A communications studies major, Kristen has been a communications intern with GE Transportation since May, serving as the communications chair for nearly 200 interns. Her other activities include public relations director for Edinboro University’s PRSSA and marketing chairperson for the Edinboro Film Series.

Kristen has specific interests in social media and public relations but is looking forward to a broad-based experience at PAPA.

– Social Media Today

Abandon your comfort zone. Bird says Pixar consistently pushes to try new things, to “shake things up.” When you invite employees to reach beyond what you “usually” do, they tend to discover new approaches or new perspectives that open all kinds of possibilities.

Hire the malcontents. People who are frustrated, who don’t like being held back from trying their ideas, tend to be great innovators. These people are looking to break away from the established way of doing things.

Encourage passionate involvement. Innovators are not always happy in their work—but they are fully engaged and deeply believe in that work. That passion translates into smart, funny, engaging creative product.

Focus your energies. Not everything has to be “perfect.” Learn what parts of a project should be as close to perfection as they can be, and which can be less so. “Certain shots need to be perfect, others need to be very good, and there are some that only need to be good enough to not break the spell,” said Bird of animation effects his team developed for “The Incredibles.” Guide your people to focus their energies where it will count the most.

Collaboration starts at the top. Create an environment that not merely invites, but positively demands collaboration. Push to get employees to share their thoughts and speak out if they disagree or have another idea about how to accomplish something. Everyone shares, everyone learns, so everyone gets better.

Team morale is everything. “If you have low morale, for every $1.00 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1.00 you spend, you get about $3.00 of value,” said Bird, based on his experience working on poorly managed productions versus well-run, collaborative films. People need to feel invested in the work. If they’re invested, they expend more energy in less time to make it a good as it can be. Zero investment translates into lower energy, less efficiency, and a shoddy product.

Believe to achieve. Approach every problem with a “nothing is impossible” attitude. Challenge yourself and your team. Reach beyond what you’ve done before to succeed beyond everyone’s expectations.

Make a product YOU can love. Yes, it’s about the customer, but it’s also about quality. Don’t turn out a product that is less than you wanted it to be, because you felt constrained to “shrink” your innovative idea to fit some preconceived notion about the end user. Make it something you are proud of, and the audience, whoever they may be, will likely share your admiration.

No Cubic-hells. Create an environment that compels people to interact with each other throughout the day. Pixar’s studios were designed with key public areas in a center atrium—including the bathrooms! Whenever people make eye contact, that mystical alchemy called collaboration tends to occur.

Cross-pollinate skills. Pixar has its own “university” (humorously dubbed “PU”) where animators can learn about lighting effects, Photoshop artists can learn animation—or even take a martial arts class! They borrowed this idea from 1940s-era Disney HR practices. A more complete, widely-skilled employee tends to contribute more, be more imaginative and even grow into other skill areas to the organization’s benefit.

Lead subversively. Be an example to your employees. Try to see things from a different angle, and encourage open debate. Make the hard choices, but always with the end goal of creating something great. Bird says he and his partner, producer John Walker, famously slug it our regularly over cost, schedule and quality. “John says, ‘Look, I’m just trying to get us across the line.’ And I say, ‘I’m trying to get us across the line in first place,’ says Bird.

Weed out passive-aggressive workers. If you saw “The Incredibles,” you may recall a villain who appears briefly just as the film concludes—“The Underminer.” People who do not contribute openly, but peck away negatively behind the scenes, are counter-productive and should be removed from a truly creative workplace lest they poison the vibe for everyone else.

If you’re not still learning, you’re not innovating. Those who think they know it all have ceased to challenge themselves, and won’t challenge anyone else. Adopt the “student” mindset, open to learning something new at every opportunity. Foster that attitude among the entire team.

Money is the fuel, not the destination. Bird compared Pixar to the Disney studios under Walt Disney’s management. “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies,” Walt once said. Money fuels the rocket ship of innovation, but it is meaningless if you don’t send that rocket to new places.

2. Combining Business And Personal Accounts
A major no-no is meshing professional and personal social media accounts with one another. Keep the highlights of your Las Vegas weekend between you and your friends, not you and your clients.

3. Little To No Monitoring
Awhile back some hackers cracked into Amazon.com and caused all books written by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) authors to disappear. Needless to say, many people were infuriated and they took to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to voice their frustration, including creating a hashtag on Twitter to funnel the disgust directed toward Amazon. Because Amazon didn't react quickly enough people believed that they deliberately removed GLBT materials from their site.

4. Cloning Strategies
Each social media site has a unique following. Getting to know and understand who the audience is and what they like is what will help you shape your social media strategy. What works on Digg probably won’t work on StumbleUpon and what works on Reddit won’t necessarily work on Mixx.

5. Inexperienced Representatives
One of the more recent social media firestorms occurred between Nestle and Greenpeace on Facebook. Supporters of Greenpeace staged a protest against Nestle for using palm oil from deforested areas in Indonesia. Unfortunately, Nestle’s social media team demonstrated a lack of tact, maturity and professionalism by posting glib and sarcastic remarks. The defensive exchange spun out of control.

6. Illegitimate Friending
Restaurant chain T.G.I. Friday’s used a supposed out-of-work actor who claimed that he was the biggest TGI Friday fan and that if he could get 500,00 people to fan his Facebook page then T.G.I. Friday's would give away a free burger to each person who fanned him. What people didn’t know was that Woody wasn’t a real person and that the challenge wasn’t an actual cause. People felt betrayed when they learned the truth.

–Social Media Today

What does the social marketing mix look like, and how is it different from the Four Ps that commercial marketers use? Consider these eight elements:

1. Product
The social marketing product is not usually a tangible item, though it can be (e.g., condoms). Generally, social marketers are trying to sell a particular behavior. While you may be promoting a life-saving or life-improving practice, quite often social marketing behaviors are things that people don't particularly want to do—eat more fiber, conserve water, exercise, get a colonoscopy. To address this issue, use the same effective tools as commercial marketing to promote the product's benefits based on the target audience's core values to show them how using the product helps them become the person they want to be.

2. Price
While adopting the product may have a monetary cost, the more important price considerations are social and emotional costs. These might include the hassle factor of performing the behavior, time, embarrassment, deprivation of something they enjoy, fear of finding a medical problem, or social disapproval. The strategic issue here is to figure out how to reduce the price as much as possible and make it easy and stress-free to perform the behavior.

3. Place
How will you make the product available? In other words, how and where can people perform the behavior? The concept of aperture is relevant here; just like a camera's lens opens and shuts very quickly to let in the light when you take a picture, you have only a small window of opportunity to get your messages through to the target audience at a time and place they can act on it. Your potential participants will not go out of their way to look for your messages—you need to go to where they are and give them the opportunity to easily learn about the product and perform the behavior.

4. Promotion
Promotional approaches for social marketing do not differ much from those used by commercial marketers. However, one key difference may lie in the types of target audiences addressed by social marketing programs. Many are not the types of consumers that a for-profit business would even consider going after; they may be low-income, unable to speak English, difficult to find, and/or uninterested in making any changes in their lives. Social marketers may need to be very creative in the ways they promote their products to these hard-to-reach populations, such as those who are homeless, illegal immigrants, drug users, or sex workers.
And because of the inherent challenges faced by social marketing programs, I have added four more Ps to the social marketing mix

5. Publics
To be most effective when planning and managing a social marketing campaign, you must take into account all of the people who can affect the success of the program. This includes the external publics—the target audience, groups that influence the target audience, policymakers, the media, and others outside the organization. Just as importantly, nonprofit social marketers must involve their internal publics in the development and preparation for the program implementation. These are the people within your organization—everyone from your Board members and management staff who must approve your plans, down to the receptionist who answers the phones and needs to know what to do when someone calls in response to the campaign.

6. Partnership
Many social marketing issues are so big that one organization cannot address them alone. Potential partners include organizations (other nonprofits, government agencies and businesses) that have one or more of the following attributes: similar goals to yours, access to the target audience, credibility with the target audience, interest in sponsorship of your program, or resources that fill gaps in your organization's capabilities.

7. Policy
Governmental or organizational policies can act as a catalyst for social change on a large scale. When policies are put into place that provide an environment of support for a particular behavior, individuals are much more likely to sustain that behavior change. For example, workplace nonsmoking policies make it easier for smokers to quit by ensuring that they do not see others lighting up around them and removing those social cues to smoking.

8. Purse strings
Unlike businesses, many nonprofit organizations are not able to automatically set aside a certain percentage of their revenue for marketing activities. Social marketers must be creative and proactive in seeking funding for their campaigns from sources such as corporate partners, foundations, donations, and government agencies.

– Marketing Profs

• Go upmarket. Vodka is pretty much of a commodity. So Grey Goose, Kettle One, Belvedere, and a few other upstarts started whispering that anyone not paying a hefty premium was a social loser. The old brands lost.

• Go downmarket. Don't want to pay extra for a preassigned airplane seat? Southwest Airlines has a deal for you! Don't need a store with fancy shelves and snooty salespeople? Go Old Navy!

• The best of both. Redefine the category by redefining the value equation. If Brand A promises (and delivers!) all the quality of premium Brand B at the price of value Brand C, what's not to like?

• Sandwich shop. Again, you redefine the category by redefining the value equation. You go upmarket and downmarket simultaneously with two differentiated products, targeting both the segment willing to pay more for higher performance and the segment willing to accept less performance at a lower price. Don’t position in the heart of the market as mediocre, satisfying no one. Just remember that if you make a sandwich, you want to be the bread.

• My team's bigger than your team. Find allies. Are there distributors who have been frozen out by the status quo? Or suppliers? They are likely allies. Or, maybe you can create some.

– Marketing Profs

• Develop user-friendly online customer service forms that actually aim to help customers quickly and efficiently, not populate company databases.

• Train client personnel to operate phone hotlines where customers can actually talk to live, professional customer service reps who can facilitate and expedite service response.

• Enable customer product reviews, and monitor comments so customer service can identify dissatisfied customers and work to resolve their problems.

• Develop customer service “best practice” response protocols for assisting unhappy customers.

• Create a customer service blog where the company can share valuable product information and advice, and enable comments so readers can interact with customer-service-trained company bloggers.

• Create customer service email protocols, with purchase follow-up email surveys inviting feedback on purchase experience and customer satisfaction.

• Do quality checks at company events and within promotions to spot-check the customer pulse.

- Second Wind Network

But that is changing. The internet is growing as the channel that influences or prompts those conversations. In fact, the web influenced nearly 15 percent of consumer discussions about brands in January 2010, up from 12 percent from a year earlier and nearly matching the 16 percent of such conversations inspired by TV ads or shows.

Oddly, the internet doesn't appear to be replacing other media as an influence over conversations. In addition to TV, which remained stable, print drove a fairly constant 10 percent of brand-related conversations over the 18 months from July 2008 to January 2010, while the percentage driven by in-store or point-of-sale displays was roughly nine percent.

– Advertising Age

7-Eleven and Zynga connect for a campaign with FarmVille and Mafia Wars

Digital games, whether on Facebook or on mobile phones, all employ what developers call "game mechanics," incentives such as points, badges, next levels and achievements that motivate players to keep playing. And a gaggle of brands, from 7-Eleven to JetBlue, H&M and Tesla Motors are counting on people's attraction to competition to get them to be more engaged.

Experts say that game mechanics are a simple way to connect with consumers. They keep people doing things and stay engaged, as opposed to what goes viral quickly where you click, you watch and then never see it again.

One of the best examples is, of course, the mobile social game Foursquare, which awards badges as users "check in" via their phones at physical places. Accumulating badges – and achieving statuses such as the "mayor" – are motivations to get people to check in and continue playing.

– Advertising Age