We are looking for a Social Media Research Intern

We are quickly approaching our year and half mark and as a result of (and thanks to) this, we are looking to add to our team.

For 3 months (starting in June), we will need someone to live in the online social web and help our accounts team with research and opportunity spotting. You will be responsible for sourcing relevant and powerful media outlets and individual influencers as they relate to a clients’ goals and targeted audience. The Social Media Research Intern is integral supportive role in helping us grow our clients’ communities and supporting our engagement driven campaigns and programs. Our ideal candidate is entrepreneurial spirited, can be self managed, has the hunger to learn and is a problem solver.

And no, we will never ask you to make or fetch anyone coffee.

View and apply here. Good luck!
NOTE: After the 3 month period pending performance evaluation results, we are open to considering monetary compensation with this role moving forward.

Pinterest by numbers

By now you’ve heard of Pinterest. You probably have an account. too. But, if you’re like most people, you’re still unsure of what all the hooplah about Pinterest is. Tamba, out of England, recently put together an infographic hoping to explain Pinterest. (Click on image to enlarge.)

We’ve started using Pinterest with a number of our clients. Initially our objective is to see what results we get for our clients with Pinterest. If you’re using Pinterest and seeing tangible results, we’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.

Introducing: Social Media 101 Class

Over the past year we have spoken with hundreds of professionals and small and medium size business owners about the value of social media. Many of them have become satisfied clients. However, there are still many more people who want to understand how social media can positively impact their business.

So we’ve decided to hold an introductory course on social media. We’re calling it Social Media 101. Taking place at The Work Republic in the north end of Toronto these 90 minute classes will take place on Saturday May 26 and Monday May 28.

There are so many names that we’ve all been hearing over the past 5 years. Names such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google + and Pinterest.

Have you heard of at least one of these social media platforms? Are you curious about how to use these tools for your business? If you’ve answered one of these questions with “Yes!”, then this class is for you.

What is Social Media and what does it mean for my business?  This is the question that we’ll help attendees answer in this introductory session.

In this 90 minute session, we will lead the group in an informative discussion on:

• What is Social Media?
• Why is Social Media important?
• How can you use these tools to grow your personal and business brand?
• How can these tools help you grow your business?

So here’s what you have to do:

Go to Social Media 101 now and register. We can only accomodate 20 people per session and tickets will sell out fast!

NOTE: Attendees are encouraged to register for only one of these classes. They will both cover the same content. ALSO, please bring your laptop. Don’t forget to make sure you’ve powered it up. There will be wifi at this workshop. Coffee and water will be served.

Our thirdocean family affair

thirdocean has officially been in existence for just over a year. Our business is built around investing in efforts to develop and manage relationships between our clients/partners and their communities or family members

We figured we could afford to spend an evening winding down and enjoying a casual gathering for ourselves and some of our very own close thirdocean family members – including some clients and partners. We are so grateful for their support. To those who made it out on April 16th, thank you. We hope you had a great time.

Special thanks goes to Maurice Chang for taking photos for the evening!

Social Media Olympics

The last Winter Olympics was the first time in Olympic history that fans had the opportunity to choose which “screen” they wanted to consume their Olympic fix from. Mobile, web, and traditional screens offered round the clock coverage from Vancouver and Whistler.

The upcoming 2012 London games are less than 100 days away. And this will be the first time that social media will play a massive role.  Athletes, the Olympic movement, corporate sponsors and agencies are creating social and digital campaigns to communicate, socialize an spread their “brand” message.

Athletes:

A couple of days ago, the Olympics unveiled The Olympic Athletes’ Hub.  According to their press release,

The Hub is a searchable directory of Olympians that provides posts from their Facebook and Twitter accounts and other information designed to connect people with their favourite athletes. Using the Hub’s search function, users can effortlessly locate athletes by country or by sport. Over 1,000 verified Olympians have already joined the Hub, and the number will continue to grow as the countdown to London 2012 continues and word of the Hub spreads.

“The Olympic Athletes’ Hub was born out of our desire to connect Olympic athletes and their fans more intimately than ever before,” said Alex Huot, Head of Social Media for the IOC. “With the launch of the Hub, we are creating a paradigm shift in the communication around the Olympic Games, and we are excited to offer this opportunity for greater engagement and interaction between Olympians and their fans.”

Sponsors:

Official Olympic Sponsors are also jumping on the social media bandwagon.  Coca-Cola, which claims to be the logest continuous corporate supporter of the Olympics has put together a fantastic trans-media campaign that aims to bring teens closer to the Olympic Games and to sport in general. The campaign is called Move To The Beat and “is all about getting teens excited about London 2012 by tapping into their passion for music and fusing it with sport,” said Grammy award-winning producer Mark Ronson. “[It] uses urban culture to excite and engage teens and is a really cool way of inspiring teens to get involved with the London 2012 Olympic Games.”

The campaign actively engages teens by encouraging them to ‘collect beats’ through Facebook to gain access to exclusive content and prizes. Teens, through the  www.facebook.com/coca-cola page, will also be able to discover the beats that feature in the Move to the Beat song, download wall papers and screen savers of imagery from the wall, and will be given a preview to the Move to the Beat television commercial on Facebook ahead of its broadcast release.

Agencies:

Agencies have been at the forefront of bringing all these players together.  Sarah McBride of Reuters recently wrote a piece called Social media is gold for Olympic advertisers. In her article she quotes a senior member of the Leo Burnett agency: ”Back in 2008, it was very much about paid media,” said Mark Renshaw, chief innovation officer at Leo Burnett, a unit of No. 3 advertising agency Publicis, referring to the last summer Olympics. “Now the reason they want to have a relationship (with consumers) is to generate shared media.”

What will be interesting to see is how consumers embrace this year’s “social media Olympics”.

Developing content for both Brand & Community

Based on our thirdocean definition of Online Community Management, an online Community Manager has a few groups to pay attention to, including: 1) The Brand he/she represents and 2) The Community he/she speaks to

It is important that our staff at thirdocean is not only kept up to date on movements in the social media realm, but also how they are applied to the fundamentals of marketing and communications. Developing content that is relevant to a target audience but that also reflects a brand’s overall marketing strategy is really, nothing new. However, with new applications of technology – the ways in which we do so changes. We now have a new set of tools and tactics that we can play around with that enable us to complete these tasks effectively.

This morning, our Community Manager was given a quick refresher on how to develop content with consideration to tone and style. There was a focus on both the brand side as well as the community side. It’s really a juggle of managing both relationships.

For instance, I had brought up a past example of when I was developing marketing programs for a client in the past. After an initial brief, in order to properly understand the brand and what I could work with, I had to sift through file cabinets of marketing collateral. White papers, flyers, brand bibles, etc. The whole nine yards. Now, as brands are further investing in digital communications – much of this collection and research process can be done online.

It is also important as a Community Manager to understand the deep ins and outs of the community side. To become immersed in the communities Community Managers are to speak to is absolutely essential. Attend the community events, Subscribe to those blogs, participate in Tweet chats, and Like and Follow who the target audience turns to. Position yourself in the shoes of the consumer (or targeted consumer).

Great Community Managers should have valid insight in to how large or small the gap is between brands and the communities they are trying to establish strong relationships with. Thus, becoming deeply immersed and developing an understanding in perceived values from both groups is extremely valuable.

We would love to hear your tips on how you manage both the brand and the community. How do you make sure that you are effectively engaging, speaking to and representing both groups?

Social Media + your Marketing Media mix

It is important to develop deep and strong relationships between brands and consumers/clients. One of the ways this can be accomplished is through managing and representing brands in much more experiential, interactive and humanized ways for their communities. Social Media can really be a strong asset to help fuel this. However, should not be treated as a stand alone. In fact, if you are looking to build rock solid relationships utilizing social media is going to be much more effective when weaved in to your existing and planned efforts.
We’re talking I-N-T-E-G-R-A-T-I-O-N.

For instance, events (the offline kind) are one of the great handful of ways to spark these types of deeply rooted relationships. The challenge here is that for the most part while audiences are experiencing a brand online, the experience from offline events is just that – offline and in many cases very different. There seems to be a lack of integration between offline initiatives – like events and online initiatives – like social media content program.

While platforms should be treated differently from one another (as they have their own strengths and weaknesses) – there should certainly be some level of consistency as they are being leveraged to represent one brand – the same brand. Not doing so can result in confusion from the community on the market positioning, brand, value proposition, etc. – impacting the level of participation from community members and valuable reach, which of course impacts the overall success of marketing and media efforts. Say ‘no’ to fragmented efforts and ‘yes’ to cohesively leading towards the same goals – like a school of fish would.

As for how this relates to what we do? The more integrated our efforts are with our clients’ existing and “to be” media, marketing and overall business initiatives/programs – the better our results will be.

Twitter for Small Business

Are you a small business owner? Have you ever wondered how you can use social media to drive measurable results? If you answered yes, then this blog post os for you.

Last month, American Express (Amex) launched a program with Twitter called Tweet Your Way To Savings. Our friends at Delvinia wrote a blog post about it earlier this month.

In short, the program worked like this: Eligible Amex cardholders sync’ed their cards with their Twitter account. When they visit a Program merchant partner they would then tweet using a special #hashtag such as #AmexRetailer. The cardholder would then receive a response on Twitter from Amex with a special discount code to redeem at the retailer upon using their Amex credit card. A win, win, win situation for all parties: Amex gets a cut of the sale, the merchant makes a sale and the customer receives a discount.

Now this week, Twitter and Amex have teamed up again to offer Promoted Products to all their eligible cardholders, merchants and small business account holders.

Before this program, most small businesses were unable to afford advertising on Twitter. With this program, the merchant is able to control how much they want to spend per user, per day, and per campaign. This allows the small business owner to understand and control their costs while taking advantage of the amplifying nature of Twitter.

We think this is a great opportunity for small businesses to start targeting and engaging with their potential audience on the same level playing field as their larger competition. However, small businesses must understand that as their following grows so does their need to invest in engaging with this community on a regular basis.

Are you a small business owner? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this new program from Amex and Twitter. Feel free to comment below or engage with us on Twitter at @wearethirdocean.

Social Media Workshop at PwC

Earlier this month we had the opportunity to lead a workshop focusing on social media as it relates to the business-to-business realm. It was a lively 75 minute workshop mostly filled with discussion and interaction amongst the attendees who were all from the marketing department at PwC (Price Waterhouse Coopers).

We didn’t video tape the workshop, but we do have the presentation below. We hope you enjoy. And if you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment or find us on Twitter