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Mobile-Friendly Makes Your Business Customer-Friendly

Your audience wants to be engaged and informed.  Establishing and maintaining brand loyalty means connecting your audience to social networks, mail subscriptions and mobile devices. This allows the consumer to receive fast, accurate content through multiple channels, making your business’ customers more accessible. With an audience on-the-go, your company needs a plan to become more mobile-friendly.

Newport Interactive Marketers (sponsored by Designated Editor) is starting 2012 off with all things mobile.  Join NIM as Annette Tonti CEO, MoFuse uncovers the best mobile web practices for advertisers and publishers. Strengthen your multi-channel approach by building effective mobile web content that is convenient and easy to use. “Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly” is an event that is open to the public and begins at 6:00pm on Thursday, January 26 2012 at 41North (351 Thames Street, Newport RI 02840).

You will learn

  • Mobile is Local: What does that mean for marketers?
  • How are people using the mobile web and how will that change in 2012?
  • Mobile Web or App, what is the difference?
  • How do you build effective mobile web content?
  • Every marketer needs to include mobile as part of their multi-channel approach.  Which are the best practices?
  • Why and how has mobile web quickly emerged as the most important landscape for mid-tier and local businesses?

No matter what industry your company is in, there are opportunities for growth on mobile devices. Featured speaker Annette Tonti knows this all too well, as MoFuse defends its reputation for powering mobile sites for customers as different as the State Department and Harper Collins.  They also power mobile sites for thousands of local businesses and marketers who use mobile to build mobile ad campaigns.  From Pandora to Ghirardelli chocolate, both large and small brands are engaging audiences in this new, effective way.

How will your mobile-friendly company engage its audience?

With so many new devices and applications hitting the streets at record speeds, it’s easy for your company to put some of these new devices to marketing use.

  • Build incentive programs (i.e. coupons, contests, etc.)
  • Enable financial services such as PayPal for streamlined billing processes
  • Run surveys – feedback directly from the customer makes them feel engaged and appreciated
  • Promote customer service – build a two-way conversation
  • …and much, much more!

Connect with Annette Tonti via Twitter and LinkedIn before the event, and check out MoFuse, too!

For event details, visit http://bit.ly/NIMmobile2012

Interns aka digital natives at the Social Media Social

 

Interns aka digital natives meet pros at the Social Media Social

By Jaclyn Liva
University of Rhode Island

Social Media is being used in almost everyone’s lives constantly throughout the day. The URI Student-led Public Relations Society recently hosted the first-ever Social Media Social. Several students that belong to the University’s Harrington School of Communication were in attendance, along with many Newport Interactive Marketers members and small businesses looking for interns.

University of Rhode Island Social Media professor Suzanne McDonald, founder of NIM, kicked off the event with an informative speech on how the need for digital natives is increasing. It was a great because the students there are all familiar in social media, aka digital natives. Her presentation is available on SlideShare and focuses on “Crossing the Digital Divide” between digital natives (student-interns) and busy professionals.

The Social was an opportunity for students to socialize with business owners and other professionals who are seeking help with social media for their businesses. Suzanne also talked about how important a LinkedIn profile is to have.

Shawn Simmons, Director Public Relations at StyleWeek Providence, @StyleWeekPR was also a keynote speaker at the social. He discussed the importance of branding yourself and offered tips on how to discover your brand. Shawn advised everyone to keep in mind that what other people say about your brand is much more important than what you design your brand to be.

During the event, there was a live Twitter stream onstage. People were tweeting and retweeting questions for the social media experts panel. And #URI_PRS was trending. One student tweeted: “How important are recommendations from co-workers and bosses on LinkedIn?”  The question was answered almost instantly by one of the panelists: crucially important.

It was nice to see even the keynote speakers tweet from the audience. It made the atmosphere of the Social feel much more open.

The Social Media Social panel featured

These pros deftly handled numerous questions and stressed the fact that everything that is put on the Internet will forever live in cyberspace.

The Social Media Social came to an end with a networking session. This gave everyone in attendance the opportunity to meet, mingle, and explore internship opportunities over free ice cream!