Pink Banana Media & LGBTBrandVoice.com

We here at PinkBananaMedia.com believe the future of marketing in 2011 is the merging of the "real world" with the newly developed " online social world " we've all been personally building over the past few years.  Many analogies have been made to social media marketing being " word of mouth " marketing, but it's so much more than that.  It's not just what we say that helps spread the word and make a video, a photo or a really good article stand out amongst our friends... it's also in what we do, how we " tag, comment, like or share " that allows the best of the best in these categories to rise to the top and get the most visibility. Utilizing the power of Photo Tagging , one solution we developed with our friends at Travelocity was the idea of shooting compelling photos at a sponsored event and encouraging folks to quickly and easily find their photos on Travelocity's Facebook fan page and tag themselves (see Tips & T...

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...

Over the past year, our company has been focused very strongly in social media marketing, helping to both  manage our clients' social marketing efforts, as well as doing a lot of education in the form of workshops, seminars and webinars, teaching clients how to do this type of marketing on their own.  A lot of emphasis has been placed on "tying all of the social media pieces together", but one area that we've not spent a lot of time on has been performance-based ads with Google and Facebook.  Until now. By default, social media marketing will work to improve a company's search engine positioning on Google, Bing and Yahoo as well. These and other search engines are incorporating more and more social media in their search results, including Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups and blogs. In addition, these search engines are incorporating Twitter and Facebook status updates as well, selecting those status updates that are shared the most (commented on, liked, retweet...

Integrating your blog, photos and videos into one complete social media infrastructure As we enter into the 2nd half of 2010, social media seems to be taking on an even more pervasive and dominant slice of our attention span, and thus our lives, with Facebook leading the pack (500 million strong and counting) in where we now find out about news items first as well as our friend’s antics as displayed in photos and video.  Status updates, limited to 140 characters on Twitter and 420 characters on Facebook, have become the norm for one of the top ways we stay up to date with what’s happening nowadays, and every news media and blogger around the world is now making sure their headlines are making their way into Twitter with direct (and measurable) links back to their content. So how can your business play a role in this space?  Is your company’s marketing efforts, as they stand now, even relevant in the world of social media or does they need a change when it comes to getting ...

Based upon our successful seminar and webinar series we've been presenting on Social Network and Web 2.0 Marketing over the past few years, we've developed this 17-part Social Network Marketing HOW-TO GUIDE , walking you through each step in promoting your company using social network marketing in a careful and very detailed format. Building Your Web 2.0 Business Presence Content Tools for your Web 2.0 Business Presence How these basic social networking tools work together Managing and promoting events in social networking Facebook News Feed Messaging and direct communication tools in social networks Social network marketing and search Facebook advertising - how to Other social networks (automated ones including Plaxo and FriendFeed) Other social networks (manual) Putting Twitter To Use For Your Company Other social networks useful for content How to make your website's content maximized for social networking tools Measuring Social Network Marke...

Together with David Paisley and Tom Roth of Community Marketing, we put together our first full-day conference on marketing to the gay & lesbian community in 2010.  With over 100 attendees, this first event appears to have been a success (we'll know more once we get those feedback surveys in!)... the tone was set from the very beginning with Jarrett Barrios, President of GLAAD ( www.glaad.org ), delivering the opening remarks, speaking passionately on LGBT representation in media and advertising today.  One can get a sense of the passion from his now-famous quote "I'm not yelling... I'm Cuban!" From that point forward, the conference moved into high gear, with presentations on the latest research findings done by Community Marketing and a case study presentation by Scott Seitz of SPI Marketing about Ru Paul's Drag Race.  After also hearing presentations by Richard Oceguera of NGLCC-NY ( www.NGLCC.org ) and other local representatives from OutProfessional...