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As our planet gets smaller and the social media realm seems to be ever increasing, we see that more and more of our clients are tempted to re-use content across several different spectrums of social media. For example:
The content for your newsletter should not be repurposed for your News section of your site, at least not entirely. More importantly, your email marketing campaign should not repeat your newsletter, and your Facebook and Twitter accounts should not mirror the email marketing campaign.

I know, sounds like a lot of double talk, but you have to take a step back and look at who the audiences are for each of these applications.
1. Your Web site – your users are most likely potential clients, current clients and peers, and perhaps job seekers. You should be writing with this in mind.
2. Newsletter – Your newsletter probably goes out to many people in your community, people with whom you are on different boards or commitees, clients, your Aunt Ruth, and current clients. The newsletter needs to invite people to your site, it needs to bring fresh and interesting news, and perhaps a bit of the human factor in your company.
3. Email marketing campaigns – these need to focus on what you can provide a potential client, or what new services you can provide for existing clients. They need to be upbeat, but not longer than absolutely necessary. They need to serve the reader with some immediate and easy call to action.

Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer has a great article on this very topic, I suggest you check it out.

I know fresh copy ideas can be a pain in the uh, neck, but you can make the most of all of these endeavors with a bit of effort and some perspective on who will be reading what you have to say, and why you are saying it.
Dana Phillips, one of our Marketing Specialists just spent a few days down in sunny Florida learning the newest and best strategies for an email marketing campaign at a Marketing Sherpa seminar. She learned a lot and we like to put her brain to use, so if you have any questions regarding your email marketing give her a jingle or shoot her an email @ dana at tkg dot com . She’s happy to answer any questions.

We can only hope! I have to admit, I am enjoying the visual I am getting of ole’ Teddy Kennedy rolling over in his grave. Okay, spiteful partisanship over…I’ll focus on meaningful partisanship from here on out!

Well, the Dems are finding themselves in an interesting situation. In the special election last Tuesday in Massachusetts to replace Senator Ted Kennedy, surprisingly, the Republican candidate, Scott Brown was able to defeat Democrat candidate Martha Coakely. Dems are preparing to basically find some way to shove this health care bill down our throats before Brown is seated.

It looks like they have a couple of options:
1. They could just go with the House verison, which pleases the Democratic party more.
2. They could hurry up and reconcile the two versions before Brown is sworn in.
3. Try and talk a Repblican into siding with them – however, that is unlikely.
4. Go for a much scaled back version of the Health care bill – not a popular option amongst Dems, but better than nothing.

The thing that really gets me about a lot of this is that they are not being transparent about any of it, though transparency was promised during the presidential campaign. So much of what they plan to do is unconstiutional – how do you justify taxing everyone but your special interest groups i.e. – the unions?
If this bill passes, everyone will be required to purchase health insurance if you don’t have it – except the Amish and those who have a religious objection to insurance. I agree that the Amish should not be fined, no one should be fined for a legitamate financial choice they have made!
Everyone with a “Cadillac” health inusrance policy (this includes folks that pay for the 90/10 coverage sometimes offered by employers, not just millionaires and union folks) will have to pay an additional tax on thier health insurance, except Union members! This is ridiculous! If people are paying for better coverage, then they have made a financial decision they feel will benefit thier family. They (or their employer) are already paying more!

What is your opinion on this whole health care reform debacle? Are you for it? Why? Are you hoping they cannot manage to reconcile it, and have to junk the whole deal? Polls say 57% of Americans are against this, and 74% don’t think it will work – where is our representative government?

guest blogger: Megan Jeffery

Heather Armstrong of dooce.com is the world’s most popular, and influential mommyblogger. She began her blog almost nine years ago as a single woman, and has since morphed it into not only a hobby for a stay at home mom, but as a career for herself, as well as her husband, Jon Armstrong who handles the business and tech ends of thier endeavor.

Armstrong weilds a signifigant amount of infuence on the web. She has used that influence not only to build her online business/presence, but also has been accused of a bit of bullying of the corporate world from time to time. She once complained about her Maytag washer on her blog until they fixed it for her, and gave her a new one to boot, which she donated to a Salt Lake area charity.

Armstrong has over a million and a half Twitter followers (as well as a contract with Suave) and has recently been offered the opportunity to work with HGTV. Obviously HGTV understands just what Armstrong has to offer in the way of advertising and influence to the mommyblogger community. She brings a lot to the table – she understands implicitly how social media can create a network that becomes a business, so helping a televison network, really a business develop it’s online network (TRIBALIZATION!) will be second nature to her.

Below is the press release from HGTV:

Heather Armstrong to Begin Partnership Activities in Spring 2010
KNOXVILLE, Tenn., Jan. 22 /PRNewswire/ — HGTV has signed Heather Armstrong of dooce.com, recognized as America’s most popular “mommyblogger,” to an exclusive programming development deal in which she will work with HGTV’s online and on-air production teams to create innovative convergence programming for the network.

“We are thrilled to have Heather join the HGTV family,” said HGTV president, Jim Samples. “Not only is she one of the world’s best known bloggers and parenting writers, with a unique and hilarious voice, she’s also a talented designer and photographer. She’s clearly a great fit for us and our audience.”

Armstrong will play a starring role in HGTV’s social media-driven audience engagement initiatives, while continuing to blog at dooce.com.

“I am thrilled to be partnering with HGTV in the upcoming year and have been a huge fan of the network for many years,” said Armstrong. “In fact, I spent the first three months of my second child’s life watching every episode of Curb Appeal and Designed to Sell, and now if called upon I could stage a house within an inch of its life. I’ve been looking to grow my business beyond its online presence, and having been approached by other media brands before I can confidently say that there is no better partner than HGTV to help me take this step.”

The network plans to unveil the details of Heather Armstrong’s HGTV platform in spring of 2010. Viewers and online users can get more information on HGTV.com/Heather, Facebook/HGTV.com, and via Twitter at HGTV.

“There are numerous opportunities by which Heather’s many talents will come to life, and we’ve been collaborating with her on a menu of them,” said Samples. “We think that both her audience and ours will be excited by what we have in store.”

About HGTV

HGTV, America’s leader in home and lifestyle programming, is distributed to more than 98 million U.S. households and is one of cable’s top-rated networks. HGTV’s website, HGTV.com, is the nation’s leading online home-and-garden destination, which attracts an average of more than 4 million unique visitors per month. For more information, visit www.HGTV.com.

About Heather Armstrong

Heather B. Armstrong of dooce.com is widely acknowledged to be the most popular “mommyblogger” in the world. She has more than 1.6 million followers on Twitter, and was recently named by Forbes Magazine as one of the 30 most influential women in media, along with Diane Sawyer, Kelly Ripa and Oprah Winfrey. She has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and she’s appeared as a guest on Oprah, The Bonnie Hunt Show and CNN. Armstrong is the author of the 2009 New York Times bestselling book, It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita. Armstrong lives in Salt Lake City with her husband, Jon Armstrong, their two young daughters, and two dogs, Chuck and Coco.

Yeah, TKG is all talk this February, and we’re pretty happy about it. Several of our group will be out and about in the community giving talks on various SEO/SEM/Social Media topics. We love the opportunity to meet with others in the area to give and gain fresh ideas, maybe impart a little search wisdom, and help break up some of the winter blahs that always hit NE Ohio about mid-February.

Jennifer Geh starts off February giving the Keynote Speech at the Green COC Business Lunch Forum.
February 10th Corey Hammond will be speaking with Kristie VanAuken from the Akron Canton Airport at the Stark CVB Breakfast.
Also on February 10, from 1pm to 3pm is the JBCC Peak Presentation where both Jennifer Geh and Corey Hammond will be speaking. The topic for the afternoon will be : Utilizing Social Media Networks in the Business World: the Real Place for MySpace!
Aaron Geh will be a panelist for the Society of Professional Marketers in Cleveland on the 18th.

If you have ever heard any of our speakers, you know they’re not really all talk. We like to listen and learn, too. We really look forward to each event, each one teaches us something new, so we look forward to seeing some folks out at some of these functions. If you need the info again, here’s the short list:

• 2/9/10 – Green COC Business Lunch Forum (Jen Geh)
• 2/10/10 – Stark CVB Breakfast Presentation (Corey Hammond and Kristie VanAuken)
• 2/10/10 – JBCC PEAK Presentation (Jen Geh and Corey Hammond)
• 2/18/10 – Society of Professional Marketers in Cleveland (Aaron Geh)

guest blogger: Megan Jeffery
Loralee Choate doesn’t really like the term “mommy blogger”, but as she would probably admit, the topics of her blog are very relevant to mothers and women, though she does have her share of male readers. Loralee authors Loralee’s Looney Tunes, blogging about her new baby, healthcare, depression, and occasionally a topic she considers silly. It was a post on healthcare and the subsequent tweeting and retweeting of this post that caught the attention of Valerie Jarret, a senior White House advisor. Choate and her husband (who had posted a differing view on healthcare on the blog) were invited to a luncheon at the White House to discuss thier views on healthcare. This lead to an article in February’s Parents magazine on the Virtual Power of Moms.
Loralee Choate’s incredible network of readers is directly responsible for the way this post made it’s way through the web.

Moms have always been a powerful force when it came to how the almighty American dollar was spent. I think this is probably true of most of the Western world. Women do the majority of acquiring goods and services for their families. Therefore, the lion’s share of marketing is directed at women.

Well, what happens when you take an already powerful spending group, add in an incredible group of women blogging about thier lives and creating rings and rings of people following these blogs and starting blogs of thier own? You get an enormous network of people (um, about 35 million of us mommys on the web as of this year) who have come to rely on each other, trust each other’s word, and root for each other. You get tribalization. You also get corporations trying to emulate and recreate the phenomenon for themselves.

Corporations have gotten on board with the web, totally. They have gotten Facebook pages and are learning how to use Twitter to promote thier products. What they haven’t quite figured out how to do is create the type of environment where their products are loved and defended and championed. They have started enlisting the help of mommy bloggers to try and help them create the types of networks enjoyed by bloggers. This practice has been chronicled a great deal in the last year or two. Mommy (and daddy) bloggers are changing the way American businesses market their wares or services. There has been a bit of backlash, as popular bloggers may get a bit pushy about recieving products. The FTC has even put new rules in place to help readers determine which statements bloggers make are paid, and which are thier personal opinion.

At the end of the day, I think the model, this tribalization that occurs for these bloggers is very interesting, and some aspects of it can work for business owners and corporations. But, when it gets right down to it, parents are connecting over emotions, events in our children’s lives and the things that are most important to us, and no corporation is going to be able to emulate that entirely.