The holidays are here! Not only does that mean ’tis the season to be jolly with family and friends, but in the workplace as well.

By peppering your business with a little holiday spirit, you can revamp your brand image and inspire some holiday cheer in your customers.

Take Starbucks.

Its holiday marketing campaign, which debuted in November, features seasonal beverages like the “Peppermint Mocha” and “Gingerbread Latte” served up in special edition holiday cups.  This year, Starbucks has gone one step further with the Starbucks Cup Magic App, which allows coffee-drinkers to animate the action on their coffee cups on their smartphone screens.  The object, says VP-Global Digital Marketing for Starbucks, Alexandra Wheeler, is to both “surprise and delight” customers during this holiday season.

So get in the spirit! Here are some things you can do to make the holiday season a catalyst for your business:

-Deck the halls with boughs of holly! But seriously, some easy, simple decorations can go a long way.  By creating a fun, holiday atmosphere, your employees and customers alike will relish in the spirit of the season.

-Learn the holiday news cycle. To avoid missing out on an opportunity for your product or service in a publication, make sure you’re up to date on the editorial calendars well in advance to see what specific topics the media outlets will focus on during this holiday cycle.

-Wish your social media following a happy holidays. A simple tweet or Facebook post spreading the spirit will bring you back into sight and into mind.  Keeping up a rapport with those in the digital world (and continuing to maintain your online presence) is extremely important, especially now!

So enjoy this holiday season, and take advantage of the opportunity to enact some timely marketing strategies. Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Let’s face it— there’s no such thing as a straight print journalist anymore. If you’re in the journalism field, never has going multi-platform been more important.

Miami Herald reporter, columnist, blogger (and tweeter!) Cindy Goodman agrees, encouraging all journalists to use new media to enhance their brand as well as the quality and readership of their stories.

This is 2011. If you’re not on the new media train, you are most likely soon without a job.

Goodman was one of the first writers at The Miami Herald to start a blog (eight long years ago!), The Work/Life Balancing Act, and is an active voice on Twitter. She has additionally developed her own blog, Raising Teenagers in The Digital Age, uses a website for her own personal branding, and has Facebook pages devoted to her stories.

Goodman is an awesome example of using new media to stay alive in journalism, without sacrificing her journalistic integrity. Here are some tips and tools you can use to follow this new media maverick into the realms of multi-platform journalism:

BLOGGING

• Have fun with voice and personality in your blog. It’s a platform where there’s some wiggle room for editorializing. But don’t go overboard! You are still a journalist at heart.
• Make sure your blog has a consistent theme, voice, or message to establish yourself as an “expert” or “go-to” on your topic.
• Use your blog as a place to put ancillary, fun, less relevant information that didn’t necessarily fit into your stories.
• Keep up a conversation with your readers on your blog. Listen to their opinions and give them what they want!

TWITTER

• Be smart about your tweets to bring traffic back to your news story rather than give it all away in 140 characters.  Always try to tweet with links to a bigger story unless you are giving periodic updates from an event.
• Create a conversation with your followers. Don’t simply promote yourself, your brand, and your stories.
• Be careful about retweets: even if you’re not the one writing them, they still reflect on you and your journalistic voice and integrity. Make sure your retweets are reputable and that you are willing to be liable for them.
• Follow and retweet relevant sources to expose your readers. Twitter is all about vanity, so retweeting twitpics from your followers will encourage others to send in their photos, and ultimately follow you.

VIDEOREPORTING

• Be sure your videos complement the print/online story. They should not reiterate the print but augment it.
• Keep your videos short, from 90 seconds to 3 minutes.
• Sometimes you can use footage from an interview as online video; an interesting fact that didn’t necessarily fit into the story could make it in to the piece this way.
• Again, don’t shoot video for the sake of shooting video. There has to be a reason for people to play it.

With regards to all of this new media, take a deep breath before you post or upload. Think, do you really want to say this? Once you click submit, your words, pics, and video have free reign in the online vortex. You can never really take anything back! So next time you write a story, grab your flip-cam and your smartphone, because you’ll need them!

As a journalist, you may be entering uncharted waters, but with street smarts and adaptability, you should be a-okay.

Is your online-self really you, or just an alias? Google Plus seems to think you’re one in the same. That’s why the new social networking site, as an article on CNN Tech reveals in its title, is starting to “boot ‘fake name’ users.”

Though praised by the tech community for its innovative features like Circles and group video chats, Google Plus has instated a policy that users must use their real names “to fight spam and prevent fake profiles.”

The debate is simply whether or not people want to be identified by their image online, and take responsibility for it. Facebook wants you to escape into a parallel universe and care less about the reflection of your online behavior. You can go by a fake name, have a picture of the Lochness monster as your own, and call it a day. Google, on the other hand, truly wants people to be able to find you— the real you— through your Google profile.

A Google spokeswoman said in an email, “By providing your common name, you will be assisting all people you know— friends, family members, classmates, co-workers and other acquaintances— in finding and creating a connection with the right person online.”

But what if you don’t want to be found?

College-bound seniors and job-seeking young adults often change or abbreviate their names on Facebook to preserve their image for future bosses, co-workers, schools and universities. Though Google’s position may be a little strong, it’s important to remember that whether you’re a CEO or 17, you never know who’s watching you online.

If Google sticks to this position, it will be even more important to monitor the information you post and posts about you.

Just when you thought social media wasn’t pervasive enough, Google has launched “The Google Plus Project”- their take on the networking frenzy. Though as the recent Miami Herald article explains, “For now, Google+ is for social media geeks,” the week-old site is still running on an exclusive basis— only dolling out limited invitations so they can continue to work out the kinks— many believe Facebook may have a run for its money. If G+ is successful, it could be the first real competitor for Facebook in terms of both users and advertisers.

G+ works on the simple premise of combining Facebook and Twitter while cracking down on privacy settings. With the site, you can compile your friends into “Circles” so you have more control over what you’re sharing and with whom. For example, “Co-workers” “Friends” and “Family” can now all be grouped separately, so you don’t have to share your family reunion photos with your boss or your bachelorette party pictures with your grandparents. The only person who can see your Circles is you, which is a big plus for those interested in having more privacy. Like Twitter, people don’t have to agree to be friends to see your feed of activity, but there is much more control over who sees a post than on Twitter. Unlike Twitter, you can disable other users from sharing a post you made— another attempt at beefing up privacy.

But there’s more to Google+ than just these circles. With the “Hangout” feature, you can instantly create a video chat room with up to ten of your friends, and you can also alert certain groups of friends as to when you’re hanging out. The “Sparks” feature gives you a continuous newsfeed that relates to specific keywords you choose. “Instant Uploads” automatically posts pictures and videos from your mobile device into a private album. From there, you can decide where to place the photos. And “Huddle” is a group texting device, so you can save time and text all of your friends at once in a group chat situation.

Stay tuned for “addition”-al information on the Plus Project. If the hundreds of millions of people with Google accounts take a liking to the sleek site and advertisers follow suit, G+ could be the next great social media tool on the Web.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Google Inc. admits to adding a social twist to keep up with other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Those companies have gotten its users to publically and privately share information on the Web, including videos, articles, personal interests, and their whereabouts. The Internet search engine is going to add a feature called the “social search” that allows its users to recommend useful search results to friends and even reorder the way the results appear. Similar to Facebook’s “like” button, this feature will install a “+1” or “plus one” that will change the way some people use Google’s search engine. The social search feature won’t replace Google’s traditional search results, which are based on the mathematical algorithm that attempts to rank sites based on how relevant they are to a user’s search query. Only users signed on their Google accounts will be able to see the changes to the search results.

For public relations and marketing professionals, former South Florida social media expert Adam Singer is a pioneer for several reasons.

First, he’s a very bright social media strategist keen to show how social media and business marketing converge. He’s also one of those pioneers who’s OK with people re-purposing his content. With that in mind, today, we’re publishing one of Adam’s posts on why companies need to integrate social media into their public relations.

Adam recently was in Las Vegas for MarTech at the LeadingRe Annual Conference; he spoke on two other panels. Among the speakers were Guy Kawasaki and Scott Murphy.

Adam sets the stage: “…The MarTech opening session title is ‘Architecting a Social Web Marketing & P.R. Strategy.’ For this presentation, I’ve decided to dial down most of my content from the deck so that event-goers focus on my words instead of reading slides.  However, to supplement my session and provide the same content to The Future Buzz community, here’s a brief written summary of what I’m presenting.” (more…)

Corporations went to great lengths and expense at Super Bowl XLIV to make the weekend in Miami fun — but not for the fun of it. Participation in events with a global audience can help a company make money, Boardroom Communications COO Don Silver told NBC 6 for a news report that aired on the eve of the big game.

Even though there is a trend to tone down the glitz and spending, companies still look for high-profile opportunities to showcase their products and services. Most important, Silver told a WTVJ reporter, the Super Bowl provides business owners and managers an exciting stage on which to solidify and build relationships with those most important to them: customers, prospects, distributors, vendors and employees.

A company that engages in sports marketing should evaluate whether the rewards justify the costs. If the payoff is there, he said, the public relations and advertising efforts tend to fall into these categories:

• Branding of events and locations, such as the recent renaming of Sun Life Stadium, where the Super Bowl was played
• Gaining paid endorsements from famous athletes like the Indianapolis Colts’ Peyton Manning
• Getting exposure through sponsorships of sports organizations like the NFL
• Hosting of events tied or timed to high-visibility sports competitions such as the Super Bowl

Even if a company has no direct connection to sports, the association with the nation’s most watched sporting event creates a buzz, Silver said. The lucky people invited to a sit in a skybox or go inside the velvet ropes of a VIP event come away with a more positive impression of a company or brand.

To capitalize on the huge audiences that watch the Super Bowl, many makers of consumer products and services think it is a good investment to pay millions of dollars for a 30-second spot to reach hundreds of millions of viewers, Silver said. Those dollars are leveraged through the free exposure that their crazy-funny ads get from news and entertainment media.

The most popular videos get free publicity through social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. This is known as earned media, Silver said.

Super Bowl ads can also support online marketing campaigns that drive people to a company’s Web site, Facebook page or virtual store, he said. And the spots can help young companies and non-profit causes gain national notice from consumers and potential supporters.