SIGMA::BLOG

Last week, marketers from all around the tri-state area converged in New Jersey at our Fuel for Thought conference to learn, share experiences and develop ideas to get a handle on social media marketing.  There’s a lot we covered/learned from each session and we’ll be sharing key highlights and materials here on our blog.

We’ll kick-off the first conference recap with John Battelle’s (CEO/Founder, Federated Media) keynote on “All Media is Social.  Now What?”  John’s keynote was brilliantly right-on-topic to get us all kindling new ideas.  Here are four key areas he covered:

1.  The Rise of Conversational Marketing: First we declared our intentions (what we want) through search.  Then we declared our relations (social graph — who we are as defined by how we are connected to other people) on sites like Facebook.  Finally, during the past year we declared our utterances (what we are doing, what we are interested in, etc.) on sites like Twitter.  When you put all these declarations together — intention, relations and utterances, you have an economy of conversations. (more…)

A year ago, we launched the Fuel for Thought Series with the goal to create a forum for marketers where we could share the most relevant trends, insights and smart practices that would fuel growth and innovation for their brands.  We made a promise to keep all content unbiased and free of sales pitches to ensure an authentic, no-strings-attached environment for marketers to engage.

Our first event last year focused on finding the optimum digital marketing solutions.  Geoff Ramsey, CEO/Founder of eMarketer shared his Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn and it sure got our attendees engaged in various discussions to help them jump-start planning in the right direction for the coming year.  Today, we’re thrilled to see that many of the attendees have implemented steps built from those insights/conversations into their marketing programs.  We as an agency also applied those insights and it helped us innovate and grow during the downturn. (more…)

Why should I?  What does it matter?  How can one person change the world?  We’ve all heard the phrase, “Think globally, act locally,” but how often do we actually heed the meaning of that phrase?

The needs of the world just seem so overwhelming, right?  We find ourselves saying, “Why bother? We can’t fix everything!” and then doing nothing.  I think that’s probably a very logical solution according to our selfish, perfectionist, overachieving natures –  “If it can’t be done right, why do it at all?“  Sound familiar?

While it is true that one person can’t solve all the troubles of the world, we at Sigma have realized that everyone holds great power to make a big difference.  The power that one person has to improve the quality of life for a few, or the ability that one person has to lend a helping hand, is tremendous.

We recently created a community outreach program called Team Hercules (we have a tradition that lends itself to all things Greek).  There were two reasons we created Team Hercules.  Reason #1: It’s a program that empowers all of our employees to reach out beyond themselves and beyond the confines of these office walls to give back and better our community.  And Reason #2: I’ll get into that in a minute, at the end of this post. (more…)

One of the coolest things about Twitter is all the creative applications and tools that are out there to further profile, search and engage with this micro-blogging platform.  There are over 1900 Twitter clients available as Twitter’s open API makes it easy for anyone to build their own client and the list grows every day.  Below are some of the favorites we use to enhance our Twitter experience.  Let us know if we’re missing your favorite Twitter tool.

[Never forget to safeguard your Twitter password and only use it on sites you trust.]

Twitter Search, Trends & News

Search.Twitter – Twitter’s own search engine (formerly Summize).  Type in any search term and see what’s happening on Twitter for that keyword.  You can subscribe to a search via RSS.

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. (more…)