Power to the Bloggers! And the Facebook Contests!

Facebook contests; created as the almighty way to drive traffic to your page, increase engagement, reward your fans, and ultimately, skyrocket your page’s fan count. But as many failed attempts will attest to, that goal is much easier said than done.

We’ve seen contests crash and burn. We’ve had contests crash and burn.

When Good Blogs Go Bad

By Constance Aguilar, social media strategist

It’s an age old tale in business. One party decides to do something new and special to draw attention and profits to their business. Another party sees its success and wants to duplicate it. Why reinvent the wheel, right?

This part of dealing with a crisis takes note of personal feelings, the hard work and dedication it takes to pull off an idea, and what happens when there’s two (or more) sides to the story.

How to Pitch Your Local Food Writer

From President, Abbi Whitaker

Local food (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Restaurant PR isn’t all cocktails and five star dining.  Food editors, writers and bloggers are constantly approached by PR people to cover the latest and greatest restaurants, recipes and products.  Because let’s face it — we are not going to hit a home run with Epicurious.com  or Food & Wine every time.  As PR people it’s our job to work journalists from most markets to keep our clients in the media. How do you break through the onslaught of bad e-mail pitches, long winded phone messages and off-topic  Tweets to get through to these local industry influencers and get your clients those much coveted regional and  local kudos?  And once you’ve broken through the clutter how do get your fair share of press?  As more and more papers turn to social media to drive traffic back to their websites PR people should be thinking of viral additions to their written pitches – include a YouTube video, a Flickr photo gallery or a pin board on Pinterest.  Offer these writers some additional resources that they can then use on their Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Pinterest boards.  Think about making their job easier and giving them more to work with.  Chances are  your e-mails will get more than a second glance.

Creating a Social Media Plan

Image via CrunchBase

Creating a Social Media Plan

This article originally appeared in the Northern Nevada Business Weekly

By The Abbi Agency

Abbi Whitaker

Social media planning for your business; an endeavor easily avoided, vastly misunderstood, and overall, quite daunting. But make no mistake, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, Google+, and the rest of the line-up shouldn’t be approached carelessly when using them to represent your brand and communicate with customers. Companies jump into the world of social media feet first, but without proper planning, a business can land in the social media snake pit faster than they can say delete post. Here are some of the common mistakes made when developing a social media campaign and ways to avoid falling into that trap.

5 ways social music tools can build brands and boost business

Image via Wikipedia

This post originally appeared on SmartBrief

Digital music and music streaming are more than just social novelties. There are many platforms for creating playlists, streaming artist stations and discovering new music on the Web. Last year we saw the explosion of Spotify, a Swedish-based streaming music service that became the first music service to fully integrate with Facebook, allowing users to share music with their friends.

How to Transform Your Social Media Efforts into a Headline

From Account Manager and Social Media Specialist, Constance Aguilar

Social media is a lucrative pool for small businesses to connect and engage with existing and potential customers. Focusing social media efforts on business-to-customer communication has been the ideal topic and force behind use for any business or brand on social networks.