Tenth Annual Weblog Awards!

The Bloggies, the Web's largest blog awards, were announced on Twitter last night! This was the 10^th annual Weblog Awards, which included categories such as Best Food Weblog, Best Weblog about Music, Best Entertainment Weblog, and more! Check out all the winners here!

Any Way It’s Sliced, Appeal of Social Media Grows

You’ve heard of Meetup, the online social networking portal? A couple of consumer marketers are bringing out campaigns that could be called “meatups.” The brands, Land O’Frost and Sara Lee Deli, both sell lunch meats, cold cuts and other sliced-meat products. Coincidentally, they are both introducing campaigns that are centered on the social media.

Or, more likely, it is no coincidence. More advertisers of prosaic household staples are adding social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to the tactics they use to reach current and potential customers.

For Land O’Frost, the campaign represents the company’s initial foray into the social media. There is a community called Land O’Moms, housed on a Web site, where consumers can exchange recipes and parenting advice, download coupons, read articles from women’s magazines and communicate with popular mommy bloggers. Land O’Frost and the campaign also have presences on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

“It’s a whole revolution,” David Van Eekeren, president at Land O’Frost in Lansing, Ill., says of the social media. “We need to be part of it, obviously.”

“This brand is recognizing what a lot of other brands are recognizing,” says Kathleen Henson, president and chief executive at Henson Consulting. “It’s important to reach moms online because that’s where moms are right now.”

Read more at NYTimes.com

Forget ROI, Let’s Focus on Social Media Optimization

As more companies embrace social media, the chatter about return on investment, or ROI, has amplified as executives attempt to determine whether the money they’re spending is worth it. In theory, it’s a good exercise but given it is still early days for social media, it is a challenge to accurately quantity its impact right now. Rather than focus on ROI, companies should be looking long and hard at SMO – social media optimization.

So, what is SMO? One way to define is that SMO is a focus on making sure that a company’s social media activities are as efficient and effective as possible. It means creating content – be it blog posts, tweets, videos or Facebook updates – that can be easily used and leveraged across multiple social media platforms.

It means making sure a company’s social media person or team is highly productive so that their day-day-day activities are focused and productive as opposed to having a scattered shot-gun approach that consumes too many cycles.

Read more at Sysomos.com

Big Honcho receives Best Award from top mom blog 3KidsandUs.com

Big Honcho Media receives recognition as Best in Public Relations Representation by top mom blog 3KidsandUs.com. Read more here