With April right around the corner, Three Deep is proud to present its April 2011 calendar, marking one year of bringing you interactive and online marketing events in the Minneapolis and St. Paul community. Have more events to share? Please tweet us @threedeep!
April 4th
MIMA CATFOA #4: Anders Sjostedt, Hyper Island USA
6:00 – 9:00 pm
Fine Line Music Cafe
Join us for the third session of Conversations About The Future Of Advertising on Monday, April 4, 2011 when we welcome Hyper Island USA Managing Director Anders Sjostedt (@anderssjostedt).
In today’s competitive environment, making the right business decisions is crucial. Using market research can help increase sales and profitability and save money by ensuring that you are “on target” with your products and services. Save money and travel costs for this one-day session with the premier market research training company, Burke Institute. This seminar is designed for marketing professionals—market researchers as well as market managers and others who want to understand how to use research in decision-making. Both B2B and B2C markets will be covered.
Whether you work at a large or small company, your best ideas often come from peers. Looking for advice on a project? Have a campaign idea you want to test out? In this Peer Go-Round for Seasoned Professionals, we will be leveraging the power of group brainstorming. You will come with a question and leave with 20 good answers. You will gain and share wisdom, meeting new colleagues and deepening your connections.
Even if there’s still snow on the ground, spring will be here soon! Cocktails with Creatives will be at The American Swedish Instituteon Thursday, April 7th, from 6–8 p.m. Of particular note, The America Swedish Institute will be featuring the art of Jesper Löfvenborg. We’re excited to see all the returning faces and the new ones.
April 13th
MIMA Spring Socializing IRL!
5:15 – 8:00 pm
Location TBD
The where and when will be announced soon, but plan to do the social networking IRL.
MWMC is eager to connect with our newest members at the upcoming New Member Breakfast. Join us for a continental breakfast, meet MWMC board members, learn how membership has genuinely impacted our board member’s professional lives and network with other new members. Help us meet our mission of fostering collaborative relationships and championing women in business. We want to meet you!
Be sure to hit the Happy Hour at Fast Horse on Thursday, April 14. It will be a great opportunity to check out a groovy agency and mingle with plenty of advertising, marketing and design folks. Fast Horse is an innovative, non-traditional marketing shop with an impressive roster of clients and shelf or two of awards.
From marketing to education to building a community for yourself and your brand, there are myriad opportunities being missed. This session aims to bridge the gap by equipping attendees with the tools they need to make good use of digital tools now. Attendees will learn basic social media strategies and skills that you can immediately put to work for yourself, and your business.
Ad Fed’s Getting Surly! The first 75 people to join or renew Ad Fed membership during the months of March/April 2011 get an invite to a FREE limited availability, private tour and beer sampling event at Surly Brewery on Thursday, April 21. Founder and President, Omar Ansari, will be giving the tour and sharing the history of how this iconic Minnesota brand came to be. He will also be taking questions afterward. Have you seen the Surly tour waiting list? Avoid the wait and renew/join now! This is your chance…
Social media is greater than simply sharing, marketing, or making friends. It’s about changing the world, and some folks really understand what this means. We’ll explore our changing world through the use of social activisim online and talk about what that means for all of us.
The Ad Fed Mentorship Circle program allows members to engage individually with industry professionals by meeting them in a casual group setting. These Mentorship Circle events are held four times a year and offer networking, discussion and group mentorship based on areas of interest.
Learn, from case studies in such areas as preventive care, chronic illness, online and print communications, and smart apps, how industry innovations are evolving to foster patient loyalty and better influence patient outcomes.
This event will showcase the various in-house groups, who use research and design to deliver on Mayo Clinic’s primary value: the needs of the patient come first. Encompassing all media, our in-house teams have the ability to connect brand touchpoints, and help provide a seamless experience for all.
Official details are still firming up, but the next Pivot will be hosted by the AIGA MN Student Group at Saint Cloud State.
The Pivot Series is designed as an opportunity for AIGA student groups to develop programming for their fellow students who reside and study in the upper Midwest.
In the world of Twitter, it is common practice to gain more followers, you should often follow users and hope that they will follow you back. This practice is a great way to not only gain more followers for your account, but also find relevant thought leaders who can be an invaluable resource to your team. There are many services that will charge you a fee to simply do precisely that. You’ll gain thousands of followers in the process, but since you are following numerous users at the same time, how do you keep relevance to those you follow?
Does “free” = Lots of MY time?
Of course there is a free option for all of this: manual following. While it may take a significant amount of time to develop such a list, pledging to follow even a few knowledgeable people a day can have a positive result on your efforts.
So where do you look when your Twitter account is looking for quality finders, who will also be likely to follow you back?
The easy answer for more people to follow?
Twitter itself. There are a variety of options to find quality people to follow:
1. Twitter lists: You know who you turn to for expertise on Twitter. See what lists they have and who influences their knowledge. Also, if you’re on any lists, see what commonalities you have with the others listed. Maybe there will be a few who offer a unique viewpoint that you’ve never considered.
2. FollowFinder by Google: Google has recently released a new tool called FollowFinder that takes accounts that are similar to yours and recommends them to you, with an OAuth login to immediately follow them without leaving the page. While this is a great tool, it has been known to have faulty relevance, and only has a limited amount of results.
3. Your RSS feeds and bookmarked websites: If you haven’t done this yet, you certainly should try to locate the Twitter accounts for your favorite websites. This provides more depth to the sites you subscribe to, and give you a better opportunity to express your thoughts to those in charge of the blog or website.
How do I know if they’ll follow me back?
There is undoubtedly no guarantee that sending out a follow will give you a follow back. The best way to gauge such a likelihood, is to check out the follower/following ratios. If they don’t follow a lot of people, but have thousands of followers (such as celebrities), you likely won’t get a follow. The opposite can also be true. If an account follows a lot of people, it may be more focusing on who to follow than looking at who is following.
In the end, it is always up to you and everyone else who maintains your account to determine who to follow, but one good principle is to try to follow back at least 10% of the people who follow you. For more information on who to follow, check out our Twitter Follower Flowchart.
You may have seen one of the many posts in the past week covering Google Social Search results becoming more integrated into the normal organic search results on google.com.
One particular post from Tech Crunch sparked an internal discussion at Three Deep that we thought would be worthy of sharing with our readers. The rest of this post represents our consolidated viewpoint on Google Social Search.
Google Social Search has actually been brewing for over a year, it just happened to surface more prominently last week and generate a lot of buzz on the web (not to be confused with Google Buzz, which is one of the services that enabled social search to happen).
The release of this feature in Google’s search results sparked a lot of conversations among online marketers and tech blogs. While we agree that this is an interesting development in search, we really think of this more as an overall opportunity for link building to improve search rankings for websites with a strong social presence.
As we close out the holiday season and move into a fast-paced New Year, the local online marketing groups have set up plenty of opportunities to further your marketing skills, and interact with other members of this great Minneapolis and St. Paul community. Whether you’re seeking more focus on users, publishing with social media, or just another happy hour to mingle with friends and new faces, there is an event that is perfect for your needs.
Know more than you ever thought you could (or should) about your prospects and clients.This interactive presentation has a huge “WOW” factor—you will be shocked at what you don’t know (but soon will). All attendees also receive complimentary access to the Know More! Center and downloadable toolbar, making it easy and fun to practice what you will learn.
Join Rick and Mykl and some of the SMBMSP members on a community call addressing the future of SMBMSP as well as your questions and concerns regarding the community.
In the 60s, graphic design changed the visual landscape. 50 years later, the ground continues to shift. Will Minnesota remain a design center? Come spend an evening with 13 leaders as they look at where design was, is, and needs to go. Communication Arts editor, Patrick Coyne moderates.
Decent cocktails. Moderately tasty apps. And deep, soul-searching conversations about the nuances of [ridiculously fascinating subject here] and the rampant misuse of [other, maybe more controversial subject here].So plan on DVRing Real Housewives (c’mon, we know you watch it), and join us as we blow your mind with a somewhat industry-relevant presentation, topic yet TBD. After all, we have the whole night before the event to come up with something riveting. Bring a pen and plenty of empty palm space. You’re definitely going to want to take notes.
January 19th
MIMA Cultivating a User – Centered Culture
5:15 – 8:00 pm
International Market Square
Please join us as Nancy Lyons and Meghan Wilkers of Clockwork Active Media Systems and Geek Girls Guide fame share their insights on creating a user-centered culture. Starting with the big things (what management can do) to the tactical things (what individual team members can do), they’ll also answer questions like “How does work culture impact the success of a project?” and “What can you do to create a support system that empowers people to influence change within an organization?” They’ll also share stories from their years of exploring and creating user-centered cultures in the workplace.
Mobile doesn’t have to be an elusive media. How can you use mobile in your own company, whether you are B2B or B2C? What else are people using other than apps? This innovative panel will help demystify the mobile world and give you ideas on how to incorporate mobile strategies and technologies into your marketing mix.
SMBMSP takes on Publishing in Social Media for their 33rd breakfast and bacon series. Stay tuned for more information on speakers and topics.
As always, if there is an event we missed, feel free to tweet us @threedeep on Twitter, or fill out a Contact Us form to make sure we put it on the list.
On September 10, 2010, I gave a speech to an organization called MENG. For those of you who are not familiar, MENG is a national organization of marketing executives. There are some pretty heavy hitters in the organization, so I was honored to be invited by the New Jersey chapter to speak to members. I was also a little nervous, because I would be talking about social media for the first time!
While I use social media every day in both my work and personal life, rarely does the opportunity arise for me to position myself as an expert on the subject. In fact, I wouldn’t call myself an expert at all. Knowledgeable is probably more accurate.
Continue Reading Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media Integration →
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.
Continue Reading Twitter Follower Flowchart for Businesses →
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.
Continue Reading Making Social Media and Email Work Together →
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 →
We have alluded several times on this blog as to our company’s continued interest in Twitter as a listening channel. While a lot more informal and lightweight than blogs, the channel is a great way to listen to what’s going on over the web. As part of my continued Autodidacticism (I know it sounds dirty, but look it up… it means self educating), I am constantly perusing the Twitterverse to see if I can learn any interesting tidbit, technique or insights into how I can improve my skillset.
As part of my daily monitoring, I subscribe to searches for Twitter hash tags (basically words with a # before them) for several people, industries, events, etc. One of my favorite hash tags is the Web Analytics channel #measure. In addition, I love the stream provided by the newly minted #ganalytics hash tag (those of you who have been on Twitter for a while know that these are much better than the deprecated #wa and #ga tags, which were polluted by SPAM for Washington and Georgia state related tweets). These two streams keep me up to date with any new developments in these areas, and also allow for some new techniques.
Continue Reading Web Analytics Insights Found Through Twitter →
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 →
With April right around the corner, Three Deep is proud to present its April 2011 calendar, marking one year of bringing you interactive and online marketing events in the Minneapolis and St. Paul community. Have more events to share? Please tweet us @threedeep!
