Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Flickr and all the social media networks out there aren’t about money. They’re about engagement; interacting with your customers, clients, friends, followers and fans is the number one priority. But that interaction and engagement is what ultimately leads to buying and, better yet, brand loyalty.

Vitrue, with its new Facebook analyzer, calculates that our client Richmond International Raceway’s Facebook fan page is worth nearly $98,000. It assumes that the average earned media impression is about $5 for each fan (all 9,000 of them who interact with on the page about 4,000 times per month…numbers that are growing every day and month). But when you think that each race ticket is about $40 and “tchotchkes” (hats, stickers, programs, pictures, posters, etc.) start around $10, the fan page’s worth SKYROCKETS!

Richmond International Raceway’s social media engagement during race-week, alone, is enough to fill up your inbox with Facebook and Twitter notifications. During race-week this spring, the raceway’s social media “buzz” (posts directly mentioning RIR and/or its events) surpassed 10,000 posts in just 7 days!

So, go ahead! Upload those pictures, comment on the wall; share your stories and interact with your fans and followers. Keep them engaged so you can keep them coming back as happy customers.

Web users across the board love image searching and meme nonsense. We enjoy browsing bookmarking sites for new content, digging through sites like buzzfeed, delicio.us, stumbleupon and “liking” things on Facebook etc… Our options for “collecting” our interests on the web are finally easy and diverse. Image bookmarking allows you to keep a collection without downloading a bunch of miscellany to a locally hosted junkdrawer, IE your desktop. Pretty simple. Pretty handy.

There are a handful of video bookmarking sites (in various stages of functional: myvidster, yuxt, kazivu, simfany, etc…) and browser plugins as well but what surprises me is that content bookmarking isn’t simply a feature of a broader property like Flickr. It’s easy to bookmark “faves” from other people’s streams. Why hasn’t Flickr capitalized on this functionality as part of their product; Bookmarking externally hosted images and videos? A lot of images on FFFFound are already hosted on Flickr.

The biggest hurdle to offering this service must be policing content. As I looked around at various lesser-known image bookmarking sites I found some images I wasn’t expecting to encounter. Pretty bold stuff. Seems obvious now but I went in a little naive considering the volume of “adult” or illicit content that is out there.

It’s got to be difficult to manage users’ expectations and sensibilities in this arena. A bookmarking property has to know who they want their audience to be and then who their audience actually is once it’s there. Again, Flickr has that pretty well managed by allowing the community rate the content but I’d imagine that some of the more fringe bookmarking sites will have to accommodate niche audiences since bookmarking is ultimately sharing, public or private.

We look forward to seeing how this bookmarking behavior evolves and which channels will iron out the wrinkles.

(fun fact: There’s no Wikipedia entry yet for “image bookmarking“?)

In the subsequent months a lot of people followed our site but immediately asked this question: “I followed. Now what?” My answer was always: “Basically it just allows you to show support and keep tabs on blogs you like through an existing profile, Twitter, Google or Blogger.” Also I expect that Google intends for all of these seemingly lackluster properties to improve in time and eventually form like Voltron to be our one-stop Google Web interface and dashboard to external profiles like Twitter or Amazon. We’ll see how that progresses without Facebook on the team simultaneously developing their own Facebook Connect functionalities.

Opinions aside, Wikipedia outlines these uses Google Friend Connect:

• E-commerce site: allow users to check whether friends purchased or reviewed the product they are interested in on the product web page.
• News sites: allow users to insert comments and opinions with their real profile.
• Organization Sites: increase marketing and communication within members of the organization.
• Blogs and Personal Websites: increase communication within author friends.

Now that you’re fully convinced of the debatable awesomeness of Friend Connect, please feel free to join this blog via the portal on the lower right hand side of our site. Thanks!

If you feed them, they will come. And they might as well learn something.

Every two weeks Madison+Main staff cross-train each other. We do this in an effort to keep the lines of communication open and to keep us all working together in true team fashion. Creative teams speak to account teams, and we all gain a better appreciation for one anothers role at Madison+Main.

It’s like family-style dining with a side of knowledge. Check out one of our lunch trainings:

Intersection Marketing: bring Madison Avenue marketing ideas to your Main Street business. Madison+Main stands at the crossroads of creativity and common sense. We’re a fully-integrated creative powerhouse with one focus: you. Hard working, hand-crafted strategies that aim for excellence and settle only for first place.

Beneath the surface of your business there lies a story to be told; a rhyme and a reason for its very existence. Your story is your brand.

How you relay this story shapes your brand. Are you using the right voice? Is anyone listening?

Our in-house team uses exclusive methodologies to identify your brand’s greatest strengths and offer solutions for its toughest challenges. Crafted from fundamental marketing techniques and tricked out with today’s technology, the end result is groundbreaking strategies that win time after time.Some agencies specialize in one type of advertising. We do it all: from web to radio, TV to direct mail, social media to affinity partnerships, guerilla marketing and beyond. Why? Because the story you tell is only as effective as the way you’re telling it.

With us your brand gets the attention it deserves. With us your brand blows away your competition.Madison+Main: Industry-recognized leaders and new media expert craftsmen. Our work speaks for itself and we’re proud of the stories they tell. And we’d like to hear yours.

Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

How does your business communicate its brand?

Aside from typical elevator pitches, business cards, and logos. Sure, these things help to reinforce your brand, but they’re merely accouterments. To get to the heart of a brand you must look beneath its structure at The Brand Pillars.

Brand pillars are the unique attribute that drive your brand. If you’re like our own Brie Hazelwood, your brand pillars are “Adventure, Deliciousness, and Chocolate-y”. If you’re a baseball coach like Dave Saunders or softball coach like Stephanie Derry, your brand pillars are probably “Mentorship, Leadership, and Cheerleading”.

Madison+Main’s Brand Pillars are:
Creativity, Innovation & Fun.

Knowing your brand pillars is critical to delivering consistent company messaging. At Madison+Main, we embody our brand pillars; they are integral to every decision we make, the way we conduct business, and the way we communicate.

What are your brand pillars, and how do you convey these with your marketing collateral and your elevator pitch?

Thanks to my friend Dave Necessary for turning me on to it.
Follow him on Twitter @davidnecessary.

An actual caption from the MadisonMain.com synthesized website melody!

The MadisonMain.com melody is a complex mix of kicky drum beats and synthesized sound effects that transport us to a mashup of 80’s disco dance party and sci-fi settings. Complimentary dances include: the Robot and the Running Man (of course!).

Put your website to the test and hear the methodical rhythm that your content and images make together.  Try each page of your website and see if the tunes are cohesive. Wonder what your Twitter page sounds like with all of those constant updates? The CodeOrgan.com possibilities are endless!

Go on, try it!

Many thanks to the people behind the music at www. CodeOrgan.com.

* Madison+Main not responsible for loss of productivity due in whole, or in part, to spontaneous dance par-tays!

This is a post about creative marketing. It involves marketing condoms.

Sagami Rubber Industries Co, the first Japanese condom manufacturer, revolutionized the condom by making it a mere 0.02 mm thick thin. Their unique marketing challenge? Generate brand awareness and obtain a positive opinion without being overtly sexual or offensive to a sensitive audience. What resulted was a 30-day advertising campaign displaying over the Internet and ending with one TV ad and one of the greatest tag lines ever “…and yet, love needs distance”.

Sagami took the word “creative”, applied all its elements: expressive; original; imaginative, and; conceptual and created an international award-winning campaign that is still talked about more than a year later. During the 30 day campaign the brand was never revealed until the final television ad. Yet, with no brand reputation to leverage, Sagami managed to interact with, and captivate, an entire country. They put a positive influence on condoms; they changed a nation’s way of thinking.

Sometimes creative is using advertising platforms in innovative ways. Sometimes it’s a groundbreaking concept. The best times are when advertising does both. Consumers crave unique messages that challenge preconceived notions about a product, a brand, and a company. Seek the creative in your day.