Blog

The FTC conducted an investigation into the promotion of the opening of a Nordstrom Rack store. Specifically, the inquiry focused on the Tweet Up, where Nordstrom provided gifts, including a $50 Nordstrom Rack gift card, to the influencers who attended the event. The FTC was concerned whether the influencers who wrote about the event provided appropriate disclosures that they had received gifts for attending.

For thousands of years (OK, at least for many decades) the PR habitat was static: fundamentally comprising strategists, writers, media relations experts, event coordinators — a short and powerful list that looked the same in 1950 as it did in 1990. Today, however, technology has led our industry to the influx of a whole slew of new talents: creative directors, videographers, statisticians, graphic designers, social media specialists, animators, audience planners, creative technologists, and more.

Speaker Blanket: Perfect for our upcoming summer Fridays – the Speaker Blanket is a picnic blanket combined with speakers with a jack to plug in your iPhone.

Influencer programs, much like a strong and active consumer fanbase, is becoming more imperative by the day. Understanding that social media doesn't "turn off," Pfizer executes influencer programs involving close to 25,000 consumers across multiple targets for many months of engagement. Pfizer's multi-brand programs aim to not only generate conversations, but also to arm consumers with the education to make the right choices for themselves and their household, and ultimately influence purchase consideration among the thousands of circles of friends that the Smiley Community touches. In our final WOMM-U interview, we sat down with Susan Frech, CEO of Social Media Link, and Jim Sears, Associate Product Manager at Pfizer to discuss their upcoming session.

When you’ve put so much into your video content strategy to get this far, don’t leave discovery to chance. Seventy-two hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute and 40% of all YouTube views take place on Facebook, where it’s estimated that people are sharing 4 billion bits of content every day. With Facebook’s aggressive filtering hiding as much as 90% of your content, it’s just not enough to reach your fan base either. What’s a marketer to do?

According to a recent eMarketer report, YouTube is now the third most active social website worldwide behind Facebook and Google+. That is why a key focus at WOMM-U this year is video and virality. Beyond simply establishing a presence on YouTube, with the vast amount of content that exists on the platform, it has become essential for brands to develop effective strategies in order to get their content noticed. Time to show that off at WOMM-U as Channel Factory, Nestle, Threshold Interactive, and Golin Harris take you through one of their most successful case studies from the past year.

Community management has graduated from a fad our industry reads about to a profession more and more brands have come to adopt as a necessary position within the organization. As demand continues to rise for this vital position, WOMMA, The Community Roundtable and ComBlu have decided to bring back our LIVE WOMM-COM Community Management Online Certificate Program. We gathered some of most influential players, as well as some familiar faces, for the community manager certificate program (Module 1) commencing June 11^th. The Community Roundtable’s Rachel Happe, past and future WOMM-COM speaker, stopped in to share some insight on her session: Leadership and Culture.

Gamers are some of the most passionate fans out there. SEGA is one of the biggest brands in gaming, and gamers have an incredible amount of love and nostalgia around the brand itself. At WOMM-U this Monday, Kellie Parker, SEGA’s Senior Community Manager, is going to show students how to create loyalty for a brand without a formal loyalty program, both for you fans and your employees. 

At Spredfast, we think about content in three distinct ways. It can be created internally, curated from third party sources, or it can be part of a conversation with clients, prospects, and the market at large. I hope you’ll join us at WOMM-U to workshop some of the most vital aspects of successful social programs, but in the meantime, here are three ways to think about creating, curating, and conversing with great content.

You heard the title right. Auditing doesn’t only apply to the accounting and finance departments. Sometimes, a good social media marketing audit/assessment of your own channels or those of your competitors is exactly what you need to move up in the world. At WOMM-U, Bill Chamberlin, Principal Analyst of Social Insights at IBM, will show students how to evaluate a company’s website and social channels to determine how socially enabled a company is, what their engagement style is, and what social strategy elements are missing.