Marina Maher Communications

Here’s my new Gmail pillow (thanks @samarafinn!), but I won’t be using it for sleeping!  :)

YouTube has 24 hours of video uploaded per minute and in May it exceeded two billion views a day.  There are more than 126 million blogs on the Internet and there are 175 million registered Twitter accounts that produce 95 million Tweets per day.  Everyday there is tons of information to sort through, and that’s just skimming the top!

To stay on top of trends, client announcements, consumer feedback and news, there are a few simple tools you can use to stay current on what’s happening on the Internet – the best part is you can use these tools on your couch in your PJs!

• Google News and Google Blogs Searches – Use these tools multiple times a day to search for online news, as well as blog posts.
• RSS Feeds (I recommend Google Reader) – Aggregate all of the blogs, Twitter feeds and news sites you read into one hub for one-stop shopping (er, reading)!
• TweetDeck – I’m an avid user of Tweetdeck, which I have for both my home and work computers and my Android.  With Tweetdeck, you can organize fellow Tweeters into groups to make sure you don’t miss updates from your favorite feeds.
• Facebook Mobile – Setting up Facebook Mobile on your BlackBerry, iPhone or Android is an easy way to quickly spot status updates, news and more, from all of your friends and favorite brands

Visiting with family and friends over the holidays is a perfect opportunity to content create on your own.  Check-in on Foursquare, share your latest photos on Flickr, plan a get-together with friends on Meetup – simply, have fun!

Remember, Social Media never sleeps, so you need to keep up!

My boyfriend and I decided to become dog owners about a year ago.  We’ve both always loved animals and as someone who never had a pet growing-up (my mother told me I was allergic!) I knew I just HAD to have a dog!

After many months of searching for our favorite breed, an English Bulldog, from local Bulldog rescue groups that never returned our calls, we expanded our search to local kennels and shelters in the greater NYC area.  After work and on weekends we visited a good number of dogs, all of which were wonderful in their own ways, but then decided that we needed a small dog (around 20 pounds) as he/she would make the best fit for our home and hectic lifestyle.

After calling animal shelters literally EVERY DAY for more than a month, a small dog appeared on the ASPCA website and we immediately trekked uptown to meet him. His name was Carlito, a grey Lhasa Apso/Brussels mix and he was adorable.  We put him on hold because he was undergoing some medical tests.  We were told he’d be available in just a few weeks…

A few days later, I was called at work with the most amazing news – little Carlito was ready to come home with us!  Although we weren’t fully prepared, we brought him home, made a makeshift dog bed out of old blankets, and picked up some yummy treats from the local store.  Carlito was in heaven….he was so happy to come home with us he literally couldn’t stop following us around and bouncing off the furniture!

I knew the minute Carlito (now re-named Wookie) walked through our front door that he was meant to be part of our family.  In just one week he’s shown us so much love and gratitude that I can’t even imagine how we lived without him.  Although he’s a lot of work, he’s 110% worth it.  If you’re thinking about adding an animal to your family, I highly recommend adoption – it literally saves lives.

In fact, October is  Adopt a Shelter Dog Month.  In honor of the holiday, P&G’s Iams is asking that you share your adoption story on its Facebook page and for every story, they’re donating meals to animals in need.  To date they’ve donated 78,510 meals…that’s nothing to bark about!

It’s no surprise, or secret, that new Social Media Conferences are springing up every month in a variety of categories.  It’s important to make the most out of each conference attendance and use your time wisely to network, meet new people and solidify relationships with the people you’ve been connecting with online.  Even though we’re living in a digital age, face-to-face communication can’t be beat!

The MMC Social Media Team really enjoyed participating in BlogHer 2010 and the Healthy Living Summit conferences and offer the following tips that can be applied to any trade show participation.

• Find Your Niche: The Healthy Living Summit (sponsored by our Arnold/Oroweat and Thomas’ Bagel Thins clients) was the perfect conference for a food company to sponsor.  In general, food bloggers are very eager to take pictures of each of their meals, in addition to the ingredients that make up those meals.  Not only did they post product reviews, but they also linked to brand websites, coupons and included branded tips during and after the conference.

• Engage in Advance:  It’s important that we share our participation – be it through sponsorship or hosting a booth – with conference attendees before we hit the ground. In a highly cluttered space, knowing where you’ll be, when you’ll be there and what you’ll be providing can make all the difference.  In the weeks leading up to BlogHer 2010 (sponsored by our Audiovox/RCA client) , we corresponded with all of our online influencers asking them if they’d be in attendance and letting them know where we’d be so they could stop by to say hi.  Our booth traffic was significant as a result of our advance engagement.

• Media Monitoring Strategy: While online coverage is not a primary objective of most conference sponsorships, there are instances when placements may result from participation.  It’s a great idea to have someone at the office conduct media monitoring every few hours to capture placements and tweets in real-time. If you secure placements while you’re still at a show, you’ll want to see them immediately and this way you can quickly pull top-notch placements on a BlackBerry or laptop.

• Capture the event:  A strategy we encourage is to work with a photographer to document the event.  Even if you can’t afford a professional, be sure someone from your team is snapping a ton of pictures to be uploaded to a photo sharing site like Flickr or Facebook so influencers can tag themselves and use those pictures in future posts.