Entries Tagged 'SMB San Diego' ↓

We’re approaching our 10th session here in sunny San Diego and our featured speaker this month is Jessica Crawford.  Jessica is the marketing manager of Birch Aquarium at Scripps in La Jolla, CA.   Birch Aquarium is the public exploration center for the world-renowned Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.  Perched on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the aquarium features more than 60 habitats of fishes and invertebrates from the cold waters of the pacific Northwest to the tropical waters of Mexico and beyond.  An interactive museum showcases research discoveries by Scripps scientists on climate, earth and ocean science.  Scripps oceanography was founded in 1903 and has maintained a public aquarium and science museum for more than a century.  More than 400,000 people, including more than 40,000 school children visit the Aquarium each year.  The aquarium’s mission is to provide ocean science education, to interpret Scripps research and to promote ocean conservation.

Jessica began working at the Aquarium in 2007, after spending several years as a newspaper reporter.  She’ll be discussing how Birch Aquarium has integrated social media into their marketing program.  She’ll discuss strategy and tactics they’ve used to help promote ocean conservation along with many other messages.  She has a lot of fun tweeting on behalf of fish.

Follow Birch Aquarium on Twitter @Birch_aquarium

Event Details:

Where: Souplantation, 3960 West Point Loma Blvd. San Diego, CA 92110

When: December 9, 2009…7:30am-9:00am

Parking: Plenty of parking in the parking lot!

Cost: Free…Bring a friend of 2, but please RSVP

Bonus: Pastries, coffee and fruit will be provided

This month’s sponsor is Souplantation.  Founded in 1978 in San Diego, California, Souplantation currently operates 112 salad buffet-style restaurants across the western southern, and eastern portions of the United States.  Souplantation features an everyday selection of made-from-scratch soups and salads and hand-crafted muffins, focaccia, breads and desserts.  The concept is built around freshly made, great tasting, recipes with a 55 foot salad bar full of seasonal vegetables and tossed salads prepared exhibition-style every 20 minutes.  Restaurants are open daily for lunch and dinner and also for Sunday breakfast featuring a variety of wholesome breakfast favorites in addition to everyday selections.  Souplantation provides its guests with an excellent value by offering unlimited access to its entire menu of high quality fresh items at a fixed price.

Please visit Souplantation on Twitter @Souplantation

If you’re  interested in following updates about the Social Media Breakfast San Diego.

Social Media Breakfast San Diego had an awesome turn out this month.  Tons of new members attended! The atmosphere was extremely energetic with lots of participation and feedback!  This month’s breakfast was a big success.  Our speaker was Angie Swartz.  Angie is the CEO of Square Martini Media, LLC a consultancy that helps businesses incorporate the power of social media.  She is the host of Twitter Talk Radio and the co-host of Boost Your Business Radio.  She is also the co-owner of Twitter Attraction, and founder of Six Figure Moms ClubTM.  Angie is a CPA and holds an MBA from the UCI Paul Merage School of Business.  She spent 20 years in the corporate world in the telecom, media and public accounting industries prior to starting her own companies.

Angie started off the discussion talking about Square martini media, LLC and how it came to be.  She went on to discuss Twitter Talk Radio, a media outlet that allows you to hear from all kinds of people in terms of their experiences, challenges and successes regarding social media marketing.

She discussed how the show is about allowing others to learn about social media.  How to use the tools and integrate them into an effective marketing plan.  She gave an example of a recent interview she did with Best Buy.  Best Buy allows the opportunity for all their employees to train on social media tools.  When they first launched their campaign they didn’t have it figured out completely, but they decided that as they launched more campaigns they didn’t need to be excellent but rather figure out what strategies would work best for their company and become really good at it.

Twitter Talk Radio’s goal is to take a big company like Best Buy and share on the radio their stories, challenges and successes so that if a smaller company is listening and has had fears in the past about integrating social media into their marketing, maybe they’ll rethink changing their marketing strategy and start integrating a social media plan.  One of the most important goals for Twitter Talk Radio is to teach the listeners basic listening tools which will allow them to sit down with their business strategy model and figure out what their goals and tactics are for the company overall.  Once they’ve figured out how social media lines up with their business strategy, Angie goes on to say, their next step is to help them figure out who will be responsible for starting the listening.

A big thank you to Angie Swartz for coming out to present.

You can view the breakfast at:

San Diego-Social Media Breakfast 9

We also went over our top 10 in 10.  Here is what I pulled:

1. #Breastcancer sets Guinness World record: 100 million overall impressions were estimated.

2. Judges allow Twitter in the courtrooms: Federal Court in Australia has decided judges can decide on a case by case basis if they’ll allow Twitter coverage from within their courtrooms.

3. Google to Launch its own phone: Rumor is it will be released by the end of this year.

4. Apple released new multi touch mouse: Called the Magic Mouse. Comes standard with every Mac.

5. Twitter has reached its 5 billionth tweet: They passed the 1 billionth mark in November and it took them less then 1 year to reach 5 billion.

6. Twitter bug exposes private tweets: Just type, site:twitter.com/*uesername* and you’re in!

7. Daily show and new CNN iPhone app Video: CNN warned viewers to not text while driving. The Daily Shows Jon Stewart noticed an irony. The new iPhone app includes a feature that lets you check traffic reports on your phone while in the car. Stewart used this to his advantage to crack some jokes.  Take a look!

8. Video of Anne Frank surfaces on YouTube: The only existing footage of Anne Frank. Video was submitted to Amsterdam Museum and they’re hoping to bring attention to Anne’s story and diaries and reach a new generation who may be unfamiliar with who she was.

9. 54% of employees banning access to social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace at work.

10. Red Bull and Facebook: Campaign launched to thank their fans on Facebook. They hid red bull shots all over the nation to search for. Great Viral marketing campaign.

BONUS: The Ford Fusion relay race: Campaign is called Fusion 41. 8 selected Fusion owners are selected and able to assemble a team with 4 others.  Over a 3 week period contestants complete challenges .

We ended breakfast with an awesome dance performance by Joe Burrough.  He did 2 break dancing sets for the group to help promote a campaign our sponsor, Altec Lansing has recently launched.

Altec Lansing is a company headquartered in Milford, PA.  For more than 70 years they have been viewed as the worlds most valuable and innovative audio brand and boasts a unique history of innovation that includes the introduction of first talkie film speakers, the first iPod docking station and the first “works with iPhone” speaker system.  They make a wide range of audio systems for the home and office; a line of headphones for personal listening; and the popular line of inMotion speaker systems for portable digital players.

The campaign recently launched is called “Mix Dance Contest”.  You can submit a 60 second video for a chance to gain votes from peers and the top 3 will be judged by a celebrity judge panel, which will include Chamillionaire!  For more information on the contest.

A big thanks to Milano Coffee Co. for having us and a special big thanks to Altec Lansing for sponsoring the event!

This month in San Diego we’ll be having our 9th breakfast and we’re excited to be having Angie Swartz as our featured speaker.   Angie is the CEO of Square Martini Media, LLC, a consultancy that helps businesses incorporate the power of social media.  She is the host of Twitter Talk Radio and the co-host of Boost Your Business Radio with small business expert Rieva Lesonsky.  She is also the co-owner of Twitter Attraction, and founder of Six Figure Moms Club TM.   Angie is a CPA and holds an MBA from the UCI Paul Merage School of Business.  She spent 20 years in the corporate world in the telecom, media and public accounting industries prior to starting her own companies.

Angie will speak about Twitter Talk Radio and Boost Your Business Radio Guests.  More specifically she’ll cover

• Lessons that guests have shared on the air regarding social media and entrepreneurship.
• Stories of things that have happened on air
• Highlights from some of Square Martini Media customers

The sponsor for this month’s breakfast is Altec Lansing.  They are headquartered in Milford, PA and are a division of Plantronics, Inc. (NYSE: PLT) For more than 70 years they have been viewed among audiophiles as the worlds most valuable and innovative audio brand and boasts a unique history of innovation that includes the introduction of first talkie film speakers, the first iPod docking station and the first “Works with iPhone” speaker system.  They make a wide range of audio systems for the home and office; a line of headphones for personal listening; and the popular line of inMotion speaker systems for portable digital players.

Altec Lansing is launching a “Mix It Up” dance contest, an online video dance battle.  Contestants submit one-minute dance videos for a chance to gain votes from their peers and the final blessing of a celebrity judge panel, which includes Grammy award winning hip hop artist Chamillionaire, a recent panelist at #tc50

To participate, contestants download music from here.  They are encouraged to mix and edit the tracks.  They video for 60 seconds and post it on-line at the Mix It Up website for the public to vote on.

You can connect with the Altec Lansing team on the following social media sites:

• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Flickr
• YouTube

The top 100 submissions all win a Mix boom box.  The top 10 videos, as voted by the public, will go before the panel of selected judges for the top 3 prizes.

Dancers can submit videos now through November 13, 2009.  Voting ends on November 20, 2009 and winners are announced December 4, 2009

Submit your videos now!!!!

We will be raffling off a Boombox at the end of our breakfast, so be sure to bring your business cards with you.  You could be the proud new owner of an awesome boombox!

Event Details:

Where: Milano Coffee Co., 8685 Rio San Diego Dr., Ste B, San Diego, CA

Parking: Recommended parking across the street

When: October 22, 2009….7:30-9:00am

Cost: Free….Bring a Friend or Two, but please RSVP

Bonus: Pastries and coffee will be provided

If you’re interested in following updates about the Social Media Breakfast San Diego

Awesome turn out for this month’s breakfast. Two wonderful speakers plus a lot of energy equals an incredible session.  Our featured speakers this month were Ginger Anderson and Erika DiProfio from Garden Fresh, otherwise known as Souplantation.  Ginger is the creative force behind the company’s online business strategy.  She has been with them since 2001.  Erika joined Garden Fresh in 2002 and has help establish the company’s PR department.  In 2004 she founded the company’s kitchen cabinet, which is a group of brand ambassadors.  She leads the company’s word of mouth and buzz activities.

They kicked off their speech by discussing the ways in which they’ve managed to create this group of brand ambassadors.  By reaching out to those who are already talking about Souplantation, their goal was and continues to be not only building a communication  channel, but making those individuals feel like they are a part of Souplantation not just being another individual that enjoys dining in their restaurant.  Their intention is to “create a strong group of brand ambassadors through authentic, transparent, real time and two-way communication” Translation, they listen to their audience.  They engage their audience and take their suggestions and comments to help better their restaurants whether it be their food or atmosphere.

They went on discussing more specifically the tools they’ve been using to engage their guests.  The two most fundamental social media tools they’ve utilized is Twitter and Facebook.  They’ve been on Twitter since November, 2008 and have more then 7,000 followers.  They launched a Facebook account in April 2009 and have over 24,000 fans.  They’ve used these two tools to keep an open dialog with their audience, to run campaigns and all sorts of contests.  They more importantly are using these tools to help keep the brand name consistent.  Their continued vision is to build long lasting relationships for Souplantation.

A big, big thank you to Ginger Anderson and Erika DiProfio for coming out to speak.

You can view the breakfast at:

San Diego-Social Media Breakfast 8

We also went over our Top 10 in 10.  Here is what I dug up this month:

1. JetBlue promo is a social media hit: $599 passes to unlimited flights for an entire month. Web traffic to JetBlue’s route-map page jumped 700%

2. Google forced to reveal identity of offensive blogger: A model named, Liskula Cohen discovered a blogger on Googles blogger had been referring to her as “skank” and “old hag”. She went to court to have Google reveal the name of the blogger. Court ruled in her favor. She can now sue the person for defamation.

3.  What makes a quality Tweet: 40% of all Tweets are pointless babble from a recent study.

4. Facebook launches a Twitter App:  Facebook pages can now simultaneously update both their page and Twitter.

5.   NPR’s iPhone app blows other news apps out of the water: NPR news just became available for download.  It’s linked to 1000+ NPR radio stations, news proframs and live streams, so you can listen to your news anywhere and anytime.

6.  First US Rehab Center for Internet Addiction opens it’s doors:  Internet addiction disorder (IAD) It’s not in the DSM, but many argue that this addiction does in deed exist. The Heavensfield Retreat Center has a program called reSTART. It’s a 45 day program. a 19 year old is their first patient who could not remove himself from the World of Warcraft game.

7.  Social media tapped to find missing Louisville man: A Twitter account has been set up specifically to find a man named Robert Botts @findrobertbotts who’s been missing since July 30, 2009.

8.  Ben Stiller asks Ryan Seacrest for more Twitter followers Video: Ben Stiller just signed up for Twitter and decided to make a video of himself asking Ryan for a “shout out” on Twitter. His account name is @redhourben

9.  How Chad Ochocinco plans to Tweet during NFL games: Chad has gotten creative. Since he can’t tweet himself he is launching a contest, in which he’ll fly a person out and pay them to Tweet for him during his games.

10. LAPD turns to YouTube to find Lindsay Lohan’s burglars: There were 3 young adults, two females and one male trying to break in to her Hollywood Hills home on August 23, 2009.

A big thanks to Milano Coffee Co. for having us and again to Ginger Anderson and Erika DiProfio for speaking.  You can follow Ginger on Twitter @gingeranderson Erika @diprofio24 and Souplantation @souplantation

This month’s sponsor was Digital Operative, an online digital marketing agency located in San Diego, CA.   Their strategic process has been a proving ground for many great ideas, assumptions, re-designs, fix-its and innovations.  If  you’re looking for an agency that knows no boundaries, is passionate about the web and has the experience to lead your projects, they are the team for you!

This month in San Diego we will be having our 8th breakfast and our featured speakers will be Ginger Anderson and Erika DiProfio.  Ginger and Erika both work for Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. otherwise known as Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes.  Together, they are the company’s social media team.

Ginger Anderson is the creative force behind Garden Fresh’s online business strategy.  She joined Garden Fresh in 2001 with a communications degree from UCSD.  Her efforts have lead to a club veg membership of 1 million members, a guest friendly and interactive website and being on the forefront of emerging social media marketing.  She has embraced Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms and has turned them into a priority for the company’s marketing objectives.  You can find her Tweeting daily @souplantation

Erika DiProfio joined Garden Fresh in 2002 after working with consumer brand clients such as Tiffany Co., Dave and Busters, Sprint PCS, and the W Hotel at a local public relations agency.  She started the company’s PR department in 2004 and has since demonstrated its importance through major print, radio and television outreach.  Erika founded the Garden Fresh Kitchen Cabinet, a group of Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes brand ambassadors, and leads the company’s word of mouth and buzz activities.  She helped lead Garden Fresh’s emergence in social media and has integrated this strategy into the company’s public relations strategy and vision.

Ginger and Erika will be discussing how Garden Fresh has utilized social media and how their fully integrated approach has proven successful.  They will share examples of their monthly promotions and how social media can be incorporated into web/interactive, public relations, advertising, and local store marketing to build guest loyalty and encourage two way communication about and with their brand.

New Social Project Update:

The THINK Together team will be coming to the breakfast this month.  Larry Tenny and Nadia Flores will be driving down from Orange County to meet the members of SMBSD.  For those members who have signed up to help tackle their social media challenges, we will be meeting after the breakfast to get this project rolling.

Event Details:

Where: Milano Coffee Co., 8685 Rio San Diego Dr., Ste B, San Diego, CA

Parking: Recommended parking across the street

When: September 16, 2009…7:30am-9:00am

Cost: Free…Bring a friend or 2, but please RSVP

Bonus: Pastries and coffee will be provided

This month’s sponsor: TBD

To sponsor a future event contact Erin Levenson VIA Twitter @SMBSD

If you are interested in following updates about the Social Media Breakfast San Diego

We had our 7th session yesterday of Social Media Breakfast San Diego, which ended up being a very intimate, energetic group.  Our featured speaker this month was Oscar Lutteroth, Digital Strategist for ParkerWhite.  ParkerWhite is a social branding agency located in Cardiff By The Sea.  Oscar kicked off his speech with a discussion about a recent campaign they launched called, Hansen’s Loves San Diego.

He discussed both the challenges and successes of the campaign and walked us through the marketing strategy that they came up with.   One of their fundamental goals for the campaign was to create something that people would want to share with their friends.   They wanted the brand to make a personal connection to its audience.  A few strategies they used to create this personal connection were:

• Creating a branded microsite
• Enabling people to upload photos of themselves and their friends with a Hansen’s soda in view
• Creating a way for users to share their submissions within other social networks and campaign for themselves
• Integrating ShareThis
• Connecting with influencers on Twitter and Facebook

Along the way there were some challenges like:

• An existing list of social media profiles some with and some without login credentials
• Finding metrics to measure offline promotional tactics like radio
• Promoting a campaign that was already in place without time to educate the audience

ParkerWhite found some great ways to overcome the previous challenges by:

• On Twitter they encouraged mroe submissions and photos to get people more involved.
• They answered questions, engaged their followers and RT their mentions.  This helped increase their follower count.
• On Facebook they created a fan page and promoted the contest via an events page.

With some great social media strategies put into place by ParkerWhite, the campaign was a great success.  It was so successful that there will be a Hansen’s Loves San Francisco campaign launching very soon.

A big Thank you to Oscar Lutteroth for speaking this month.

You can view the session at:

San Diego – Social Media Breakfast 7

We also went over our Top 10 in 10 and found some interesting things going on in Social Media.  Here’s what I found,

1.  Digg just hijacked your Twitter links: Digg.com changed the behavior of its shor URL’s so they no longer go to the source of the story for logged out users:  Instead they direct visitors to a landing page on Digg.com

2.  Twitter correcting follower counts 1000’s of spammers perish: Notice a drop in your Twitter follower count lately? Twitter annouced that the company is purging spammers.

3.  The longest solar eclipse of the century online: LIVE! UNIVERSE webcast displays a live webcast from Japan: for the latest info(in Japanese) you can follow the Twitter page www.twitter.com/liveeclipse2009

4.  Google Wave is here: 100,000 invites go out on September 30,2009 for the next version of Google Wave

5.  Alice and Wonderland Trailer Hits YouTube, Disney Deletes it: Movie is coming out March 2010.  copy of trailer arrived on the web and found its way to YouTube. Disney forced YouTube to take it down

6.  Want to find marijuana? There’s an App for that: App is $2.99 named cannabis for all you iphone users. Purpose is to help find legal medical marijuana in states and locations where it can be purchased.

7.  A Twitter contest too far? Comic-Con contest hosted by Electronic Arts that some say objectifies women. The “Sin To Win” contest to promote Dante’s Inferno, encourages attendees to take photos with the so-called “booth-babes” and Tweet the photos to the @danteteam account. They are told to “commit acts of lust”. Sexual Harasment?

8. Newt Gingrich Promises to Tweet harder next time: He spelled the word “military” wrong in a tweet and critics got down on him. He promised to make more of an effort to Tweet better.

9. London Tower bridge is on Twitter: What does it say? It tells you when it’s open and when it closes.

10. Twitter enters the dictionary: Twitter will enter the dictionary this year.  It will be defined as “a website where people can post messages about their current activities” under verb it will read: “to write short messages on the Twitter website”.

We ended our session with our feedback in 5, which allowed a couple people to present some issues they’ve been facing with their own social media strategies.

A big thanks to Milano Coffee Co. for having us and to Oscar Lutteroth for speaking.  You can follow Oscar on Twitter @el_gigante and ParkerWhite @ParkerWhite

A very special big thanks to Resume Bear for sponsoring this month’s breakfast.  You can follow them on Twitter @resumebear

We are heading into session 7 this month in sunny San Diego and our featured speaker will be Oscar Lutteroth.  Oscar is a graduate from the University Southern California with a degree in administrative and global marketing.  He has run his own digital design agency for almost 5 years in Los Angeles.  Since October of 2008 he has been working with ParkerWhite.  ParkerWhite is a social branding agency located just north of San Diego in Cardiff By The Sea.  Oscar’s role at ParkerWhite is anything from business development to digital strategist.  His biggest focus has been offering fully integrated digital marketing solutions to their clients.

Oscar will be discussing a campaign he’s recently been working on called Hansen’s Loves San Diego.  The key points he will address are integrating social media into a large company for the first time with low expectations from the client.  He will also discuss the problems they came across and in turn solutions they came up with for rolling this campaign out to San Francisco.

New Social Project Update:

The members that have currently signed up for helping THINK Together met last week. Larry Tenney and Nadia Flores from the THINK Together team took the train down to San Diego for a 5 hour session to go over what their challenges are on a day to day basis.  We will update other members at this upcoming breakfast with a recap and what our next steps should be.

Event Details:

Where: Milano Coffee Co., 8685 Rio San Diego Dr., Ste B, San Diego, CA

Parking: Recommended parking across the street

When: August 4, 2009…7:30am-9:00am

Cost: Free…Bring a friend or 2, but please RSVP

Bonus: Pastries and coffee will be provided

This month’s sponsor is Resume Bear.

ResumeBear, Inc. was founded in 2006 by a diverse group of individuals with backgrounds spanning education, human resources, technology, administration and business development.

It is this variety and wealth of expertise that enables us to determine the needs of today’s job seekers, employers, students, and colleges, and to offer a 21st century technological solution to the traditional job search process of years past.

As today’s career marketplace requires job seekers to be ever more proactive, the mission of the ResumeBear is to make the job search process easier, more efficient and more effective.

You can follow Resume Bear on Twitter @resumebear

To sponsor a future event contact Erin Levenson VIA Twitter @erinlevenson or @SMBSD

If you are interested in following updates about the Social Media Breakfast San Diego

We had our 6th session this morning of Social Media Breakfast San Diego, which turned out to be a very energetic session.  Our featured speaker was Steven Cox, CEO and Founder of TakeLessons. TakeLessons is Americas leading source for private music and voice lessons.

Steven began his speech discussing what some of the challenges TakeLessons has come across in their own marketing strategies. One question they had as they began to build their strategy was how were they going to apply social media, which is now 15% of their marketing.  TakeLessons fundamental issue was to create a trustworthy and safe environment for their audience.  Their goal is to inspire a generation of people through music, so how could they create this safe environment through social media?

Their 3 marketing challenges:

1. How do we build trust?
2. How do we communicate passion to people?
3. How do we sell more lessons?

The social media solutions they’ve integrated are as follows,

1. A Blog: Firstly, creating relevant content, which establishes them as credible experts, which in turn helps create that trust.  Secondly, recruiting guest contributors, which opens the blog up to junior editors.  This allows people to be a part of the experience by sharing their thoughts.
2. A Twitter Feed: Of course this is on the list to help connect and create value for the people
3. YouTube: To showcase their customers.
4. A Facebook page: How they get people to be their “brand ambassadors”. They communicate their latest happenings and use that to build trust.

One of their philosophies is that people buy from people they know, so one of their fundamental reasons for integrating social media into  their marketing is to help people feel comfortable and to help create value.  One important aspect in all this that I personally took away from this speech is that TakeLessons really try’s to bring out the human side of what they do.  They listen to their feedback, they communicate with their customers/fan base, they decide what is most interesting and relevant to their audience with help from this feedback, then they run with it using all the social media tactics mentioned above.  In essence they use social media to build trust.

It was a delight to have Steven Cox speak this morning.  You can view the presentation here:

TakeLessons Presentation

You can view the session at:

San Diego – Social Media Breakfast 6

We went over our top 10 in 10 and found some great new stuff going on in social media this month.  Here is what I grabbed,

1. Twitter Tees: Twitter launches official Threadless T-shirt store. Twitter and Threadless have partnered up to bring Twitter T-shirts to the masses. Tweets on Tees  Example: In space no one can hear your Tweet.
2. Patrick Swayze not dead despite Twitter reports: Traditional media reported it and social media helped spread the news only it was false.
3. Iran-A social media election held on June 12, 2009: twitter is the best place to follow what’s happening in real time.  YouTube has video content from inside Iran.
4. What is Twitters value to Dell Computers?: The Twitter account @dellourles-Tweets discount offers for Dell products has generated more than 2 million in sales in 2 years, making it the biggest concrete business on Twitter.
5. Twitter plans to conquer the Tube with a TV show: Twitter has partnered with Reveille productions and Brillstein Entertainment to develop an unscripted series we know that it’s going to be a competitive TV series which will “harness Twitter to put player on the trail of celebrities”.
6. How 2 roommates saved a dogs life using Twitter: Twitter has found a heartwarming use.  2 roommates found a Pit-bull on the side of the road injured.  They took him to vet and needed $400 to amputate in order to keep the dog from being euthanized.  The 2 girls set up a Paypal account and used Twitter to raise money. They raised $500, so they used the remaining $100 for food for the dog.
7. The United Nations Environment Program: The UN has engaged in a really cool Twitter campaign for every follower @unepandyou gets by midnight June 5, 2009 the program will plant a tree with a cap of 100,000 trees.
8. E-Commerce tool BillMyParents allows teens to enhance social experience: parents are able to manage teen’s purchases on social networking sites with a new payment system that enables teenagers to purchase goods and services on social networking sites and e-commerce sites, but this gives parents full control over whether to either accept or decline the child’s purchases.
9. Bing: Microsoft launching new rival to Google: Microsoft plans on spending 80-100 million dollars in ad campaigns. Google spent about 25 million dollars in 2008.
10. Another Facebook phising scam: Scammers continue to exploit Facebook. From a site called Areps.at, like other scams it asks you to input your Facebook username and password, with a design that looks similar to Facebook.  If you give them this info all your friends will get the message telling them to go to Areps.at and the scam will spread like a wildfire.

We ended the session with Feedback 5, which allowed a couple people to present some issues they’ve been facing with their own social media campaigns.

A big thanks to Milano Coffee Co. for having us and to Steven Cox for speaking. You can follow TakeLessons on Twitter @Take_Lessons

A special big thanks to UserVoice for sponsoring this month’s breakfast.  You can follow them on Twitter @uservoice

Next Session: TBD More details will be available on the SMBSD website soon.

This month in San Diego we’re heading into session 6 and our speaker is Steven Cox, CEO and Founder of TakeLessons. TakeLessons is America’s leading source for private music and voice lessons. The company based in San Diego, is a privately held company with instructors teaching in over 400 cities across the USA. In addition to private lessons, TakeLessons also offers turnkey music lessons to private schools, after school programs, and corporate wellness facilities.

Steven will be discussing the social media channels and strategies TakeLessons has and is currently using to show how it has helped the company grow to what it is today. TakeLessons is one of the few music companies who are using a wide range of social media tactics to communicate with their students and teachers as well as perspective students and teachers.

New Social Project Update:
Our spreadsheet is up for our non profit organization, Think Together and is ready for volunteers to sign themselves up. We have created various groups so that people may choose what will suit them best.  We will announce this during the breakfast and will be taking any questions and statements regarding our next steps.

Event Details:
Where: Milano Coffee Co., 8685 Rio San Diego Dr., Ste B, San Diego, CA
Parking: Recommended parking across the street
When: June 30,2009…7:30am-9:00am
Bonus: Free…bring a friend or 2, but please RSVP
Cost: Pastries and Coffee will be provided

This month’s sponsor is UserVoice. The company was started in 2007 as a simple way to prioritize feature requests, reinventing the way companies engaged customers. Today UserVoice continues to capitalize on crowd sourced voting to simplify the aggregation of untapped knowledge from employees, constituents and consumers. UserVoice is revolutionizing the industry with its real time, “Ideas Anywhere” solution, making idea generation not only easy to integrate, but so cost effective that any size company or organization can redefine how they learn, share, and evolve their offerings. You can follow UserVoice on Twitter @UserVoice.

To sponsor a future event contact Erin Levenson VIA Twitter @erinlevenson or @SMBSD

If you are interested in following updates about the Social Media Breakfast San Diego.

One of the strengths of the Social Media Breakfast series is the “personality” that each breakfast group takes on, reflecting the strengths and smarts of the local organizers and the makeup of the attendees.

In this short audio conversation that I recorded earlier this week, Digital Operative CEO and co-founder BJ Cook talks about the SMB San Diego group that he shepherds.

(Readers via RSS and e-mail may need to click through to the original post to stream the audio file.)

 

 BJ Cook talks Social Media Breakfast San Diego [4:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Show Notes from conversation with SMB San Diego’s BJ Cook

• Bryan Person and BJ Cook reflect on SMB San Diego 5.
• BJ talks about the evolution of the San Diego Social Media Breakfast series.
• BJ peviews the group’s upcoming work with the nonprofit organization, THINK Together.
• Bryan asks BJ about the breakfast’s “Feedback in 5″ segment, where attendees talk about challenges they’re facing in their own social media projects.

Running time: 4:34

To keep up with BJ online, follow @BJ on Twitter.