Lotame Learnings

New RSS Feed for LotameLearning Site

This is a second notice -

If you are an RSS subscriber to Lotame Learnings you will need to point to our new "FeedBurner" RSS feed. All you simply need to do is click on RSS Feed Button or clicking here or click on the image to the left. We made the first announcement of this transition last week, but Google's feedburner service crashed, so you may need to renew again, sorry for the incoveince.

If you haven't subscribed to Lotame Learnings here is your chance!

We have Moved our RSS Feed

 We have redesigned and redeployed our Blog.

If your an RSS subscriber to Lotame Learnings you will need to point to out brand spanking new "FeedBurner" RSS feed. All you simply need to do is click on RSS Feed Button or clicking here.

If you haven't subscribed to Lotame Learnings here is your chance!

Looking for Questions for Pharma meets Social Media Panel

Next Wednesday, Lotame will be hosting 40 marketing industry leaders representing Pharmaceutical companies, Advertising Agencies, and Social Media Marketing Innovators. The session, which will be held in MidTown New York, will explore how big the Social Media Marketing opportunity is, some effective ways that other brands from other industries have participated. Joseph Jaffe from Crayon, who wrote the book "Join the Conversation" will be our Keynote speaker. The summit will conclude with a panel designed to unearth the real world obstacles (and maybe solutions) that need to be addressed before Pharmaceutical companies are comfortable with Social Media as a marketing platform. I would like to invite you to submit some questions (and maybe some solutions) for the panel; here is a great question that we already got from an agency executive at UniversalMcCann:

"how do I justify the cost of a social media monitoring campaign and how do I calculate ROI for money spent of social media?”

If you have any questions that you would like submitted to the panel, please email them to me at scott @ lotame.com or you can twitter them to me at @lotame

Defend your Brand within 30 important Social Media platforms

Listen up brand managers, have you have been trying to get your organization to try social media? Have your efforts been unsuccessful? Well it's time to reverse the conversation, and explain to your organization that you need to defend your brand and marks with the social media world. If you don't grab your brand name on the various social media services out there, someone else will, and effectively Hijack your efforts. And the people who register your brand may (read: definitely will) say things that could damage your organization. I implore you, for the next 48 hours, take some time out of your busy day and register your brands and trademarks on the various different services. Hats off to our excellent PR firm Perkett (and their Blog), a my behest they put a list of the top 30 social media sites that you need to register your brands on.

Don't wait or you may find that someone else has already taken them.

Top Tier – Set up profiles, actively monitor for relevant content, drive traffic from your blog, etc.:
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Flickr
FriendFeed
LinkedIn
SlideShare
StumbleUpon
Twitter
Technorati (“claim” your blog at minimum)
YouTube (along with other video distribution platforms: Vimeo, Viddler, Revver, Yahoo video, etc.)
DocStoc
Scribd

Second Tier – Set up branded profiles and use as warranted:
Digg
Windows Live spaces
Yahoo Groups
Google Groups

Third Tier -- Claim your name and monitor:
Bebo
Brightkite (individual focus)
Friendster (international focus, Asia)
Gather
Identi.ca (alternative to Twitter)
Imeem
Ma.gnolia
Meetup
Multiply
MySpace (more for usage policy than an active corporate presence)
New York Times (TimesPeople)
Ning
Orkut (international focus, Brazil)
Picasa (alternative to Flickr, smaller community)
Plurk (alternative to Twitter, younger demographic)
Spoke
Tribe.net

If you think that there are other social media platforms that brands need to register on, please add a comment to this post or email me at [email protected]

Steelers win the Social Media SuperBowl

Image via Wikipedia

The Pittsburgh Steelers won the Superbowl in a very exciting game, but did you know that the Steelers also won the Social Media Superbowl. Based on the Social Data that Lotame collects and provides analysis on millions of Social Media users, we have determined that the number of people who have declared their fandom for the Steelers is more than 4x the number who have declared themselves Cardinals fans. By number of fans, the top teams on the Lotame Co-op are the Cowboys, Redskins, Colts, and the Packers.

Lotame Speaking at OnMedia NYC

Tomorrow, Feb 3rd, Andy Monfried will be speak on a panel at AlwaysOn's OnMedia NYC, at the Ritz Carlton, Battery Park, NYC. He will be speaking on the panel entitled "Report Card: Advertising Meets Social Networks" The panel will explore if ads shown traction on major social networks and if not, how can they be optimized? It will be Moderated by Peter Kafka, Senior Editor, at All Things Digital. Other panelist include; Jay Hallberg - Co-Founder & CMO, Spiceworks, Carter Brokaw, CRO, Meebo, Lance Tokuda, CEO, RockYou!, and our friend Mike Lazerow, CEO, Buddy Media.

The Lotame Car's first '09 Race

The Gentleman Jack / Lotame Car is kicking of the 2009 Grand Am series with the Rolex 24, to be held this Sunday at the Daytona International Speedway. We wish our team the best, now go burn some rubber! Here are some pics of the car, very cool, and very fast!

  

 

Lotame on Wallstrip

Lotame gets coverage from Inc. Magazine

Wow, Lotame was just featured in Inc. Magazine, the whole article can be found here. My favorite paragraph is:

Advertisers used to think that social networks only appealed to college-age students, but now social media has a reach comparable to the portals, such as Yahoo and MSN, says James Kiernan, vice president of digital media and innovation at New York-based MediaVest Worldwide. "There was a tendency not to acknowledge the [social media] ads as much as traditional ads, but now Facebook and Lotame are making the ads more relevant. All advertisers should consider social media as part of their plans.”

Lotame is mentioned with the likes of Facebook, MSN, and Yahoo, that makes me smile!

If Agencies succeed in Social Media, so do we!

A new report predicts that two-thirds of advertising agencies are not prepared for the industry changes prompted by social networks and new forms of digital media. The report prepared by The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) also warns that if advertising Agencies don’t adjust to the challenges of Social Media, they will face market declines.

My own opinion is that majority of Social Media solutions that are available on the market today are not scalable, they are non-standardized, hard to implement effectively, and unproven. This is in sharp contrast to state of other media today. We need to be cognoscente of these issues as leaders in the Social Media space.

We not only need to be easy for an advertising agency to work with, we need to be their guides, we need to be SHERPAS. We need to take the creative assets they understand and have developed and make them work inside the social media space. We need to constantly deliver above and beyond what the agencies expectations are. We need to take the time out, to explain results of campaigns, and suggest new methods for upcoming ones. We need to support all results with meaningful data that spell out metrics of success for each campaign (we may need to help the agencies develop those metrics to begin with.)

This is our unique challenge; we are not like other media where agencies know exactly what to do. Our success is tied to the success of our agency partners.

One important note about the report that was covered by the Financial Times; two-thirds of the projected decline could be made up by creating new forms of web content that contains branding messages, and by analysis the data expressed on the web. The later initiative is one that Lotame has demonstrated leadership and expertise.