Since 2006, DoubleTake Marketing has transformed baggage carousels at 23 North American airports with its patent pending AdSpressive Graphics and a variety of creative, out-of-the-box campaigns for clients including Toyota, Harrah’s, and Overstock.com.

In addition to reaching nearly one million travelers who check bags daily, the DoubleTake Marketing platform offers a breakthrough advertising placement that provides a potentially interactive experience for the viewer. A creative Harrah’s campaign transformed a baggage carousel at Kansas City International Airport into a larger-than-life roulette wheel, prompting travelers to bet with each other on which number and color their bag would land.

DoubleTake Marketing was created when one of the company’s founders, Michael Gleeson, was waiting for his luggage and realized that everyone was staring at the carousel. DoubleTake Marketing was created to capitalize on this dull waiting time by introducing vibrant, moving ads directly into consumers’ lines of vision, offering travelers unexpected boredom relief and advertisers prime access to an ideal, affluent demographic.

For more information on DoubleTake
LinkedIn
• Zack Clark, co-founder and CEO
• Michael Gleeson, co-founder
• DoubleTake Marketing
Flickr
• All Photo Stream

YouTube
• Durability
• Fox News
• Baggage Carousel Advertising Install Process

Facebook
• Facebook.com/DoubleTake Marketing

PHOTO CREDIT: GeishaBoy500

• If you are a household brand name, like Virgin America, by all means use it. Followers will be looking for you.
• If you are a well known in your category and people are already seeking you out, use your name in your handle. Again, people will want to find and follow you because you’ve already built a personal reputation offline.
• If you fall into the category of virtually unknown, like most of us, consider using a descriptive name in your title, for example @winedinetv. Building my following would have been much easier had I used “public relations” or “social media” in my twitter handle.
• If you use your company name and/or your personal name and you don’t have a significant offline following, describe what you do in your profile.

2. Fill Out Your Profile Completely

• Think of this as your introduction to your followers. If you were at a networking event you would introduce yourself and at some point get around to telling people what you do for a living, your philosophy on life, the books you’ve written; whatever you want people to know about you.

3. Post A Photo Of Yourself

• This proves you are indeed, human. Leaving the Twitter icon up looks like you might be a spammer (this is the equivalent of talking to a wall at a party and no one wants to relive THAT experience). We found when we had our logo posted we did not get as many followers. When we posted my personal picture, the numbers of followers increased greatly. Again, going back to @winedinetv, they use their brand name, but put pictures of themselves up on their page.

4. Do Not Lock Your Updates

• Locking your updates tells potential followers that you’re not interested in having a two-way conversation with them. We have a client who was complaining that no one was following them, but they had locked their updates. We unlocked their updates (and changed a few other things) and followers poured in.

5. Follow Your Followers

• The whole idea behind participating in social media is to have a two way conversation with the folks in your group. If you don’t follow people who follow you, it’s like you are staring mutely back at someone who ask you a question.
• There are a few exceptions and I may be a prude, but there are some people who I don’t follow back because of the content that they are tweeting. Some of that stuff I just don’t want to see pop up on my screen!
• If you don’t follow your followers, you may find that they stop following you.

6. Follow Your Follower’s Followers

• If your followers like your content, their followers are likely to be interested in the same topics.

7. Be Consistent With Your Tweet Content

• This allows people to find and follow you based on content. With few exceptions, I consistently tweet about social media marketing, public relations, wine and restaurants. If someone is considering whether to follow me, they will have a good idea of what I’m all about and decide if that’s information they are interested in receiving.
• If your business is geographically specific, i.e. you run a furniture store in West Hollywood and you know your customers come from a 15 mile radius, you need to mention “West Hollywood” in your tweets as many times as appropriate.

8. Give Back To The Community

• It’s fine to send people to your website for specials, deals, information etc. But if you only do that, you will earn a bad reputation as a taker, you will lose followers and break the trust of your followers.
• Find articles that talk about your area of interest or retweet other posts.

9. Avoid Following People With Locked Updates

• Do you really want to try to have a conversation with someone who is already telling you they don’t want to talk to you?
• I have found that these people are less likely to follow back

10. Tweet (seriously)

• I realize this seems obvious, but clients will tell me that they can’t understand why no one is following them, but they posted three totally lame (and you know who you are) updates months ago.
• You need to post on a regular basis with relevant, helpful information. Except for your parents, few people care that you can’t find matching socks in the morning.
• We recommend that client’s tweet at least every 48 hours.

11. Don’t Over Do It

• If you are tweeting too frequently, unless you are reporting breaking news, you are probably sending out too much information too frequently that can overwhelm people and turn them away.

Check out our 26 Tips On Social Media Participation.

PHOTO CREDIT: AcousticSkyy

As of a week ago, there were 60 million worldwide bloggers talking about everything including wigs, wine, wedding bling and grandma’s recipes. According to Technorati, nearly one hundred thousand new blogs are created each day. Consumer generated media is so powerful it helped elect the most unlikely of candidates, President Barack Obama, against absolutely impossible odds.

On the flip side, traditional media as you know it is taking its last gasping breaths. As you may be aware, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has ceased publication and two-thirds of respondents to a recent Nielson survey didn’t care. It was the city’s oldest and most influential news source and it had become obsolete to advertisers and consumers.

The reporters we’ve relied on for decades are going the way of the dinosaurs by virtue of reduced space for editorial, daily layoffs, and the rise of the proletariat blogger. Soon, reporters will no longer roam the hallowed halls of some of America’s greatest news sources but be relegated to fighting for their digital voice among the masses.

The ascendency of the blogger and the ubiquity of social media have transformed the practice of media relations and the very definition of influencer.

About four years ago when we were opening a glitzy Hollywood celebrity-filled restaurant, the Los Angeles Times gave the Italian restaurant a much deserved glowing review. The client’s hopes were very high that the article would fill the restaurant with happy patrons. To everyone’s surprise, the phones were nearly silent. “Odd,” we thought. “It must have been a fluke.” The week after the feature print story ran, we launched the restaurant’s on- and offline word of mouth campaign including outreach to some of our friends who were running restaurant review blogs and an email campaign to Ink Foundry’s exclusive foodie database. By noon on the day that both the email announcement was distributed and a positive review ran in a blog, the not-insignificantly-sized restaurant filled its reservation quota for the entire week.

Oprah talks about the “a-ha moment” and this was it for us. We realized without a doubt that traditional media had lost it standing as the preeminent influencer and that social media was changing the way we do business. We learned from that and subsequent experience with everything from luxury automobiles, organic clothing, travel, and live entertainment that the return on investment for social media marketing far surpassed its traditional media cousins.

Is traditional media totally dead? Don’t count them out just yet. Who doesn’t want to see their brand in the New York Times? I know I still do and our clients feel the same way. But if you are relying on traditional media to move the needle for your brand, or recommending a traditional media-only strategy for your clients, you are clinging to an unreliable and risky proposition.

When it comes to getting someone to read or take action after viewing content, it turns out PR related functions – namely, placing your client in a story – are more effective than online advertising tactics.

According to an ARAnet poll by Opinion Research Corporation, cited today by eMarketer:

Compared with banner ads, pop-up ads, e-mail offers and sponsored links, articles that include brand information were most likely to lead US Internet users to read – and act.

Continue article

Now for the recommendation: Michelle MacPhearson is a rock star. She’s not our client and she wasn’t my college roommate (although she seems like fun) she’s straightforward and really likes to help people understand social media. And guess what, she actually knows what she’s talking about. Check her out: SocialMediaDaily

The San Francisco office is thankful that I’ve found an outlet for my frustration, they hope it’s going to reduce the expletives emerging from my office every time I receive a post about some junior level practitioner with an over inflated dose of self importance claiming to be a social media expert.

Next, I’ll post an article about how to determine who is an expert and who’s not.

This holiday season we recommend you make your Vodka personal! Who wants a just a gorgeous bottle filled with a luxury spirit when you can have one with your astrological sign on it. Zodiac Vodka is the smoothest spirit this side of the cosmos, is US-made with Idaho spuds and a Rocky Mountain fed water source, then masterfully distilled and elegantly displayed in a crisp frosted bottle with one of twelve astrological signs and its corresponding prediction. So invite the vodka lover on your list to raise a glass to the holiday season, and let Zodiac be their guide through the New Year!

Suggested retail price is $25 for 750ml. Zodiac Vodka can be purchased online