Twttr Strts New Txt Stndrd?

Cn you read/undrstnd ths pst?

In a prior lfe I wrked at MBNA in cllctns. As prt of the jb, I hd to dcmnt accnts re cnvrstions wth cstmrs. To mke thngs qckr/easr we wre instrcted to lve out vwls whn typng, only to use thm whn absltly ncssry for a wrd to mke snse.

Due to Twttr's chrctr restrctions, thnk this nw type of typing cld tke off? Prsnlly I thnk snce Twttr is mnly a biz tool, cld be dffcult to adpt unvrsl stndrd of typng wthout vwls. Tone & cntxt alrdy can be easly misundrstd evn whn typng full characters, and unprfssnl look of txt is prbbly nt the way mst biz wnt to presnt thmslves.

Panel Discussion on New Media

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be a panelist on a New Media discussion hosted by JumpStart. The other panel members are a very esteemed group - Lauren Rich Fine, Barbara Oney and Anita Campbell. It was really an honor for me to be included with this group of such accomplished professional women, and I'm sure attendees learned a lot from the discussion because I know I did!

Some of the questions asked at the panel included:

1) What is your definition of New Media?

As expected pretty much everyone agreed New Media means it is conversational in nature, but most panelists weren't comfortable with the phrase "New Media" itself. I think the consensus was a better term may be "Interactive Media", and should online and offline techniques that are designed to promote dialogue.

2) An example of a company that is doing New Media really well.

In light of the Democratic National Convention it was pretty hard to ignore Barack Obama's social media strategy - online community, facebook, twitter.

3) How do you decide what social media techniques are right for your company, and where do you start when there are so many options?
I think Lauren gave great advice when she cautioned that social media may not be right for every company or industry, but once you start you'll be able to understand better which channels work for you.

What types of questions would have wanted to ask the panel? Or what do you think New Media should be called?

The Limited - Fashionably Late

Got a flyer in the mail a few weeks ago, with some exciting news... The Limited is finally getting into the e-commerce game! As I'd mentioned late last year, the current website is definitely hurting their ability to be competitive.

Even better, The Limited e-Marketing team is already encouraging customers to sign-up and register for email alerts. All this before the site is even launched, way to go!

Now I'm curious to see the site's functionality, ease of use, any social media applications... online product reviews? Does anyone know of a clothing store where customers can comment online on the quality of the merchandise?

Kicking the Tires on Google's Ad Planner

Earlier this week, did a quick trial run of Google's new Ad Planner tool. Overall, I give it a two-thumbs up rating. First of all its free, and I love free stuff! Second, the interface seemed to me to be intuitive. Figuring out how to use the service was fairly simple (full disclosure, I did attend an Ad Planner webinar a week or so ago but still think I could have figured it out), I could easily create profiles and store reports.

Where Ad Planner seemed to fall short was in the breadth of sites currently included. The good news is this part can hopefully be improved over time, whereas if the interface were clunky it would not be as useful of a tool.

For example, we do a lots of local (Cleveland) media planning/buying so I was particularly interested in any sort of geo-targeting capabilities. While it was made clear geo-targeting is not a current option, I thought I could game the system by entering our largest local website - www.cleveland.com. Unfortunately its not included in the Ad Planner index.

Next I moved onto doing research for one of our larger, national clients in the home improvement/home design space. Our client currently does lots of advertising on HGTV so I immediately entered this as a site to benchmark against. Only problem, HGTV is not included in the index either. HGTV is one of the largest home design websites, if they aren't included it is going to be tough to create Ad Planner home design recommendations.

Anyone spent some time with Ad Planner, what are your thoughts? Got any suggestions on how to do inspired geo-targeting?

Blog Council - Blogging Best Practices

Optimistic Rebel, the newest addition to the Optiem blogging family, just sent an intraoffice email reminding our group about The Blog Council's guidelines for blogging. I particularly think reviewing the section on Blogger Relations is a good gut check (no belly problems here), on the transparency of your outreach program.

Focus: Best practices for how businesses interact with external blogs and bloggers.

When communicating with blogs or bloggers on behalf of my company, I will:

1. Disclose who I am, who I work for and any other relevant affiliations from the very first encounter.
2. Proactively ask bloggers to be transparent about their relationship and communications with me.
3. Always be truthful.
4. Never ask someone else to deceive bloggers for me.
5. Never ask bloggers to write a fake endorsement or something they do not believe.
6. Never use off-topic comment for self-promotional intent.
7. Never take action contrary to the specific boundaries, terms and conditions, and community guidelines set by each blog.
8. Not use services or technologies for mass-posting comments.
9. Use extreme care when communicating with minors or blogs intended to be read by minors.
10. Comply with all laws and regulations regarding disclosure of identity.
11. Make it clear to our employees and agencies that these rules apply to them.

The 3 C's of Blogging

Yesterday I captured on video my comments on blogging for a "coming soon" website. In my need to be concise (1-minute time limit), I compiled the 3 top level concepts I think you need to consider before commencing a blog. Coincidentally all three steps had a "C" adjective that corresponded nicely.

1. Content - What does your audience want to read from you?
2. Commitment - Set the expectation for how frequently you can realistically manage to add new content.
3. Community - Engage with other bloggers, comment on their posts, reference them in your blog, etc.

What else do you think could be added to the compilation?

m0serious Raps About PPC

Hilarious and has some good info!