Everyone meet Craig Miller.

As a Maintenance Ambassador at Anchorage Downtown Partnership Ltd., Craig is responsible for keeping our downtown clean and our sidewalks snow free.  You can see him almost every day sporting his orange jacket, long hair and complementary long beard shoveling sidewalks, picking up trash and operating heavy machinery in downtown.

Craig first became interested in beard competitions in 2003 when he stumbled across a picture in the newspaper about David Travers who won the World Beard and Mustache Championships.

From then on, Craig was hooked.  He vowed to compete in the next competition but soon found out it was going to be held in Europe, forcing Craig to stash his beard dreams away.

Then last year he learned that the World Beard and Mustache Championship would be in Anchorage, Alaska!

Craig entered the Alaskan Whaler category – full beard with no mustache – picture an Amish or Abe Lincoln beard.  His hopes were high for placing and thought no one stood a chance because he said he “rarely saw anyone with this type of beard.”  However, some locals from the peninsula brought their “Abe” game and stole his thunder leaving Craig with fourth place.

His hopes are still high and he will compete in the 2010 Mr. Fur Face Beard and Mustache Competition at the Fur Rondy Miners and Trappers Ball this Saturday, March 6th at 7:30pm.  Craig plans on redeeming his Alaskan Whaler Beard and hopes to bring home the gold!

Come help support Craig Miller and his Alaskan Whaler Beard tomorrow night at the Miners and Trappers Ball at 7:30pm.

GOOD LUCK CRAIG!!!!

For more info visit http://www.minersandtrappersball.org/ or call (907) 279-5650.

How about we take a look at a small retail store like Forbidden Shoes?  If Forbidden Shoes sets up a Facebook account and starts adding their personal friends, family or whoever they can find on Facebook, most likely Forbidden Shoes is not hitting their target audience.

Now if Forbidden Shoes decides to collect information from their customers, like their name, (which is all you need to search for someone on Facebook) and sends them a friend request and that person accepts it, Forbidden Shoes is now connecting to their target audience.

So now half the battle is over.  Forbidden Shoes is connected to their audience and the people that shop at their store.  Now comes the creative part.  Once Forbidden Shoes connects to their audience, they have to keep their attention, engage them and keep in contact with them.  Otherwise, people forget who their friends are and will never visit the profile of Forbidden Shoes!

Perhaps one way of keeping their attention is making an event at the store exclusively for the Facebook friends of Forbidden Shoes.  Maybe they receive 10% off if they mention that they are a Facebook friend or fan of Forbidden Shoes.  Maybe Forbidden Shoes has a monthly special that only people on Facebook can find out about.  Or maybe the store creates an event on Facebook like a pre-sale preview party for exclusive Facebook friends.  Customers get to come in after hours and get a sneak peek at the sale and receive an extra discount.

This is an opportunity for customers to feel the benefit of being a Facebook friend of Forbidden Shoes and gives Forbidden Shoes the chance to get to know their Facebook followers and maybe pick their brain about what they like, don’t like and how they use Facebook.

If you engage your audience, spark their interest, make it worthwhile for them to visit your profile often and then are able to make a sale out of it, you are using social media successfully.  There are endless possibilities and creative ways to connect to people with social media.  The key to social media is connecting to the right people and finding a reason for people to visit your profile.  This is what will determine the effectiveness of your social media.

Now go get Facebooking!

As a new member to Anchorage Downtown Partnership, I will be writing a weekly blog about cheap, free and easy marketing ideas for businesses.  This week I’m going to talk about social media and how to properly use Twitter to help your business.

It seems like everywhere you turn people are talking about Twitter and Tweeting!  Sometimes I get the feeling it’s been ingrained into people’s head that their business NEEDS to use Twitter that people forget how to effectively use it for a business.

When Twitter was created, it was a take off of something that Facebook used as one of their features called “Status Update”. Basically, it is a sentence or two (140 characters) about whatever you are doing, what you are thinking or something you find interesting.  It’s a quick way to keep an update on your friends and celebrities. Through the evolution of Twitter, businesses realized that they could make an account and give information about their business and so on.  The problem now is businesses have a hard time trying to track the effectiveness of Twitter.  I’m going to show you an example of how a business could measure the effectiveness of their Twitter account.

Lets take a food business like Dave’s Donuts.  Dave decides to make a Twitter account and he Tweets each day about the store or maybe about the daily donut special.  But if Dave has no followers or if his followers are people in Texas, his social media is not being used effectively.  Dave needs a way to find his target audience and once he does that he needs to find a reason for people to follow his Tweets.

Now lets say that Dave decides to somehow collect his customer’s information like their Twitter account name.  Maybe he does a weekly drawing for a dozen donuts and for people to win, they have to put their Twitter account name as their contact info.  Then, each week the winners are announced on Twitter when Dave Tweets their name.

Dave is now effectively communicating to HIS audience and he is using Twitter as a marketing tool to get people to check his Tweets.   He also has his customers Twitter user name so he can follow them and most likely, they will add Dave and follow him.  Dave is now using social media effectively and hopefully this tool will transition into new business opportunities for him like new followers, more customers checking Tweets from Dave’s Donuts and possibly more traffic into his store which equals more $$$$$$!

The key to Twitter and all social media is:

1.  Finding your target audience

2.  Keeping their attention – make them want to check your Tweets!

3.  Being able to measure the effectiveness of your Tweets

P.S.  Did I mention that Twitter is FREE????

Here’s a link to more FAQ’s about Twitter http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/13920

For more questions or comments email me at: ebolling@anchoragedowntown.org

Happy Tweeting!