Launching your company’s social media presence is a big step – both in terms of shifting to a more engaging and customer-centric marketing approach, and because of the resources you’ll need to dedicate to make it succeed.

As a strategist at MediaSauce, I’m often charged with helping clients launch their social media initiatives. I’ve found that the most challenging thing for most marketers isn’t learning how to use new tools. It’s knowing how to get digitally organized.

Time management, baby.

Now, I should clarify. These tips are for businesses. If you want to spend 5 hours checking out your old high school friends’ family photos, by all means, feel free. Your time, your dime! more

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I was very glad to represent MediaSauce at Mashable’s Social Good Conference and present our formal case study on the Pledge to End Hunger. It was inspiring to learn and share with such a great collection smart and talented people.

If you want the case study, you can download it here. Here’s the slide deck I shared during my time on stage:

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Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting a half-day workshop entitled “Social Media for Cause Marketers” at the 2009 Cause Marketing Forum.  We had a full house partake in this fast moving, high energy workshop. I was very pleased with the audience participation and the solid exchange of ideas.

The highlight of the program was the lively breakdown of five case studies, which starts on slide 99.  The final one (starting on slide 115) was a behind-the-scenes view of www.pledgetoendhunger.com, which includes various analytics and measurements.

All of the slides I presented are included here.  The remaining slides were from the four companies sponsoring the workshop and can be found via www.causemarketingforum.com.

If you attended, what did you think? If you didn’t, what are your questions and thoughts?

Find me on Twitter:
@scottyhendo

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MediaSauce proudly announces an exclusive business partnership with the creator of “The Social Media Bible.” Being released on April 21, 2009, it is the first book to comprehensively define the tools, tactics and strategies of social media in the Digital Age. The Book will be a must-have reference manual and business guide for executives around the globe that seek to succeed on the internet.

(I’ll share more details about this important business book and our partnership following a case-study account of how social media gets the credit for this business opportunity.)

Every week I spend 45-60 minutes perusing the hundreds of discussion forums on LinkedIN to identify if there are any interesting job recruits or business development opportunities that MediaSauce might like to pursue.

Those minutes, spread across the business day, are my version of mental smoke breaks. I don’t find a lead or opportunity every time, but I’m addicted because of the fix I get when there is something that drives a new opportunity.

On January 5th I spotted a question from Lon Safko asking for “…the right partner who can help me develop the web site around my new book, “The Social Media Bible” published by John Wiley & Sons.”

This caught my eye, as John Wiley & Sons is a respectable publisher, best known for their “For Dummies” series.

more

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There are a few critical steps that every business must accomplish to succeed online. There are six steps I always cover with a business as the ‘basics’ or “Internet 101″ concepts that they must tackle, including:

• Owning an appropriate domain name (or names)
• Easy to use and find “Contact Us” link on every single page of your site
• A ‘real’ email address with corresponding tools to use it
• Simple, functional navigation and design
• Relevant, useful content that actually matters to prospects
• A transaction point (and this does not necessarily mean e-commerce)

While these six key steps might seem elementary, it’s surprising how many organizations still fail to complete them.

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation to the Indiana Small Business Development Corporation on business basics of Digital Strategies. While the strategies and tactics MediaSauce offers to our clients as part of the Digital Blueprint are very comprehensive, I did want to post this presentation for those of you who are just getting started. more

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The Obama Campaign’s use of digital and social media was the best executed integrated business initiative EVER implemented since the inception of the Internet. I truly believe it. Do you?

Last week MediaSauce hosted more than 100 business executives at our “Election 2008” seminar. As leader of the development and strategy teams for MediaSauce, I was passionate for us to lead this discussion!

I was joined by my colleague Colin Vaughan to present 12 key lessons that every business can apply to increase your digital footprint. I’m glad he could join me – not only is he a marketing strategist for MediaSauce, he was active in the Obama campaign and a Get Out of the Vote Team leader and fundraiser in Indiana.

The program was fast-paced and covered nearly 2.5 hours of lessons, questions and answers. We’ve created a 40 minute version to give you the key points. Please share this with your colleagues and network.

Goals drive success

In the first of four videos below, you’ll discover the background for the campaign’s goal, their 3 strategies and how their team made the difference. more

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I am an unabashed history buff.  Ever since I was a young boy, I loved reading books, hearing stories, and watching movies about historical events.  It was no surprise then that I completed a history minor while pursuing my undergraduate degree.

This past month, it was my pleasure to speak to the Class of 2008 of the Seminar for Historical Administration.  This three-week seminar brings rising leaders from a variety of historical sites, museums, and societies together for an intensive program designed to shape the next generation of industry leaders.  It made sense then that digital and social media would be a part of that education. more

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We had a great time with everyone who attended The Event Gap: Taking Your Event from Adequate to Amazing.  About 100 attendees representing a wide variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations gathered to learn how to combine big thinking and social media to achieve amazing results.

After a lively networking breakfast, Sarah Robbins, our very own social media rock star, framed the entire day’s conversation by comparing the typical event with what’s possible using existing and emerging technologies.  Throughout her presentation, audience members used laser pointers to indicate how their events performed in comparison to what’s possible.  Staying true to form, Sarah used an innovative presentation format to “fly” us thru the dueling timelines.  See a simulation of the presentation for yourself here (or view the high resolution version on YouTube): more

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This is going to be a short post but I absolutely loved this tool, www.websitegrader.com.

Check it out, use it and then come back and we’ll go through all the cool stuff that is in it.

There’s also another free tool for ranking your website.

Being found on the net is getting harder and harder – you need to have this SEO stuff down.

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Last week, Sarah Robbins and I were in Rochester, NY, for the American Association of State and Local History (AASLH) 2008 annual conference. We presented a 1/2 day workshop on Web 2.0 and how museums, historical societies, and other historical organizations can leverage social media.  Here are the slides:

I love history and preparing for the conference made me realize how much more alive history can be with digital and social media.  Knowing how much our past drives our present, the human race can gain much from understanding it better.  With the digital and social media tools at our disposal today, anyone with Internet access can experience the past better and derive more insight from it.

As we got into the second half of our workshop, we switched to the user-generated content (UGC) approach to generate examples of the principles we were teaching.  We had 28 people in the workshop representing 20 different organizations.  Here are some of the cool examples that came out of our joint explorations: more

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