Here is what Raj Patel has to say about it, in light of the recent results in South Carolina.

Central Area Motivation Program is dedicated to helping people help themselves and each other as they move from poverty to self-sufficiency through programs and advocacy. We seek to create a healthy, thriving world free of poverty. Our organization values excellence, compassion, responsiveness, innovation, resiliency, and diversity.

Give it a looksee at http://www.karasscreative.com/karass-creative/2012/1/9/the-transformative-power-of-artted-speaker-chris-jordan.html

Instead of getting them locked into just implementing AdWords, we spent a few hours discussing why they had reached the conclusion that AdWords would help.

What they needed was some honest feedback and a solid Social Media plan. The guys did what they needed to do to transform their business after we worked together, and the results were like night and day.

Are you struggling to find the right answers in your business? I can help you decide what to do, and how to do it.

Find out more about this wave of the future in this article at Non-Profit Tech News, which interviewed me on the subject.

My client Central Area Motivation Program provides essential social services to the low-income community of Seattle, including Home Heating Bill Payment Assistance, Financial Literacy training, and a Food Bank that serves up to 1000 households each week.

By Roger Working, Ragan.com
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My client Pensione Nichols is a downtown Seattle Bed & Breakfast with wonderful views of Puget Sound just one block away from the historic Pike Place Market. Pensione Nichols uses a Social Media marketing program designed by Timothy Thomas Consulting.
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Lindsey Nichols had been running a bed and breakfast in Seattle for 22 years when she wondered if a better social media presence might help her through the winter slump.

The trouble is, Pensione Nichols doesn’t have the staff or expertise to sort out how to accomplish that. So she brought in Timothy Thomas Consulting, one of a growing breed of content counselors as businesses seek to make good use of social media.

Part of Thomas’s plan included emailing former guests and encouraging them to post on Facebook their photos of the B&B and its views of Puget Sound. It worked.

“It put heads in my beds,” Nichols says. “Within 20 minutes of sending it out, we were already getting responses.”

A shifting landscape

The growing trend of bringing in content counselors has been noted by Adam Vincenzini of the agency Paratus Communications. He is also European contributing editor of PRDaily.com.

For decades, he says, a PR agency would craft new content and distribute it to the media, but real-time and social media have changed this. So Vincenzini doesn’t think agencies should be doing social media for businesses.

“Instead,” he writes, “our role should be to train up relevant talent internally, act as ongoing mentors, provide strategic counsel and help them be prepared for the next thing that comes along.”

Now even nonprofits and small businesses are hiring people like principal consultant Timothy Thomas, who worked with Nichols. He found that receptionists were hanging out on Facebook during downtime, so he urged Nichols to have them manage the B&B’s Facebook site.

Counselors come in when companies and small businesses aren’t sure how to approach the Internet’s social spaces but worry they are being left behind, he says. Businesses need to view Facebook as a networking event or a “nonstop, electronic, 24-hour cocktail party.”

“So the business that you’re going to get is not really direct business where you’re going to cut a deal,” Thomas says. “It has more to do with, how do you cultivate people’s perceptions of you online, of your business or your work?”

A combination teacher and PR maven

Rebecca Maguire, president of Maguire Media Group, acts as a content counselor for clients ranging from individual entrepreneurs to larger corporations.

The role is similar to that of a writer or PR maven, she says, in that one must listen to the needs of the client, understand the brand and its positioning, and communicate a multi-level marketing plan to the client, she says.

“The other aspect of this role [of content counselor] is one of teacher—we must impart the intricate knowledge of social media and its use to our clients,” Maguire says. “Without proper instruction, they will be spinning their wheels unnecessarily.”

With client Janine Driver of The Body Language Institute, Maguire’s team is responsible for content for her blogs for Psychology Today and Doctor Oz, but Driver also personally transfers information to her Facebook sites.

The ‘new rules of marketing and PR’

Matt Batt, principal at Pipeline, has served as a content counselor for companies that include Redbox movie rentals, helping them understand “how to play by these new rules of marketing and PR.”

Redbox “had just started with Facebook,” Batt says, “but their Facebook wall was closed. So it was very much a one-way medium, where they were just posting things that they thought were relevant to their customers, but they didn’t give their customers any kind of voice.”

He recommended that the company to open up the discussion and empower customers. Redbox has done a great job since, Batt says. Now if a customer complains, loyal followers will often jump in and defend it.

Content counselor Mary Lynn Halland has both counseled and provided content to nonprofits such as one that gives grants to small businesses run by immigrants. Her firm, Consulting Resources NY, strategies and interviews and writes profiles of businesses, including a sports bar in Queens run by a Guyanan immigrant.

Smaller and mid-size organizations intend to do social media, but they let it fall through the cracks, she says. Generally they turn to a young employee in marketing who is familiar with social media.

“They might do it for three days or a week, but then they get busy and the bosses forget to follow up, and they turn around three weeks later and nothing’s been done,” says Halland. “So they bring in someone like me to keep continuity.”

Originally posted at: Health Care Communication

Find out more about the upcoming intensive at this post on The Center for Serious Play Blog.

My client The Center for Serious Play is a study center at the University of Washington Bothell founded by Wizards of the Coast alum Wanda Gregory. It is designed to foster an alliance between academic study and game development, viewing the culture of video games with respect, and assisting students to start careers in the video game industry. The CSP uses a Social Media marketing program designed by Timothy Thomas Consulting.

Find out more from Energysavers.gov

My client Orb Optronix, Inc. specializes in test and measurement products and services for characterization of high-brightness LEDs and lighting products made from LEDs.