Last Friday we finally had the long-awaited theatrical release of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Casting Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, together again with Tim Burton, was enough to get all of us fans charged up. Unfortunately I haven’t yet had the chance to see the movie and I understand the reviews have not been so positive. When your expectations are so high, it’s sometimes hard to live up to them. Nevertheless I still plan to see the film soon in the theater.

I did become a fan of the Alice in Wonderland Facebook fan page, which as of today has over 1.1 million fans. I think they’ve done a pretty good job of engaging the fans. They’ve included some fun applications and have been updating the wall consistently with video clips of the movie and interviews of the cast members as well as short polls. 

The one, fun app they’ve developed invites fans to join the Mad Hatter and his army to battle the red queen. Fans can replace the Mad Hatter’s face in an image with a face from one of their Facebook photos which can then be shared with friends. So I’ve included mine here.

Fans can watch the movie trailer and also purchase tickets to see the movie at a theater in their area from right off the page. The polls ask you simple questions like “who’s your favorite character?” and  “who would you most like to be?” And of course fans can also see what all the other fans are saying about the movie, most of what I see on the page is very positive.

So effective social media marketing with Facebook fan pages doesn’t have to be a very complicated issue. Sometimes the simpler the better. The trick is to engage your fans so they keep coming back. Therefore, the more you post, the more they can interact with you. And each time they interact with you it then provides you with the opportunity to gain more fans by having them share your brand and your message with their friends. So we all don’t have to go MAD trying to be too WONDERFUL!

If you’ve seen the movie, please let us know what you think of it. Thanks.

Earlier today I wrote about this promotion and posted it on The Lip-sticking Blog since I am the guest blogger for Wednesdays. So I’m posting it here as well.

Wednesdays are my guest It’s tax season again, the time of year that we all love to hate,
especially us small business owners! I handed over all my papers to my
accountant a couple of weeks ago which of course is the hardest part of
the job. I have two daughters that are both in college now so I was
excited to learn that I’d be getting some tax credits for this. My
oldest daughter is in her second year, in what I believe to be the #3
most expensive college in the U.S. – NYU!

Anyhow I recently received an email advertisement from the Neat Company in which they invited me to “Tame the Paper Monster this Tax Season” and enter the “Paper Monster-Less Tax Day Giveaway”. So it got my attention and I clicked through to learn more. 

They’re promoting their NeatDesk scanner
and digital filing system that digitizes and organizes documents, such
as all those little receipts that you need for tax time. Their website
has a brief, instructional video that demos the product and clearly
states it’s features and benefits. I’m liking that more and more
companies are using videos online to communicate their products or
services. Very smart online marketing.

Also what I like is that this promotion is very simple. They’re giving
away 10 of these little NeatDesk products with the intent to “spread a
little organized, digital love this tax season”. So I clicked on the
“Enter Now” button and was taken to this blog page which told me about the two ways I could enter the sweepstakes:

1.
I could comment right on the blog post telling them how NeatDesk will
help me reduce paper clutter and simplify my life at tax time. They
reminded me to use a valid email address so they can contact me if I
win!

2. Or I could follow The Neat Company on Twitter and re-tweet the contest by posting a pre-written tweet that includes a short url and the hashtag #papermonster. 

So
I did both, entered through the blog promotion and through their
Twitter promotion. The Neat Company currently has 1,245 followers, now
including me. I did a search for #papermonster and found a whole page
and more of others who “want to Tame the Paper Monster” as well.

Yesterday I attended a breakfast event in Rochester with guest speaker Peter Shankman on social media which I wrote about on my blog here.
Peter’s advice was to keep it simple (so it can be retweeted) make it
fun and make it relevant. This sweepstakes promotion does it all. Now I
hope I win one of these little wonders. Will make my life in 2010 much
simpler.

Yesterday Peter Shankman was back in Rochester again, this time speaking to a full room of mostly women at a breakfast event hosted jointly by RWN (Rochester Women’s Network) and GRC-NAWBO (National Association of Women Business Owners). It was held at the Woodcliff Hotel, which was a perfect setting located east of the city on one of our higher points overlooking the area on a much needed beautiful, sunny morning.

Now I had the privilege to hear Peter speak when he came to visit last October at a luncheon put on by our local PRSA chapter. Yesterday’s talk was titled “”Social Media – Be better
or take up residence on the Isle of
Mediocrity’, which was very similar to what he reviewed with us in October. However, I was still highly engaged and entertained by his lively, hour-long discussion. He again didn’t use any slides or video. He even got rid of the mike, which was too loud and poor quality.

He started out by telling us that he arrived the night before and tweeted that he was flying into the Rochester airport and if anyone would pick him up and give him a ride he would buy them dinner. Well one of my friends, Kelly, known as @craftyb on Twitter, responded and greeted Peter with a small balloon sculpture of a skydiver. For those that don’t know, Peter’s Twitter handle is @skydiver. He thought it was so cool and had the balloon skydiver with him that morning.

Peter is the founder and CEO of The Geek Factory,
Inc a boutique Marketing and PR Strategy firm located in New York City,
with clients worldwide. He is perhaps best known for founding Help A Reporter Out, (HARO) which in just a year has become the de-facto standard for thousands of journalists looking for sources on deadline.

It’s difficult to summarize all that Peter shared with us, but as before he focused on these 4 basic rules that were the key points that I believe he
wanted us to walk away with.

Transparency
– This is the “new black”. Today we all need to be more open. In the long run it will save us. We are more apt to buy from companies today that we can connect with, such as those that have a CEO who blogs.

Relevancy – Make it relevant to your audience. Ask them what information they want and how they want to receive it.

Brevity
– Keep your messages short. The average person’s attention span is now
2.7 seconds. That’s about as long as it takes to read a text message or
tweet. Back in the 80’s it was 3 minutes, the time it took to watch a
music video! Learn how to write.

Persistance – Make use of today’s social media tools
and put yourself out there. Get on Facebook and connect with your
network. Check to see who has a birthday today and send them a
greeting. I remembered Peter’s advice this morning and checked my Facebook birthdays and actually found 4 of my friends that have birthdays today. What’s the chance of that? I wrote all of them a Happy Birthday greeting on their wall.

Peter closed with telling us that social media is really
all about having someone else do your PR for you, whether it’s good or
bad. So if you want positive buzz, you need to gain your customers’
trust, focus on customer service and give off good karma.

Thanks Peter for visiting Rochester again. Yes, he was promoting those pokens again as well. I got my Kitty from him the first time we met. One of his next stops he mentioned with be SXSW in Austin. Thanks also to my friend Kelly Mullaney for sharing the photos she took at the event that I’ve included here. You can see all the photos Kelly took here on Flickr! I forgot my camera again! Finally thanks to all the women who helped put on a great event.

My Lip-sticking blog leader, Yvonne DiVita, has mentioned BlogPaws several times over at that blog and I wrote about it here in this post back in January. We’re
now just a little over a month away now from getting together in Columbus,
Ohio with a large group of pet bloggers, online pet enthusiasts and pet
brands for BlogPaws 2010. Yvonne and her partner, Tom , who work together on the Scratchings & Sniffings pet blog, together with Caroline Golon of Romeo the Cat, came up with the idea of BlogPaws last year. Since then they’ve been very busy turning it into reality.

Now you should check out the BlogPaws website
and learn all about it. I am one of several committee members, most who
are pet bloggers, helping to organize the event. Now while I am a
blogger, I am not a pet blogger. I do have several pets though…2
dogs, 2 cats and a chinchilla who my daughter left in the care of my
husband and I while she’s away at her first year in college. My blog
is focused on marketing with an emphasis on promotional and social
media marketing, which is what I primarily blog about here as well. So
while I’m excited to be on the ground floor of this great new online
community as a committee volunteer, I am also really looking forward to
being a speaker as well. I’ll be part of the Contests, Sweepstakes, Promotions – Nuts & Bolts panel along with Jenny Cisney, Chief blogger for Kodak, Hollis Thomases, Web Ad.vantage Blog and Jane Couto, MomGenerations.com.

So in light of my promotional marketing background, and as a way to promote the event,  we’ve developed the BlogPaws or Bust Sweepstakes
which we just launched on Monday. We’re giving away two grand prize
travel packages to Columbus which include round-trip airfare from
anywhere in the continental U.S., two nights hotel accommodations at
the Westin Columbus
(where the event is taking place) and a pass to attend BlogPaws 2010.
We’ve also thrown in three second place prizes which are free passes to
the event.

Now we’re using a web-based application tool to run
the BlogPaws or Bust Sweepstakes which enables us to launch the
campaign simultaneously on our website, on our Facebook Fan page and on Twitter all at once. This app creates a micro-site that can be either embedded or linked to a website or blog and added to any Facebook
fan page. The Twitter option
gives extra entries to people who tweet
about the sweepstakes and are successful in getting their followers to
enter. I’ve now used this app several times for a few of my clients and
have been happy with the results, but this is the first time I’ve used
the Twitter option.

The application, called Wildfire, is included on Facebook’s Preferred Developer list and is in compliance with Facebook’s promotional guidelines
that they recently released in December. Facebook now states that you
need prior approval to run a sweepstakes or contest on their platform,
however, by utilizing this app prior approval is not necessary.

So this is a very cost-effective way to get a promotion up and running
on multiple platforms quickly and fairly easily. This makes it a great
tool for anyone who wants to integrate a promotion with their social
media efforts, what I call Social Sweeps promotions.
The app offers a premium or standard version that helps to fit within
most budgets. We’re utilizing the standard version for the BlogPaws or
Bust Sweepstakes.

So whether or not you want to join us pet
enthusiasts in Columbus, please check out the sweepstakes and go ahead
and enter and please let us know what you think about the promotion.
Follow any of links above to get to the entry form.

Oh yeah,
we’re also having a Twitter Party tomorrow night where we’re giving
away some great prizes. Please join the fun if you can for a
#blogpawspawty on Thursday, March 4  @ 7 pm EST. You can get more info
on this here.

Hope to meet some of you in Columbus!

The Pepsi Refresh Project got quite a bit of buzz around the Super Bowl for the fact that Pepsi decided not to run a Super Bowl ad. I wrote about the Super Bowl and Pepsi in this post and many others bloggers and columnists did as well. The program was just beginning and as I said then, this is one social media marketing initiative that I want to follow.

Well a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet with someone who currently has a project being voted on in the program. To review, the Pepsi Refresh Project originally launched on Jan. 13 and invites people to submit their ideas online for their projects that will refresh their communities to make a better world. February has been the first month that visitors to the site could start voting on projects that have been submitted. Pepsi estimates they will fund thousands of projects spending in excess of $20 million dollars with the hope to start a movement where others will begin funding community projects in the same manner.

The specific project that I’m referring to is called “Elastic Park” which was submitted in the Arts and Culture category by Larry Moss of Airigami, LCC. Larry is an artist who builds balloon sculptures, so this project is basically a Jurassic Park made out of balloons! His goals are to demonstrate what can be accomplished by working together and building community through art, science and “pop” culture. His plan is to build an exhibit at Exploration Place in Wichita, Kansas that will serve as a template for a national museum tour. To accomplish this he will need to recruit 100’s of community volunteers which will hopefully result in 1,000’s of visitors all learning about pre-history and art in a very unique way. Check it out:

Larry has displayed his work in 12 countries, and has been recognized by the Associated Press, CNN, Smithsonian Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! He has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show and NBC’s “Today.” He created  Balloon Manor here in Rochester last Fall, which was a haunted house for Halloween all in balloons. Also this past December he participated in the DARPA Network Challenge which celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Internet and the way social networking now plays a role in communications. For that he had cupcake balloon structures flying over various major cities in the U.S. including New York.

February is now winding down with only a few days left for voting. What Larry told me that I didn’t realize at first is that visitors can come back every day to vote. So those projects that are associated with a large organization have the advantage of sending out reminders to people to go back and vote again. Therefore, there does seem to be a disadvantage for the small biz or entrepreneur.

So please vote here for Larry and Elastic Park. He’s ranked #18 today, down from #15 from when I met with him. The good news is that if he doesn’t win this month he’s received enough votes to come back for a second try. Winners from all six categories will be announced on Monday, March 1.

BTW – I usually write on the Lip-sticking blog on Wednesday, but Yvonne really wanted to get word out on a new product today. So I’ll post this there tomorrow instead!