Pink Banana Media & LGBTBrandVoice.com

Our LGBT Marketing Conference held at the Radisson Hotel Westside was an incredible success, thanks to the support of our key partners including OneGoodLove.com, Lesbian News, Frontiers Magazine and Echelon Magazine.  In addition, we worked closely with local LGBT chambers of commerce in the area as well, including the Long Beach LBCBN, Palm Spring's Desert Business Association and the California Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Key presenters included not only Matt Skallerud (Pink Banana Media) and Tom Roth (Community Marketing) but also Rick Lugash of Next for Small Business discussing the good, the bad and the ugly of creating good copy, Jerime Black of Barefoot Winery reviewing their successes over the years in LGBT marketing and Frank Mastronuzzi of OneGoodLove.com talking about mastering search engine optimization. Matt Skallerud presented some of the latest in social media marketing, including some new topics such as FourSquare and mobile phone technologies and ...

A year ago, I was telling folks that sooner rather than later, there would be several thousand social media marketers out there and that this still wouldn’t be enough to service the needs of businesses large and small seeking to tap into social media marketing as an integral part of their company’s 21 st century marketing strategy .  It’s safe to say I was right, but that was an easy one to predict.  The same phenomenon happened in the mid-90s when every company realized at some point along the way that they needed a website, only to find thousands of web designers from which to choose from.  Many call this era the “Internet’s Wild West,” where anyone who could put together some HTML code was able to charge anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars, often for the same quality of website. Where we’re at with social media marketers is being compared to that era quite often nowadays, and it comes back to me where friends and potential clients are ask...