Are you ready for fall? This September brings many entertaining and invigorating interactive marketing events to the Minneapolis/St. Paul interactive scene. With events from the following organizations, there is sure to be an event that’s perfect for your needs. We look forward to your suggestions. Contact us to add an event or tweet us at @threedeep.
Find out how to use this important and often overlooked tool for business and personal development. Discussion will be led by LinkedIn experts Nicole Harrison (@SocialNicole) and Kate-Madonna Hindes (@girlmeetsgeek).
Each month AIGA Minnesota hosts a mixer event at various bars and restaurants around the Twin Cities. This event is a great networking and social opportunity so bring your business cards and your ideas! Members and non-members alike are welcome.
What do you get when you combine livestock, thrill rides and hashtags? Join us for our second annual Social Media Breakfast State Fair event on September 3rd, 2010. We’ll be talking with vendors at the fair who are using social media in their business at the fair. There will be live music throughout our event, some fun activities (Bacon Haiku returns!), and great food.
Join AIGA for part two of Design Conversations, an informal three-event series hosted by W Minneapolis – The Foshay, benefitting BrandLab, and featuring internationally recognized design experts. Grab a cocktail, pull up a chair, and join the conversation with some of the nation’s leading creative geniuses as they discuss the state of visual arts, brand identity, and design.
Learn about all aspects of blogging, from design to storytelling, book publishing and more at the first annual MN Bloggers’ Conference. Tickets are all sold out, but you can sign up for the wait list.
Sad, but true: summers almost over. Reconnect with your MIMA peeps the Annual Fall Social. Oh, did we mention that this year’s Fall Social will be at Target Field. Yup, we thought that would get your attention. We’re holding this year’s event at the Home of Minnesota Baseball. Leave your laptops at home, but not your Old Spice Guy imitation.
The Minnesota Chapter of the AMA is kicking off the fall with another Speed Networking event—this time in an all new group format! Attend this “can’t-miss” event and meet more people in one evening than in a month of traditional networking. It’s fun and easy!
Join us at Caribou’s corporate office to hear SVP Marketing & Product Management Alfredo Martel present the story behind the brand. He’ll cover the strategic business objectives that led to Caribou’s brand evolution, how the company measures success, what’s next after the branding dust settles, and more.
This year, MIMA has added more to the Summit, starting with a half day of Intensive Workshops. The half day will feature both beginner and advanced how-to sessions over the course of almost 2 hours. The 10 in-depth sessions will focus on key topics relevant to marketers.
Shout out to our very own Jeff Sauer, who is hosting a workshop on Google Analytics!
Our usual full day conference will offer more breakouts this year! We’re taking it to a whole new level, with 8 tracks of breakouts and 2 separate Geek Outs…that’s 40 different places to pick from throughout the day, or 10 different ones each hour! I know, I know. Sometimes choices are hard, be we think you’ll like it in the end.
Join Ad Fed at Kieran’s Irish Pub, and bring your friends who may be interested in joining Ad Fed or Ad2, or those who are looking to renew existing memberships. It will be a night of Irish spirit, revelry and camaraderie: complete with food, drinks, music and give-a-ways.
The #1 rule to social media is to be social. For businesses, it can often be a difficult premise to adhere to this simple rule, and we often see businesses criticized for having thousands (or millions) of followers and only following 5 people back.
It’s something we think about from time to time as we manage our @threedeep Twitter account. Someone follows our business on Twitter and we wonder if it’s worth our time to follow them back. Some people will advocate that you automatically “follow back” everyone who follows you, but that’s not always practical and brings your account in some spammy areas.
How does a Businesses decide who to follow on Twitter?
We’ve created this flowchart which may offer some insight into how we evaluate whether or not your business should follow someone on Twitter.
The chart starts with a simple question:
Does this account tweet in English?
Unless you are well versed in that language (as well as everyone else that manages your account), it’s in your best interest to just let them be.
Does your account know this Twitter account professionally?
This should be a simple question if you’re a business. Are you in business with this person or organization? If so, you have just found an additional venue with which to communicate with them and can also help to cross-promote each other.
Does your account know this Twitter account personally?
For example, does your brother blog frequently about photography and his blog feeds into Twitter? Or does your college roommate have a Twitter and posts amusing tweets?
Is that content valuable to your business?
Perhaps you can rationalize your brother’s account, but unless you’re a comedy business, your roommate will have to be reserved for a personal account.
Is this account local?
For us at Three Deep, we may follow businesses that have no relevance to our business, however this business still may be of value to us, such as Barrio, where we often enjoy their tacos. Another option is that the person behind the account may be someone seeking a position with Three Deep, so following them would be helpful for them to message us if they need to follow up on a posting.
Do they tweet regularly? excessively?
These terms are relative to you and the amount of accounts you follow. We say that more than 5 tweets an hour is excessive, but that is something you must determine for your account. Also, if the account tweets less than once a week, it is doubtful that you will glean any knowledge from them unless you can target the exact time that they will post a message.
Is their content original?
At Three Deep, we follow many social media people. However, if their tweets are all filled with the latest Mashable news, then it would make sense to just follow Mashable. It’s certainly fine that accounts want to retweet people, but make sure that there is a healthy balance of original and retweeted content. Again, these are just guidelines that we use to determine who we follow for our organization’s Twitter.
We welcome your thoughts and what parameters you use for those you choose to follow.
If you’re looking for interactive marketing events in the Minneapolis / Saint Paul area for the month of May, then look no further. We have your May events calendar ready and waiting!
If you want to subscribe to these events, please check out the Google Calendar!
Join the Twin Cities Thursday Happy Hour crew and Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota for the 1st annual TCTHH Charity Event. All proceeds benefit Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.
Don’t see an event that you’d like to have on this calendar? Contact Us or send us a tweet (@threedeep) with a link to the event information and we will make sure to have it on here as soon as possible!
I read a very interesting article the other day on the Marketing Sherpa blog highlighting how social media and email work together. Some of the takeaways that stuck with me are statistics that were found in Merkle’s study “View from the Social Inbox 2010”:
42% of social media users check their email four times a day or more as opposed to 27% of those that do not use social media
63% indicated that their email address for social media is the same for opt-in permission based email
What does this mean and how do they relate to each other?
First the obvious: social media users are two times more likely to be checking their email at least four times per day, disproving the long standing notion that email deployment should only occur Monday – Friday and in the morning.
Since social media users are regularly checking their inbox, email campaigns can be deployed at non-traditional times (evenings and weekends), with greater confidence that they will be viewed, and even better, acted upon.
For example, if a restaurant would like to offer a special for the weekend, they can deploy an email Friday afternoon knowing customers on their distribution lists will view their email.
Given this information, experimenting with non-traditional email send times can dramatically increase the ROI of certain campaigns.
Email as a Viral Marketing Catalyst
With over 60% of social media users having the same email address for their social media accounts and opt-in permission emails, the barrier to share relative messages from one channel to the other is no longer limited.
Besides viewing the email and completing the Call to Action, the greatest benefit an engaged social media user can bring to an email distribution list is the potential of making the email message viral amongst their social network.
Social media users tend to have “friends/followers” who share the same interests amongst a variety of things. As marketers, our challenge is to serve up relative content to the customer that they find worthy of sharing.
The Merkle study indicates that 20% of Facebook, MySpace and/or Twitter users have posted or shared an email/message from their opt-in permission emails. With highly engaged social media users checking their email four times a day, the potential of an email reaching beyond the original distribution list is high, a key catalyst to establishing a viral expansion loop.
In fact, Silverpop estimates that posted/shared messages on social networks reach around a 25% greater audience than an original email communication. It’s amazing that your email distribution list could increase 25% through your recipients sharing with their social network.
Thinking back to the restaurant example from before, one email sent out Friday afternoon notifying your email distribution list of your weekend special could turn into a pretty significant ROI!
So how does this become a reality? If I knew the simple answer I would be making a lot more money writing this blog. With that said, I think it all goes back to knowing your customer and keeping them engaged with your brand or product. The more you know about them, the more likely that you can present them with beneficial content, which may cause a ripple effect well beyond your original intended audience.
Those who are familiar with our company and our culture know that we are constantly thriving to be thought leaders in our industry. Our blog has proven to be an excellent channel for conveying useful information to our peers. By extension, many of our employees use Twitter and other social networks to further extend our reach.
To make keeping up with Three Deep one step easier for our followers, we have recently created a mobile application (or app) for iPhone and iPod Touch users. After all, we figured if Seth Godin has an app, we probably should too!
This flashy piece of digital goodness serves up our company blog, as well as Twitter feeds from individual team members that are frequently posting on industry trends, best practices, and even a bit of humor.
The app. is named simply Three Deep, and can be downloaded at no cost from the iTunes App Store or by clicking the link below. If you like the app, please be sure to rate and comment. Enjoy!
For our followers that do not have and iPhone or iPod Touch, there are many other ways to keep up with what’s going on at Three Deep. You can follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and by subscribing to our RSS Feed.
It’s funny how in a country with hundreds of millions of people, the world can seem really small through Social Media. This past Thursday, two members of Three Deep – Brandon Smith (aka @bg3dppc on Twitter) and Jeff Sauer (@jeffsauer) attended a gathering of Twitter users in the Twin Cities at an event called the Minneapolis Tweetup.
The event was held at the Bulldog in NE Minneapolis, which is one of the better restaurant/bars in the Twin Cities, and the promise of free food and cocktails made it an event not to be missed.
We met some great people at the event (@kareemy, @ddn, @swineheart, @paulmalenke to name a few) and called a successful event after about 2 hours – and decided to leave the happy hour around 8 PM. After driving home, I logged on to check my Twitter account and noticed some interesting news about the event:
Continue Reading Three Deep Attends Minneapolis Tweetup, Meets Mark Cuban →
Our company President, Dave Woodbeck, sent the above slide deck to several members of our team this weekend, and I found it worthy of sharing on our blog. I made the executive decision to tone down the actual title of the slide show (what the f**k is social media?) to prevent any misunderstandings from those who read the title and get scared away.
The actual content of the presentation is much less harsh than the title would imply. The underlying theme throughout: you need to join the conversation! You can’t simply ignore the social interactions that are happening around your company, brand, clients, friends, family, etc. While the tactics used to deliver messages may change, social interaction will only become more open and candid. Like-minded individuals will be forming groups, talking, interacting, etc… and those that listen will be the ultimate winners in the social media landscape.
Continue Reading What is Social Media? – Excellent Presentation Social Media →
To make keeping up with Three Deep one step easier for our followers, we have recently created a mobile application (or app) for iPhone and iPod Touch users. After all, we figured if 
