Recently in Social Media Marketing Category

Southern California is a hotbed of technology companies that are leaders in their sector. This includes MySpace, CitySearch, Ticketmaster, eHarmony, and thousands of lesser known technology companies.

A high-tech community like this also has many bloggers and Web-based news outlets that cover our companies, venture capital, and events -- plus a number of advisers who help technologies entrepreneurial companies grow.

It's been difficult to keep up on all aspects of the technology sector in Southern California. There are several journalistic Web sites that do a great job of covering the news about SoCal companies. However, it's been hard to find the thoughtful bloggers who provide interesting commentary on what's happening and are advising high growth entrepreneurs.

The Technology Council of Southern California and TechEmpower have created Southern California Tech Central, a new Web site that makes it much easier to keep up with the whole technology sector in Southern California.

For example, here's a page on that site that summaries my recent blog posts:
http://cc.tcosc.org/&source=cliff-allen-on-marketing

One of the unique features of the site is that the links on that page refine the search deeper and deeper, without having to master any complex search language.

Check out the Southern California Tech Central -- and keep up with Southern California.

The popularity of social networking among friends — and would-be friends — is fast becoming "social media."

Individuals are now concerned about their "personal brand." And, companies are looking for ways to use social media in their marketing to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to their Web site.

The area of social media marketing is challenging for most corporate marketing people because it's so different from one-way mass media advertising.

In addition to being two-way marketing (or one-to-one marketing), social media marketing is both very personal and very public. It's personal because it depends on personal relationships and conversations. And, it's very, very public because prospective customers are usually communicating with people from the company in public areas of the Internet.

A lot has been written about using company blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, but It's hard to sift through all of that to develop a complete, consistent, and concise social media marketing strategy.

On February 25th the Gravity Summit at UCLA will give marketers a full day of guidance on social media marketing. Here is what the seminar organizers say:

Gravity Summit is designed to educate and inform the business community on how to use social media to foster customer engagement, provide internal productivity tools, and further online branding for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

The speakers at the Gravity Summit are from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, Yahoo, Sony, Sprint, and others:

• David Reis, CEO DEI Worldwide and Founding Member of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association)
• Justin Goldsborough, Social Media Manager, Sprint
• Ann Glenn, Senior Web Producer, Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive
• Tony Adam, SEO Manager, Yahoo
• Ricardo Bueno, Blog Director, Real Estate Tomato
• Renée Barrett, Principal of Awareness, Action, Accountability
• Karl Kasca, CEO, Kasca & Associates

The descriptions of each speaker's presentation looks very good:

I'm looking forward to learning from each speaker at the seminar. If you're going to attend, let me know so we can chat face-to-face.