1. Social Media Marketing: Getting with the Program – Sigma’s tips on the best ways for an organization to embrace social media
2. Five Phases of Social Media Marketing – Social Computing Journal listed out five distinct phases to successfully leverage a social media program: Discover, Strategy, Skills, Execution, Maintenance.
3. How-To: Search the Social Web – Ultimate Toolkit – Robin Broitman from Interactive Insights Group is best known for her Superlists and this is one of our favorites. She has gathered a wide range of free resources, websites and services that help you find, filter and monitor the social web.
4. AdAge’s Digital A-List 2009 includes a collection of reports on the innovators (marketers, media, products) currently redefining marketing relationships with consumers.
5. The Best Social Media Marketing – Compiled by Zeus Jones, this blog post rounded up some of the best SMM programs currently in the market.

SIGMA IN THE NEWS
A little plug for our agency. We are thrilled to be working with Water-Jel, our newest client and the world leader in emergency burn care treatment.

NEW DATA
Do You Know What Men Do Online? At last, a summary of male Internet users in the U.S. by eMarketer. Highlighted findings – 53% of males spent more than one hour per day on the Internet, compared with just 42% of females. Did you know that 15% of men have never been online?

AROUND TWITTERVILLE
One of the best advantages from Twitter is all the creative applications and tools that allow you to further profile, search and engage with this micro-blogging platform. Below are a couple of new tools we found this week that can be quite useful.

1. Twazzup – An alternative Twitter search engine. It has the basic functionality of search.twitter.com, but is faster, has a better UI and offers additional useful resources.
2. TweetBuzzer – Tracks the top 100 tweeted brands. We especially like the “Track Your Favorite Brand” feature, which summarizes the number of tweets and impressions during the past 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days.
3. In case you missed it last week, Mashable’s article on the 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates is a must-read.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK
This one’s for our Friday Breakfast. Anyone want to serve this? Cooking Egg On a Macbook Pro.

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What lessons and best practices are out there for marketers in this economy?  We’ve gathered few AdAge articles that provide great fuel for thoughts:

1. Philp Geier’s 10 Principles for Bad Times that Work in Good Times – Adapt, Motivate, Focus Efforts, Stay True To Your Vision, Communicate, Innovate, Seize New Opportunities, Integrate Marketing, Retain Credibility and Inspire Customers are 10 principles we should harness right now.
2. Study:  Cutting Spending Hurts Brands Long Term – Based on TNS Media Intelligence data that revealed  brands that cut spending in downturns lost shares to private labels.
3. Don’t Damage Your Brand for Short-Term Gains in a Recession – Reminds us that marketing is a long-term proposition and brands that change strategies to cope with short-term problems can bring on irreplaceable damage.

SIGMA IN THE NEWS

Last week, our humble ad agency in Northern NJ was featured on CNN and this week on ABC.  What’s all the buzz about?  It’s Creativity Saves Jobs and Inspires Empolyees as explained by Shannon Morris (President, Sigma).

NEW MARKETING & ADVERTISING DATA

1. IAB reports Internet advertising grew 10% last year, outpacing TV. Search advertising dominated with 45% of total online advertising market share, followed by display ads, classified and rich media/digital video.
2. Jay Sears from ContextWeb points out at SES-NY that only 5% of consumer’s time is spent searching.  Therefore if you only use search to reach your online audience, you are missing 95% of opportunities.
3. A recent study by McPheters & Company found that in a half hour period, magazines deliver more than twice the number of ad impressions as TV and more than 6 times those delivered online.
4. Borrell Associates reported that last year, local TV station sites surpassed newspapers in 22 of 80 markets in terms of unique visitors.

WEEKLY TIPS

Mashable’s 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence offers the right way to create a profile, how to show different content to Fans and non-Fans and much more to maximize your presence on Facebook.

AROUND TWITTERVILLE

1. During the past year, Twitter has grown 1,200% in members.  It seems everyone’s joining the Twitter bandwagon, but is Twitter right for you?  Here is a great article on the Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet (if you have any one of them on your list).
2. The first Twitter scavenger hunt (hosted by HostelBookers.com) is taking place around Europe this week.   Join the hunt or follow the journey.

INTRODUCTION TO…

This week, we introduce just one site – SingleFunction.  This website showcases a variety of sites that have one purpose and one function.  Go check it out.  I found a lot of neat single function websites.

VIDEO SNACKING

The Brilliance of Shepherds by Samsungis the video pick of the week. Additional viral video ad campaigns are posted here and please keep in mind that ‘viral is a result, not a goal/strategy‘.

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