Chris is the President/Co-Owner at Spikeball Inc. So what is Spikeball? It is a game that is kinda/sorta like volleyball, but then again not at all. I was introduced to the game a few summers ago and have been hooked ever since.

Spikeball is becoming more and more popular not only on the beaches of California but here in the Midwest, especially Milwaukee and Chicago. While it is mostly played on the beach, Spikeball is adaptable enough to be played on any surface.

Chris Ruder will be live on Comet Radio to discuss his role at Spikeball, their social media strategy, and some of the rules and regulations of the game. We will also be taking questions via Twitter. Please send your questions to @Cometbranding and we will ask Chris live during the show.

To listen to the show, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

On Wednesday, August 11th at 11am Central, Comet Branding Radio will explore the revolutionary smartphone application Taxi Magic with our guest Sanders Partee. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.

For many of us having cash is a rarity as we expect to do just about everything with the swipe of our credit card. Bring smartphone technology into the mix and we have a whole new world of electronic transactions.

Taxi Magic, RideCharge’s well-known smartphone app, enables users to book, track, charge and expense their taxi trip all from their smart phones. As my fellow smartphone junkies will tell you, we are always looking for new ways to get the most out of our pocketsize computers and Taxi Magic vastly improves the way we should think about riding in a cab.

Taxi Magic was featured in full-page Apple/AT&T iPhone ads in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The New York Times. Taxi Magic has also been included again and again in best iPhone apps lists from Wired Magazine, CNET, SF Weekly and Business Insider.

Join us Wednesday, August 11 at 11am CST as we interview Sanders Partee on this week’s edition of Comet Radio to discuss his role in expanding the Taxi Magic network to include over 60 taxi fleet partners across major cities, and click-to-call directories covering 4,000 cities and towns in smaller markets. Send your questions to @cometbranding and we will ask Sanders live during the show.

Jason is the founder of the company behind RunKeeper, a mobile fitness platform for runners with over 2 million users. Their flagship iPhone app for GPS tracking was named TIME Magazine’s top iPhone apps of 2009. It is also the leading fitness app for the Android platform.

Jason has over ten years of experience in venture capitalist based companies. Now he has taken a stab at launching his own with RunKeeper.

Jason Jacobs will be live on Comet Radio to discuss his role in the world of fitness, technology, and RunKeeper. We will also be taking questions via Twitter. Please send your questions to @Cometbranding and we will ask Jason live during the show.

To listen to the show, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

On Wednesday, June 30 at 11:00 a.m. Central, Comet Branding Radio will revisit a show from earlier this year with SlideShare Founder, Jonathan Boutelle and Marketing Manager, Daniel Lu, as we talk about when the SlideShare concept was created and how you can promote your personal brand with SlideShare. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.

SlideShare is a source for you to “Upload and share your PowerPoint & Keynote presentations, Word & PDF documents on SlideShare. Add audio to make a webinar. Capture leads with your presentation.”

Many of you have seen how Laura landed a position at Comet Branding through my SlideShare presentation, “Laura Gainor Utiliziing Social Media.” She created this presentation to compile her “get hired” strategy to get the attention of the Comet Partners, Al Krueger and Sara Meaney. This is one example how you can differentiate your brand and reach a large audience through social media.

You can also check out this presentation, created by SlideShare themselves, as to why you should SlideShare.

Boutelle and Lu will be joined Comet in a discussion to talk further about these SlideShare features. There are numerous creative and unique ways on how you can present your brand, while utilizing recent SlideShare feature updates.

Below are Laura’s top 10 ways SlideShare can be utilized:

1. Provides a seamless way to embed presentations/resumes/documents into blogs, distribute via Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook/Websites.

2. Businesses can discover new trends and interesting presentations related to their interest on SlideShare.

3. SlideShare offers companies a way to share presentations discreetly on intranets as well as on private sites.

4. Consumers can join groups on SlideShare and establish themselves as an industry expert.

5. Consumers can easily incorporate social media tools into their SlideShare presentations to help them go viral.

6. People can embed SlideShare presentations into their LinkedIn account to boost their profile and offer enhanced resume/work experience.

7. SlideShare helps boost search engine rankings for documents (use this to become an industry leader; promote documents/deliverables).

8. SlideShare helps bring life to case studies.

9. SlideShare offers branded channels for businesses.

10. SlideShare can get you a job! Get creative and create your own virtual resume, displaying your capabilities and talents to potential employers.

How have you used SlideShare? Tune in on Wednesday, June 9 at 11:00 a.m. Central and share with us. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.

Dr. Bell is a nationally recognized nutrition writer/presenter and co-author of Energy to Burn: The Ultimate Food and Nutrition Guide to Fuel your Active Lifestyle. She is a Board Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics, registered dietitian and a nutrition advisor to international sports nutrition companies, and co-founder of Swim, Bike, Run, Eat! blog and has a regular column for Chicago Now called, “Eat Right Around Chicago.”

She is the Heart Beat columnist for Today’s Dietitian, and her expertise has been featured in US Weekly, Fitness Magazine, Pilates Style, Men’s Health, Runner’s World, and related publications on the web. She has been published in scientific journals, and has appeared on nationwide TV appearances, radio programs and podcasts. Dr. Bell is also featured in ten Healthy Learning videos and is an annual presenter at IDEA Health and Fitness International Conferences.

Dr. Bell also has been a media spokesperson for the food industry and has aided in the development of nutrition communications programs for a variety of companies in the food industry, including Kraft, Nestle, Unilever, the Cranberry Institute, and Ocean Spray.

Dr. Bell will be live on Comet Radio to discuss her role in the world of blogging, nutrition and social media. We will also be taking questions via Twitter. Please send your questions to @Cometbranding and we will ask her live during the show.

To listen to the show, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Comet has grown quickly and as our latest press release discussed, we each offer our clients a unique blend of experiences and knowledge in the areas of social media, PR and marketing. Al Krueger and Sara Meaney have highly encouraged a team atmosphere at Comet to spark creativity and strategic thinking, so think of this week’s radio show as a bonding moment you can all be part of.

We invite you to take this opportunity to learn a bit more about what makes our social media and PR clocks tick. Got questions? Send them to our @CometBranding Twitter account by clicking here. We’ll answer as many as we can on air.

Please join us Wednesday, June 16 at 11 a.m. Central, for this week’s addition of Comet Radio. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.

Looking forward to your questions!

At Comet, we often receive advance copies of new books on the topics of public relations, marketing and social media, some of which are noteworthy and others that are not. However when this book arrived unannounced, I was stopped in my tracks. The name alone piqued my interest.

As the left brain of this outfit, Sara was absolutely titillated (yes, titillated) by the abundance of data and statistics collected in Socialnomics, to prove the point. It’s my kind of book. But it’s not just a book for data nerds like herself. It’s a book for skeptics who are holding out on their conclusions about the influence of online media upon our way of life. It’s a book for believers seeking more proof for their dinner table arguments. It’s a book for business people looking for more information about how the world is changing around them.

Even after a few pages, the conclusions are undeniable. Something is happening. And a lot of it is happening online.

It’s an exciting time of information evolution and communications revolution. So what? Well, the so what is determined by what you decide to do about it. You have two options: 1.) keep on doing what you’re doing or 2.) get on this high speed train before it leaves without you.

Have you seen the video companion to the book? If you haven’t, you are missing out on something 1.45 million other viewers have found fascinating.

Erik Qualman (@equalman) is the author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business. Socialnomics made Amazon’s #1 Best Selling List only after three weeks of publication & has been in the Top 100 Best Selling Business Books List consistently since its launch in August. Qualman is a frequently requested International speaker of the Fortune 500 and has been highlighted in numerous media outlets including: BusinessWeek, The New York Times, CNET, San Francisco Chronicle, Mashable, USA Today, Forbes, CBS Nightly News, and The Huffington Post. He has been fortunate to share the stage with Alan Mulally (Ford CEO), Lee Scott (CEO/Chairman Walmart), Jose Socrates (Prime Minister of Portugal),Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (Nokia CEO), Julie Andrews (Actress) and Al Gore (former Vice President).

Join us on Comet Radio to hear from Erik about his insights, his experience and maybe some of his predictions for what comes next. It’s sure to be an interesting conversation.

The Cleveland Indians positioned themselves as leaders in the sports social media space early in the 2010 Major League Baseball season when they announced they would offer a Tribe Social Deck for a select group of social media users to use to cover the team at their home games. The Deck, situated atop the left field wall at Progressive Field, serves as a 10-seat exclusive section designed to engage fans and further establish the Indians brand in the social media space. The Tribe Social Deck offers the Indians organization a way to personally connect with those who significantly influence the team’s communications and reputation in the social media space.

In an effort to drive excitement in the social media space, the Indians also recently featured a head-to-head Mascot Twitter battle with the Chicago White Sox to see which team would receive the most hashtag mentions. The friendly competition encouraged fans to tweet out the hashtag #GoTribe or #GoWhiteSox, with the losing team’s mascot having to pay tribute to the winner prior to a series finale game between the two teams. The team donated $1 to Stand Up to Cancer (@SU2C) for every hashtag that was tweeted during the game.

The Indians have also successfully developed several different social media channels to connect and engage with their fan base:

Facebook

• Official Indians on Facebook Fan Page – 158,509 Fans

Twitter

• @Indians – The Official Twitter Feed of the Indians – 1,550 Followers
• @TribeTalk – The Indians PR Guy – 4,730 Followers
• @TribeInsider – The Official Behind-the-Scenes Voice of the Indians – 3,176 Followers
• @SlidertheMascot – The Official Mascot of the Indians – 600 Followers
• Several Indians Players – @Dhuff11 (David Huff) , @Gator4God (Matt LaPorta), @GrillCheese49 (Jason Grilli), @JLEWFifty (Jensen Lewis)

Blogs

• Indians Off the Field, CastroTurf, Wagner’s Compositions, The Scrappers Scoop, and View from the Booth

Curtis Danburg will be live on Comet Branding Radio this Wednesday to tell us more! CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.

Since 2006, Steven has been the Milwaukee city editor for The Onion A/V Club. One of Milwaukee’s most popular entertainment publications, the A/V Club generates hundreds of thousands of readers in print and online every week. In November of 2008, the online version was launched. Steven and his staff stay busy updating the site several times per day, 5 days a week, focusing on stories about local music, art, food and culture.

In addition to his duties with the Milwaukee branch, Steven is also a contributor to the National edition of the A/V Club, where he covers music, film, and TV. He also co-wrote the 2009 book Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists.

Steven will be live on Comet Radio to discuss his role in the world of The Onion. To listen to the show, PLEASE CLICK HERE.