Digital Digest: June 27th

The Digital Digest by 360social gives you the best digital secrets, trends, tips and tricks for new tools, and general news circulating in the digital world. Have a question? Curious about a new site and what it does? Never heard about a tool mentioned recently? Contact Lesley Ridge, 360PR’s content and community manager:  @lesleyridge or  Facebook.com/360pr and join in the conversation using #360PR!

Michelle Obama on Pinterest: Obama Campaign Launches Account for First Lady to Celebrate Father’s Day:  Is politics the latest Pinterest trend? Possibly! Today, First Lady Michelle Obama made her debut on the social site with three boards – Around the White House, Great Memories, and Father’s Day. What other boards do you think MO will create? Tweet your ideas using #360PR.

Behind the Scenes of 4 Hot Social Media Campaigns [CASE STUDY]: While most brands have a presence across multiple social channels, usually one in the bunch emerges as the rock star, driving traffic, engagement, and conversation. Mashable contributor Lauren Hockenson gives four recent campaigns gold stars of excellence. Read the short version for quick insights to what drove success, or click on each campaign to dive a little deeper.

Five Strategies to Dominate Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube [INFOGRAPHIC]: This week’s infographic is brought to you by Awareness, Inc., covering goals brands and companies should strive to achieve across their social networks to be successful. A favorite? Analytics. Understanding what works for your audience is key to develop and curate the most relevant content. Want to read more? Download the full white paper here.

Filed under: Cause-Related, Digital Digest, Digital PR, Facebook, Social Good, Social Media by Admin - 3 Comments →

By Caitlin McNamara

The JPMorgan Chase Corporate Challenge Series is a 12-city, six-country, five-continent road race, making it the largest road race series in the world. The Corporate Challenge provides an evening of healthy competition, camaraderie and teamwork for local companies to get to know all of their employees. This year, the Corporate Challenge continued its success with a projected number of 250,000 participants.

360PR was lucky to be involved in the race series by taking the communications lead in Chicago (May 26), Boston (June 2) and New York (June 15 and June 16). In addition to focusing on JPMorgan Chase, the bank, we also worked with companies that participated including Caterpillar and Molex (Chicago), Dassault Systemes and Fidelity (Boston), as well as Coach and Johnson & Johnson (New York). Learning about the individual runners and the companies as a whole, we were able to fine tune our pitches leading to national and regional coverage with Banker & Tradesmen, Mass High Tech, the WSJ Dealbreaker Blog and many more.

Each year, companies from all different industries participate in this 12-city road race series – ranging from Tassimo, to WebMD, to Bloomingdales. In Boston, the 360PR crew took part in the 3.5 mile race around the Boston Common. And, while we didn’t win the race, we’re proud to say that 360PR made it to the top 10 in the Boston  t-shirt contest this year!

Filed under: 360 Public Relations, Boston, Cause-Related, Events and Conferences, Industry Organizations by Admin - No Comments →

The little black dress has always been a classic addition to any woman’s wardrobe, but could you wear one for a whole year? Sheena Matheiken did.

Sheena set out on a one-year journey, the “Uniform Project,” last May to exercise sustainable fashion and raise money for children in India. Every day she reinvented her outfit with recycled and donated accessories, which were photo-documented and posted on the Uniform Project blog daily.

Through a very savvy use of social media, Sheena and the Uniform Project were able to raise $94,958 and send 263 children to school. Take a look at the video below featuring all 365 outfits!

Uniform Project Picture Book from The Uniform Project on Vimeo.

What are some other examples of people using social media to raise money for charity?

Filed under: Cause-Related, Charity, Digital PR, FaceBook, Internet, Social Media, Social Networking by Admin - 2 Comments →

Simply stated, social media has changed the way we communicate during disasters. This is now abundantly clear with all of the online activity surrounding the recent earthquake in Haiti.

Over the past couple weeks, there has been a tremendous outpouring of support for the Haitian people. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy donations have exceeded $470 million!

Mobile giving raises the bar

A large portion of donations are coming from The Red Cross’ mobile phone texting campaign. With partners Mobile Accord and the mGive Foundation, Red Cross quickly enacted a mobile texting campaign shortly after the earthquake hit. And with the help of the NFL playoff game spots and other widespread promotions, mobile phone users have donated over $25 million thus far just by texting “90999!” According to this NY Times story, over $500,000 per hour was donated to the Red Cross during recent NFL games. And according to Pew and Twitter-tracking service Sysomos, 189,024 tweets included “90999″ between January 12^th and 14^th. 2.3 million included the word “Haiti” or “Red Cross” in this same time frame. Truly unbelievable!

Relying on social media and citizen journalists

Not only has social media been used to gather donations, but people on the ground in Haiti have used Facebook and Twitter to send updates/photos, while concerned onlookers tune in to the constant stream of updates. In addition, news outlets have relied on social media and “citizen journalists” in their reporting. For example, CNN started a “Haiti Boots On Ground” Twitter list, compiling updates from the CNN reporters on the ground.  CNN’s iReport has also played a key role in their coverage of the disaster.

And companies have rallied to develop mobile apps and websites dedicated to the cause, such as a Creole-to-English translator app .  An organization called “The Extraordinaries” which allows people to complete micro-tasks for organizations or causes, using a mobile phone or web browser in a few minutes, have set up a support page at http://www.beextra.org/haiti to leverage the “power of the crowd” to help locate and identify missing persons.

Our best wishes to the Haitian people and to all of the families affected by the earthquake. Stay strong.

Filed under: Cause-Related, Internet, Media and Press, Mobile Industry, Social Media by EliciaBasoli - 6 Comments →

Our 360PR Stop & Shop team hit the road last week and headed to the Frog and Peach Restaurant in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The reason?  To meet some of the great New Jersey mom bloggers and chat with them about what Stop & Shop can do to help their families eat nutritiously, while still sticking to a budget.

Our good friend Liz Thompson from This Full House co-hosted the event and spread the word about it with her fellow Jersey (or Joisey as she calls it!) mom bloggers.  We had a really nice lunch with some great new friends, including Deb from Jersey Bites, Vanessa AKA Chef Druck, Hilary of Mrs. Mo’s NJ, Baby!, Monica from Paper Bridges, Bay from Queen Mother Blog, Cecile of The Shopping Duck and Kate from Growing Up in the Garden State who even celebrated her birthday with us!

Bringing together communities of bloggers for in-person events is always fun. Many of the bloggers at the lunch knew each other in the online world, but just “met” for the first time. And it sounds like great things will come out of that. The bloggers we met are especially committed to helping their communities through their blogs. Started by Deb at Jersey Bites, bloggers across the Garden State participated in Blogging Out Hunger, a holiday-timed campaign that raised $7,000 for the Community Food Bank of New Jersey and showed the power of blogs. Stop & Shop was able to get involved by pledging a $1 donation for every comment Liz at This Full House received in response to her campaign post.

Now that we’ve been formally introduced (and broken really good bread!) with these New Jersey bloggers, we definitely look forward to more events and collaborations like Blogging Out Hunger in the future.

Stop & Shop’s New Jersey Blogger Lunch introduces new friends: Cecile from The Shopping Duck, Deb from Jersey Bites, Kate from Growing Up in the Garden State and Liz from This Full House

Filed under: Blogger Relations, Cause-Related, Events and Conferences by Admin - 3 Comments →