Yesterday I was a presenter at a conference about Marketing and PR for a group of professionals in the marine trades, composites and boat building industry in Maine. The first session was about Traditional Public Relations methods and the second session was about Social Media. 

One of the things we talked about is creating groups in MySpace and Facebook. I wanted to post an example of a MySpace group for owners of Hatteras Yachts.  There are pros and cons to creating a group in MySpace or creating a group on your own Website. If it resides on your site, you have more control, however if it resides on MySpace, you can access a larger number of people who might not already be visiting your site, and you can drive traffic to your site with links.

I’d like you to weigh in here on the pros and cons of having a group on your own site or on FaceBook or MySpace.  My PowerPoint is too large of a file to post here but let me know if you’d like me to email it to you.

I’m listening to a podcast from Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson on their “For Immediate Release” blog (go to the March 22 edition of the podcast: is PR One Way or Two Way?)  It’s about the need for companies and organizations to call on outside help to monitor the blogosphere in order to track their reputations. Their discussion ties back into the conversation that is taking place on AdRants about whether Social Media belongs to the Marketers or the PR people. One comment on AdRants indicated that most PR people don’t have the technical skills to adequately manage Social Media. Continue Reading »

I just read a great post on AdRants about whether Social Media should fall under the domain of the PR people or the Marketing people. The  more I learn about Social Media, the more I believe it is totally a logical extension of the PR function. Continue Reading »

The Maine Built Boats organization gathered at the Portland Museum of Art on Saturday night to celebrate the launch of its new branding campaign. It has been my pleasure to be involved with a group of talented boat builders as well as the creative people who have put this campaign together. Continue Reading »

Julie Parenteau, my agency’s web designer, just sent me a link to this article from the WebPro newspaper with some staggering statistics about Social Media Advertising:

“The top 25 social media networks delivered over 155 million unique visitors in Feb. 2008 with 70 percent coming from MySpace, Facebook and Classmates.com. Add in YouTube and Flickr and you get another 60 million totaling an estimated 215 million humans viewing social media monthly. ”

This is why we’re getting into Social Media optimization at Nancy Marshall Communications. The audiences are targeted and they are growing. They are tuned in, loyal, and educated.

That’s the kind of audience most of our clients are looking for.

This weekend was the Maine Boatbuilder’s Show in Portland.  What a fabulous gathering in an authentic warehouse space on Portland’s waterfront!

It was also the kick-off of the integrated marketing campaign for the Maine Built Boats organization. I’m pleased that my agency, Nancy Marshall Communications, is part of this amazing effort coordinated by Elaine Scott of Maine’s Department of Economic and Community Development. The new Web site, created by ImageWorks of Portland, includes videos and podcasts we’ve created with renowned sailing broadcaster Gary Jobson to provide lively content and to drive traffic. The ads, created by Leslie Evans Design Associates, are based on a brand platform created by Victory Branding. And the public relations and social media is part of our contract.  All of this is made possible by the North Star Alliance which is promoting Maine’s Marine, Composites, and Boat Building Industry thanks to a USDOL grant. Continue Reading »

Tonight I had the pleasure of speaking to a lively and energized group of women at the monthly meeting of the Maine Women’s Network at the Weathervane Seafood Restaurant in South Portland.

As promised, here is my list of ten tips on Branding and Public Relations. I encourage the women who were in the audience to leave comments with their own thoughts on branding and experiences in the realm of public relations and marketing.

Also check out my White Paper on “How to Build a Stronger Brand Image Through Publc Relations,” or my white paper on “Harnessing the Power of Conversational Marketing.” Continue Reading »

I love my job.

I recently visited Brooklin Boat Yard where Steve White and his crew are building a 90 foot custom yacht.  That’s Brooklin, Maine, not Brooklyn, New York.  And Steve White is the grandson of the great writer E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web and the Elements of Style, among many other great books and essays.

I was there with Gary Jobson who is a renowned sailing broadcaster and writer. He produced a video ‘vignette’ about Steve which is posted on our Web site as well as the Maine Built Boats’ site and even on YouTube.  This Social Media program is part of an overall strategic public relations program which Nancy Marshall Communications has developed for the North Star Alliance Market Development Pillar here in Maine to promote the boat building, composites and marine trades industries.

It’s fascinating work.

Last Monday, I was in New York with the team from Maine’s Office of Tourism for the annual Taste of Maine Media Marketplace.

 John and Brendan Ready, aka the “Ready Brothers” were along as one of the tourism “PR Partners” with a table at the marketplace.

Here are two of the finest kind of Maine ‘boys.’ And they have a new take on an old Maine business. The Ready’s recently started “Catch a Piece of Maine.” They are selling lobster traps as if they were time shares. You can buy one of their traps for $2,995 a year and get all the lobsters that are caught in the trip delivered to you, along with all the fixings to make a real Maine lobster dinner. If you don’t want the lobsters delivered to you, they will deliver them to a family member, a client, or a friend. Not only that, but you can get to know the lobsterman who tends to your trap. He will send you emails and videos of the conditions, of his boat, and of the lobsters as he catches them. Imagine having a lobster bake in Milwaukee, Missoula, or Monterey, and watching a video of the lobsterman in Casco Bay, as you cook the lobsters and clams from Maine.

In this day and age when people want to know more about where their food comes from, this is a brilliant idea.  They plan to engage in Social Media to sell lobsters. Who woulda thought?  This is a great way to ‘ Catch a Piece of Maine.’ 

We’re getting yet another foot of snow at Sugarloaf this weekend. I can’t believe how much it has snowed this winter. Our total accumulation for the winter is now well over 100 inches. It’s the snowiest winter in over 30 years.

A lot of people say they are tired of it, but there are many people, like my family, who have figured out how to enjoy the snow.  We enjoy skiing as a family, and my boys are involved with competitive ski racing. My husband Jay is a weekend coach in the Sugarloaf/Carrabassett Valley Academy program. My son Jamie headed out at 8 this morning to ski the “pow” which is slang for “powder,” or “powdah” as some Mainers would say.

Yesterday I met my friend Vici Robinson and hiked into the new Hut in Carrabassett Valley. We saw Steve Minich and his cameraman, Kevin, who were producing a news story for WMTW News about the Huts and Trails with Alexa Dayton and Dave Herring. Alexa is the Marketing Manager and Dave is the Executive Director. They’re great people and they’ve got a big job ahead of them launching this exciting system of 12 huts from the Mahoosuc Mountains to Mooshead Lake across the state of Maine.

We saw Jamie Corriveau at the hut. He is the operations manager for the hut system and is very excited to be back in Carrabassett Valley after an extended hiatus. Back in the 70s and 80s, he worked for Peter Webber as his pilot and manager of the Sugarloaf Inn. Peter is my husband Jay’s uncle, so Jamie was involved with the extended family including Nana Webber, who was my husband’s grandmother and my inlaws, Dick and Joan Marshall.  He loves to reminisce about the old days of flying the family around and working at the Sugarloaf Inn, which Peter owned with his wife Martha. She passed away at the young age of 51 in 1996 after fighting Breast Cancer. Peter has devoted his life to building the Martha B. Webber Breast Cancer Center in Farmington at Franklin Memorial Hospital.

 Jamie told me about a group that had just stayed at the Carrabassett Valley Hut from Johnson and Wales College in Rhode Island. The group was guided by Russell Walters of Northern Outdoors Adventure Resort, one of my former clients.  Jamie told me that one of the girls had found the experience of staying at the hut to be among the high points of her lifetime. She had called her mom in NJ to tell her about stargazing from the Maine Woods where the sky was so clear. The mom asked her daughter if there was anything that the family could do for the hut and the girl said they could use a telescope. So Jamie thinks they might get a donation of a telescope this week. We started talking about how there will be so many amazing moments like this at the hut, that it would be great to document the moments in photos and words with a blog. People working at the huts could be the authors, and visitors to the huts could contribute their photos and stories as comments. This was just another example of how Social Media can be used to build communities, document memories, and promote nature-based tourism.

Vici is very involved with the Kingfield Pops which is an annual summer concert in the beautiful town of Kingfield.  She told me how excited she is about the Pops being involved with the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce and Lorna Nichols, its executive director.  I told her that the Pops could upload video to YouTube and create a Wikipedia listing, as well as populate the web with other content in order to optimize its social media online. Maybe we could record some podcasts with the music and the musicians as well.

All of these examples drive home the fact that it’s wonderful for me to be a part of so many social and professional networks in my day-to-day life, but all of these networks can ‘live’ and be reenforced online too, in Web sites, blogs, Wikis, podcasts and videos. That’s why they call it Social Media, and I find myself talking about it with everyone I know because it’s so exciting for a professional communicator like me.