My name is Ted Raymond with Allegra Marketing in Scottsdale, Arizona.  Social media has become a very important component of our self promotion.  We set out about 18 months ago to really be recognized as thought leaders in the integrated marketing space and one of the easy ways that we found to do that was to use social media to promote things like case studies, surveys that we’re conducting within specific verticals and then promoting that through Facebook and Twitter.  We’ve also begun to leverage other social medias like LinkedIn by actually doing some display ads and starting to target specific job titles of those individuals that we may be interested in and we think that we’ll continue to see growth in that area of our marketing communications.

In almost all of our cross media campaigns that we develop for clients now social media has become a component.  We will take existing social media communities and we’ll use those communities to drive people into campaigns.  We’ll also take the campaigns themselves to drive people back into social media to create a very symbiotic relationship to try and communicate and to engage those prospects on behalf of our clients.  

It has continued to add value to our clients.  Probably the most important thing is that in between large campaign pushes there is an opportunity to engage clients and keep it fresh.  We do a lot of work in the nonprofit space and social media is an outstanding way to communicate back to the constituents on how their money is being spent after an annual appeal for example.

In fact, we have used social media in certain nonprofit campaigns to actually promote donations even through social media, simple things like finding a corporate sponsor that says for everybody that responds to this survey the corporate sponsor will give the nonprofit $5 and really leverage the community to say share this with your friends and drive them into the campaign and had significant organic growth in email databases as well as in the social media community.