The Michigan Business and Professional Association (MBPA) has named Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria LLC as one of Metropolitan Detroit’s “101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For,” marking the fourth year in a row that the agency has been named.

“We are proud to receive this high honor once again,” said Adrienne Lenhoff, Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria founder and president. “We take special care in making our workplace a creative and fun place to work for our employees,” she added, “and the results show in both our work for clients and the dedication that our staff shows every day in accomplishing their goals.”

Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria and 100 other businesses in greater Michigan will be honored at an awards luncheon on Wednesday, September 22, 2010, at The Dearborn Inn, a Marriott hotel located in Dearborn, Mich.

Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria, Novi, Mich.-based businesses, have also received numerous recognitions from Crain’s Detroit Business named as a “Cool Place to Work.” The selection of Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria, along with other winning companies, affirms to its employees, clients, vendors, and to the business community at large, that it is committed to being one of the Best and Brightest companies to work for.

MBPA qualifies companies using independent research that evaluates company communication, community initiatives, compensation and benefits. The organization also reviews other categories such as diversity and multiculturalism, employee education and development, employee engagement and commitment, and work-life balance.

“Because the companies selected have created impressive organizational value and business results through their policies and best practices in human resource management, we believe it is important to recognize their accomplishments, especially at a time when all businesses are being challenged in ways never before seen,” said Jennifer Kluge, MBPA executive vice president and chief operating officer.

Metro Detroit’s 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For is sponsored by AT&T Michigan, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Corp!, Magazine, Davenport University, DTE Energy, Pepsi Bottling Group, Douglas Marketing, The Designate, Strategic Staffing Solutions, WJBK Fox 2, HRAGD, the Detroit Athletic Club and McGraw Wentworth.
About Shazaaam!/Buzzphoria

Founded in 2001, Shazaaam! (shazaaam.com) is an award-winning, independently owned, group of affiliated communications companies headquartered in Novi, Mich. Shazaaam! Public Relations, Social Media Marketing Agency Buzzphoria (buzzphoria.com) and experiential marketing company Promo Marketing Team (promomarketingteam.com) specialize in traditional public relations, social media marketing, product sampling and street-level marketing promotions and events, respectively, on a national level. Specialties include media and public relations, guerilla marketing, online viral marketing, electronic and new media development, mobile tours, product samplings, social networking and event coordination and management.

Ok, so we’ve all received the unwanted emails offering up everything from millions in unclaimed dollars to imposter designer watches to the latest and greatest viagra-like substance, diet revolution, multi-level scheme, etc, etc, etc…

While those types of emails are considered by most of us a nuisance or spam, how aware are you of whether YOU, your brand or company has ever violated CAN-SPAM laws?

To make it easier, Buzzphoria (www.buzzphoria.com) has put together a list of the 10 essential things you need to know about CAN-SPAM compliance.

1.  What is CAN-SPAM?  Written into law in 2003, CAN-SPAM is a United States federal government measure to ensure that all email adequately identifies its origin, allows a user to remove themselves from future mailings and provides the government and ISPs a right to action against anyone not following CAN-SPAM requirements.

2.  Did you know that CAN-SPAM is only applicable to email that is sent and received in the United States? It also overrides any state level spam laws.

3.  If you have specific CAN-SPAM questions, you’ll want to refer to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).  They’re the governing body in legal prosecutions and also update CAN-SPAM’s core compliance requirements.  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is also involved when it comes to emails that are sent to cell devices.

4. Under CAN-SPAM once a recipient has opted out of receiving your email, you may not contact them again for further marketing opportunities. An email unsubscribe operates similar to a Do-Not-Call list with telephone numbers.

5. In terms of opt-out function, landing and links CAN-SPAM requirements keep things simple for the recipient. Senders are allowed to only have the recipient take one action after landing on the unsubscribe page from an opt-out click-thru.  At that point, the recipient can click on a confirm button, check a box, etc. Senders cannot require recipients to sign into an account and perform other actions to be removed from the list or require a fee.  You must support the unsubscribe link and the resulting landing page for at least 30 days to ensure that recipients have enough time to unsubscribe. This helps avoid senders from having confusing or complicated opt out mechanisms.

6. CAN-SPAM mandates that you must remove a recipient from mailing lists or suppress sending to them within 10 days of receipt of their opt-out request.

7. Transactional email is exempt from CAN-SPAM since it is mandated by the FTC. CAN-SPAM defines transactional email as one which “facilitates an agreed-upon transaction or updates a customer in an existing business relationship.”  This definition prohibits marketing messages from being labeled as transactional although it does allow for marketing content in a transactional email. It is advised that a sender get input from someone who’s an expert in email law to certify that the content does apply to the
transactional definition.

8. CAN-SPAM requires that headers accurately reflect the originator of the email message. Failure to do so is considered fraudulent and in direct conflict of the transparency spirit of the law.

9. CAN-SPAM has no volume thresholds for enforcement.  Any amount of email sent, even if it’s just to a single recipient, is covered by CAN-SPAM.

10.  Violation of CAN-SPAM can result in monetary fines and jail time depending on the number of offenses and the sender’s intent.  Also, a sender in violation can face civil damages from private ISPs.

In our last posting, we talked about how we’ve made ourselves our own best case study by putting our own brand on the line to illustrate how we can help you protect yours.

As we discussed last time, there are unscrupulous individuals and groups who are hijacking brands for both sport and profit.  In our case, a hijacker registered and began impersonating the Buzzphoria brand on Twitter.

The first step in defending your company and brand when a hijacker hits it to verse yourself on your rights within terms of service for the social media platform or site in which your brand has been compromised.

Below is a screen shot from Twitter’s Terms of Service:

Twitter Terms of Service

Notice that the Terms of Service clearly state that:

1. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.
2. You may not use the Twitter.com service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. International users agree to comply with all local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.
3. You must not, in the use of Twitter, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright laws).

Twitter General Conditions - Terms of Service

Please note the following:

1. We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party’s intellectual property or these Terms of Use.
2. We reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.

Below, we’ve share the final section of Twitter’s Terms of Service - Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours):

Twitter Terms of Service - Copyright

Please note the following:

Twitter undertakes to obey all relevant copyright laws. We will review all claims of copyright infringement received and remove content deemed to have been posted or distributed in violation of any such laws. To make a claim, please provide us with the following:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or the person authorized to act on its behalf;
2. A description of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed;
3. A description of the infringing material and information reasonably sufficient to permit Twitter to locate the material;
4. Your contact information, including your address, telephone number, and email;
5. A statement by you that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and, under the pains and penalties of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

At the beginning of the .com boom, it was squatters grabbing brand names they felt were valuable and holding them for ransom to corporations.  In the past weeks and months, it was employees at a Dominoes who disparaged the brand by posting YouTube videos, causing the company to go into crisis communications mode.  It hasn’t just happened to Dominos:  with the rise of user generated content, comes the crush of corporations being impersonated and spoofed across user-generated mediums, creating more publicity nightmares, crisis communications situations and expensive legal battles.

Equally as deadly and dangerous to brands, are imposters who grab brand names within popular social media platforms such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, to name a few…

Thus, the Buzzphoria case study continues… We too were a victim of brand high-jacking and the retrieval process to gain our brand back.

Within Scott Allen’s original blog post about Buzzphoria, he essentially posed a call to action for someone to high-jack the Buzzphoria name and identity within multiple social media sites.  Someone took him up on it and immediately grabbed the Twitter identity @buzzphoria.  The individual(s) then took elements of artwork from the Buzzphoria website and set up a branded page, representing themselves as our brand.  From our tracking, we witnessed the individual(s) populating the page with tweets representing themselves as us, sent to the followers the culprit(s) had begun amassing.

When we spoke to Scott Allen, he told us that the culprit(s) had reached out to him and had let him know that they would give us our brand back…if we asked.

Unfortunately, most corporations don’t see that level of generosity and kindness (I’m being facetious here…).  No…brand high-jackers do not usually reach out to a blogger or journalist to say - “hey, if you do talk to that company let them know I’d be happy to hand them back their brand…”

So, what’s the journey for a corporation or brand to retrieve its identity?  (without an expensive and protracted legal battle?)

Our next few posts will show you step by step how we were able to retrieve our identity from Twitter.

In our last post we covered To Blog or Not to Blog. In that post we mentioned that too many brands and corporations take a Field of Dreams approach to creating a blog believing that just because they build it the audience will come.

A report in the Wall Street Journal, noted the effect of adding a blog to a web site: unique site visitors increased from 100 per month to 150,000 per month; total sales increased 18 percent; web-site generated sales increased to 25 percent of referrals, up from a mere one percent.

The Wall Street Journal article also suggested that a blog can be more important than having a web site.

While we agree that blogs can be an important component of a brand’s marketing mix, we feel that it would be reckless for a brand or company to depend solely on the blog as their online marketing initiative. A blog is a great tool if properly planned and executed, however, if there is no voice, no plan and no audience it can also fall into the proverbial tree falling in the forest argument…

Creating a blog can be inexpensive when free blog sites such as Google’s Blogger.com (www.blogger.com). And while no one can promise that using Google’s blog site will get your blog a better listing in a Google search, it just seems like common sense that it would be a plus.

Other free blog sites include Wordpress.org (www.wordpress.org), LiveJournal.com (www.livejournal.com), and . . . we’ll stop here, because any list will be sure to omit the one blog site that someone thinks is the best blog site on the web. But that’s one of the great things about a blog: readers add value by posting comments. So, let the debate begin over the best place to be blogging. Or whether Blogger.com earns better positioning in a Google search.

But back to business . . . your business.
 
Why Blog?

A blog is alive.

A web site is static.

A blog is fresh, it’s now: content with a “born on” date.

A web site is like . . . that jar of peanut butter of an unknown vintage, lost in the back of the pantry.  Contaminated with salmonella? Who knows how long it has been sitting.
 
A blog engages the reader by empowering each reader to post comments.

A web site is mere dictation . . . dictatorially delivered.

A blog collects consumer feedback . . . in a place where your business can respond, especially to show the world you care about satisfying any unhappy customer.
 
A web site may invite an email or phone call, but can fail miserably at enabling you to show the world you care and do deliver excellence in customer service.

Updating a blog is as easy as posting your latest text, pics, or video to the blog.

Updating a web site? Unless you’re technically savvy, you’ll be writing text and a check with every little update.

A blog allows you to show your expertise. With this blog, Buzzphoria aims to illustrate details about our being our own best case study while at the same time showing how your business can use digital marketing strategies to enhance your bottom line.

To help stimulate the discussion, Buzzphoria will continue, intentionally, to do some things wrong, while unfolding all the elements of endgame and “we are our own best case study” illustration . . . and, we invite readers to demonstrate their informed opinions on the better way to achieve marketing success in this space. Uncensored.

Coming soon: What is a social media reality check? and What happens when your brand gets hijacked.

It seems everywhere you go people are either talking or writing about Social Media.  Articles herald that Social Media is a must-have in any brand or company’s marketing mix.  Corporations are converting large segments of budget previously allocated to traditional marketing channels into social media marketing.  Many of these corporations and brands end up being disappointed or disillusioned with the results.

The reasons?  Lack of planning, entering into social media without understanding the mediums they’re leveraging and not identifying upfront the brand or company’s end game for engaging social media into the marketing mix.

When clients work with Buzzphoria, we feel the questions we ask are as critical as the planning of the campaign, the campaign implementation and our client’s end game results. 

Some questions you should ask yourself in the planning phases of your campaign:

Why are we doing this?  What do we hope to achieve?  How will we measure results both on and offline?  How will our social media activities enhance other activities within the client’s communications and marketing channels?