Talking to Sophie Shiatis, Vice President of Ecommerce Strategies at PRWeb, I learned about the latest trends they are seeing given the hundreds of clients they are servicing. Adding images, and sound either through video or podcasts is becoming the norm for press releases today. People are not using press releases to drive media results, but instead drive understanding by using different forms of communication. Video is proliferating and as Sophie explains, it is not expensively created video, but instead using inexpensive cameras to improve text content.

Social Media Strategist, Eric Schwartzman talked to Marketing Voices about his newly released study highlights, and the findings were enlightening.

Public relations professionals (not the marketing pros) at corporations are taking the lead in managing the organizations use of social media communications channels, in this 13 minute podcast, Eric discusses other salient findings from the study by iPressroom, PRSA, Trendstream and Korn Ferry International.

KickApps is a social CRM platform that enables companies to create online engagement experiences, used by marketers, customer support and product development teams. Michael Chin, a repeat interview for me on Marketing Voices, talked about his latest campaigns for Lea and Perrins and Ovation TV. Lea and Perrins used a $5,000 prize contest to drive engagement and Ovation TV held a Battle of the Nutcracker Contest. Chin also tells me that despite the recession, KickApps business is going gangbusters. Good to hear for social media and marketing!

I was intrigued about how a mom blogger, author, publisher, consultant built her business into a multi-million dollar entity using social media.. Talking to Stacey Kannenberg who lives in Wisconsin, I learned that she started with a blog then built from there, and has now sold more than 60,000 books all through using social media. She is a real success story about how to use social media wisely. Find her at:
cedarvalleypublishing.com