Building a company’s valuation is instrumental to a company’s success. Using marketing communications techniques by integrating social media with traditional media is one way to build a better brand and value. Big Fix’s Senior Vice President of Marketing, David Appelbaum, knows how to create innovative, powerful programs and shares his thoughts with Jennifer Jones in this 7 minute podcast.

Figuring out what is a best social media strategy for a corporation is now easier with KickApps. The company provides on-demand social media, online video and widgets applications to grow online audiences. Marketing Voices talked to Michael Chin, Senior VP of Marketing for KickApps and learns how to best use Facebook as part of a corporate social media strategy.

Who is in your social circle? What influence do they have on you and what you purchase? Shiv Singh, VP of Social Media at Avenue A Razorfish thinks your peers have enormous influence on what you do and what you buy. Talking to Jennifer Jones, Shiv delves into how marketers should best use peer influence to their advantage and where he has seen peer influencers have the greatest impact.

Who would ever think that a financial services company would be innovative about marketing? Paula Drum is vice president of marketing for H&R Block. In this podcast, she explains how programs using Twitter, Second Life and other onlines venues have had impressive success. As Drum tells Jennifer Jones, one of their great surprises was how much human capital they had to spend to make the programs work. She advises all marketers to truly understand just how much personnel commitment it takes to implement such extensive programs.

Economists are hinting if not insisting that the U.S. is in a recession. Most often marketers are hit hard by a recession, as they and their budgets are the first to get cut. Forrester’s Josh Bernoff gives tips on how marketers should be thinking about social media now and what to do given this environment. Bernoff also talks about his upcoming book on social marketing and media: Groundswell that he is co-authoring with Forrester’s Charlene Li. He spoke with Jennifer Jones for this Marketing Voices podcast.

Influence, impact, engagement. How should marketing executives be thinking about measurement today? Margaret Coles, COO of Factor TG, a marketing measurement and accountability company, says marketers have to start with their target audiences and decide what tools to use based on who they are. Coles tells Marketing Voices listeners to start by deciding to measure something now and just get started.

Microblogging is a social media tool that allows users to send brief updates to public and private networks. Peter Kim, Senior Analyst of Forrester Research tells how marketers are using the medium today and what best practices are for its use. Kim reports that there really are no rules for use of Twitter and that marketers should be enormously creative when devising a social media strategy to use microblogging. Kim’s Forrester report is available at:

www.forrester.com/marketingvoices.

Kim’s blog is:

ww.beingpeterkim.com