I’d done some reading, some evaluating, some equivocating… but I finally took the plunge and joined in the fun on Pinterest. Here are some things I’ve discovered:

It’s quiet and undemanding. It’s not about real-time conversation. It’s not really about conversation at all, actually. It IS about connections. It’s about inspiration, curation and obsession. Here are the things you’ll need to know to join in. (Note… it’s invite only. You can let me know you want an invite in the comments for quicker access, or you can enter your email address on the Pinterest.com homepage and one will show up in your inbox in a few days.)

Pinterest is a virtual “pin-board” not unlike the old-fashioned cork board you probably had in your bedroom as a teenager or may still have on your office wall (note image of mine). The difference is now you can have as many boards as you have diverse interests. On my account I have one for places I like to go, one for information I think is worth sharing, one for stuff that makes me smile, etc. Virtual wedding planning, home decor ideas, DIY home improvement, jewelry, crafts, fashion look books… all common boards.

But, the uses that intrigue me and make me think the now 4 million plus users of Pinterest are on to something are ones like these, posted by some of my Facebook friends when I asked them about the service:

• It’s like being a contemporary art director of dreams. – Jennifer Luitwieler
• “Mood Boards” for client projects. – Trisha Salas
• Resource images for photography clients. I can add them to the collaborators on the album and both of us can add images, talk about what we like, don’t like etc. – Marty Coleman (a.k.a. The Napkin Dad)

Successful brands using Pinterest aren’t doing tons of pinning their own stuff. They’re doing lots of putting out eye-catching visuals on their websites and making it easy for users to pin them to their own boards. Each “pin” is embedded with the source link from the website, so it’s a referral engine for pins that go viral and get “re-pinned” to other user’s boards. Commenting is possible, and some people do, but the beauty of the service is, well, it’s beauty. It’s visual, visceral and always changing. You don’t have to comment or feel compelled to “keep up” with the flow. Viewing a board lets you quickly scan a wealth of content in one glance, and users can follow only select boards of others if they want to. For instance, I am not a home decor makeover freak or particularly crafty. I tend to not follow those kinds of boards though I may follow the same user’s “Books I Want to Read” board.

Ready to give it a whirl? I’ve pinned some good Pinterest articles to my Info To Share board, and I’d suggest following Collen Pence’s Pinterest info board, too.

After reading some of the tech coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show happening in Las Vegas this week, one thing stood out… following is more than a trend in social media. It’s the norm for big tech companies. The reviews of Windows 8, coming sometime soon to a PC near you, has a screen of tiles that you scroll through, “similar to what you find on a smartphone or tablet.” And what launched the initial touchscreen/swiping through icons for navigation trend? An Apple product, the iPhone.

The Tulsa World’s own Robert Evatt interviewed Tara Dunion, senior director of communications of the Consumer Electronics Association, the organizing body of CES, and she told him one of the big trends for product announcements and launches at CES this year is new ultrabooks. Evatt’s article mentioned that tech experts have characterized ultrabooks as similar to the MacBook Air — a product that is as powerful as a traditional laptop yet ultra thin and light.

Full disclosure: I own an iPhone, two iMacs and a MacBookPro. I am definitely an Apple fan. But this post isn’t about praising Apple. Not really. I just wonder where the other innovators are? It’s not enough to have the best iteration of the thing people already know they want… because you’re always going to be spending time and resources on incremental improvements to a known entity and directly competing with every other company out there trying to do the same thing.

Whatever field you’re in… don’t be just a follower. Don’t be the ones out there touting the latest “improvement” to someone else’s product or idea. Spend your time and R&D resources to develop what people need, even if they don’t know they want it yet. Find the problems. Find the pinch points. Figure out a fundamentally better way. Once the product or idea or service begins to take shape, marketing and PR are the tools to help your potential audience see what’s possible, not just what’s passable.

UPDATE: This conference is still coming to OK, but will be making its debut in the Spring of 2012 with a more intensive format and open to both men and women. Watch this updates as we firm details! — Mandy

The name is actually misleading, I think… because the conference isn’t really about getting all fired up because Yay! We’re Women! In Business!

It’s about teaching and sharing tools, ideas, methods and collective wisdom about being better in business as a woman. Whether that’s in your own business or as a team member in someone else’s company, the WES is about going further and accomplishing more through leadership, brand and marketing management, and business/entrepreneurship core concepts. The conference is a learning module format with an accompanying workbook. Less rah-rah, more brass tacks. The kind of thing that will help close the entrepreneurship gender gap.

Want to know more? The conference website is here. Register to attend here (and email me if you want a special discount code just for my network).

Hear Deborah, me, Angela Allmond, Joan Vasquez and Aprille Franks talk about some of these issues.

And I hope to see you October 29th in Oklahoma City!

I have been using Google + for a few days now (and no, this is not a post all about Google +) and have noticed an interesting phenomenon already. Everyone wants a “do-over” on social connectivity. Much discussion is happening around posts like, “Will you build your network differently here?” And the consensus seems to be that many people want to approach the whole concept of networking differently. Either they intend to be more selective in who they follow or add or they intend to be more rigorous in the groups (“circles” in + parlance) they form or maintain.

Another common thread is the desire to return to the halcyon early days of social networks when the novelty of connecting with other people – interesting people –was the driver behind the growth of Twitter or Facebook. You know, back before brands and marketing became the main focus of those old networks. Yes, that was a tiny bit sarcastic, I admit. Google + could potentially be much larger than Twitter given its much larger reach and the opportunity for even the most casual, non-networked internet user to be exposed to it every time someone does a search. Google + will be baked in to the search experience in a very seamless way by early indications (new “share” buttons have appeared in my gmail and my Google Reader apps already).

I remember the euphoria that accompanied my early days on Twitter, now nearly three years back, when someone new followed me. I long ago turned off “new follow” notifications because the emails were swamping my inbox. But I have the “notifications” from Google + turned on and that old feeling is back…. a little rush when someone adds me or comments on a post or shares something with me. Will it last? Probably not. Google + may end up being a better tool for personal connection, but professional networkers will soon be all over that platform and newly minted Google + jedi, knights, gurus and the like will be hawking their professional help. Soon, the who is following whom will become a game of sorts… social climbing for the 21st century.

Will anything be different in two years? Won’t Google + (or whatever is next) become what the users make of it and choose to do with it? Is a “do-over” really possible if defining relevance online via social cues – really the reason Google is doing this – will continue to be driven by who you know/are connected to and who’s talking about you, your brand, your company, your last presentation, slideshare, blog post or content bit? What do you think?

At Crossroads Communications, LLC (the “official” name of my business, although you probably found me by searching my name; it’s just the way the Google search bounces) we essentially are a message company. We discover the stories of our clients and share them, whether through PR, marketing, advertising, social media, content-creation on blogs, videos, etc. The tools are less important than the focus on the messages. Before we can find and authentically help brands, businesses, and places tell their story, we have to really, and I mean really, get to know them. You can’t effectively market what you don’t understand.

I use a set of questions to help get that process started. They’ve evolved over the past several years, but not as much as some might think… because they are focused on the business goals and objectives rather than the tactics. I hear often that just going through the process of defining the business and its profit centers, challenges, goals and marketplace in the way that we do is valuable to business owners. I also hear that answering the questions we ask is hard work. Until we have a solid idea of where your business IS, why that’s true, and WHERE you want to go… how will we all agree we’ve reached “there?”

While I won’t share the whole set of questions here (I do have to feed my family, after all), I am going to share a few of them with you, and then share some additional thoughts in upcoming blog posts. I hope they’ll be valuable conversation starters for you and your business supporters, partners, or even that little voice in your head who pushes back whenever you want to go try something new.

Defining the Business

Current Challenges

1. What is the biggest obstacle, in your opinion, to purchasing one of your top profit-generating services for most of your potential customers? When you hear “No…” what is the “why?”
2. How much time must you typically invest face to face and behind the scenes to close a sale? Please list face to face separately from behind the scenes. How much of this time is spent explaining what you do, the benefits of using you or of having the service, and generally in educating your prospects?

Looking forward

1. Thinking about the future, what would you like to be different about your business in one year? In three years? What kinds of clients do you want to be serving? What services do you want to sell them?
2. Considering your profit-generating activities of today, what do you see changing, growing, fading over the next 1 to 3 years in those activities? Do you see an increasing demand for what currently drives your profit or a declining demand? Why?
3. If the demand for today’s profit-driving activities may decline or remain flat, what other activities or products are within or adjacent to your current expertise and offerings which might be increasing in demand over the next 3 years?

Did anything above make you stop and think for a minute about your business? How do you keep your business “on-track”?

Still working on updating pages here on the site that the WordPress pharma hack infected. I apologize if you see in a title or search something that obviously I am not selling… I think between Carlos Moreno, Doug Stewart and some very helpful Twitter friends (@bradleyhunt, @rmalove), the worst is over.
If you were, indeed, searching for some concoction (I don’t want to use any of the keywords that would just pull more unrelated traffic!), I apologize. This blog is written by me, Mandy Vavrinak, about integrated marketing, public relations, marketing places, and digital relevance.
As soon as I’m confident all the pages (there are a lot of infected posts) are updated, I’ll get back to writing new content for the blog. Thanks, everyone, for your support One thing I’ve learned from this, other than those security measures they recommend taking with your database are worth it, is that we all get along with a little help from our friends, online or off.

This is the framing post for the Wednesday, 2/9/11 #smchat on Twitter.

When you live in a social media fueled world, you sometimes forget to examine the larger perspectives out there. The more engaged in social media you are, the more likely this is to happen to you, your company, your clients or your brand. Social Media blinders are dangerous and marketers, PR people, brand managers and small business owners need to know the signs and how to look beyond.

Signs you may be wearing blinders:

1. You can’t remember the last time you watched an entire local newscast or read more than two stories from one issue of your local newspaper (even online)
2. You have no idea which local TV or newspaper reporters cover your business area or expertise
3. You get all or nearly all of your news from either your Twitter feed or your Facebook feed

What can happen?

1. Missed PR opportunities, missing trends or local shifts in perception that may not be filtering through to social media
2. Skewed view of your marketplace or your target audience’s wants, needs, problems or challenges
3. Giving up market share to competitors who are not constrained by blinders

How can you combat Social Media Blinders?

1. Use Google Alerts for more than just your name or your company name. Stay on top of key concepts or phrases in your industry or marketplace.
2. Stay in touch with what is happening in your local community by staying engaged with your local media.
3. Create content that is easily shareable beyond Twitter or Facebook. Think larger, think longer-term.
4. Get to know how much time your target market spends online, and where they spend it. Most importantly, figure out WHY they’re online. Posting coupons to Facebook is great if customers are there for coupons. If they are there for backstory and to find out about your corporate responsibility, you’ll need a different strategy.
5. Get out there… literally.

Got more? Other concerns about living to much in a hyper-connected world as it pertains to marketing, PR, brand, business or reputation? Anything you want to be sure we address in the chat? Post away in the comments!

Hope you’ll be able to join us this Wednesday, 1PM Eastern/noon Central for the chat. If you miss it, check out wthashtag.com for the transcript afterward. I’ll post the link in the comments on this post after we wrap the chat.

Twitter became meaningful for me two years ago today. Happy Anniversary, sweetheart

Today is the anniversary of the day I figured out the power of Twitter. I’d joined a few months before, in November of 2008. I’d tweeted some, and found and followed about two dozen people I respected in my industry… names I knew from MarketingProfs.com or from reading blog posts or articles. But mostly it was just for fun and a way for me to collect links and articles more quickly. I’d yet to really utilize a news/blog reader very well, so Twitter was serving that purpose. I’d first become intrigued after spending the previous year on Facebook, joining FriendFeed, and then hearing/seeing/reading about Twitter in industry articles. No one seemed really clear on what to do WITH it, just clear that everyone should be DOING it. I began to read… a lot. I didn’t follow anyone else and decided to start tweeting the good content I found, and commenting on it. I knew nothing of hashtags, really, other than that they existed. I’d never participated in a chat. I was determined to see if sharing good content was a strategy that actually worked, though…. so away I went.

After a couple of months, my following had grown to several hundred, based on luck and retweets of the content I’d created or shared. I still wasn’t actively following anyone, but I’d begun to talk to the followers I did have and with those I’d initially followed. Cool… but still not earth-shattering or profoundly game-changing. Then came Superbowl 43. I sat down to watch with my family, with my laptop… and started tweeting about the commercials (Hey, the Dolphins weren’t in it, and growing businesses is my profession). Suddenly, as the hashtag for the ads connected me to a slew of people across the globe all seeing and reacting to the same thing I was, at the same time, through a single medium, the power of Twitter (indeed, of all social media) became crystal clear to me. The conversations and engagement were infectious and addicting. I debated, agreed, challenged, tweeted and retweeted though the entire game, and have been actively engaged ever since. Because life is always happening, everywhere, all the time, and people are talking about it. Online, offline, all the time. The power of Twitter is not that I can talk to you, or you to me… it’s that WE can talk to EVERYONE else out there, anytime we want, one conversation at a time. Even if all we have in common is a love of Superbowl commercials, for today, it’s enough. Let’s connect.

What was your moment like? When did social media hook you?

Brand DNA isn't a static thing

I found an article by Inc. magazine on rebranding a company and when it makes sense to do so that I tweeted and amplify’d. I liked the article enough to post the amplify.com note to my blog, too. If you’re a regular reader, you know I almost never “reblog” anything. Bottom line, I thought it had merit. It garnered more retweets on Twitter than anything I’ve posted in recent days, too, so it seems others saw the merit, too. And that made me wonder WHY it struck a chord with so many, right now.

Here’s what I think: It’s a new year. It’s an evolving economy seeking a new normal. As business owners, we are all striving to make the best start, seeking to leave behind the angst and difficulty of the recession and looking for authoritative answers to our questions on just how to make it happen. In some of the discussions that happened about the article (Twitter, Amplify and here) several people commented that new packaging won’t fix a bad company. Very true… so the question becomes, “How do I know if we’re a company with a branding problem, or with a deeper problem?” Before you scoff and tell me that is an easy one and list off all the things obviously unhealthy companies get wrong, let me tell you why this question is harder to answer than it seems for most businesses, and what I mean by “branding problem.”

Brand does NOT equal the logo, name, colors, style of letterhead, signage (physical expressions of a company’s visual identity). Brand DOES equal the perceived attributes, ideas, relationship, expectations and direction of a company, as expressed by external viewers. Not just customers, either. Apple’s brand is shaped by both customers’ and non-customers’ opinions and expectations. This is why people can say they “love” or “hate” a brand. They are in relationship with all the things they associate with that company. Therefore, rebranding doesn’t mean changing your logo (although that may indeed be part of the tactical steps taken). It means examining dispassionately the perceptions of your company in the marketplace. It means looking at market potential with existing perceptions in place (current brand) versus market potential with changed perceptions in place (successfully rebranding) and any number of potential new sets of perceptions or brands. It means looking at your business as an organism that must make conscious choices and that can foresee, with some degree of accuracy, the outcomes of those choices. It means doing the hard work to understand the marketplace, consumer behavior and drivers, trends, costs and long term financial impacts.

So, that’s what I mean by branding.

If you’re a small business (one or a few employees), the company’s identity is often so closely associated with your own that changing the brand can feel like a betrayal of self. Having or acquiring the market knowledge to accurately reflect and then predict your company’s trajectory based on brand A, B or C can be difficult at best. Being able to set aside the hopes and dreams you had when you launched to look carefully at the future, especially if you’re doing fine right now, is often the hardest part of all. The upside is that the vision is usually strongly shared and employees (if there are any) are committed to it and tend to start from a cohesive point. Changing a brand is impossible if the company only concentrates on external packaging, advertising, marketing, PR etc. Changing how the business operates, what it produces, how it produces or delivers, how it interacts with the marketplace… those things are often easier in a smaller company once the commitment to changing is set.

If you own or work for a larger business, the difficulty often arises from that lack of shared internal vision and perception in the first place. Many larger businesses have the resources to model their marketplace and make some educated assessments regarding what might happen if… what’s ofeten missing is the internal commitment to real change, since the starting place for the many employees is so varied. If, for instance, a large consumer goods company wants to change how they interact with the marketplace so they are perceived as more community-minded, more involved in social issues, more caring… but their employees feel neglected, unimportant, like expendable resources… I submit that the rebranding will ultimately fail. Advertising can say whatever it wants, but products and service delivered by employees who feel like the company doesn’t care are not going to deliver on the advertised promise of caring.

How do you know if your business would benefit from a rebranding effort? You don’t – without doing the hard work of figuring it out. The best thing about the process may be how it forces us to look at our businesses from a clinical perspective… examine the DNA and look for mutations that may signal a problem or may herald our next big thing.

Here, in visual form (courtesy of wordle) is what I’ve written about on this blog in the past year.

Visual Image of Just Exactly What It Is I Do (or at least, what I write about)

There’s nothing like doing a wordle based on the feed of your blog to show you exactly where you’ve been spending your digital time. It’s like printing a list of your entire Google search history and posting it… You feel a little naked for a moment or two.

Interestingly, even though this blog is about ‘Marketing,’ that word doesn’t appear in the wordle. Not even once.

If you’re a regular reader (according to Feeburner, there are 2 of you out there. Bless you both.) you know that I view Marketing as forging connections between people and other people, ideas, places or spaces. And THAT is reflected in the wordle. I believe in relevance, community, making people think and in making social media and its tools work for business.

And, as you look closely through the image, you’ll see I have a teen, I hate complacency and I think context is the next big thing. I also should spend a little more time on my blog dealing with the specifics of marketing, since most of the tactics in marketing and PR apparently are getting short shrift on my blog.

Now… here’s my challenge. If you blog, go to wordle.net and enter in the URL of your blog. Grab the image and post it to your blog, just like this. Do a little self-analysis and share the link in the comments. I can’t wait to see what you discover!