Pink Banana Media & LGBTBrandVoice.com

:: Mobile Marketing - Web App Development :: We have begun creating some of our first Web Apps over the past few months for a variety of clients. One of our most recent can be viewed here: www.CaliforniaGayChamber.com/mobile/ . We've gone this direction because more and more web traffic is going mobile and being driven by the increased technologies in cell phone bandwidth (3G and 4G), as well as the increased adoption of smartphones, including the iPhone, Android-based phones and Blackberries. Optimizing a website for the smaller screen size while also taking into consideration the concept of a touch-based navigation of a website versus the original mouse-based navigation demands taking an entirely new approach to a website's mobile design. Bigger fonts and large, clickable screen areas merged with an aesthetic interface are the name of the game now. Our mobile websites automatically sense whether the user is viewing the site from a PC, a Mac, a smartphone or a table...

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. Don’t miss this comprehensive research, advertising, marketing, and communications forum, helping you better understand and serve gay and lesbian consumers. Audience: Marketing, advertising and PR executives of all industries who want to successfully reach gay and lesbian communities, and initiate or update effective strategies. Perfect for newbies and veterans alike! Dedicated: Conference attendance is limited, in order to facilitate the best learning and networking environment. http://www.communitymarketinginc.com/education-and-conferences/new-york-lgbt-marketing-conference/

A story made its way through the blog world and mainstream media world recently which is incredible in that it shows that a number of social media marketers worldwide are beginning to see the future phases of social media marketing and where this is all going in the next five years. The articles and blog postings themselves were about Paul Adam s and his presentation he did at Voices That Matter Web Design Conference in San Francisco in 2010 ( http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2 ).  His presentation was exciting in that he put forth for the first time where social media is going, told from a perspective of where social media has been (with us since the dawn of civilization) to where it’s headed in terms of expanding past the current social media platform of Facebook and into a vast, new frontier, of which there is no doubt that Facebook will continue to play a lead role in. His concept was that Facebook has done an incredible job of connecting us...

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...