Ben Wright, Atlas' CEO, shares our latest thinking on how brands are built using Social Media tools.

1. How to Build a Community Brand in the Age of Social Media

2. Outline What is Social Media? What is a Place Brand? How Social Media can Help you Build a Place Brand Examples of Great Place Brands Experienced through Social Media Appropriate Goals for Brand Building Using Social Media Action Steps to Build a Brand Using Social Media Q+A Appendix: Background on Social Media Tools

3. Your Hosts Ben Wright CEO, Atlas Advertising benw@atlas-advertising.com www.twitter.com/atlasad Guillermo Mazier Business Development, Atlas Advertising guillermom@atlas-advertising.com

4. About Atlas Atlas Advertising helps economic developers reach national and international prospect and site selection audiences. We deliver branding, website development, GIS mapping, research, social media, and creative services professionally and with a staff experienced in economic development. Unlike firms with little or no economic development experience, Atlas Advertising uses a proven mix of economic development marketing tactics that generate interest from site selection audiences. Atlas Advertising is led by a former economic development practitioner and has worked with 50+ different economic development clients in 30 states. Our approach and experience means that our campaigns generate an average of three to ten times the response of other campaigns. Featured clients: Northeast Utilities State of Ohio Indy Partnership City of San Francisco Greater Phoenix Economic Council Greater Omaha Economic Development Partnership

6. Content Services

7. Research Services

9. Commercial Property databases

10. Business databases

11. Data Search (Data Tab)

12. Other Data Management (Map Overlays)

13. Community Data Management

14. GIS System Analytics

15. GIS Data Reporting

16. Data Widgets

18. To view this presentation: Visit our blog:http://blog.atlas-advertising.com And, join our LinkedIn Group: Next Gen Economic Development Marketers (Once you sign up, you will need to be approved) We look forward to having you!

19. What is Social Media? At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC). Source: Wikipedia

20. What is a place brand? The sum of all the characteristics, tangible and intangible, that make a development, city, state, or region unique.

21. How Social Media Can Help You Build a Place Brand

22. How Social Media can help you build a place brand It is a new channel for people to discover, read, and share information about your community. It can foster “many to many” dialogues about the most important issues and assets in your community. It can transform your board members, community advocates, and ordinary citizens into marketers (or critics) It facilitates relationships around information, issues, and assets in your community quickly, transparently, and flexibly.

23. Question: What are the things that are central to your brand? The heritage, reputation, and attributes of your community itself The heritage and reputation of your organization The information you have at the ready to tell a favorable story about your community relative to other locations The capability of your staff to be proactive and professional The network of influencers you have in your community that can mobilize around business expansion or retention

24. Which of these can’t be enhanced by a strong Social Media program? None!

25. Examples of Great Place Brands Experienced Through Social Media

26. Savannah, GA

27. Denver, CO

28. Bloomington-Normal, IL

29. Appropriate Goals for Brand Building Using Social Media

30. Recommended Goals Generate new prospect and investor inquiries Engage current prospects, stakeholders, investors, and the general public in economic development Move important community investment decisions forward Grow the reach of your organization by building your fan, follower, friend, web traffic, and connections base

31. What about negative comments? Building a brand using social media doesn’t create negative press. It you to manage and engage with that press. After much criticism for poor customer service, the direct-sell computer company earned the rather unfortunate moniker “Dell Hell.” (Googling the term results in a long list of links largely tied to customer dissatisfaction.) In response to this, Dell executives worked to improve customer relations and actively join in the conversation. Dell has even developed the property IdeaStorm—a community driven forum in which customers are invited to note problems, share suggestions with the company, and even assist fellow customers. Since then, some past critics have praised the company for their improvements and negative blog posts about the company have purportedly dropped from 49% to 22%. Read more

32. Action Steps to Build a Brand Using Social Media

33. Step 1: Create an online persona for your brand What are the attributes of your community itself? Great technology community? Low cost? Business friendly? Outstanding companies? What is the heritage and reputation of your organization? Have you made big deals happen? Have you led some big wins? What information do you have that others don’t have? What are you expert in? Is your staff proactive and professional? How can you show that? Who is in your network? How do they fit in to your community’s persona?

34. Step 2: Pay off your persona with real content. Take your community’s best attributes and seed or join the communities that have already formed around them. If your organization is a long time leader – act like it. Be authoritative. If you are an upstart, talk about things that push the envelope. Make all the information that you have that is legal to share completely available on your website. Make a big deal on social media of releasing it. Set a calendar to do so. Engage key staff members whose work can be made more efficient by social media to participate. Have them own key areas of your persona. Do the same thing with your network, including innovators, CEOs, and others who can own something valuable.

35. Step 3: Create reasons to engage/comment Be relevant – always tying back to how your persona meets the needs of your audiences: Be timely – don’t be the last one to post or comment on an important community issue. Be the first. Be different – take positions that only you can take. Augment them with information only you have. Be edgy, open, conversational – this is what people expect. After all, they are relating to a persona now.

36. Step 4: Give away real value that can be consumed or forwarded Inside information Customized research Tidbits from meetings Stories from the road Legislative updates Official positions

37. Q+A

38. Looking for a jumpstart to your social media efforts? Try our social media services. Initial Review Strategy Development Training Sessions Atlas Assistance in Implementation

39. Contact Atlas Contact information: 2601 Blake Street, Suite 301 Denver, CO 80205 Contact: Ben Wright t: 303.292.3300 x 210 benw@Atlas-Advertising.com www.Atlas-Advertising.com LinkedIn Profile| LinkedIn Group | Twitter| Blog| Slidespace

40. Background on Social Media Tools

42. More than 300 million active users, 150 million once a day

43. More than two-thirds of facebook users are outside of college

44. Average user has 120 friends on the site

45. More than 900 million photos uploaded to the site each month

46. More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week

49. Your Fans

50. Status Updates

51. Inbox

52. Applications

53. Advertising

55. Usage up 1300% in last 12 months

56. Fastest growing site in the Member Communities category at 1,382%.

57. Tweeters are not primarily teens or college students as you might expect:

58. Largest user group on Twitter is 35-49 year olds; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience.

61. Who you follow

62. Who follows you

63. Mobile accesshttp://twitter.com

65. Execs in all of the Fortune 500

66. 60% of incomes over $93,000

67. Segments:

68. Executives: 28%

69. Networkers/Consultants: 30%

70. Late Adopters: 22%

71. Exploring options: 20%

74. Your Contacts

75. Your Connections

76. Status updates

77. Groups

78. InMail Feature

79. Applications

80. Advertising

82. Video on YouTube can be viewed through their site, as well as embedded in websites, blogs and other locations throughout the web

83. Every minute 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube

84. 51% of users are on the site weekly

85. YouTube is an independent subsidiary of Google and YouTube videos are searchable and viewable on Google

88. Subscriptions

90. Flickr also supports video upload

91. As of October 2009, it hosts more than 4 billion images

92. Flickr is owned by Yahoo!

95. Photo sets/collections

96. Photo descriptions

98. Launched 2009 – 500,000 users in first year

99. Integrated with facebook and Twitter

100. Badges

103. Integration with facebook

104. Integration with Twitter

105. Friends

106. Tips

108. There are over 200,000,000 blogs online

109. Blogs tend to rank high in search

110. Atlas blogs are hosted through Wordpress. Wordpress currently has 7,237 available plugins for things like sidebar polls, event calendars, Twitter integration, Share It and more

111. Blogs, in 2008, had 77.7 million unique visitors

114. Categories

115. Archives

116. Authors

117. RSS feed

118. About us page

119. Search