My SC Interactive Marketers Association

SCIMA Holiday Party Dec. 5

2007-11-26T08:58:00.001-08:00

Join us for the SCIMA (SC Interactive Marketers Association) Holiday Party!

We're honored to have interactive marketing expert Cerelle Centeno present "Getting Started with Search Engine Marketing."

December 5, 2007
4:30 p.m.
WIS-TV, 1111 Bull Street

View e-vite (click to view) or RSVP to Laura at lotero@wistv.com.
Learn more about:
- SEO and PPC
- Market research and competitive analysis
- Optimizing your website
- Keeping up with the search industry
- And more!

We'll be raising money to adopt an Alston Wilkes Society therapeutic foster child for Christmas...donations welcome.

See you there!

SCIMA Holiday Party Coming Soon!

2007-11-04T15:07:00.001-08:00

Stay tuned for details on the first-ever SCIMA holiday party. November & December SCIMA meetings will be combined for a holiday bash with the midlands best interactive marketers!

Then in January we'll have honored speaker Robin Welch of http://www.sciway.net/ share tips on how to create websites that truly LAST.

Details on both to come...

SCIMA by Phone!

2007-10-15T17:03:00.000-07:00

SCIMA by Phone

Date:Friday, October 19th , 2007
from 2:00 - 3:00 p.m

Topic: Five Killer Secrets to Effective eMarketing
Location: Dial-in 1-800-774-4523
Mtg ID 0870
Join web conference here

Speaker:
Jeff Greene, Director Marketing & Communications Coastal Federal Credit Union

Jeff Greene has agreed to an encore performance, he will share his Five Killer Secrets to Effective eMarketing at our first ever dial-in SCIMA meeting. Jeff oversees the publishing and placement of over 35 channels (including advertising, media, website and email marketing) yielding continuous member and marketing communications for Costal Federal Credit Union. Devoted to evolving his trade, Jeff uses his experience across many mediums to mentor others; he even finds the time to engineer successful philanthropic drives on a limited budget.

MySCIMA Meeting Tomorrow!

2007-09-24T06:54:00.000-07:00

Don't forget, tomorrow's MYSCIMA Meeting at The Colonial Center (map it!) from 4:00 - 5:45 p.m. (presentation will begin at 4:30)

Our topic will be Membership Marketing with guest speaker Jeff Greene, Director Marketing & Communications Coastal Federal Credit Union

Please RSVP by emailing contact@myscima.com.

Nine Billion Videos Viewed Online in July

2007-09-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

According to a comScore recent release, nearly 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched an average of three hours of online video during the month of July, with Americans viewing more than 9 billion videos online.

Google Sites ranked as the top U.S. video property with nearly 2.5 billion videos viewed (27.0 percent share of videos), 2.4 billion of which occurred at YouTube.com. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 390 million (4.3 percent), followed by Fox Interactive Media with 298 million (3.3 percent) and Viacom Digital with 281 million (3.1 percent). More...

Date for Sept. SCIMA is set...

2007-09-13T03:21:00.000-07:00

We've set the date for the next SCIMA and have a great speaker lined up - won't you join us?

September 25 , 2007
Location: The Colonial Center (map it!)
from 4:00 - 5:45 p.m. (presentation will begin at 4:30)
Topic: Membership Marketing
Speaker: Jeff Greene,
Director Marketing & Communications Coastal Federal Credit Union
Please RSVP by emailing contact@myscima.com.

Membership Marketing:
Get your customers and prospects involved – their feedback is the best way to improve your communications strategy.
Jeff Greene, our guest speaker, oversees the publishing and placement of over 35 channels (including advertising, media, website and email marketing) yielding continuous member and marketing communications for Costal Federal Credit Union.
Devoted to evolving is trade, Jeff uses his experience across many mediums to mentor others, he even finds the time to engineer successful philanthropic drives on a limited budget. Read more about our speaker and make plans to join our next gathering.

About this Month's Speaker: Jeff Greene, Director Marketing & CommunicationsCoastal Federal Credit Union

Since graduating with a double major in broadcast news/ technical journalism from Colorado State University in 1985, Jeff Greene has been passionate about discovering new creative ways to communicate and embracing his weaknesses. He commonly refers to himself as a caterpillar in the way he’s polished his skills and made continual professional advancements.
With experiences in Television news – photojournalist, reporter and newscast producer – Jeff is a marketer that looks at you straight in the eye. As the marketing director at the American Lung Association of North Carolina, he engineered a very successful fund raiser driving the sale of $390,000 in discount golf discount cards and nearly half a million in donations over the internet – all this with a budget of less than $200.
Today at Coastal Federal Credit Union, Jeff oversees the publishing and placement of over 35 channels for continuous member and marketing communications (including advertising, media, website and e-mail marketing). His marketing is based on true member feedback, as he is always learning & improving the impact of his communiqués. He is always trying to learn.
A mentor to many online marketers, he is learning to demonstrate the extent to which he knows what is most important role is by commonly answering his phone as, "Jordan Greene's Dad."
Jeff has a BA in journalism from the University of Colorado and an MBA from the University of North Carolina.
Sign up for our email list or visit our blog for information about this and upcoming sessions

Make Flow Charts without Visio

2007-08-29T06:59:00.000-07:00

The Digital Inspiration blog has a great article about a website that allows you to create flow charts online, without the use of any special software. This is a great tool for project managers and others in IT or Web development who might need to put together a flow chart on their infrastructure.

Next SCIMA: Email Absolutes

2007-08-18T16:54:00.000-07:00

Please join us for the next SCIMA meeting:

August 28, 2007
Location: NCR (map it!)
from 4:00 - 5:30 p.m. (presentation will begin at 4:30)
Topic: Email Absolutes
Speaker: Sundeep Kapur
Send us your RSVP to contact@myscima.com.

Looking to launch an email marketing initiative or sharpen your current campaigns – our Email Absolutes can help you harness the interactive features of this low cost, high-speed, personalized medium while avoiding SPAM and maintaining your whitelisting status.

RSVP to contact@myscima.com. See you there!

Service In Action Call - TODAY!

2007-08-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

All SCIMA members are invited to the Service In Action phone call, hosted by Sundeep Kapur of NCR eCommerce. Service In Action is a monthly marketing phone call attended by several marketers in various fields to discuss best practices in email marketing and ecommerce.

Today's call is at 2pm EST. We'll be talking about The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - Best Practices in Email Creative.

Remember, the call is free!

The call in number is 1-800-774-4523, meeting ID 8816. The presentation is hosted here.

We hope to hear from you today!

Ready to Start a Blog?

2007-08-09T17:18:00.000-07:00

If you’re ready to start a company blog, but have encountered resistance from senior management, consider using these justification points:

1.It’s free!

2.It works! When searching Google and Yahoo you’ll notice blogs are showing up earlier and earlier in the search results. Search “SC meeting planning” and you’ll find the Columbia CVB website. But look just a few results down and notice their sales blog coming in at #4.

3.It’s fun for everyone. Not only is creating a blog easy, it’s also a great way to build a sense of teamwork and collaboration amongst all levels of staff. Yes, some members of your team might feel overwhelmed or not know what to write. Give it just a few days and notice the change in attitude. It’s fun to create a profile. It’s neat to see your photo online. Pretty soon everyone feels like a celebrity.

4.It’s easy. Since posting to a blog doesn’t require knowledge of html, everyone from the president to the receptionist will enjoy the ease of use and sense of freedom that comes along with posting. Inviting others to join your blog as contributors is as simple as entering their email addresses and clicking on “invite.” This will generate and email to each person you’ve invited with instructions on how to create a username and password. After that, it’s ready, set, blog!

5.Everyone’s doing it. From McDonald’s to Grandma. If you want to stay current online, you need one, don’t you?

Social Media in the Skies

2007-08-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

City Wall

2007-08-01T20:40:00.000-07:00

The CityWall is a large mutli-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki which acts as a collaborative and playful interface for the everchanging media landscape of the city.

5 Lessons In Getting Your Blog Quoted, Linked & Discussed

2007-07-30T06:09:00.000-07:00

Rohit Bhargava (of Influential Interactive Marketing Blog) shares the following 5 lessons in getting your blog quoted, linked & discussed:

1. "Target new audiences. When I wrote about the idea of Library 2.0, I was engaging an audience who may not usually read this blog. Doing so in a positive way helped to drive new discussion about my post and open the audience of my blog up to a whole new group of readers. To date, the post has been my top traffic driver to the site, indicating that there are a whole lot of forward thinking librarians loving the chance to finally feel appreciated.

2. Give them something to share. Soundbites work well for people to cut and paste into their own blogs or stories ... but making it shareable means letting people forward emails with your posts from one to another, take elements of content, forward a URL and have an easy way to summarize your point. If someone else can't paraphrase it in a sentence, it won't get discussed.

3. Offer a linkable and useful resource. The Simpsons Movie marketing blog post is one that took hours of effort to compile and several updates to keep current, yet it is a great resource for anyone interested in the range of marketing that is behind the film. The post has many links and images and as a result is linked to often for its thorough list and as an example of how pervasive the marketing for the film has been.

4. Join a buzzworthy effort. You don't always have to create something original in order to add value. My post about how a Facebook group is trying to save Business2.0 magazine was in support of a group that had already been created. The whole campaign is extremely buzzworthy as it represents a great story of people fighting back online for an offline publication they love (a brilliantly ironic story). Being part of something like this creates a "halo effect" where the conversation about the topic drives interest and awareness and your voice goes along with it.
5. Make it easy to contact you. In my day job, I often find blogs that could be worth including in a marketing program or ones that would be interested in a particular idea or product ... yet many of them are hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Protecting yourself from spambots is one thing, but you cannot make it too difficult for people to contact you or else you will end up missing every opportunity."

Google's "Blackle" & Oh Don't Forget

2007-07-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

Read more about how you can help conserve energy by using blackle. http://www.blackle.com/

Oh Don't Forget sends text message reminders to your cell phone http://www.ohdontforget.com/.

PC World Shares Strangest Sights in Google Earth

2007-07-27T05:47:00.000-07:00

PC World writes, "With its detailed satellite photos, Google's interactive map lets everyone be a virtual globetrotter. And some of the things we've found in our travels are downright bizarre."

To view their 16 "strangest sights," visit http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,134186-page,1-c,mapping/article.html.

25 Types of Blogs

2007-07-25T07:57:00.000-07:00

Here is that list of the 25 Types of Blogs. Look at each one, and when you start your blog, decide when and how you want to use each of these voices.

Thank you Phil the Cable Guy

2007-07-25T00:31:00.000-07:00

The SCIMA meeting last night was another success! Phil the Cable guy shared tips on blogging and even walked us through creating a blog. A copy of his presentation will be posted in a few hours. Thanks again to SC State Museum for use of their wonderful venue.

We hope you enjoyed the meeting and welcome your feedback. We're excited about the SCIMA blog and hope you'll make yourself at home here.

As we mentioned, if you'd like to be an "official" contributer to this blog, just send us an email at contact@myscima.com. The more SC interactive marketers contributing, the better. Of course regular blog comments and interactions are also encouraged.

The blog site Phil used in his demo was www.blogger.com (which also powers this blog). Here's a quick rundown of getting started on blogger:

Step One: Before you can create a free blog on Blog*Spot, Blogger's hosting service, you need to have already created an account on blogger.com. Once you've logged into blogger.com, click the Create a Blog link beneath your list of blogs.

On Step Two, enter a Title and Address (URL). Remember you'll want to include your brand name in your URL if possible. For example, our URL is http://myscima.blogspot.com. You'll also need to type in the verification word displayed on this page, to confirm that you are a real person and not a computer. When you're done, click continue.

On Step Three,you can choose a template for your blog; this is how it will appear when you publish it. Next, Blogger will create your new blog and reserve your spot on BlogSpot. As soon as you make your first post, your page will appear at the address you chose. You're all ready to blog!

For more information, visit the blogger help page for helpful how-to information.

About Add This! Social Bookmarking & Feed Site

2007-07-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

We all know the importance of making our websites & blogs friendly for SMO and Web 2.0. Add This! is a site that will generate the bookmarking and feed code for you.

Al l you have to do is create an account (it's free) and enter the URL you'd like to get the widgets for. You'll then get html to copy and paste into your code that produces colorful, recognizable widgets your web saavy customers are looking for.

http://www.addthis.com

Flickr Letters

2007-07-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

A guy named Erik Kastner has created a fun application with PHP and javascript that allows you to enter the letters of your name (it can be your name or any word you happen to like) and get a fun graphic made of flickr letters. Once you have submitted your name you are actually given an embed code, which you can put on your website or profile. Try it out here. Source: GeekSugar

Over 8 Billion Streamed Videos Watched in May

2007-07-19T20:02:00.000-07:00

According to GeekSugar, ComScore, which does internet research measuring, just released the results from the Video Metrix report for May 2007. The data reveals that the average American watched more than 2.5 hours of online streaming video during that month. Have people kissed their TV watching good-bye? Here are some more interesting stats related to these findings: Nearly three out of four (74.3 percent) U.S. Internet users streamed video online.
More than one out of three (35 percent) U.S. Internet users streamed video on YouTube.
The average video stream duration was 2.5 minutes.
The average online video viewer consumed 63 video streams, or more than two per day.

Ready, Set, Blog! July 24 at SC State Museum

2007-07-11T21:42:00.000-07:00

Our next meeting will be held Tuesday, July 24
at the South Carolina State Museum (Vista Room) map it!
from 4:00 - 5:30 p.m. (presentation will begin at 4:30)

Please note the time is slightly different from our last meeting

Topic: Ready, Set, Blog!
Speaker: Philip Looney (of Phil the Cable Guy blog)

Won't you join us? Please RSVP.