Tag Archives: Cincinnati

by Michelle Lentz

I love it when my city hits the national news for something other than race riots or boycotting Robert Mapplethorpe. In fact, I can proudly say we’ve come a long, long way since those days.

The latest national news out of Cincinnati is what’s being billed as The World’s Largest Tweet-Up. I’m not sure if that’s accurate on a number of levels, but it doesn’t matter. It’s good marketing for a good cause, and a great example of a non-profit using social media to raise awareness.

Last July, musician Katie Reider passed away at age 30 from a rare form of cancer that attacked the left side of her face. It left her blind in one eye and unable to do what she did best – sing. Katie was a local musician for us, but she’d been on the national scene as well, and was one of those artists spotlighted on WB shows like Dawson’s Creek.

500Kin365.org, was created in May of 2008 with the help of Katie Reider’s loyal fanbase to reconnect and introduce 500,000 people to Katie Reider, her music and her story over the next year, as she continued to undergo treatment. The site took off, and the goal is to introduce 500,000 people to her music. Two sets of Katie’s songs can be downloaded for only $1 each on the site and 100% of the proceeds to go help pay off the family’s exorbitant medical bills.

Now for the Tweet-up. About 500,000 people attend our annual Taste of Cincinnati event on Memorial Day weekend. Until last year, the Katie Reider Band had entertained at the food festival for almost 10 years. This year, Taste of Cincinnati will spotlight the Katie Reider Stage, presented by Avalon and Metromix.com Cincinnati at P&G Gardens, as the first stage in the history of Cincinnati named for a pioneer of gay and lesbian rights and as the first stage in the annals of Taste of Cincinnati named for a performer. I told you we’d come a long way.

The goal is for everyone to tweet awareness of the whole deal. 500,000 attendees might equal 500,000 downloads of Katie’s music. Called 3 Tweets 4 Katie, the campaign uses the shorthand Katie used in her everyday life.

Tens of thousands of tweets are expected to fill the Twitterverse over the Memorial Day weekend in honor Reider’s life and music. The Friends of Katie Reider encourage peeps around the world to adopt new Twitterminology and embrace a Reider family tradition: “3″ means “I love you” and “4″ means “I love you, too.” With tweets limited to 140 characters on Twitter, organizers believe the Reider family tradition of “3″ and “4″ may likely gain a global following as new Twitter shorthand.

Remember, you don’t have to be at Taste of Cincinnati to participate. You can tweet directly from the 3 Tweets 4 Katie site and show your love for the cause. Your tweet will help expose other people to Katie’s music and help achieve those 500,000 downloads. Or you can just spend $1 and download a set of her songs.

Here’s a a YouTube clip from Katie Reider’s last show:

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

I’m off live-blogging a wine festival today (I know. Poor me.)  Kevin Dugan, whom you may know from the Bad Pitch Blog or the Strategic Public Relations blog has offered to fill in for me. Kevin was lucky enough to attend the P&G digital summit earlier this week, and here is his synopsis of the event.
- Michelle

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The first moment of truth is “the time it takes shoppers to make up their mind about a product” according to The WSJ. It’s a tight window at three to seven seconds, so P&G considers it the most important marketing opportunity for a brand.

Earlier this week I joined Peter Kim, David Armano, Jason Falls and representatives from companies including MySpace, Hulu and Google to help shape the first moment of truth with social media for 100 P&G employees.

Loads of Hope
40 nerds teamed up with 100 P&G marketers to help raise funds for disaster relief through Tide’s Loads of Hope project. And we did just that…$20 at a time. $50,000 was raised in four hours employing everything from Digg, blogs and Twitter to MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and a host of niche community sites. Tide matched the $50K for the $100K in all.

The teams that broke down into smaller groups, around specific strategies, were able to test more ideas more easily and quickly. They focused on the ones that did work and dropped the ones that did not gain traction. This is a great lesson that can be applied across marketing projects in my opinion.

The competitive, reality TV nature of the event was intense as the final minutes approached. The digital dashboards shown above were posted throughout P&G’s learning center and clearly added to the urgency of the experiment. In one view we tracked sales, site visits and conversion rate for each team while the Twitter Feed tracking the event scrolled at the bottom – all in real time.

It’ll All Come Out in the Wash
Post-event we have the predictable, armchair dissection of the event by pundits. But most critics miss the point of this exercise.

This was a starting point for P&G — a learning exercise designed to show the power of social media that organized itself transparently around a good cause.

In the process 3,000 people got a t-shirt and, most importantly, $100K was raised for a great cause. The P&G marketers that continue to participate in social media will come to understand its true value which includes better customer relationships and, done correctly, establishing a personal dimension to their brand.

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Kevin Dugan attended the P&G event and has been blogging at Strategic Public Relations since 2002. More recently he created The Bad Pitch Blog.

by Michelle Lentz

Every now and then, something exciting happens here in Cincinnati. This week, our local giant Procter & Gamble brought in the digerati so that P&G could learn more about social media. You may have seen folks hawking Tide t-shirts on Twitter? That was the P&G Digital Hack night.

We weren’t all lucky enough to attend that event, but a lot of folks came out for a happy hour the evening before, sponsored by Cincinnati’s rather wildly successful startup, ShareThis and organized by our Social Media Breakfast team of Daniel Lally, Dave Knox, and Kevin Dugan. The event took place at Bootsy’s, a rather hip restaurant co-produced by Bootsy Collins and local restaurateur Jeff Ruby.

I took photos, but I’m no Brian Solis.   Full event photos can be found on Flickr.

Ben Lerer (Thrillist), Dave Knox (P&G), Chad Sims (Hyde Park Blast), Adam Paulisick (Nielsen Online)

Chris George (MySpace), Tim Schigel (ShareThis)

Dave Tokheim (SixApart), Heidi Browning (MySpace), Emrah Kovacoglu (TotalBeauty.com)

Phil Wierbinski (MySpace), Chris George (MySpace)

Bobby Uhlenbrock (Ample), Kevin Dugan (PR Blog / FRCH), Josh Fendley (Ample)

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Michelle Lentz

I try to keep the overly personal stuff out of bub.blicio.us, but these are social media related.

First off, I always get to announce when Brian is speaking somewhere, but this time – it’s me! I’m thrilled to have been asked to speak on a BlogHer ’09 panel: Food Blogging in Time of Recession. I know, I’m not a food blogger. But what’s food without wine? I’ll be speaking, I think, on both finding Recession Wines as well as how to be a wine (and food) blogger during a recession. It sort of cuts back on fancy dinners and such – unless you’re a bit creative. BlogHer is happening in Chicago this year on July 24-25.

Next, my wine blog is up for a local award, although I fully admit there’s a popularity contest element here. In fact, I sort of feel like I’m campaigning for Prom Queen. That said, I’d love if you’d vote for me in the City Beat Best of Cincinnati Awards. My wine blog, among others, is listed as potential Best Blog. (I really wish they’d broken it out into categories, but they didn’t.) All you need to vote is an email address – no worries about whether or not you actually live in Cincinnati.

Once you get to the survey, you can vote on just about everything in the city. (Again, I wonder why they only have one category for blogs.) It’s a fun survey. You can fill out as much or as little as you wish. The BLOG category is listed under PUBLIC EYE. Select the drop-down list and scroll for MY WINE EDUCATION (http://www.wine-girl.net). Do I think I’ll win? Well, my fingers are crossed, but all my favorite local blogs  – and closest friends – are nominated too. The competition is stiff. But at least I’m in the mix, yes? You have until March 1 to vote, so vote soon!

Right. So, we’ll now return to our regularly scheduled programming here on bub.blicio.us.

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel, Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

Nominee for City Beat’s Best of the City: Vote for My Wine Education under Public Eye > Blog:
http://www.bestofcincinnati.com/

by Michelle Lentz

Cincinnati has a surprisingly huge social media community. Maybe not surprising. I suspect, due to P&G, we have more marketing agencies per square mile than anyone but Madison Avenue, and a lot of them are embracing social media. Today was our 5th social media breakfast, which sold out in under an hour, and it featured Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora. You can view our Twitter stream and see Tim’s 55 minute presentation on UStream

Pandora is that amazing internet radio project you have on your iPhone and quite probably on your computer. As you might know, they’ve recently added ads to their stream. The ads are extremely targeted and you can get rid of them for $3/month.

Their new advertising stream is very very targeted. If they wanted to, they could target 35-year old women in Cincinnati who enjoy Weezer (i.e., me). They are thinking about branching out with this. For instance, would you like to opt-in to an email that tells you your favorite band is playing at your local club? Taking that one step further, what if it also told you that a band you might like is coming to a club near you? Pandora does have the recommendation thing down, although they see themselves as a radio product, not a recommendation engine.

I was also intrigued to hear about their fight with the government over radio fees. Remember the big uproar back in early August? Tim had told The Washington Post that Pandora had a real possiblity of shutting their doors for good as the government had raised the fees on Internet Radio. Well, apparently enough of you got upset and wrote your congressmen. In fact, email accounts and faxes on Capitol Hill were jammed enough that it made a difference. Pandora, and other internet radio stations, are currently wrapping up a second round of talks with Congress. Grassroots worked.

Here’s a few more tidbits I learned today:
- Pandora was the most downloaded iPhone application of 2008. (Okay, I knew this, but thought I’d re-share it.)

- When they launched the web site in November 2005, they rather quickly ramped up to 50-60K new users per day.

- They’ve done virtually no marketing, but have grown by leaps and bounds. In fact, they grew by word of mouth, using occasional Google AdWords. Tim has also traveled in the last 2 years, conducting over 200 town halls across the nation. One of his first, in NYC, attracted 2 people, and a recent (albeit canceled) one in NYC attracted over 1000.

- Of the 600,000 indexed songs, 85% are played every day.

- They see every communication (email, tweet, etc) with a listener as an opportunity, not a cost. In fact, they respond to all communications with their listeners.

- Pandora is going to be everywhere. For example, Ford is integrating Pandora into their cars via SYNC.

My friend Krista Neher was there, brilliantly snapping photo after photo. So as Brian would say, I’ll let the photos tell the rest of the story. View Krista’s entire SMB5 Photostream on Flickr.

SMB Founder Bryan Person and our local SMB impressario Kevin Dugan

The early morning crowd at LPK for Cincy Social Media Breakfast #5

Tim Westergren

Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora

Our Social Media Breakfast was sponsored by Lucrum and LPK.

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology
Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

Nominee for City Beat’s Best of the City: Vote for My Wine Education under Public Eye > Blog:
http://www.bestofcincinnati.com/