Recently, the marketing team at Cuker had the opportunity to attend the first ever Social Media Marketing World (SMMW) conference, which took place in our backyard of San Diego, California. The conference covered a variety of topics including how to improve your social media reach, connect with your social media community and organize your content. We came back to work after the event with some great takeaways. Here are just a few tips and trends we want to share with you:

Katie:

Be sure to connect with your audience through social media outlets. The relationships you build are key. Build an authentic, engaged community by sharing your brand personality, listening to what your audience is saying and responding to their needs. You need to be present in your social media community if you want your audience to care.

Joni:

Consider these 5 elements when telling your brand story on social media:

• Who: Identify your target audience and create a buyer persona.
  
• What: Create a mission statement to answer why your audience seeks your social channels.
  
• When: Always meet with your marketing team to coordinate and produce fresh, relevant content.
  
• Where: Just because multiple channels exist doesn’t mean you need to use all of them. Be strategic when choosing your channels.
  
• Why: Because your brand matters and your community needs to know it.

Christina:

Social media marketing is about humanizing your brand. Take risks and be creative! Pam Didner, Marketing Strategist for Intel said it best: “Don’t just collect your fans - activate them!”

Janet:

Be responsive. Today’s consumers expect social media channels to provide them with an instant connection to their favorite brands, from a friendly “hello” to customer services inquiries to technical product questions and everything in between. While 50% of Twitter users expect a response within 2 hours the average brand response time is on average 13.7 hours and 60% of brands do not respond at all!

Hitting the road for SMX West 2013, it was unclear what we could expect. The sessions and speakers seemed to be top notch, ranging from editors at search marketing publications to the search engine representatives themselves. The lineup of topics seemed to be very diverse, hitting all spectrums of search marketing from paid search to local search, mobile search, and organic search.

The goal was to see as many sessions as possible, making sure to attend the most advanced topics from the most seasoned minds in the industry. With the trip being such a success, here are five highlights worth sharing:

1.) Semantic Markup: Schema.org, Open Graph Tags, Good Relations – if you’re not using these already, the time to start is now.

2.) Metrics: Take advantage of the insight you can gain from free sources like Google Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics.

3.) A few words from Google’s Matt Cutts & Bing’s Duane Forrester:

• “If you’re not using HTML5 and microdata yet, you need to be doing so within the next year to keep up” - Duane Forrester
• “SEO is no longer a pinnacle marketing activity, it should be the baseline of any effort online” - Duane Forrester
• “Usability testing is crucial, you really never know how something will be used and navigated until your audience actually does it” Duane Forrester
• “Encourage more social sharing” - Matt Cutts

4.) Duplicate Content: It’s more common than you know. Your website is shooting your SEO efforts in the foot by having multiple versions of each page such as www.site.com and site.com and site.com/index and site.com/home.

5.) Pagination: All paginated pages should use rel=”prev” rel=”next” and canonical tags on each subpage pointing to the root.

There were so many great topics and sessions and we look forward to attending SMX East in the fall. With so many topics worth sharing, these five should help you look out at the horizon and know if your search efforts are headed in the right direction or if you need to start addressing some new areas now.

The Cuker team recently headed north to the Anaheim Convention Center for the 33rd annual Natural Products Expo West. The world’s largest premier tradeshow for the natural, organic, and healthy products industry drew in more than 63,000 industry members and over 2,000 exhibiting companies.

We were thrilled to support one of our food clients, Royal Hawaiian Orchards, who was a first time exhibitor. Royal Hawaiian is an exciting new healthy snack brand, featuring GMO free, gluten free, and sulfite free seasoned macadamias and fruit & macadamia crunches.

The Hawaiian brand stood out from the rest, and was recognized as one of the most eye-catching package designs at Expo West by NewHope360. Our desire when creating the packaging was to keep it unique, handcrafted, and colorful all while speaking to the authentic Hawaiian character of the brand. It has been a truly humbling experience watching the Royal Hawaiian brand grow from a small company to a national player in the snack food industry.

The natural and organic food market is rapidly growing, and we were excited to see the new product launches as well as the established brands’ exhibits. We had a great time visiting the Royal Hawaiian booth, networking, and sampling some delicious natural foods. As self-proclaimed foodies, we are already looking forward to next year’s Expo West!

One of the biggest challenges that brands face in social media marketing is gaining and engaging followers. Recently, Cuker was given the opportunity to create and execute social media sweepstakes campaigns for three nationally recognized clients: Eldorado Stone, Red Bull, and Royal Hawaiian. By creating compelling, interactive social media sweepstakes and contests, Cuker was able to attract and engage a significant number of new fans for each brand.

In September, the leading manufacturer of architectural stone veneer Eldorado Stone turned to Cuker to create a social media marketing campaign featuring a contest for a $1,000 giveaway towards a home remodeling project. This strong offer, combined with compelling creative elements that were featured on the Eldorado Stone website and Facebook page, helped to make the contest one of the most successful promotions ever for the brand. After only one month, the contest had increased the brand’s Likes by 600%.

This year, Cuker partnered with Red Bull to create and deploy their athlete and event social media marketing campaigns. The first contest was dedicated to Red Bull sponsored athlete Mark McMorris at the Winter X Games. The contest asked followers to guess the maximum speed, height and airtime of a McMorris ride featured on a YouTube video and was hosted on his Facebook page for one month. The entrant who guessed correctly received a pair of Oakley goggles and lift tickets to a local ski resort.

Finally, Cuker helped emerging brand Royal Hawaiian Orchards create a custom social media sweepstakes campaign on Facebook. The contest attracted nearly 5,000 entrants, delivering valuable customer contact information as well as new followers for the brand. The winners, which were selected weekly, received an assortment of Royal Hawaiian’s delicious fruit & macadamia nut crunches as well as their popular seasoned macadamias. The contest created a drastic increase in engagement and reach along with a 5,000% growth in new Facebook Likes.

What a great way to start the week! This past Monday, our client X-1 was featured on The Today Show with Kathie Lee and Hoda. X-1, formerly H2O Audio, the most trusted brand in waterproof audio solutions for swimmers and aquatic athletes, recently recognized a new market opportunity for their innovative waterproof technology. H2O decided to expand their brand beyond just water sports, creating weatherproof and sweatproof headphones and cases for running, triathlon fitness, outdoor sports and more. That’s where Cuker stepped in. We were given the opportunity to create a new brand name, logo, tagline, packaging and eCommerce store for X-1.

The ladies on The Today Show selected the X-1 Momentum Headphones as one of their favorite things this week. Kathie Lee and Hoda explained the full product functionality including water resistance, ultra-light design, stay put fit, and the iPhone compatible remote and mic. Kathie Lee and Hoda, we must agree that they are our “favorite headphones ever” too!

Our Cuker crew hit the 20th annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival and experienced the full taste of Austin- the next generation of digital, the latest bands to hit the music scene, and of course, the best food trucks, fried everything and 100% genuine Texas BBQ!

Over 30,000 of the brightest minds in the industry headed to Austin, making this year’s festival attendance an all-time high. The techie festival wrapped up after five days of compelling presentations, fun-filled networking events, and an unbeatable lineup of the newest innovations. We had an amazing time and hope to see you at SXSW next year!

Cuker was recently given the opportunity to host an event facilitated by San Diego Python Users Group called ‪Django Day‬. Django Day was an all day workshop created in order to allow San Diego programmers and developers an opportunity to learn more about our favorite high-level Python framework, Django.

The workshop was broken up into two tracks in order to accommodate different levels of understanding of Django. The first was a beginner class, which was an overall tutorial on how to install, set up and build a custom web application with Django.

The second, intermediate class was taught specifically for developers who were well versed in Django, but wanted to further their knowledge and skill set. The intermediate track was broken up into four main parts: Django Security, Django for Production, the Django Ecosystem, and useful Django Applications.

Because of Cuker’s love affair with this high level Python web framework, it was really a pleasure to host this event. We enjoyed opening up our doors to the developer community in San Diego and can’t wait for the opportunity to host again soon!

Cuker’s very own CEO Aaron Cuker was asked to headline an Ad 2 San Diego event on February 20th. Ad 2’s Industry Download, powered by MeetSoci.com, was a half-day advertising and marketing industry seminar for ambitious young professionals. While other industry experts touched on consumer insights and online marketing, Aaron shared an exclusive look at creating a dynamic eCommerce experience.

Aaron’s session, “Rip Curl’s eCommerce Success: Live the Search,” shared the creation of the ultimate online store for the ultimate surf brand. Live the Search sells Rip Curl’s lifestyle while also including a full-featured online store. Cuker delivered an optimized navigation, streamlined one-page checkout process, technology stories, product videos, and social media integration.

The Cuker team also built a Wetsuit Selector to address the challenge of finding the right wetsuit online. The Wetsuit Selector recommends the perfect wetsuit based on gender, zip, region, height, weight, and performance. Along with the mobile-optimized website, the Wetsuit Selector was also integrated into Rip Curl’s tablet app so this digital tool could be used in retail stores. “It’s imperative for modern brands to offer an optimized shopping experience on mobile,” Aaron explained.

Cuker recently won a 2012 WebAward from the Web Marketing Association for Rip Curl’s eCommerce site, and Rip Curl’s 2012 revenue expectations doubled in result of this powerful eCommerce platform.

The 20th annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival is right around the corner and we are counting down the days! SXSW, taking place on the weekend of March 8-10, is one of the largest interactive conferences in the nation drawing in over 20,000 people to Austin, Texas annually. We are looking forward to previewing the next generation of innovative technology and digital creativity as well as networking with some of the brightest minds in the industry.

If you share our passion for all things interactive and are planning on attending SXSW, we would love to meet up with you! Give us a shout out at 858-345-1378 or info@cukerinteractive.com. We look forward to hearing from you!