photo credit: Global Index Wave 2 Trendstream.net

It’s common practice in almost all forms of business to take notice of your active target audience and concentrate on this already established, better known consumer group. This logic may hold true in many cases, but research shows that when it comes to social media networking, it’s the passive audience that also deserves focus.

Best selling author, Founder of Altimeter Group and leading voice in the field of business technology, Charlene Li discussed the importance of focusing on passive social media users at a recent event held by SmartBrief and SocialFish. She discovered that while active users are more likely to produce their own content as well as comment and curate already existing content, they are not nearly as sizable as the passive users of social media. Passive users account for 63% of all on-line social media sharing as well as 78% of all social media watching, making them (although discreet) very active users – see photo.

Focusing on an audience that seems to not actively participate in your brand might seem backwards, but it’s these passive users that are still actively watching and sharing your content. It is for these reasons that I too believe it is important to establish one’s brand with the “passive user” group, as they are a more prominent user than more active users, which are harder to come by, even though they do produce their own content.

—Etienne is an intern with Wicked PR in Atlanta. She recently graduated from The University of Georgia with a degree in fashion mercandising. Follow her on Twitter @Etienne_Wicked

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. 5 Steps To Planning Social Media Campaigns in 2010
2. Wicked Quick in Social Media – 11/2/09
3. Six Useful Social Media Monitoring Tools For Your Business

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The simple, effective design and CMS allows for direct control and greater access to its staff, making it simple for them to publish posts that speak to its core messages: eating a healthful diet, exercising every day, quitting smoking and getting screened.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Sponsored Blog Posts and Paid Tweets: The Case For and Against
2. Wicked PR Launches New Website for Poker Player Justin Bonomo
3. Top WordPress 2.9 Features For Clients and Developers

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Wicked was tasked with developing and executing an online branding and communications strategy for TV personality and one of America’s leading DIY design experts Kristan Cunningham, including designing and developing a website that brings to life Kristan’s unique identity and personality while also serving as the communication hub for all her projects. Wicked also designed a social media plan that extended Kristan’s reach and influence with her audience.

More than just a personality site, KristanCunningham.com was designed to be a daily resource for interior design and home decorating enthusiasts. The site offers stories, videos and photos that educate visitors on how to turn any decorating dilemma into an achievable reality.

Highlighted sections:

:: Do It Lovelier – Simple ideas to elevate your lifestyle. Do what’s practical. Do what’s affordable, just do it lovelier.

:: Adorable & Affordable – You don’t have to spend a million bucks to make your home look like it.

:: Resource Library - Let Kristan Cunningham help you find the right items for every room in your house.

:: Design Report - Kristan spotlights the newest products in the marketplace with links to where you can buy and for how much.

:: Flea Market Finds – Kristan shares the amazing treasures that she finds — and you can find– at flea markets, thrift stores and garage sales.

:: Favorite Things – Items they simply can’t live without – at least right now.

:: Auction Alert – Kristan finds treasures everyday online that won’t break your bank at sites like ebay and shopgoodwill.com and passes along those finds to you.

:: The Man Room and Floyd & Beans – Not just for women, the new site makes room for Kristan’s fiance Scott who shares his recommendations on everything from razors to shoes. And even their two dogs, Floyd and Bean, get in on the action with a section dedicated to items every dog — and dog owner — should own.

Finally, KristanCunningham.com gives fans of Kristan a glimpse of her life and travels, from how she spends her time when she’s home in Venice Beach to her adventures across America on design projects and in search of great products, music and food.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked PR Launches New Website for Poker Player Justin Bonomo
2. Five Ways Twitter Lists Can Benefit Your Business
3. A Google Wave Quick Reference Guide

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Anything but #traditional, the invite has been posted online, inviting one and all to celebrate with the happy couple, #Paul&Sara.

Wedding season is officially here. The flowers are out, the sun is shining, and love is in the air… and all over Twitter. That’s right, Twitter.

Mark your calendars for June 19 4:00 pm CST, because this Saturday you’re invited to the first ever Twitter Wedding (#Paul&Sara) between @SubrbanOblivion and @PaulOFlaherty as they romantically “merge their lifestreams and the contents of their hard drives forever.”

The nuptials will take place in Mobile, Ala., but will be streamed live on both http://www.SuburbanOblivion.com and http://www.pauloflaherty.com. The following reception/tweet-up is twitter themed and will also be streamed live, so you can witness all the action, from the “I Do’s” to the cutting of the cake.

Make sure to stay tuned for the bouquet toss (which is anything but a traditional bouquet), the purple wedding dress and many other surprises along the way.

For more information, read Sara’s blog.

Alex Reed is an intern with Wicked PR in Atlanta. She is currently enrolled at the University of Missouri Journalism School and is majoring in Strategic Communications with a minor in Marketing. Follow her on Twitter @Reedyriv.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Five Ways Twitter Lists Can Benefit Your Business
2. Are Teens Warming Up To Twitter?
3. Wicked PR’s Top Five Favorite Twitter Applications

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Photo Credit: www.fifa.com

You may not be in South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, but with these five Apps you won’t miss one minute, goal or penalty kick that takes place over the next two weeks. Enjoy.

1. ESPN 2010 World Cup FIFA

This free app is the most well rounded App for the 2010 World Cup and is simply essential for following the football frenzy. It includes a Fantasy Bracket Predictor, descriptive profiles of each of the 32 teams, World Cup history since 1930, a full schedule of all the the games, a Soccer Power Index and a live news ticker at the bottom of the screen. You can select your favorite countries and receive their match schedules conveniently on the homepage. The premium upgrade is available for $7.99 and features live audio, live commentary, live scoring alerts, live play-by-plays, breaking news alerts and the option to share your favorite FIFA 2010 news and team tidbits via Twitter, Facebook, etc. ESPN’s App is easily the best available World Cup 2010 App available for all types of fans.

2. 2010 World Cup South Africa by Infindo

This App is second to ESPN’s app only because it is almost too full of information. Infindo’s App takes all of the basic features of ESPN’ app and adds quotes from the top players, summaries of all prior World Cup tournaments, goal alerts and an archive of the Soccer Hall of Fame, along with many, many other things. Do you need all this information? Maybe not. Do you want it? Absolutely you do, and the $1.99 price tag is a small price to pay for the true soccer fanatic.

3. World Cup Schedule by Mahango

With this nifty $.99 App, you can sift through the World Cup schedule by individual day without any annoying ads distracting you from your quest for soccer knowledge. Users can receive score updates by groups, and navigate this app with ease, however without the news and video updates it won’t keep you quite as up-to-date as some others.

4. 2010-The World Cup

This homescreen of this free app lists details of all of the 32 teams participating in the 2010 FIFA World Cup, their international appearances, players and club teams. You can have a live countdown to your favorite team’s first game just to make sure you don’t miss a minute, and the App can even run in English, Portuguese, German, French and Spanish.

5. TOTAL FOOTBALL 2010

At $2.99 this App stands out from the crowd with its massive list of detailed match statistics like diagrams of shots, quantitative analysis of the most influential player in a match, passes completed, location of fouls, etc., with real-time statistics from Opta Sports that live update throughout the games. If you want intense amounts of information, this World Cup App is for you. However don’t look for the basics; while it does have the full match schedule for the 2010 tournament, this app does not have the standard history of player profiles. In other words: experts only, please.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked Quick On Social Media Week 2010
2. 5 Steps To Planning Social Media Campaigns in 2010
3. The Rare Occurrence of 09/09/09

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Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked Quick On Social Media Week 2010
2. Wicked Quick in Social Media – 11/2/09
3. Companies Should Take Interest In Passive Social Media Users

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Let one of these social media monitoring tools help you filter out the noise and listen to what people are saying about your brand online.

“It’s about conversations, and the best communicators start as the best listeners.”-Brian Solis, The Social  Media Manifesto. Social media monitoring tools are quickly becoming a lot less of an option and more of an essential tool for both individuals and companies. Conversations are being held in the vast world of media web with little regulation of what is being said, and no longer can we choose to be ignorant of these conversations. On the contrary, we must join them.

Of course, not everyone has the same monitoring needs and as a result there are a variety of different tools available with prices that range from absolutely free of charge to thousands of dollars. A beginner blogger might just want to know who’s sharing his/her blog posts with friends on social networking sites, where on the other hand, a large corporation might need a more extensive service that monitors mainstream news, blogs, forums, social media and more across multiple keywords and filters with analytics and reporting features.

Bottom line, it’s okay that you can’t be everywhere at once because your social monitoring service can be. So take the plunge and sign up for the tool that’s right for you and your business. To help you get started, here are a few different options that Wicked recommends, which are perfect for any budget.

Free Services:

• Google Alerts: Google Alerts is a great place to start and it’s free. It can be used for multiple purposes and is best suited for those who just wish to have a basic monitoring of either one or few online sources. It’s as quick and easy as google search, but conducts more specific searches. By simply filling in a search term, your email address and selecting a type of search from either blogs, news, web, groups or comprehensive search, you can filter your search as narrow as you would like. Google Alerts also gives you the option of receiving emails with the following frequency levels: as-it-comes, once a day or once a week. You can also receive up to 50 results in each email.
• Social Mention: “It’s like Google Alerts but for social media.” Social Mention is also free and sends you email alerts of whatever you are monitoring, whether it is your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, developing news story or a competitor. Social Mention goes one step further than Google Alerts and actually gives you data that can be broken or sorted into categories including: likely hood that your search is being mentioned in social media, the ratio of mentions that are positive to the amount that are negative, the percentage of people who talk about your brand and will do so repeatedly, and a measure of the range of influence your brand has.
• Alterian SM2: The free version of SM2 is a social media monitoring tool that was designed specifically for PR and Marketing agencies to measure social media. It monitors a wide range of social media channels like blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networks, video/photo sharing sites and real-time alerts and allows you to create up to five profiles that store up to 1,000 search results. Unlike Google Alerts and Social Mention, SM2 retrieves more than just keyword search results and gives you multiple types of analysis and reporting such as comparison charts, reports that identify daily volume, demographics, location and the sentiment of what is being said.

Paid Services listed by price from lowest to highest:

• Trackur: As their tagline states “60-second reputation monitoring. Guaranteed!” Trackur scans millions of web pages including blogs, images, forums, etc. and notifies you of any keywords findings or related interest items. Trackur offers four different levels of service: personal, corporate, enterprise and agency. Each includes an unlimited number of results and an update frequency of every 30 minutes, but they vary greatly in the numer of active searches. Personal accounts runs for $18/month for five active searches at a time along with other tools such as full media monitoring, sentiment tagging and trending charts to name a few. Corporate accounts and Enterprise accounts offer everything that personal accounts have to offer, but with an additional 25 active searches for $88/month, while Enterprise accounts allow you to have 250 active searches for $197/month. The last account type is Agency, which runs for $297/month with unlimited active searches along with a co-branded dashboard, co-branded URL and direct client logins.
• Brands Eye: Brands Eye not only tracks and monitors every online mention with multiple tracking tools, but also provides you with a real-time reputation score for both your brand and your competitors. Duplicate mentions are excluded by the filter created based on pre-determined criteria, and users can rank the mentions in order based on those that require immediate attention to be viewed first. Brands Eye offers three unique packages to meet your needs. Blogger only cost $1 and runs five phrases twice a day, while Small Business cost $95 with 20 phrases that are updated every six hours, and lastly there is the Enterprise package which cost $350 and includes unlimited phrases that are updated every hour.
• Radian6: Radian6 allows you to listen, measure and engage in conversations online. It scans over 100 million sites including mainstream news, blogs, videos, social media, etc. in real time, so that you can be aware of who is talking about your brand and recognize who are the influential people in your industry. Radian6 stands apart from the other monitoring tools in that it offers comprehensive analytics and allows for deep filtering, social media metrics, and data segmentation in order to help make educated decisions. Radian6 starts at $500 per month, per profile for up to 10,000 new monthly results on an unlimited amount of keywords.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Companies Should Take Interest In Passive Social Media Users
2. Wicked Quick in Social Media – 11/2/09
3. As Social Media Booms, Some Look To Ban

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Wicked designed and developed a new website for professional poker player Justin Bonomo at JustinBonomo.com. Justin and his management team were looking to completely revamp their existing site in order to better reflect who Justin is as person and poker player. Everything from video blogs, interviews, press releases, blog posts, photos, podcasts, Twitter and even musical tastes needed to be incorporated into the build.

On top of that, we always keep an eye on making the content management as simple as possible so the client is not required to contact us to keep their site up to date. From posting photos and videos to blog posts, it needed to be done in a way that was not time-consuming and made maintaining the site easier instead of frustrating. To that end, we used WordPress as the CMS and managed to find simple, yet elegant, solutions for this multimedia website.

Here are some notes on key parts of the site and how we implemented some of the features you will see at JustinBonomo.com.

HOME

For any personality that is also a brand, the home page of the site needs to leave no doubt as to whose site you are visiting. Through several meetings, mock-ups and wireframes, we arrived at a design that that Justin felt suited his personality, then went about adding in content that would give visitors a quick glimpse into his life and career. To that end, we included several elements that would serve as a dashboard for his most recent news items including most recent tweet, video interview and blog posts as well as one specifically for career-related info. To give visitors more  of Justin’s personality, we included the Last.fm widget, which is updated with tracks he listens to on iTunes while playing poker and living life). As a result, the home page became Justin much more than his previous site and will update dynamically as he goes about his life and job with no more effort than was put into the old site.

GALLERY

Poker media outlets generate an immense amount of content on a daily basis and as one of the best players on the poker circuit, Justin is often featured in various photos and videos on those sites. We wanted the gallery to be a home for as much of that content as possible, pulling in multimedia from all over the web.

The photo gallery is managed by the excellent NextGen Gallery plugin, which gave us a lot of options for hosting our own images (boosting traffic for image searches) and displaying them gracefully using javascript. The backend of the plugin is very user-friendly and makes it easy to add individual photos and organize them into albums and galleries. The smaller selection on the main gallery page was populated by calling in a single sidebar containing the NextGen widget set to display random photos from the gallery. The full Photo Gallery page displays the entirety of that gallery we created within the plugin.

For videos, we ran into the problem of having content from varied sources needing to be integrated into the page in a manner easy enough for the user to update and universal enough to handle embed codes from multiple sites. To that end, we couldn’t use a plugin without getting too complex and possibly eliminating some sites with non-standard embed codes. So, we made each video a separate post and used custom fields within those posts that would be pulled into the WordPress loop and displayed within a shadowbox set at a standard size to accomodate the largest video size likely to be used. For the user, adding videos to the site is as easy as writing a new blog post and pasting the video embed code into a custom field, the rest is handled by the template we created for the page. The full Video Gallery page is just an extension of this with the query set to show all posts from the category.

MEDIA

With the amount of written content put out, not only by poker media, but by Justin himself, we wanted to create a page that could be a hub for all of his media content, a dashboard of all things Justin. Clockwise, the media page displays his most recent articles written for print publications, articles from publications written about him, the latest news (press releases) from his management team, most recent blog posts, radio shows and podcasts and a Twitter feed. Some link directly out to the sites where he was featured and some link through to internal pages. Either way, the process of adding content to this dashboard is as easy for the user as creating a new blog post, putting it in the right (and obviously named) category and filling in some information in the (once again, obviously named) custom fields of the post. All of the links, titles and everything else are handled by the template built for the page.

BLOG

The most popular section of Justin’s old site was his blog, which featured poker strategy, tournament updates, personal updates, etc… However, with no permalinks available for each post and no way for people to share the blog posts – without copying and pasting it somewhere else – his content was more or less stuck on his site. With this blog section (and thanks to WordPress, which makes this very easy) each post has its own link and one-click share tools, giving visitors the ability to tweet, Facebook, Digg, email or bookmark the posts instantly, spreading them across the social web and building Justin’s visibility as a brand while driving traffic and authority to his site.

Well, without getting too horribly technical, that’s about it. The site is up and already drawing in a good amount of traffic. Once the spiders realize that there is now lots more delicious content to devour, we’ll begin to see even more organic traffic heading in. The dynamic nature of the features we set up ensure that no visit is the same as long as the content is kept fresh, which has been made as easy as possible for the user. So, take a look at the site and let us know your thoughts in the comments below, reply to us on Twitter, or drop us a line on our Facebook page.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked PR Launches New Website for Poker Player Justin Bonomo
2. Top WordPress 2.9 Features For Clients and Developers
3. Wicked Quick On Social Media Week 2010

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Wicked designed and developed a new website for professional poker player Justin Bonomo at JustinBonomo.com. Justin and his management team were looking to completely revamp their existing site in order to better reflect who Justin is as person and poker player. Everything from video blogs, interviews, press releases, blog posts, photos, podcasts, Twitter and even musical tastes needed to be incorporated into the build.

On top of that, we always keep an eye on making the content management as simple as possible so the client is not required to contact us to keep their site up to date. From posting photos and videos to blog posts, it needed to be done in a way that was not time-consuming and made maintaining the site easier instead of frustrating. To that end, we used WordPress as the CMS and managed to find simple, yet elegant, solutions for this multimedia website.

Here are some notes on key parts of the site and how we implemented some of the features you will see at JustinBonomo.com.

HOME

Through several meetings, mock-ups and wireframes, we arrived at a design that that Justin felt suited his personality, then went about adding in content that would give visitors a quick glimpse into his life and career. To accomplish this, we included several elements that would serve as a dashboard for his most recent news items including most recent tweet, video interview and blog posts. To give visitors a glimpse at Justin’s personality, we included the Last.fm widget, which is updated with tracks he listens to on iTunes. As a result, the home page was no longer static like before and is now updated dynamically as he goes about his life and job.

GALLERY

Poker media outlets generate an immense amount of content on a daily basis and as one of the top players on the poker circuit, Justin is often featured in various photos and videos on those sites. We wanted the gallery to be a home for as much of that content as possible, pulling in multimedia from all over the web.

The photo gallery is managed by the excellent NextGen Gallery plugin, which gave us a lot of options for hosting our own images (boosting traffic for image searches) and displaying them gracefully using javascript. The backend of the plugin is very user-friendly and makes it easy to add individual photos and organize them into albums and galleries. The smaller selection on the main gallery page was populated by calling in a single sidebar containing the NextGen widget set to display random photos from the gallery. The full Photo Gallery page displays the entirety of that gallery we created within the plugin.

For videos, we ran into the problem of having content from varied sources needing to be integrated into the page in a manner easy enough for the user to update and universal enough to handle embed codes from multiple sites. Because of this, we couldn’t use a plugin without getting too complex and possibly eliminating some sites with non-standard embed codes. So, we made each video a separate post and used custom fields within those posts that would be pulled into the WordPress loop and displayed within a shadowbox set at a standard size to accomodate the largest video size likely to be used. For the user, adding videos to the site is as easy as writing a new blog post and pasting the video embed code into a custom field, the rest is handled by the template we created for the page. The full Video Gallery page is just an extension of this with the query set to show all posts from the category.

MEDIA

With the amount of written content put out, not only by poker media, but by Justin himself, we wanted to create a page that could be a hub for all of his media content – a dashboard of all things Justin. Clockwise, the media page displays his most recent articles written for print publications, articles from publications written about him, the latest news (press releases) from his management team, most recent blog posts, radio shows and podcasts and a Twitter feed. Some link directly out to the sites where he was featured and some link through to internal pages. Either way, the process of adding content to this dashboard is as easy for the user as creating a new blog post, putting it in the right (and obviously named) category and filling in some information in the (once again, obviously named) custom fields of the post. All of the links, titles and everything else are handled by the template built for the page.

BLOG

The most popular section of Justin’s old site was his blog, which featured poker strategy, tournament updates, personal updates and more. However, with no permalinks available for each post and no way for people to share the blog posts – without copying and pasting it somewhere else – his content was more or less stuck on his site. With this blog section (and thanks to WordPress, which makes this very easy) each post has its own link and one-click share tools, giving visitors the ability to tweet, Facebook, Digg, email or bookmark the posts instantly, spreading them across the social web and building Justin’s visibility as a brand while driving traffic and authority to his site.

Well, without getting too horribly technical, that’s about it. The site is up and already drawing in a good amount of traffic. Once the spiders realize that there is now lots more delicious content to devour, we’ll begin to see even more organic traffic heading in. The dynamic nature of the features we set up ensure that no visit is the same as long as the content is kept fresh, which has been made as easy as possible for the user. So, take a look at the site and let us know your thoughts in the comments below, reply to us on Twitter, or drop us a line on our Facebook page.

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked Quick On Social Media Week 2010
2. Top WordPress 2.9 Features For Clients and Developers
3. Wicked PR’s Top Five Favorite Twitter Applications

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Updates About Social Media Week 2010

Today marked the last day of Social Media Week 2010. Conferences took place in Toronto, Sao Paulo, San Francisco, New York City, London and Berlin. And if like us you weren’t able to attend, we’ve provided a couple links to help you catch up on all the news and ideas shared at the program’s various presentations, panel discussions, interactive workshops, seminars and more.

1. Social Media Week Website, Take a look at the blog

2. Social Media Website (SMW) Blog Post About Start of Event

3. The SMW Twitter page

4. Blog Post From NY Conference

5. SmartBlog Updates throughout the week

6. Flickr Albums From All Conferences

Related posts from The Wicked Blog:

1. Wicked Quick in Social Media – 11/2/09
2. Wicked Quick in Social Media – 04/16/10
3. 5 Steps To Planning Social Media Campaigns in 2010

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