Annual Holiday Collection For Homeless Focuses on Sleepwear

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Pajama Project will collect new sleepwear donations to benefit Friends of the Homeless and Gray House

Don Anderson, owner of the Cruise Store in East Longmeadow, places pajamas under the tree at his store. Additional Pajama Project collection locations include the St. Francis Chapel in Springfield and Tower Square’s City Walk Café on Wednesdays in December from 12pm-1:30pm.

Don Anderson, owner of the Cruise Store in East Longmeadow, places pajamas under the tree at his store. Additional Pajama Project collection locations include the St. Francis Chapel in Springfield and Tower Square’s City Walk Café on Wednesdays in December from 12pm-1:30pm.

SPRINGFIELD, MA (December 6, 2010) Father Jim Brennan, co-director of the St. Francis of Assisi Chapel, started the Pajama Project several years ago after hearing the compelling story of a third grade girl. Her teacher explained to Father Brennan, how the young girl said that she was unable to participate in “Pajama Day” because she didn’t have any pajamas. The girl also said that she often slept in her school clothes as a result.

“It was a real eye-opener learning this girl’s story and knowing that she is not alone,” said Brennan.  “With the current economy, pajamas are a luxury item for many families because they chose to pay the rent and heating bill instead of buying sleepwear. It’s an aspect of poverty that wouldn’t occur too many of us.”

This is Don Anderson’s second year participating in a holiday collection for the homeless.  Anderson, owner of The Cruise Store in East Longmeadow, collected personal care items for the homeless last year.

“Helping the homeless community is important because they‘re our neighbors,” stated Anderson.  “A streak of bad luck and we could all be in that position.”  He said donations have already started coming into his store and that they are running out of space under the Christmas tree to store all the pajamas.

The Pajama Project collection will run through January 7th and donations of clean, new sleepwear can be dropped off at the St. Francis Chapel in Springfield on weekdays from 10am-2pm, The Cruise Store in East Longmeadow on weekdays from 9am-5pm and on Saturday from 9:30am-12:30pm, and Tower Square’s City Walk Cafés on Wednesdays in December from 12pm-1:30pm.

About

The St. Francis of Assisi Chapel serves the community of downtown Springfield, MA. The chapel seeks to help area homeless by collecting sleepwear and personal care items. During the winter months, the chapel also serves as a homeless shelter.

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How Many People View Your Facebook Posts? Confused By Community Pages? Social Media News Explains

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Do you love the information that Facebook Insights gives you as a fan page administrator?  Now you can now see per post impressions and the feedback for each individual post according to this Biz Report article.  But what counts as an impression? According to the Facebook Help Center “the impression number is the raw number of impressions that have been shown to users. These impressions can come from a user’s news feed, a visit to the Page, or through an Open Graph social plugin.”  Seems a little vague to me…please let me know if you have found a more thorough explanation.  Overall, I like the new and improved Insights because you can see the posts that led to engagement and the ones that didn’t.  With the new information you can work to eliminate the later.

While Facebook has enhanced their Insights, their community pages still need some work.  AdvertisingAge reports that there are millions of unclaimed pages on Facebook right now and recommends that businesses claim their community page before Facebook changes again. So what’s the problem? Well, once you claim your community page it may converge with your original fan page which can result in lost content and formatting changes.  Not good! If you have any experience with this we’d like to hear your story.

If you have suggestions for future Social Media News articles, want to ask questions or share thoughts, please feel free to email me. Thanks! – Laura

Curious Who You Are Tweeting To? Could A New Analytics Tool Kill Klout? This Week’s Social Media News Has The Answers!

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Have you ever wondered what the lifespan of a retweet was or what the average age and education level of a Twitter user is?  Who Are All Of These Tweeple has the answers and other interesting facts about Twitter and its users.  What I found intriguing was that although more women use Twitter than men, men are found to be more influential than women according to the Klout information included in the article.

Speaking of Klout, they should be on the lookout because Twitter is currently having a select group of users test out their new built-in analytics tool according to Mashable. The graphs look like they are going to provide users with lots of useful information.  I’m excited to try it out, but I will have to wait because the analytics service isn’t expected to be released to all Twitter users until the end of the year.

If you have suggestions for future Social Media News articles, want to ask questions or share thoughts, please feel free to email me. Thanks! – Laura

Curious What Your Digital Footprint Says? Need SEO Tips and Tools? Twitter Adds Ads? It’s Been a Busy Week in Social Media, Find Out What You May Have Missed!

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This week’s Social Media News features a few articles that peaked my interest and should peak yours as well.  First, Who Is Following Your Digital Footprints? from the Loopfuse blog explains how much information can be gathered about a user when they click on a website.  I’ve got to be honest, it’s a little creepy just how much information is available.  Next up, 6 Ways To Optimize Your Blog For Search Engines from the Social Media Examiner which includes some great tips and tools for determining keywords that you’re bound to find useful whether you are new to SEO or an old pro. Lastly, Twitter Begins Publishing Ads in Users’ Streams from Advertising Age confirms what everyone knew was only a matter of time; ads in your timeline.  It was inevitable that ads would invade Twitter users timelines, but do you like seeing ads mixed in with your tweets?

If you have suggestions for future Social Media News articles or want to ask questions or share thoughts please feel free to email me. Thanks! –Laura

GCAI Appoints Caroline Scannell As Accounts Analyst And Laura Chechette As Public Relations Analyst

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Ms. Scannell manages over $1 million in financial transactions annually ensuring contract compliance, through reconciliation, and arranging for make goods where necessary. A resident of West Springfield, Ms. Scannell will complete her Bachelor of Arts degree in Finance and Accounting from Northeastern University in the spring of 2011, where she has already earned a Certificate of Accounting.  She is also a graduate of the Katharine Gibbs School in Boston, MA, where she earned an Associate Degree in Secretarial Arts with a legal specialization.

Ms. Chechette creates content for Search Engine Optimized (SEO) and Social Media Optimized (SMO) Public Relations efforts. She also supervises over 30 social media platforms that GCAI currently has under management for its clients.  Ms. Chechette is a recognized expert in social media monitoring and measurement platforms having researched, evaluated, and written about most of the top products currently available.

A resident of Longmeadow, Ms. Chechette is a Cum Laude graduate of Stonehill College in Easton, MA where she holds a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Communications.  After graduation, she completed a year of service with AmeriCorps NCCC where she provided public relations services in support of various projects around the country. Ms. Chechette is an associate member of The Public Relations Society of America and a member of the Advertising Club of Western Massachusetts.

Caroline Scannell-Accounts Analyst

Laura Chechette-Public Relations Analyst

Social Media Monitoring-The Game Changer, The Gap, and The Goods

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As a part of our continuing efforts to evaluate Social Media Monitoring and Measurement platforms, the GCAI team attended Monitoring Social Media Boston hosted by Influence People. There were lots of interesting presenters from both the US and the UK so we really got a good idea of what is happening on both sides of the pond in the world of social media monitoring.  As presenters highlighted, and we have discovered in our own research, there are literally hundreds of platforms available right now. We have tested, or are in the process of testing, the following: BrandsEye, HootSuite, Socialware Sync, Viralheat, and Sprout Social, just to name a few.  We have found however that with such a wide variety of prices there is, of course, a wide variety functionality as well.

Since there are so many different platforms currently available the competition is starting to heat up and some smaller companies have started being bought out by larger ones.  For example, Scout Labs recently became part of Lithuim Technologies and I would guess there are a few other mergers in the works as well. Another potential game changer that was discussed at the conference: Google enters the social media monitoring space with a free tool similar to Google analytics.  This will knock out all of the entry level tools when it happens.

The gap we have discovered, and which was supported by comments by two presenters in response to our questions, is that there does not appear to be a mid-level social media monitoring tool.  The platforms currently start at entry level – just above Hoot Suite (free) and then quickly jump to the Radian 6 level at $600/month per client. Certainly, with Google Alerts and other free services you get what you pay for and with the entry level paid platforms you get slightly more than that.  Radian 6 costs a lot, yields an incredible amount of useful information, but our clients are not at the point where they can digest and use it yet.

This is just some of what we took away from Social Media Monitoring Boston, an additional perspective on the conference is offered at this blog post. The goods that we took away, and are sharing with you, are the many PowerPoint presentations that Influence People posted.

Please feel free to email me any questions or thoughts. –Laura

P.S. If you want to see our thoughts on some of the different platforms we have tested check out my last blog post.

Moving Beyond Alerts – Social media monitoring and measurement

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GCAI Social Media News: Moving Beyond Alerts – Social media monitoring and measurement.

Like PR agencies around the country, we have moved beyond the social media management x 3 platforms approach.  Basically that means we listen with one, engage with another, and achieve with perhaps a third.  Management of the social media platforms for multiple clients has been quite labor intensive using this approach (for those who want to know we have approximately 30 plus platforms under management current and that number is expanding rapidly).

For years (okay months – but that’s like years in social media development), we have used Hoot Suite for engagement (and management-lite) for multiple client presences on social media, Trackur and then BrandsEye for monitoring (backed up by Google Alerts and Social Mention), and Socialware sync for archiving.  Our goal: do it all through one platform. Here is our review of what we have found to date:

HootSuite (free)
Exporting. Allows us to post and reply on Twitter and Facebook for multiple clients.  Convenient because everything is in one place.

Trackur (free)
Listening. Tested it for about a month, but didn’t keep it.  Could be described as a “poor man’s version of BrandsEye.”  It missed a lot of content that it should have picked up.

BrandsEye (Fee)
Listening. Allows for multiple search terms. Ability to mark each found item as relevant or irrelevant. A robust analytics package is available, but for a steep one-time price.

Socialware Sync (Free 2 year trial)
Archiving. Pulls in all Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn mentions.  Also allows for searching within the archive.  Only negative so far is that when it exports the data it is an .XML file which is not easy to read and is not presentable to clients.

Sprout Social (Fee)
Listening and exporting. We are testing this platform out with a free trial and so far we like the dashboard and the analytics it gives. We’ve had issues with some of the monitoring features and not much help from their customer service.

Social Volt (Fee)
Listening, exporting, and archiving. Recently had a live demo which looked promising.  It has not gone live yet and appears to be out of our price range.

In Research Lab Currently:

Mutual Mind (Fee)
Listening and exporting. Live demo is set up for later this week.  We’ll let you know how it goes.

Beevolve (Fee)
Social Media Monitoring and Insights platform. No data yet, but the company called us after we attended Monitoring Social Media Boston and expect to research this platform next.

Questions?  Feel free to email me. – Laura

This Week's Social Media Bark: Facebook Reaches 500 Million Members, Investor or Collector, and Watch What You Tweet

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Just wanted to let all of you know that we’re looking for people involved in Social Media to help us out with our anti-bullying effort. If you are interested in volunteering, please contact me at agauthier@askmydog.com

Facebook Reaches 500 Million Members: Facebook has announced that they now have 500 million members. This means that one in thirteen people on the planet now use Facebook. Check out this video from BBC. Read more

This Week’s Social Media Bark: Summer Heat, Facebook’s New Traffic Record, and Microsoft Adds Facebook To Your Outlook

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Summer Heat: Okay, so Al Gore told us to expect global warming…but he didn’t say we’d live in HELL all summer long! I hope you are finding ways to stay cool.

Mary says the results are in on Gregg and John’s “Potty Mouth Over Strategy” video in last week’s update (camera woman Steph Jackman was in on this too): 10 views as of yesterday! Since they feel it was a HUGE success, apparently they are at work on another one. Steph, for our neighbors’ sake, please stop them from filming in the men’s room!

And in other news, here’s my Social Media “Bark” for this week…

– Amanda G

P.S. – If any of you have any questions, or something specific you’d like me to discuss in these updates, please let me know! I can be reached by email at agauthier@askmydog.com, on Twitter at @GarveyComm, or on Facebook on the @Garvey Communication Associates Inc. Page!

Facebook’s New Traffic Record: According to comScore, Facebook had over 141 million unique visitors last month. In June of 2009, there were 77 million. Facebook just keeps growing! If you have any thoughts on if/when the growth may end, we’d love to hear it.

Microsoft Adds Facebook To Your Outlook: You can now read status updates, look at photos, and review wall posts in real time right in Microsoft Outlook. At this time, you are not able to comment or “Like” anything but you can sync your Outlook contacts with your Friends on Facebook. (Note: this is only in Outlook 2010 – so please let John know that GCAI needs to upgrade!).

YouTube Requires Linking Username With Google Account: If you created your YouTube channel before May of 2009, you now need to link your YouTube username with a Google account. Some of you may have already noticed this if you logged into YouTube recently. More information can be found here.

This Week’s Social Media Bark: Local Search on Smartphones, John and Gregg Get Potty Mouth Over Strategy, Twitter Search up 33%.

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This week I’m writing to you from Ridgewood, NJ! The heat down here has been ridiculous, and I’m actually hoping for some rain soon! My summer has been quite exciting so far, and I hope you have all been enjoying yours as well.

Local Search on Smartphones: According to research firm Compete, one third of Android and iPhone users learned of at least two new businesses they were not aware of after turning to local search applications. The most common of local search apps is Google Mobile (66%). This is a good reason to double check that your Google Places listing is optimized correctly! Other local search apps to keep in mind are: Citysearch, Mobile Yellow Pages and Yelp.

John and Gregg Get Potty Mouth Over Strategy:

If you are interested in how Gregg approaches social media strategy, email him at gtobin@askmydog.com.

Twitter Search up 33%: Twitter Co-Founder, Biz Stone announced on July 6th, that Twitter is now supporting 800 million search queries every day! This is an increase of 33% from what they were handling back in April. Twitter is actually beating Bing and Yahoo in the number of search queries they receive.