Pink Banana Media & LGBTBrandVoice.com

Are you registered yet?   Community Marketing and Pink Banana Media’s 4th Annual Gay & Lesbian Marketing Conference will be held on  April 29, 2011 at the Kimpton Eventi Hotel, New York City .  Offering a " Productive Day of Education and Networking ", topics covered will include Research, Insights, Strategies & Case Studies. The agenda for the day includes: John Lake , Director of Corporate Development , Human Rights Campaign The special significance of business/community relationships in LGBT connections and communications. Leveraging your HRC Corporate Equality Index ranking David Paisley , Senior Research Director , Community Marketing, Inc . Thomas Roth , Presiden t, Community Marketing, Inc. There is no “LGBT Market:” Segmentation findings and interpretations from the latest research can lead your company to diverse new business opportunities The Business of LGBT Business Darren Spedale , Founder , StartOut and Richard Oceguera , President , N

We are proud to announce the newly relaunched LBCBN.com , the website of  The Long Beach Community Business Network , offering  New Features, Greater Access, Expanded Directory Listings and Links To Social Networks   The Long Beach Community Business Network's new website is LIVE and now a more productive tool in the marketing of one's business. Members can now take advantage and link with the social networks Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Flicker, Linkedin, YouTube, easily through the new LBCBN website. The primary goal of this website design is for the LBCBN to become THE HUB for LGBT business information in the Long Beach area.  Integrating their member's social media activities with activities posted by the Chamber allow for a single location from which a person can be quickly kept up-to-date as to what is happening in the Long Beach LGBT business community, both from the Chamber's perspective and the perspective of individual business members of the LBCB

Upon hearing the recent news of Fab.com throwing in the towel on the LGBT market, it immediately got me thinking about what actually did seem to work with the Fab.com website.  As one of the very first consumer websites, LGBT or otherwise, to integrate user-generated content in the form of social media, it truly was cutting edge in terms of what it had accomplished, what it showed can work and even more importantly, what it foretold about the future direction and success in consumer-oriented websites in general. What Fab.com showed the world was that the integration of social media into a newly-formed community-based website can work.  Websites for consumers seem to have followed a basic pattern, starting in the mid-90s as informational resources and then slowly, over time, graduating to the level of building true community, with tools for a website’s members to interact with each other, comment collectively on articles they had read together, meet each other and more.  The power of