Tapping into social networking is an idea that brands love, they want to network with their consumers but how do you do it?
Well I interviewed Pettrina Keogh of Gurgle.com on The Engaging Brand Podcast which you can find here,  to find out

Why use social networking to build a brand
Is the site to connect readers to readers or brand to readers?
How the site is seen as a hub of information rather than a website
How you attract people to the community
Why is social networking so important in brand engagement
Are there different strategies for different social media tools?
How to protect yourself legally on …read more

Online and citizen journalism have been around for ages – you know, at least four years, which is at least a century in internet years, but it appears that a school superintendent in Minneapolis didn’t get that memo.
Students from the Fairbault, Minnesota High have taken their newspaper online in response to the demand they shut their paper down from the superindetendent when he wanted to review an article about a teacher in advance.
While there are many touting the fact that this is a win for citizen journalists and lamenting the fact that there are still need for online …read more

I spent the weekend working on a Christmas gift for our families. Photos were edited, accounts created and by Sunday afternoon, I was ready to start doing the layout for my Blurb book.
It didn’t really take me too long before I got frustrated, mainly with myself and the software and our interaction. I tweeted my annoyance and then promptly went out to run a few errands. An hour or so later, around 430 or 5 pm, my phone trilled with a message
“@colleencoplick what are you trying to do? i’m blurb’s marketing director – maybe i can help.”
On a Sunday afternoon. …read more

Many of the established and well respected blogs within the online marketing community have recently started to make their audiences available to a variety of new voices. I’ve done it here and both Michael Gray and Jeremy Shoemaker have both recently put the call out for guest bloggers.
I’m totally interested and willing to have guest bloggers on Buzznetworker, (see below) but I also take it very seriously. I have high standards – I want to make sure that it fits the tone and topic of my site, and that the content is exclusive – it can only be published …read more

Online news outlets, like this one, and pretty much any other influential blog out there, are hot commodities for many PR and marketing people. If you’ve got any kind of consistent readership, companies like Matchstick Marketing will want to get you to try out and review products.
Rebecca Bollwitt, hyper-local Vancouver area blogger, Miss604, has been involved with Matchstick Marketing in the past, and even successfully reviewed a Samsung T10 for the company. In addition, she and her husband John had successfully participated in a campaign for a Nokia 6682.
But, it seems that successful campaigns from Matchstick Marketing are few and …read more

I owe my b5 gig entirely to the connections I’ve made through social media.
I met Tris Hussey on Twitter. We chatted, I found out that he was across the water in Victoria.  We met, briefly, face to face at Bloghaus at SxSW. I knew he was with b5. We got to be better friends after SxSW, primarily over GTalk and Skype.
I saw ProBlogger’s post about b5 looking for a new blogger through a tweet from Jesse Stay, but not through Twitter. I noticed it on my Facebook homepage, under the status updates. Jesse has connected his Twitter account to update …read more

I have been doing social networking consulting for awhile now, a few months back I had to do a bid for Joey Lawrence. The former child star had just finished doing his stint on “Dancing with the Stars” and was in the studio recording an album of covers of classic crooners like Sinatra and Martin.
Being friends with one of his managers I needed to prepare a marketing plan for them. In doing the plan I had to do a keyword check of Joey Lawrence and prepared a listing of some of his search terms on a few individual social networking …read more

Have you heard of Ray Hopewood? A Software Mogul from Silicon Valley that has more money than God and is now running to become the next President of the United States, Hopewood has been all over the place, including most of the major social networking and bookmarking websites.

You haven’t heard of him? Well Hopewood is fake, and I don’t mean in the traditional way a lot of politicians are. He is a creation of Rassak Experience, a online marketing company, for their client BigFix. Hopewood can be found on MySpace, Youtube, Flickr, and on various other social networking websites, all …read more

This is part four of my case study on how I used MySpace.com to drive traffic to a clients website. You can read the first three parts here:
Part I-How to Establish a Foothold on MySpacePart II-Establishing the marketing plan and doing the designPart III-How one profile used MySpace Groups
In my previous posting I talked about how we used the “professional” profile on MySpace, now I want to talk about how we used the “personal” profile. Let me recap a bit about the “personal” profile. The personal profile was where we used the identity of someone that worked for the company, …read more