social media strategies matter

(TAMPA) The Tampa Bay chapters of Florida Public Relations Association (FPRA) and the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) co-sponsored a half-day professional development social communications meeting that spotlighted the intersection of mobile, social and point-of-purchase (POP) media. Read more about how POP can deliver a targeted message here.

Presenters included Pinstripe Marketing’s Ginger Reichl, Bryan Marks from Irvin Steel, Mad Mobile’s Greg Schmitzer, and newly named Public Relations and Marketing VP for Moffitt Cancer Center Joe Hice.

The event’s main focus was on management issues faced by both users and creators of social media, including how emerging technologies are leveraging the nearly universal engagement of social networking by communicators to capture the interest of consumer/users.

The five-hour seminar included segments on reputation management, criteria for creating a successful social strategy, applying rich content creative to a digital media interface, and maximizing web content for engagement using mobile media.

hice back home

Highlight speaker was local writer, editor and pr pro now returned home Joe Hice, after mar-com stints at Harley-Davidson, University of Florida, North Carolina State, and Segway. Hice, a former business editor at the Tampa Tribune, drew heavily on his experiences at two of the country’s top universities to make the case for integrating social media into a client or company media relations plan.

Hice stressed the need for proper budgeting of time, talent and dollars for a social strategy to have any hope of succeeding. It’s not enough to blog, tweet or post to your facebook wall, according to the well traveled communicator. Engagement comes from the intersection of several metrics, including number of connections and choosing the right platform for the message.

Tampa’s Mad Mobile CEO Greg Schmitzer brought his 33-pixel button message to an audience that was mostly unfamiliar with the advantages of a mobile optimized web site in an ecommerce world. Not just web lite, Mad Mobile’s primary focus is on designing a successful retailer-consumer interface capable of quickly presenting options and concluding transactions.