Anchor Your Social Marketing

Many brands and organizations rush to set up social networking sites simply to broadcast press releases or other important company announcements. While awareness is one of the ways to use social media, it's certainly not the end all. Your social updates should be part of a larger strategy that's anchored to simplify your decision making when you need to choose between conflicting options.

You should be using your social media assets to:

• Generate awareness
• Engage your existing and potential customers
• Respond to product or service inquiries or feedback (complimentary or not)

You should do a lot of experimenting to find out what really works well in order to determine your best engagement tactics. Repeat successful tactics and adjust others to learn as much as you can about your followers, viewers, etc. When you use repeatable tactics,

Sponsor Moment And Not Just Media

In the multi-screen next stage of media in which brands should align themselves with consumer “journeys” throughout a day, they should be looking for ways to sponsor moments -- instead of just   media. Brands like Toshiba have learned to align its brand identity and valuable content with a compelling event. This week Toshiba launched its third iteration of the annual Times Square Ball app for Google Play and IOS. The useful app is in tune with the brand’s major presence in Times Square, running one of the largest screens in the zone, the Toshiba Zone monitor at One Times Square. The app is a mobile broadcast of the New Year's event. It has its own Webcast live video feed and its hosted ad-free program goes on for six hours with hostess Allison Hagendorf of The CW’s “The Next” and the app-cast complements and extends the music and entertainment programming coming from the Dick Clark legacy show with Ryan Seacrest. Interviews with the Time Square event creators as well as those who traveled from afar to be part of the madness help form its unique content. But content isn't the only thing that