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, 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.

The Golden State Warriors, Oakland, California’s professional basketball team, have taken that interaction to the next level. I came across a very interesting article on ESPN about how the Golden State Warriors are using the power of social media to engage a wider fan base.

The Warriors are about to unveil a new logo for the upcoming season. Their problem was how to keep their fans from leaking it out. Their solution was to take a positive approach and get involved with their fan in the unveiling process.

Using multiple social network platforms, the Warriors leveraged their fan’s excitement by turning the logo unveiling into a scavenger hunt type of game.

Thus the “Warriors Draft Challenge” was born. Fans can sign-up on the Warriors website and each weekday from May 20-31, there will be a challenge question tied to each of the Warriors major social media accounts. If you get the answer right, then a small section of the logo will be revealed. If you get all the questions correct, on the last day you will see the whole logo.

This tactic is great because it gives the Warriors an opportunity to continually post new content during the off-season and give their fans a reason to seek it out.

They have leveraged current players like top rookie Stephen Curry to give fans clues, and subsequent clues will be revealed only when you tweet a specific message from the Warriors. Through every clue revealed, fans have an opportunity to share their experience via Facebook and Twitter.

The Warriors are giving more to their fans than just a unique interaction. Fans who sign up will be automatically registered to attend the team’s draft party at the end of June. In addition, there are also daily prizes available including a chance to be entered to win season tickets.

The Warriors also took a non-traditional approach to their public relations efforts, using Pitch Engine to post the official release.

Within the first 24 hours, the release generated over 4,000 views. A typical release gets sent out to about 400 people. The Warriors are one of the first professional teams to utilize the Pitch Engine service.

Their overall strategy is solid and speaks to their fan-base. They have come up with a unique engagement for their fans and have given them a reason to come back for more.

I also applaud their willingness to embrace new tools and strategies, where it could have been very easy to go the traditional route and “do things how they’ve always been done.”

Other sports teams should take a page out of the Warriors’ book.

What do you think of the overall campaign? What teams do you think are doing a good job leveraging social media?

Developing this summit was an interesting case study into leveraging to social media as part of PR right from the beginning.

For the event to be a success we knew it had to be packed with great content and we were fortunate to be able to offer a great mix of speakers.

The program was strategically developed for professionals and students by including presentations and discussions on a mix of social media and PR activities.

Presentations were designed to give insight into multiple case studies and approaches to using social media – whether you are at the top of an organization or just starting your career.

To promote the event the group specifically avoided using traditional methods to promote the event. We felt it was important to “walk the talk” in terms of using social media to drive attendance and interest.

There was no structured Web site and there were no flyers to speak of. Only Twitter, Twitpic, Facebook, BlogTalkRadio and LinkedIn were used.

The result? 290 people traveled to UW-Whitewater to participate in the daylong event and from the responses, it seems that everyone enjoyed it. Beyond this, hundreds of photos were posted to Facebook (here’s a batch) and over 1,000 Tweets were sent with the hashtag #PRSMS leading up to, during and after the event.

**If you attended, what was your favorite part? A speaker? A side conversation? The alumni luncheon? Share your thoughts below in the comments please!

The day was kicked off by Paula Berg, Southwest Airlines’ Director of Emerging Technology discussing her company’s approach to leveraging social media for customer response, promotion, crisis communication and service improvement.

Following her session, Alysha Schertz from BizTimes Milwaukee did an interview with Berg to learn more about Southwest’s approach to social media and her visit to Wisconsin.

And the day was capped off by Randy Sprenger giving everyone a picture into Harley-Davidson’s use of social media to engage with prospective and current customers. One of the coolest elements of Randy’s presentation was this video….yeah try not to get excited…I dare you.

**You can also download video of Paula Berg and Randy Sprenger’s presentations on iTunes from UW-Whitewater. Follow this LINK and search for Paula Berg or Randy Sprenger.

Between Paula and Randy’s presentations were some other great ones. Here they are with a little information about the presenters:

Susan Spaight is VP of Account Management and Digital Strategy at Meyer & Wallis and she presented on strategy in social media.

Web site | Blog | @suespaight

Sara Meaney and I offered a presentation on leveraging social media in public relations to help events and announcements live beyond the day/time they take place.

Andrew Wintheiser is a founding partner of Lightburn, an interactive agency in Milwaukee and he presented on using PR and social media to influence SEO.

Web site | Blog | @andywintheiser

Sarah Soczka is an assistant account executive at Boelter-Lincoln in Milwaukee and she shared a personal story about how professional and personal brands can collide in social media.

If you are interested in social media, branding, personal branding or taking an innovative approach to running a business and you haven’t heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, look above you. You might be living under a rock. Gary’s larger than life personality is helping redefine how business is conducted by leveraging social and new media to produce a great flavor profile that will please many a palate. (Note to Gary – sorry for the lame wine reference).

If you want to get a glimpse into Gary, check out how traditional media has fallen for him. This LINK shares his many appearances on mainstream TV and Cable news shows. This is of note because, much like TV personalities may have a hard time transitioning to movies, social media types can’t always get over the hump and make a splash in traditional media.

People have been paying attention and his brand of branding + social media capital helped him land a seven-figure book deal. His book, “Crush it” will be landing in mailboxes on October 13th. We, at Comet Branding Radio, have received an advance copy (today actually) and we will chat with him about it on the show on Wednesday at 9am Central. (He might not realize it, but in the 47 other times we’ve done this show over the past year, we’ve never changed the show time to accommodate a guest…and we likely won’t do it again…feel special Gary…)

If you’ve been curious about Gary, tune in and learn.

**Just before this post went live, we came across a Tweet by Gary that lead us to check out the “Experiences” that are being “sold” with book packages. Want to buy 500 Crush It books? If you do, you can have a two-hour dinner with Gary in NYC. You also get to enjoy some wine with him too. Interesting approach, no?

At this point, we will let his publishers continue his biographical introduction:

Online marketing trailblazer Gary Vaynerchuk (VAY NER CHUK) is a 33-year-old entrepreneur whose dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him known as the “Social Media Sommelier.” A self-trained wine expert, he revolutionized the wine industry with his video blog, Wine Library TV (affectionately known as The Thunder Show), and grew his family wine business from $4 million to $60 million in five years. What raised Vaynerchuk’s notoriety even more than his business acumen was his foresight combined with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. While his youthful following broke down barriers in the wine industry, the business world (and Web 2.0) admired him for creating a new generation of branding, focusing on the Internet and leveraging social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, and his family’s wine business grew to over $60 million a year, he made television appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Ellen DeGeneres, NBC’s Today Show, CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer, and The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, was featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and has become a consultant for Fortune 100 companies, and a keynote speaker around the world.

In CRUSH IT! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In On Your Passion (HarperStudio) he shares with business owners how they can boost sales using the internet. He shows audiences how to find their passion, then step by step how to turn it into a flourishing, monetized business. Vaynerchuk’s speeches on personal branding, social media, and marketing at conferences such as FOWA, Strategic Profits, and South By Southwest have occasioned praise from established web denizens and earned him the admiration of countless bloggers and aspiring entrepreneurs. As the youngest winner of Marketwatch’s Business Award at 27, as well as being named to “Silicon Alley 100″ -Silicon Alley Insider – 2008 and “101 Most Influential People in New Jersey” – New Jersey Monthly – 2009, Vaynerchuk is an icon in his industry.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

Chris is a proponent of the concept of narrow branding, as an alternative to taking a mass media approach to brands that don’t necessarily translate well into that approach. As he points out in his blog post on brandchannel.com,

“Narrow branding is a deeply subversive concept. It challenges cherished ideas about brand consistency and standards by enabling consumers to shape and mold the very essence of a brand.

But for those willing to shake off old assumptions and look at a more customer-centric approach to marketing, narrow branding promises big benefits.”

What I like about that concept is that it plays off of the idea that today’s customer is savvier and better connected than in the past. With the use of social media by just about every age group comes opportunities to connect on a more personal level with customers and for them to do the same with the brands with which they engage. As Chris points out in his post, you can think of narrow branding as brand personalization.

Naysayers may argue that this concept flies in the face of what a brand truly is or should be: a unified voice or face in the marketplace that drives everything from communications to product development. But seriously folks, this is the way things are going in the future. People just want more from their brands. And the same ol’ same ol’ is just not good enough anymore.

Hope you can tune in to our conversation. Should be a great one.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

Passion Brands, how they’re different and what it takes to make one.
Kate Newlin — Author, Passion Brands; Principal, Kate Newlin Consulting

On the show we like to talk about some of the progressive things that are happening in branding, marketing, PR and social media. Sometimes, those things aren’t progressive in the sense of technology, technique or attitude.

Today’s topic is interesting to us for many reasons, but mainly because it digs into the deep, deep depths of brands. What makes some better than others? Why do some people get personally offended if you don’t love a brand as much as they do? Why do some brands become personal emblems that help us tell our own story? Why do some brands come alive and have a life of their own? Why do some brands become the brands of the people?

We are going to talk to Kate about all of these things. Like last week’s show with Brian Solis, we will let Kate describe for herself about her book:

What makes some brands stand out from the pack year after year? In a vast marketplace glutted with countless “pretty good brands,” how are some products able to command unquestionable customer loyalty and lasting enthusiasm?

Veteran business strategist Kate Newlin defines the key ingredients that go into passion brands—brands that we recommend to friends wholeheartedly, with a joyous, even evangelical zeal. Passion brands inspire an emotional attachment. Unlike consumer fads, we become personally invested in them, sometimes even more so than we do with our friends and loved ones.

Newlin identifies the social factors that have made passion brands the driving force in consumer marketing today. Based on proprietary research, which makes use of in-depth interviews with company executives as well as state-of-the-art analytics, she answers the following key questions:

•    Are there common characteristics that enable passion brands to become carriers of personal meaning?
•    What is the financial impact on a company that produces a passion brand?
•    Do passion brands create a halo over the stock prices?

She notes that in a world of almost unlimited consumer choices, the old rules of marketing just don’t work anymore (product, package, position, price, and promotion). Now marketers must react to consumers in real time, encouraging “brand democracy” in which users can help decide a product’s characteristics, from size and color to how it should be marketed. Passion Brands is must reading for entrepreneurs and denizens of corporate cubicles and boardrooms alike.

Here’s a little bit about our guest: Kate Newlin (New York, NY), the principal and founder of Kate Newlin Consulting, is the author of Shopportunity! How to Be a Retail Revolutionary, which was on the “Oprah Selects” list of O magazine in 2006 and was also a recommended selection of the 2006 Harvard Business Review. With over 25 years of experience in business strategy and marketing, Newlin has worked with a broad cross-section of Fortune 500 businesses, including McDonald’s, Pennzoil/Quaker State, Kraft, Hasbro, Cigna, GE Capital, Waldenbooks, LensCrafters, and others.

If you happen to be interested in checking out the book for yourself, you can from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com.

Passion Brands, how they’re different and what it takes to make one.
Kate Newlin — Author, Passion Brands; Principal, Kate Newlin Consulting

On the show we like to talk about some of the progressive things that are happening in branding, marketing, PR and social media. Sometimes, those things aren’t progressive in the sense of technology, technique or attitude.

Lately, we’ve been beating the social media drum pretty hard. It has been great to explore and learn how companies can utilize social media within their branding, marketing and public relations strategies (and we will again soon). But, we decided it was time to check back into some pure branding. Rad, no?

Today’s topic is interesting to us for many reasons, but mainly because it digs into the deep, deep depths of brands. What makes some better than others? Why do some people get personally offended if you don’t love a brand as much as they do? Why do some brands become personal emblems that help us tell our own story? Why do some brands come alive and have a life of their own? Why do some brands become the brands of the people?

We are going to talk to Kate about all of these things. Like last week’s show with Brian Solis, we will let Kate describe for herself about her book:

What makes some brands stand out from the pack year after year? In a vast marketplace glutted with countless “pretty good brands,” how are some products able to command unquestionable customer loyalty and lasting enthusiasm?

Veteran business strategist Kate Newlin defines the key ingredients that go into passion brands—brands that we recommend to friends wholeheartedly, with a joyous, even evangelical zeal. Passion brands inspire an emotional attachment. Unlike consumer fads, we become personally invested in them, sometimes even more so than we do with our friends and loved ones.

Newlin identifies the social factors that have made passion brands the driving force in consumer marketing today. Based on proprietary research, which makes use of in-depth interviews with company executives as well as state-of-the-art analytics, she answers the following key questions:

•    Are there common characteristics that enable passion brands to become carriers of personal meaning?
•    What is the financial impact on a company that produces a passion brand?
•    Do passion brands create a halo over the stock prices?

She notes that in a world of almost unlimited consumer choices, the old rules of marketing just don’t work anymore (product, package, position, price, and promotion). Now marketers must react to consumers in real time, encouraging “brand democracy” in which users can help decide a product’s characteristics, from size and color to how it should be marketed. Passion Brands is must reading for entrepreneurs and denizens of corporate cubicles and boardrooms alike.

Here’s a little bit about our guest: Kate Newlin (New York, NY), the principal and founder of Kate Newlin Consulting, is the author of Shopportunity! How to Be a Retail Revolutionary, which was on the “Oprah Selects” list of O magazine in 2006 and was also a recommended selection of the 2006 Harvard Business Review. With over 25 years of experience in business strategy and marketing, Newlin has worked with a broad cross-section of Fortune 500 businesses, including McDonald’s, Pennzoil/Quaker State, Kraft, Hasbro, Cigna, GE Capital, Waldenbooks, LensCrafters, and others.

If you happen to be interested in checking out the book for yourself, you can from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com.
*Again this week: We will take questions live on Twitter. Send questions to @AlKrueger or @SaraMeaney

So why should you and your organization leverage social media to build your business? Big question. To get closer to an answer, let’s start with how social media differs from more traditional marketing methods such as trade shows, direct mail, print advertising and cold calling.

The difference between social media marketing and traditional media marketing is a bit like the difference between talking with people at a business conference and talking to yourself in the mirror. At the conference you’re going to engage in discussions and gain fresh perspectives from new contacts. The person in the mirror will agree with everything you say, whether you’re right or wrong and whether you have all the facts or not. Very little is gained in the latter exchange. That’s not to say that daily self-affirmations aren’t valuable; Jack Handey and his Deep Thoughts serve a purpose. They simply don’t accomplish the same things as conversations with other people do.

The recent social media boom has changed the way people seek and consume information in a huge way. Yesterday, my business partner, Al Krueger, and I hosted Brian Halligan and Mike Volpe of Hubspot on the Comet Branding Radio Show.

Those guys really know their stuff and shared a lot of insights into the many benefits of what they call Inbound Marketing, or marketing tactics that focus on helping companies get found on the Internet by their target customers and convert those leads to sales. AS they explain it, inbound marketing takes place largely through search engines, social media and the blogosphere.

Some of the insights the Hubspot guys shared make a very compelling argument for social media. My jaw nearly hit the floor when they shared that inbound marketing strategies were shown to result in a 61% lower cost per lead than outbound (or traditional media) marketing. Talk about an ROI argument! Your boss is gonna eat it up!

People of all ages are turning to Web-based resources to gather information relevant to virtually every aspect of their lives. The Internet is also changing how people interact with each other and with the products and services they want and need. It only makes sense that you get into the game.

I’m not delusional. I’m painfully aware that convincing senior management to approve your plan is not always going to be easy. But to get you started, here is a list of strategic reasons why you should include social media in your marketing mix. You’ll help your case a bit if you do your homework and compile some supporting materials and examples of each of the following as they pertain to your company and your industry.

1. Social media is very measurable. Even more so than some traditional media marketing. So much so that it’s possible to adjust and improve upon your approach based on nearly real-time response rates. And many interactions can be tracked all the way from initial touchpoint to close of a sale. It doesn’t get any better than that.

2. Social media is flexible and customizable. Your brand can take on as many customer touchpoints as your company is able to manage effectively. Social media is useful for multiple people within an organization, not just marketing and PR. Product managers, customer service, senior executives and junior staff can all play a strategic part.

3. It’s possible to deploy many social media-based strategies for *less money and better results (*Hubspot) than traditional media strategies.

4. Social media allows you to expand your customer base and establish deeper connections with your existing customers, increasing loyalty and building an army of brand ambassadors. This is accomplished through the use of personality and storytelling in lieu of hard-selling and one-way information pushes.

5. Your competition may already be using social media, shaping the industry discussion or possibly even telling your story for you- in a way you would not necessarily appreciate.

6. Your employees are already using social media, maybe even on your behalf, without your oversight or knowledge. It is possible to leverage their knowledge, their personal and professional networks and their savvy to increase your company’s reach in a positive way. Just ask any Zappos.com employee. Nuff said.

7. Your customers are definitely online and many are actively using social media, searching for information and support. They need someone to give it to them. Add value to their search, and they’ll become advocates, not just customers.

We believe that people prefer to interact with other people, rather than with faceless brands and companies. True, a strong brand can offer the promise of certain human traits or aspirations, attributed to the brand by both advocates and critics. But only a select few brands have been successful at establishing a sustainable, personal connection with their audiences. Social media makes this possible in ways other media forms only wish they could. You just have to be ready to share your brand’s story in an engaging way and listen + respond to what people have to say about it.

In an upcoming post, I’ll explore some of the questions you can ask of yourself and your organization to determine whether you’re really ready to take on social media as well as the steps to take to prepare for the best possible outcomes. Stay tuned.

What’s the hub-bub with inbound marketing + Hubspot  and why you should care.
Brian Halligan — CEO & co-founder, Hubspot
Mike Volpe — VP Inbound Marketing, Hubspot
*See Hubspot’s blog post about the show here.

Mr. Volpe has been a guest on the Comet Branding Radio show in the past – last November actually. The show discussed the Best ways to use Twitter and social media for business and Volpe contributed to the conversation nicely. It was a memorable show for me. I hosted it sick and from my bed at home.

The idea of Inbound Marketing is a pretty interesting one. According to our friends at Wikipedia here is a bit of a definition (paraphrased here).

Inbound marketing is focused on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and permission marketing. It is the idea that marketers “publish their way in” (via blogs, etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where businesses have to “buy their way in” through traditional marketing (outbound marketing) where companies focus on finding customers by advertising. This sense is related to intrusion marketing and interruption marketing.

So, where does Hubspot fit into all of this? Well, I’ll let Brian take a stab at introducing that side of this discussion here:

Okay. Inbound Marketing seems like a pretty darn good idea, no? On the show Sara Meaney and I will be discuss some ideas with the Hubspot folks as well as learn about some other things they are up to and if those activities are paying off for them. As you might know, they have a lot going on, which includes, but not limited to:

Inbound marketing software
Inbound marketing kit
Social media marketing kit
Twitter Grader
Facebook Grader
Inbound Marketing Summit(s)
Website Grader
Press Release Grader
Gobbledygook Grader
Personality Grader
Hupspot TV

That all seems like a lot of stuff doesn’t it? Well, I’m guessing that’s the point of helping to draw people to your site and to your content. But, I wonder if this all seems like a lot of heavy lifting for the average small- to medium-sized businesses out there? I’m sure we’ll find out more on the show.

Upcoming Comet Branding Radio Shows (Weds @ 11am CDT):
May 20th — Legal issues in Social Media for Communicators with Christopher Cain, Foley & Lardner and Chris Moander, Dahlberg Przybyla Law
May 27th — Discussing the new book “Putting the public back in public relations” with Brian Solis.