MSU is promoting the eco-friendly movement through the Be Spartan Green site. The site is intended to inspire environmentally friendly values in the MSU community and shows the compromise of MSU in making an impact by encouraging a more sustainable way of life. The site is divided in the following sections:
What does it mean.In this section you can find the basic guidelines of the Spartan Green environmental stewardship and why it is important for MSU.
Projects.A list of the different projects and ideas developed by the environmental stewardship team to promote eco-friendliness. These projects go from installing energy saving appliances in different MSU areas to promoting recicling policies or attending Climate Change Conferences.
News and Events.Be informed of all the activities that the Spartan Green team is promoting.
Resources. From local/student based associations to National Initiatives, this section provides you with a lot of resources and information necessary for having a more eco-friendly lifestyle.
Fun and Games.Here you can find info about the Be Spartan Green video contest, as well as many resources for spreading the Be Spartan Green spirit among your community.
In my opinion this is a great initiative that will encourage the MSU community to be more eco-friendly. Hopefully more institutions will follow this path, realizing that they can make a difference and starting similar campaigns. I think that if more people is informed about how little changes in their lifestyles can lead to a more sustainable world.
Social Harbor is a Profile Building service recently launched by Ingenex Digital Marketing. The goal of Social Harbor is to provide its customers with the best of what having a professionally managed online profile can give them: Credibility, control, promotion, connections… For doing this Social Harbor relies on their own business and professional profile directory but also in several social network sites, especially on LinkedIn, which is currently the most important professional networking site on the internet.
The advantages of using LinkedIn are many, but I think that the one that sets it apart from the rest of the online social networking sites is the absence of irrelevant content for your professional development. In other words, there are no photo albums, no wall where your friends can make funny comments, etc. Instead, LinkedIn offers you the possibility of having a professional online profile, to interact with other professionals in the same field through groups, Questions&Answers pages, and most important, to reach more people that may be interesting for your business or your career development, either through these groups or through your own contacts.
The challenge with having a profile in LinkedIn is to make it stand out, and that is exactly the goal of the Social Harbor Team. They will create and manage profiles for you or your company in different networking sites, then they will give you advice on how to grow your different professional networks. By doing this, the Social Harbor professionals will give your profile the online relevance that it deserves, and more importantly, they will make easier for your profile to be found for the professional reasons you want it to be found.
The Eco-Friendly Digital Marketing Interns are going to be doing some Experimental Marketing. I don’t know anyone else in Michigan doing this kind of stuff right now, but through applying some techniques we’ve learned in the last three weeks we hope to get some really stunning results.
I can not say much more at this time, but it is going to be more spectacular than mixing Mentos with Coke. I’ll keep you posted during this week of how this experiment is going. In the meantime don’t hesitate to check out Derek’s and my fellow “Experimental Marketing” Interns blogs:
Last Wednesday was a pretty intense day at Ingenex. We were all creating our personal profiles on About Us, the site has a wiki area where you can introduce your bio, personal information, etc. It is impressive to see how in a couple weeks, through creating profiles in social networking sites, blogging, cross linking and the rest of techniques that we are learning at Ingenex, my online presence had been empowered. Two weeks ago, when I googled my name I could only see the Ecofriendly Internship blog on the search results. Now I am in the first ten results, which is pretty amazing.
Last Wednesday I also created a Squidoo lens for Social Harbor. Squidoo is another social networking website that allows you to create pages (called lenses) about a certain topic, where you can include links to anything you like that is online, get related content, and even make money from it. Certainly this website is another tool to keep in mind if you want to promote your online presence, since it allows you to do lots of cross linking.
Finally we attended LA2M (Lunch Ann Arbor Marketing, check out theirFacebook group), where Shawn Smith from Optimal Webworks gave a very interesting presentation about Mobile Marketing. He talked about many different uses of mobile marketing, but I think the one that surprised me the most was the Quick Response codes.
In Japan QR codes are very popular and they consist in images similar to a barcode that can be recognized by your cellphone when you take a picture of them. Between the many uses I think the one that impressed me the most was the one that consisted in having these codes in front of a bar, then you take a picture of it with your cellphone, the cellphone recognizes it and you get a happy hour discount or some other promotion. He also talked about the use of this Mobile Marketing in politics, and how the Democratic campaign was using this. What they did is to offer news via text message to their subscribers. By offering the subscribers to send them a text message with who was going to be Obama’s VP they got more than 3 million subscribers. This was revolutionary and very interesting for the campaign, since they can track where the messages were sent from and have 3 million of potential supporters localized.
This video won the “Outstanding Commercial” Emmy Award and the most interesting thing about it: It was created and intended to be shown only online, and it already has more than 12 millions views. So yes, the Emmy Award winner commercial has never been shown on TV. From the advertiser point of view this is a big advantage, not only because the cost of having this ad online as a viral campaign is much less than the cost of putting an ad on TV, but also because potential customers spend more time browsing the internet than watching TV.
After my first day at Ingenex Digital Marketing, I am looking for blogs that cover digital marketing topics. I am also creating profiles in social networking websites I did not know, and rediscovering some others for which I had created a profile some time ago but I did not really use until now.
I plan to follow several digital marketing blogs, but I will focus in these ones:
These blogs common topic is digital marketing and social media, and these are only the first ones of a list that will keep growing. I also plan to follow the blogs of my fellow interns at Ingenex Digital Marketing, you can find links to their websites in the “Blogs I Read” section of this blog.
I have been increasing my presence in Social Network sites in which I was already participating, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, as well as creating profiles on About Us, Naymzand ZoomInfo. I have also become more active on Twitter; I think it is a great way of keeping in touch with friends and professional contacts, and in my opinion has many possibilities that I will talk about in an upcoming post.
By doing all this I expect to get a better understanding of how Digital Marketing and Social Networking work, so I will be able to improve my digital marketing skills and share all this new knowledge with you.
Today I just started the Eco-Friendly Digital Marketing Internship at Ingenex, a Digital Marketing company located in Ann Arbor, MI. The Internship will last three months and I will be doing some Digital Marketing work, and the most important, getting some first hand real world experience of how a marketing agency works.
I just meet Derek Mehraban, CEO of Ingenex, and the rest of interns. The first impressions are very good and it seems that this will definitely be a big step in my career.
