Social Media Group Helps Business Navigate the Social Web. » News

Leona Hobbs receives TIAW World of Difference 100 Award

Hasdeep Kharaud — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:15:12 +0000

We’re incredibly honoured to announce that our very own Leona Hobbs, Vice President of Social Media Group, has been named a recipient of The International Alliance for Women (TIAW) World of Difference 100 award.

TIAW, an international umbrella organization of women’s networks representing more than 50,000 women worldwide, created the very special World of Difference 100 Award to honor up to 100 women from around the world who have contributed to the economic empowerment of women.

We’re incredibly proud of Leona for this wonderful accomplishment and wish her many, many congrats!

Joining the Social Media Today Board!

maggiefox — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:02:26 +0000

I’m extremely pleased to announce that I will be joining the Social Media Today Blogger Board. After joining the Social Media Collective in 2007 (which later morphed into the SMT community), it’s been amazing and gratifying to watch this conversation and industry grow. When I first started Social Media Group, I was able to keep up with everything that happened in the social media space on a weekly basis. As adoption has exploded over the last few years, it’s almost unimaginable that this was once possible, and it’s also increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. That’s where SMT comes in, providing enormous value by curating the best and the brightest from amongst all the noise – bringing leading voices and cutting edge thinking to those interested in learning more about the social web.

John Byrne describes the SMT community well, calling it:

“A nonstop seminar in new media for anyone who sees social networks as the technical articulation of the front porch on a summer night, the place where people set the community agenda for both the personal and the profound.”

A special thanks to SMT CEO Robin Fray Carey for the ask. It is indeed an honour to join my esteemed and respected colleagues John A. Byrne, Brian Solis, Jonathan Salem Baskin, Rachel Happe, Vanessa DiMauro and J.D. Lasica on the Social Media Today Board. I look forward to what’s next for the SMT community!

SMG Featured in the Financial Post: Make Your Content Good Enough to Steal

maggiefox — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:52:13 +0000

Coverage from this week’s Mesh conference in Toronto:

“When it comes to marketing, if your content is good enough, people will steal it.

For many marketing departments, the question of “how do we reach people online” isn’t just the most important question of the age of the social Web, it’s the only question.

That’s where Maggie Fox, founder and chief executive of Toronto’s Social Media Group, comes in. As one one of the most respected voices in the field of social media marketing, when Ms. Fox speaks, people listen.”

[Read the full story here]

Ford wins PR Week Award for Best Use of Social Media!

maggiefox — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:30:41 +0000

We’d like to extend our sincere congratulations to our client Ford Motor Company for this week’s win at the PR Week Awards! This past Thursday in New York (where we were all very dressed up, including Ford Digital Communications Manager Scott Monty in black tie) the team took home a very prestigious and competitive award – Best Use of Social/Digital Media (some of the other nominees included the Queensland Department of Tourism and their “Best Job in the World” campaign).

When we started working with Ford in 2007, their social media activity consisted of a lone (unauthorized) YouTube channel. It has been incredibly gratifying to be a part of such an amazing evolution and to watch our client grow and master these new and emerging tools and ways of communicating, and be recognized by their peers for doing so.

Congratulations! We are so proud!

Social Media Group selected as social media partner for Beaujolais wines in U.S. market

maggiefox — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:48:10 +0000

Social Media Group is very pleased to announce that we will be providing social media marketing services for Inter Beaujolais, the official trade association for the wines of Beaujolais, in order to help them grow awareness, conversation and interest about wines from the Beaujolais region on the social web.

SMG, in partnership with Sopexa USA, an integrated marketing services and communications agency dedicated to the promotion of wine & spirits and gourmet food in the United States, will support an integrated marketing campaign that will take Beaujolais cross-country, making stops in New York, Chicago and California for media and trade events.

We’re honored to have been chosen as the social partner to help bring conversation about 3,000 dedicated producers, prestigious domaines and a number of châteaux in the Beaujolais region to new and interesting places online!

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/slapers

25 Women that Rock Social Media – TopRank Blog

maggiefox — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:59:54 +0000

Last week Erik Qualmann posted a list of “All Star Social Media” players in his ClickZ column. Being included in such a list with the likes of Chris Brogan and Scott Monty was humbling to say the least. Erik qualified the list by saying they were mostly people he knew and he welcomed suggestions. I noticed few women were mentioned and knowing there are so many power players, I decided to create a list of my own featuring women that I think “rock” the social web… [Read the Full Article]

ZDNet: Social media RFP template separates strong from the weak

maggiefox — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:15:22 +0000

One of the trickiest challenges for a company seeking out third-party social media help is determining which consultants or agencies are jumping on the social media bandwagon (aka pushing snake oil) versus those that have a strong pedigree in the practice. With social media being a fluid, sometimes hard to quantify business endeavor, a lot of senior management leaders who are far removed from the industry may not know exactly what to look for in their social media programs or might have a hard time translating buzz words into real-world metrics. To try and help companies combat these issues, Social Media Group, a long-standing consulting firm, has made available a Social Media RFP Template that should help companies separate the strong from the weak…. [Read the full article]

AdWeek: The New Social Gurus

maggiefox — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:12:39 +0000

The rise of social media has been met with thousands claiming expertise in the area. The skepticism this engenders in longtime marketing pros is best captured in a popular animated video called “The Social Media Guru.” The clip shows a know-it-all, lightly credentialed “expert” dispensing little more than buzzwords and common sense to a bemused client.

Despite the easy laughs at the expense of self-proclaimed experts, big brands are on the hunt for help in figuring out their approaches to connecting with consumers on Facebook, providing service on Twitter and instituting internal social media guidelines. Because it can touch everything from communications to marketing to customer service to product development, social media has created a muddied playing field that some see as ripe for creating agency opportunities… [Read the full Article]

Social Media: Enter the Twitterati

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:07:15 +0000

SMG was interviewed recently for an article in Canadian Business. Read the full story here!

“The incident served as an important lesson to brand managers everywhere: with the advent of the Twitterati, a public-relations disaster is only ever 140 characters away. Moreover, your loss could be your competitor’s gain. “Twitter provides instant feedback for brands, and that can mean both positive and negative things,” says Leona Hobbs, director of communications for Toronto-based Social Media Group. “It’s important to listen and monitor what is being said, because you’ll be able to act on things early, which is key.”…” read more

Fireside Chats with Fiery Entrepreneurs: Social Media Group

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:07:13 +0000

SMG was featured in a recent article on Springboarders Blog. Read the full story here!

“FM: Do you think it important for young, entrepreneurial companies to have a well-defined competitive position, target market and value proposition? Why?

MF: Yes, I do. Absolutely – without question – I think a young entrepreneurial company needs to have those things before they have anything else. Those are the first things you need. You need to understand who the competition is and align your value proposition against weaknesses in the competitive offer. That’s exactly what we did. We took a look around and realized there were a lot of Public Relations (PR) companies engaged in social media that didn’t particularly have ‘build’ capabilities, nor did they have marketing sensibilities in terms of ‘creative’. We also identified there were a lot of advertising and marketing agencies that were engaging in social media that didn’t understand the ‘relationship’ aspect of social media the way PR companies did. And additionally, for us there’s a real, identified need for business consulting-type requests around how you define what it is you’re going to be doing – that involved a lot of research and neither of those organizations were good at that at all. So we took a look at all three vectors of competition, bridged all of them and presented an offering that filled all of the holes in all of these traditional models. That was done within the first few months. We took a look at the competition and identified that those things were extremely important to our positioning…” read more