as such.

So what does this have to do with me? Well, as a project manager for Fusework Studios, I am charged with providing my clients with the best service possible in order to create a positive brand image for the company. I will be a point of contact for clients, and I have to face the truth that Leroy Stick presents. Despite this challenge, I am excited to take on the responsibility of embodying the brand of Fusework Studios while maintaining my own values. Regardless of whether it is a global, multibillion dollar company or a small Internet Marketing and Website Design Company (with offices in Indianapolis and Muncie, Indiana), the point is to represent your values by making ethical business decisions and providing your clients with the best possible solutions; something that both the public and Leroy Stick feel BP is lacking.

As a result, I am even more motivated to practice what I preach in response to Leroy's skepticism. So, thank you, Leroy Stick, for encouraging me to face this challenge.

Jenn Lisak is a new Project Manager for Fusework Studios, and obviously, we're excited to have her join our team! Look for more posts from Jenn soon.

Want to learn more about Internet marketing? Do you have burning questions about how to use social media and blogging tools effectively for your business?  If so, join us for some great food and a short presentation from 11:30am to 1:00pm on Thursday, April 8 at Scotty's Brewhouse downtown.

Sign up now for the Lunch and Learn!

Fusework Studios' President, Bruce McClain, will start off with an overview of Internet marketing, discussing the importance of strategy in your marketing objectives. He'll cover a range of tools and tips in social media, business blogging and much more.  Then the CEO of Compendium Blogware, Chris Baggott, will share how to use corporate blogging to change your business and search results....for the better!

Feel free to bring along a friend or two and spend your lunch break learning information that you need to know!  We promise you'll leave with a new found knowledge of what Internet marketing can do for your bottom line.

Your ticket price includes your lunch at Scotty's Brewhouse!

Original article by Indiana University Kokomo: http://www.iuk.edu/news/?naid=19&ncid=.

Kokomo, Ind. - Indiana University Kokomo has launched a new and improved Web site, www.iuk.edu, featuring easier navigation, online video, vibrant flash images, and socia media integration.

"The new site will allow us to share IU Kokomo in a more engaging and dynamic way. It brings with it a content management system that allows us to better manage updates and changes, as well as the ability to implement analytics that measure site usage and give us the tools to make constant improvements that better serve our users," said Katrina Janes, director of the Office of Communications and Marketing at IU Kokomo. "The redesign and launch of a new university Web site is a huge undertaking, and we are very excited to unveil this new Web presence to the students, campus and community that we serve."

The site, developed by Indianapolis-based Fusework Studios, provides easier navigation for the user, improved search functions, and a consistent look, design, and feel. The first step in the redesign was an audit of the old Web site that included an evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses. This evaluation enforced the need for IU Kokomo to clearly indentify and match target audiences with specific marketing objectives, as well as the need to transform the site from a static information source to a dynamic and engaging marketing tool.

This direction is supported by a recent TeensTALK®survey of high school sophomores which found that 74 percent of the respondents conducted general college research on the Web, and 67 percent visited a specific college Web site. It is clear that higher education institutions are positioning their Web sites as a primary marketing tool and relying more on electronic communication tools. The average Web user today is highly skilled and able to communicate through many technological formats, from text messaging to IM to Twitter. This is particularly true for prospective and current college students.

"This was a huge project and encompassed two years from vendor selection to launch. Every unit on campus participated," said Paul Nowak, vice chancellor for external relations. "A special recognition is due to our marketing and IT departments, and especially Rudy Kizer, our campus Web manager, and Katrina Janes."

Indiana University Kokomo serves a seven county, primary service area in north central Indiana. The campus offers more than 40 academic programs including four graduate degrees.
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Fusework Studios provides service in Business Blogging, IT Services, SEO Indianapolis, Indiana Website Design, Indiana Website Development, Web Based Strategy, Social Media Marketing, Indiana Video Production, Email Marketing Strategy, Corporate Blog, Internet Marketing Indianapolis, and much more.
 

• Make a plan. A web based strategy is a plan to achieve a goal. Put it on paper and keep it where you can see it.
• Make a habit. Practice working on your strategy every day until that goal is achieved.
• Do it when you don't want to do it. Some days it feels like too much work to participate in a social media community for your business, but those days are probably the most important to do the work.
• Have a coach. Even professional athletes have a coach to help set goals and achieve them.
• Form a team. Don't try to do this alone. Find skill sets that are needed to accomplish your goals, and find the people with similar discipline and passion to achieve your goals.

In Episode 8 of Interfuse, President & CEO of DK New Media, Douglas Karr, joins us to talk about the shift of "traditional" marketing toward a more interactive marketing strategy.  We also take a deeper look into the social media community, Smaller Indiana, which helps make people and ideas in Indianapolis findable.  One of the biggest reasons for its success is the ability to take online relationships to an offline environment through events for which people register online.  The episode concludes with a look into the blogging strategy behind Douglas' Marketing Technology blog.     

We hope you enjoy!  Feel free to contact us with any questions.

 

We are two weeks into my social media experiment on how to gain twitter followers, and it appears as though I will not make my goal of being one of the top 10 most followed people in Indianapolis. In fact, I have only added about 30 followers since my announcement. 

What can we learn from the social media community with this project? Well, I anticipated some of my followers would be excited about the opportunity to win a TV and tell their friends to follow me. This would then snowball and in short order I would have thousands of followers. 

Do I think this strategy could ever work? Yes, I believe if you had other methods of advertising the contest, it could be a hit. Also, if I were giving away a huge prize like a new car, I am sure word would travel faster and maybe get my desired outcome.

I believe though what the real message so far is, social networks are all about relationships. They are about one on one interaction and genuine, sincere conversations. This is how to gain Twitter followers.

Sure you can buy more followers, but are these of any value to what you are trying to achieve with your social media presence? Probably not. 

The bottom line is...don't rush to build your followers. Take your time, have genuine conversations and build a following that matters.

I will continue to monitor my experiement until January 3rd as promised, and I will post the results at that time.  But as of today, I am the 75th most followed person in Indianapolis.

1. I will use the website, wefollow.com, as my measuring tool. (There may be better ones out there, but Kevin Rose helped develop this one.)
    
2. I will set a deadline of one month. This will be January 3rd.
    
3. If I am in the Top 10 most followed people in Indianapolis, I will give away a prize. Currently, I would need around 5,000 followers to make the top 10.
    
4. On January 3, I will pick a winner randomly from my followers.
    
5. I will tweet the winner's name from my Twitter account.
    
6. They will have two hours to tweet me back.
    
7. If there is no response after two hours, I will pick another winner until someone claims the prize.
    
8. You do not need to live in Indianapolis or Indiana to win. I am just going to use that a measuring stick.
    
9. Now, for the big giveaway...if all this happens, the winner will receive a:

Samsung 32" Flat Screen HDTV

"Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement" by Brian Haven of Forrester Research identifies four areas of engagement that can be measured. Engagement is the name of the game when it comes to social media and measuring successes and failures.

• Involvement: Just how involved is the community you're engaging with? Are they visiting your site? Are they subscribing to your blog? How many video views do you have? Did they request information from your site or from a member of your team?
   
• Interactions: How are your efforts working in the way of gauging interactions? Are fan visits to your fan page increasing? Have those fans started conversations? How many replies to a post in a forum have you received? How many comments are your blog posts getting?
  
• Intimacy: Intimacy demonstrates the level of comfort/love/hate your audience feels with your company brands, products, or services. How much user generated content such as videos, photos, blog review sites or even threads in forums are being generated around your company? How many ratings are you receiving? What is the sentiment of your ratings or product/service comments?
   
• Influence: Just how much influence are your efforts (or those of other influencers) having on your strategy? How willing are people to recommend you? Did you get a brand awareness lift with your efforts? Are influencers sharing their opinions and are they creating user generated content around your products/services?

There are so many ways to measure the four I's, you could count the number of blog comments on a new blog post, you can look at how many friends you have added on Facebook, or you could determine a number that would be "successful" to tracking how far a link was created and spread through Twitter. But that is just the one step of all this, you still need to look at the traditional monitoring numbers as well.

Basically there is not simple report or one statistic to look at. Each company will measure their success a little differently in the Social world. This is where a Social Media Agency can be helpful. We can help you clearly define what you want to accomplish for your business and help you measure all these different avenues to determine success.