Vitamin D influences pathways related to cancer development, but little is currently known about vitamin D status in breast cancer survivors. Recent data taken from the Health, Eating, Activity and Lifestyle (HEAL) study showed a correlation between vitamin D status and breast cancer survivors. Vitamin D concentrations from 790 female breast cancer survivors were obtained and vitamin D insufficiency was found in 597 individuals - or 75% of participants. Average vitamin D concentrations were even lower among African American and Hispanic women.

Controlling for various factors such as body mass index (BMI), race/ethnicity, geography, season, physical activity, diet, and cancer treatments showed that stage of disease independently predicted vitamin D levels.

In this group of breast cancer survivors the prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency was abnormally high. Based on these results, health professionals and clinicians should consider monitoring vitamin D status in breast cancer patients in addition to administering appropriate cancer treatments.

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 88, No. 1, 133-139, July 2008

It’s going to take a considerable amount of focus or major shift to get past it. A more likely scenario is that I end up replacing it with another, different addiction.

PerezHilton.com is a menace and force to be reckoned with. A narcissistic, overweight, gay Puerto Rican, Perez named himself, as well as his website, after starlet Paris Hilton and runs one of the busiest celebrity gossip blogs in the world getting upwards to 1000 comments sometimes on one blog post. He posts between 10 and 20 a day. (The following post about Celine skipping out on playing in Halifax gleaned over 700 comments.)

I should know, because I have barely missed one day, or one blog post for that matter, for over a year. The habit of reading Perez is interspersed throughout my daily routine. I’ve gone a few days without but always catch up.

Granted, I find that the buzz wears off a lot quicker than when I first started. I have lost a bit of interest, thank the heavens. So I thought I’d make some sort of use of the obvious time I’ve lost on this addiction of mine.

One thing I am grateful for is that I’ve discovered a number of new, great musicians and artists thanks to Perez. My favorite is Regina Spektor.

From a marketing perspective a reason I enjoy the PerezHilton.com is that this man has catapulted himself into music, fashion and Hollywood fame by blogging about them, trying to “out” celebrities and being incredibly crass and cruel sometimes. The latter two things happening resulted in my saying to myself on a few occaisions “That’s it! I’m not going to read this #@!%& blog anymore.” To no avail of course.

How it can relate specifically to a small business owner is that in terms of websites, you ought to have compelling content and update it frequently in order to make your website really work for you.

The next thing which Prezzers, as he calls himself, does is develop a relationship with his audience/readership. With business owners, the more that you can work towards a relationship with your client through their exploring your website, the better. I’ve had more than one client tell me before they hired me that they had spent over 2 hours going through my site and blog the night before.

The final obvious analogy that I will share from my observance of Perezhilton.com is the brilliant self-promotion that this man has projected. He generates millions from ads on his blogs, he has merchandise, he hosts parties, launches artists and has a tv show. Perez has been featured in magazines all over the world and people send him things in hopes that he will mention their names and/or gift. Unabashed, self-glorified marketing.

Celebrities are afraid of Perez - this is where the marketing analogies end - for his slicing, mean-spirited comments which particularly seem to target stars with addiction issues, mental problems or “Perez perceived” appearance flaws. He lightens it up with posts about charities and asking people to donate.

As I said, I have a difficult relationship with this blog, my addiction, but, frankly today I give thanks for it as it serves as a fine business model for small business owners.

Please don’t consider me shallow or horrible now, just because I admitted my dirty secret. Let he who is without sin….

And there you have it folks, words from an online junkie admitting a problem and reaching out for help, trying to justify it by using a marketing angle and then showing signs of anger, lashing out and finishing by quoting the Bible.

Do you know anyone who reads gossip online?

]]> http://yourmarketingmavens.com/2008/08/04/totally-sucked-in/feed/ http://yourmarketingmavens.com/2008/07/25/one-more-win-for-the-little-guys/ http://yourmarketingmavens.com/2008/07/25/one-more-win-for-the-little-guys/#comments Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:23:03 +0000 maureen http://yourmarketingmavens.com/?p=475 I went to a movie tonight with my boyfriend playing at Empire Theatres to see the new X-Files movie which, in our opinions, was just fair at best. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone by giving any of the surprises away.

What I do think is worthy of “giving away” is how bloody expensive it was along with just an all around poor experience. It cost over twenty bucks for the two of us to get into the theatre and then $10.60 for ONE large popcorn and ONE regular pop. My perspective by this time, was of the feeling that I had possibly been pillaged. Then we sat down and watched 15 minutes of commercials and previews. Confined in a room, having paid to be there and having no choice but be marketed to, is not great an experience that I enjoy. Hence, our lack luster experience at Empire Theatres.

Now let me describe our recent experience at City Cinema, the local “alternative” theatre. We knew to go about 10 minutes before it is scheduled to begin because sometimes you can’t get a seat. Graeme Putnam of Sketch 22 fame greeted us and gave us our tickets and we stood in line for popcorn and I ordered a dark roast coffee. It cost $2 and $1.50 respectively ($3.50 compared to $10.60 for nearly the same - 300% price difference, is it not?).

We took our seat amongst other people and had a chance to talk and listen to the friendly murmur of the small, eclectic crowd. The movie started on time with had no commercials or trailers.

As such, the small guy, City Cinema, has garnered my customer loyalty and I hope you check.

Social media can be an incredible tool for your business, providing you with more customer insight, direct communication channels and the ability to measure the effectiveness of these conversations very closely.

But as the proliferation of social media platforms grow, participating can turn into little more than a giant time suck without some sort of structure behind it. With that in mind, we’ve put together a 5 step plan for kickstarting your company’s social media participation:

Step 1: Listen

Social media is a term we use to to discuss the tools that facilitate conversations. Before your company can be a part of those conversations, you need to know what people are already talking about so you can determine how you can best contribute.

Setting up some tools to monitor conversations is easy. The difficult part is choosing the keywords that will return the most usable results.

Here are some tools to get you started:

Social Media Firehose: Kingsley Joseph used Yahoo Pipes to create one RSS feed that aggregates results from Flickr, Digg, YouTube, FriendFeed and other social media sites.

Latest Blog Mentions Pipe: This is another Yahoo Pipe that will aggregate brand references across several major blog search engines, including Technorati, Icerocket and Google Blog Search.

Alltop: This website aggregates the top posts from the top blogs around the world. Because it divides the blogs into categories by topic, it’s also a great place to begin building your list of relevant blogs to read.

Be as specific as possible so that your searches return fewer results more relevant to your brand. This will take some time, but once you’ve discovered which keywords yield the results you’re looking for, you will discover a host of blogs, twitter profiles and videos relevant to your industry. We’ll use those results in step two below as we develop an internal social media strategy.

Step 2: Prepare

Social media platforms help facilitate conversations between individuals, not companies. Once you have a sense of what people are talking about, it’s time to identify the appropriate people inside your organization to participate.

Find the People

People want to have conversations with company representatives who are experts in their area, who are passionate about their work and who are empowered to act on the feedback they receive from the community. If you want to focus on the marketing vertical, then look to your marketing team. The same is true if you want to participate in social media platforms devoted to product development, engineering or package design. Part of this process should be to provide the proper training for these employees on social media participation.

Set Rules of Engagement

Make sure your company has a social media policy in place that offers guidelines to your employees on the appropriate way to engage in online conversations. Microsoft’s Channel 9 Doctrine is a good place to start.

Define Your Strategy

Social media is comprised of many different platforms. Rather than trying to participate in all of them, begin with one or two that seem to make the most sense. Having an engagement strategy will help to determine how much time employees will devote to social media communications, what will be the focus areas for engagement and of course, it will help to measure success.

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang posted a list of social media strategies from enterprise corporations that’s worth a look.

Step 3: Engage

This is the fun part! Start leaving comments on blogs, uploading images to Flickr, building a community on Twitter or FriendFeed or whatever else that strategy entails that helps further the discussion and illustrates your company’s commitment to developing these online relationships. It might also be useful for employees to create a social media editorial calendar so that it’s easier to structure time to participate. You never know what might happen, as this example from Blendtec illustrates.

Step 4: Go Offline

As stated in step one, social media is simply a group of tools that help facilitate conversations, but there’s really no replacement for face-to-face interaction. Use trade shows and other events as opportunities to build even stronger relationships with the members of your online community. This could be in the form of an exclusive session, an informal breakfast or even a group picture on the event floor.

Step 5: Measure Success

Unlike other campaigns, measuring social media success begins by asking more questions:

– Did we learn something about our customers that we didn’t know before?
– Did our customers learn something about us?
– Were we able to engage our customers in new conversations?
– Do our employees have an effective new tool for external feedback and reputation management?

We also recommend using a tool like Trendpedia -a blog search engine that allows you to both track and graph topics as well as compare terms- to help benchmark your company against your competitors by running the exact same search and parameters before and after your engagement begins.

Conclusion

The potential payoff for corporate social media participation is enormous. These companies will have a better sense of how they are perceived by their target audiences, they will establish a two way dialog with key stakeholders and they will empower their customers to speak with them, not at them. But without a strategic approach to social media, it’s difficult to succeed. Hopefully this 5 step plan can help your company get started.

If you have any tips from your own experience establishing a corporate social media plan, please share them in the comments below.

[image credits: businessman - K Ripp;measuring tape - G&A Sattler]

Paul MacNeill, owner and publisher of the said company, Island Press, had the foresight to buy the domain name (and others) years ago and it is rumoured to currently be worth $50,000 now. Talk about a return on investment.

For this reason alone space on the site is valuable.

We were approached by a company to advertise on the site with a text link and I found it very interesting yesterday when by chance, because I am looking for a company to insulate my basement, I googled “insulation PEI” and this company’s website was the first one to come up and offered great articles on home improvement, renovations and all sorts of subjects.

They are offering an introductory price of $70/month for an ad anywhere on the site that you wish for the next six months. For more information email ads@peicanada.com and think about signing on to a great opportunity.

My new client came out to Pownal for a meeting and we went over a few things on my site. She said that she spent two hours going through my site and reading my blog and at the end of it she decided that she would hire me without a doubt and immediately to boot.

Coincidentally, there was a prospective client for Jodi who happens to be staying in my neighbour’s house so Jodi and I marched on over and introduced ourselves and Jodi got some serious market research accomplished. I learn something from her every time we meet This time: “just do it”.

We headed on in to town after I so politely squished a bug on the passenger window and having no tissue handy, left the gob of blood there. A souvenir from Pownal.

The Chamber of Commerce mixer was at Jake’s this month and there was a great turn-out, lots of new faces.

My life coach and client, Tammy Younker from Inspired Life Coaching, and I snuck out to have a productive meeting.

Handsome met me and we went to Brennan’s on Victoria Row and had a nice chat with my friend, the owner of Brennan’s, Kier Kenney. After a drink we wandered over to the big tent for the Jazz and Blues Festival and found out Jill Barber was playing so we bought tickets and saw her perform and as always, she was outstanding.

So now I sit at home, listening to Jill’s cd, reflecting on the day, grateful for the opportunities, grateful to be doing what I love, inspired by my friends and clients and a brilliant songstress. And my house is clean. All is well.

Photo by Chris Barber, from flickr

I was involved with the tourism industry for seven years and to say that it was challenging is an understatement. The frustration that I suffered whenever trying to deal with any of the government departments or associations was over the top and culminated with my business partner leaving my company to work for a heavily government funded association, out biggest client, who then proceeded to drop their contract with my company so that my ex business partner could run my business for them (despite a non-compete agreement in place) which resulted in my company going under within a year.

SO…, I’m sorry, I couldn’t hold back on my personal dealings with tourism and the government on PEI. Reading Paul and Barry’s scathing remarks about them brought back memories of my experience and although I try not to be bitter I really am sorry for the people currently within the industry who are working their butts off for the nicest weeks of the year to only be just getting by and then to have paper pushing, bureaucrats (with exceptions of course) who can’t make a decision to save their lives (nevermind PEI’s tourism industry), blowing our tax dollars on the things listed in this blog post.

Okay, maybe I am a bit bitter. I don’t think I’m the only one by the sounds of Mr. Barry Smith with his closing words from his letter to the Guardian the other day:

“Until the people of P.E.I. stand up and say: we want a professional approach to marketing our Island, tax dollars will continue to be wasted on plans/executions that equal nothing.”