Make 2010 the year you “do some good.” Whether it’s donating to victims of the earthquake in Haiti or bowling for your local chapter of Big Brothers Big Sisters — social media platforms have leveled the playing ground, making it just as easy for a small entrepreneur or multimillion-dollar conglomerate to play a philanthropic role in the community.

Why should you expend energy on “giving?” Besides the obvious answer — because you can make a difference — there are some business advantages. Remember, “community” no longer defines a geographical region just outside your door. It represents a larger, virtual online community populated by your fans, customers and prospective customers. People talk about you in these virtual communities. And they share your links, events, white papers and postings.

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News flash: People waste time at work. According to salary.com the average worker wastes 2.09 hours in a typical day, nearly half of it surfing the Internet. Believe it or not, Wisconsin ranks No. 4 in the country for most time wasted. So the desire to combat lost productivity by blocking Facebook access for your employees is completely understandable. But it’s also shortsighted.

For starters, the problem isn’t Facebook. Wasting time at work is as old as the caveman who sat around drawing pictures in the mud with a stick while everyone else was busy hunting and gathering. During the pre-Internet era (shortly after the caveman era), I worked at an advertising agency with a guy who spent at least three hours of every day on the phone chatting with his friends.

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TMA+Peritus is building a series of consumer panels — what we call our PopVox Panels — to help us identify key trends in specific category segments. The people selected to become part of PopVox will be invited to provide their insights in activities like short surveys, quick telephone interviews, Web-based focus groups, and brief responses to email exercises.

PopVox Panel members will be required to provide us with their contact information — email address, telephone number and mailing address — to enable us to interact with them in a variety of ways. This information will not be shared with any other organization or entity and will remain confidential to the TMA+Peritus PopVox manager.

Panel members who complete assigned activities will be invited to choose from a variety of online gift cards as a thank you for their input. You can opt out of Panel activity at any time.

We are currently recruiting two groups of members:

1) Consumers aged 18 – 35 who use financial services
2) Consumers of all ages who are members of a credit union

If you are interested in becoming a PopVox Panel member, please email abrown@tmaperitus.com or call toll free (877) 296-7114 by TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10 .

If you call, please tell the operator that you’re calling about becoming a PopVox member.

We hope you’ll join us!

It’s your blog. About your business. So you might be tempted to think of it as your own little kingdom where you get to project your expertise, talk up your business, and bask in the positive feedback, free from dissent by what former Vice President Spiro Agnew called “the nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Think again. A blog by its very nature is about opinion, and sooner or later a few of those opinions are going to be unflattering, unfair, insulting or worse. It’s natural to want to control every aspect of your company’s message and image. But in the blogosphere everyone gets to weigh in. Even stupid people. That’s what makes a blog so dynamic.
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The Women’s Community is now on Facebook, and to jumpstart their fan base, Thomas Marks and Associates and Peritus Design (TMA+Peritus) are hosting their semi-annual social networking event to benefit the non-profit organization during Domestic Violence Awareness month.

TMA+Peritus’ Fall Ice Maker will be held on Thursday, October 22, 2009 at the RedEye Brewery in Wausau. But you won’t see invitations in the mail. TMA+Peritus and The Women’s Community are using the power of social networking to generate awareness for the event.

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Ah, the Seventies.  The Gremlin, The Saturday Night Special, denim furniture and macramé.  If your logo hearkens back to this era and hasn’t been updated, it is time to consider bringing it into the modern era, Baby.

Will It Cost a Lot of Bread?
A logo can be a significant investment to a company, because a change may require new signage, vehicle graphics, packaging and trade show displays – in addition to the numerous correspondence and marketing materials you have in inventory.  Cost has to be considered, but also consider the cost of doing nothing and maintaining the status quo with a logo that represents a different company from the distant past.

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The Business Development team from TMA+Pertius will be tweeting followers from The Mirren New Business Workshop Series in Chicago. On September 24 and 25, Craig Sweeney, Director of Business Development, and Shawn Van Dalfsen, Senior Business Strategist, will be attending the Mirren workshop “Advanced New Business Training: Practical Strategies and Tools.”

“We are one of the very few agencies in this state to implement The Mirren Method™,” notes Tom Marks, Managing Partner of TMA+Peritus. “By tweeting directly from the workshop, our team will share the insights they gain from this training in real time. Our clients will have immediate access to new strategies and business innovations.”

“The training curriculum from Mirren is constantly evolving, which ensures that we’re at the forefront of best practices and strategies,” adds Kathy Marks, Managing Partner of TMA+Peritus. “As an agency recognized for our business-first approach to marketing, it’s imperative that we fully understand our clients and their business. The Mirren Method™ is the process through which we increase that understanding. Only from that foundation are we able to build successful, integrated strategic campaigns for our clients.”

Executives from PJA Advertising + Marketing and Mintel Research are featured guest speakers. These national workshops, held in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, have been sold out each of the past three years.

Madison, WI – September 04, 2009 – Thomas Marks & Associates and Peritus Design (TMA+Peritus), a strategic agency specializing in the interaction between businesses and customers through branding, public relations, print, web 2.0 and social media marketing, announces the appointment of Craig Sweeney as Director of Business Development. (more…)

Local interactive design and marketing agency to grow sales of state’s potatoes

The Wisconsin Potato & Vegetable Growers Association (WPVGA) has partnered with Thomas Marks & Associates and Peritus Design (TMA+Peritus) to increase awareness of the Wisconsin Potato and Healthy Grown® potato brand among consumers and retailers nationwide.

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If you remember only one thing from this column, it should be the title, because therein lies perhaps the single most important key to success for a company wanting to incorporate blogging into their marketing mix.

Successful blogging for business is blogging continued…week in and week out. Even when it seems like you’ve got twenty things more important to do. A few weeks back I said that a blog is like a pet. You have to commit to feeding it regularly or it will die. The good news is you don’t have to feed it every day, like a dog or cat. Try for a minimum of two posts a week. If you can manage three or more, all the better. But remember that the idea is to keep people coming back because they have confidence that you’ll show up, too. (more…)