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.

Bal Harbour Shops was recently featured in the Miami Herald business section. Highlighted for their luxury retailers and exclusive shopping experience, Bal Harbour Shops is one of the country’s top shopping centers.

Bal Harbour operating partner, Matthew Wintman Lanzenby, took this excellent opportunity to speak about the recent changes and expansions Bal Harbour Shops is making. Visitors from around the world will find several new tenants opening their stores at Bal Harbour, including Balenciaga, Breguet, CH Carolina Herrera, Panerai, La Perla and Stella McCartney. And more are on the way including Moncler, Canali and Alexander McQueen.

“Invariably it will be our best year of all time,” Lazenby said. “Some tenants are up as much as 100 percent.”

Since its opening in 1965, Bal Harbour’s sales per square foot have increased every year – only exceptions were in 2001 after the 9-11 attacks and during the recession in 2009.

Much already has been written about Steve Jobs – his marketing genius, his control of public relations, his ability to skillfully meld the products he created with a pent-up consumer demand for those products (or so we thought once his products were released).

That was the brilliance of Jobs. To paraphrase something he once said, “It isn’t up to consumers to know what they want. It’s up to us to tell them.”

Steven Jobs was one of those transformative inventors who comes along once every few generations. Perhaps it is a testament to how much he touched so many that – as President Barack Obama commented – so many learned of Jobs’ passing on a device he had invented.

He was also a public relations and marketing mastermind. His retail success came from creating powerful products backed by the buzz that made people feel they must have those devices. Apple’s iMac, iPod, iPad and iPhone wowed audiences when revealed in grand on-stage debuts – with Jobs as the emcee. Journalists were awed, and their articles reflected their amazement.

And we consumers bit – hard.

Apple didn’t need “traditional” consumer electronics marketing. The company consistently avoids major announcement hubs like the Consumer Electronics Show, notes PRdaily. He launched the hype – and sustained it.

Most (dare we say All-But-Apple) cannot afford to sidestep the major events. We bend over backwards to please our patrons, and play the retail merchandising game the way the industry has created it. Yet Jobs’ prowess in product development showed us that the brand dictates the trend – and not vice versa.

By developing one-of-a-kind products with unique messages to match, marrying art and technology in a way we’ve never seen before, Jobs dominated the technology industry. As the article explains, many described Apple products as “funky” and “snazzy,” showing their appreciation for the visual appearance of the tech.

Steve Jobs was quoted once as having said, “The customer is not right, I am.” Masterfully brilliant, unabashed in his view of the world, in every essence of the word, Steve Jobs – in his jeans and black, mock-turtleneck – didn’t just sell us things. He sold us dreams.

And if you were listening, he sold us a new roadmap to successful marketing.

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.

At the Primetime Emmy Awards Sunday night, Charlie Sheen shelved his tiger blood and goddesses, and revealed a seemingly much less violent torpedo of truth.

Sheen seems to have taken a sabbatical from his previous antics, which lead to his firing from the hit comedy series, “Two and a Half Men.” With the season premiere of “Men” and his Comedy Central roast both airing on the Monday night after the Emmys, Sheen picked the perfect moment to debut his new, non-warlock self.

He also offered a lesson in why celebrities and other high-profile individuals – CEOs, executives and athletes – must protect their public personas, and apologize if they’ve transgressed.

Before being fired, Sheen was the highest paid actor on television at the time. Then, the meltdown. He held surreal interviews and television appearances. He spewed rhetorical nonsense that left viewers and media wondering about his mental state. He quickly became the hottest trending topic on Twitter for his outlandish posts and wild behavior.

Though he claimed to be “bi-winning,” this seemed like a huge lose-lose for Sheen, the show, and CBS.

So when Sheen took center stage at the Emmys to present the award for Lead Actor in a Comedy Series – his old category – no one knew exactly what to expect. He was apologetic and humble. He wished his old series well. He said (with apparent sincerity), “I know you will continue to make great television.”

So the question is: Who was the Sheen we had just seen? Was it an act, or has he truly changed? More importantly, how will he be remembered? Will we look back on Charlie Sheen and think of the eight years he spent dominating primetime? Or will we recall only “Violent Torpedoes of Truth,” “Rock Star from Mars” or any of the other 22 phrases he sought to trademark? Only time will tell.

On a more broad scope, celebrities and others in the limelight – community leaders, presidents of corporations, executive directors of a charity – must watch how they act in public. Don’t act in ways or say things that will tarnish the personal or brand image. Behave with decorum. Beware who’s watching. If caught, apologize – quickly.

Though Sheen dug himself into a PR nightmare this past year, he’s managing to slowly dig himself out. He’s even endorsing the “Two And A Half Men” premiere with his replacement Ashton Kutcher, tweeting, “Odd…But cool..! So far a lot of laughs!”

Though his jury is still out, hopefully Charlie Sheen can emerge #winning.

Twitter is no longer just a resource for teenage girls to follow Justin Bieber’s daily happenings, or to track down the nation’s favorite food trucks. According to an article on Mediabistro, SEO firm BrightEdge has found that having a Twitter share button can drive up to seven times more exposure via the social media universe. SEVEN times!

Even with these statistics, less than half of the top 10,000 websites use this share button on their pages, according to the same firm.  The share button for Twitter, the Facebook “LIKE,” and the “follow” option for both sites are all free tools- why aren’t these websites tapping in?

With these tools, your website can travel from social network to social network, and reach more people through retweets. Twitter and Facebook are no longer just social platforms, but are really becoming business tools. Knowing how to target your Facebook page and Twitter account or website, whether personal or for your business, can help you expand your audience. While the “share” button is of course a great start, there’s much more you can do!

Here at Boardroom Communications- here’s what we’d suggest to help you broaden your online exposure:

• Be smart about your Facebook posts and tweets. You want to keep your information fresh and current, but don’t go overboard!
• If you own a small business, use your personal Facebook page to plug your business, but subtly of course.
• Keep up with those in your social networks that can potentially benefit your business; after all, information is power!
• Always stay up to date with the various apps and tools that can further link you to the social media universe.

With these tools and tips, you’ll be sure to expand your online exposure. It’s all free and there’s absolutely zero risk involved!

As consumers, we are bombarded with advertisements on a daily basis. Ads come at us from all directions – when we’re sitting in our cars on the highway, when we grab a newspaper or magazine with our daily coffee, when we log on to the Internet…the list goes on. The average consumer is unaffected by most of the ads, rendering them ineffective.

When the Internet started displaying ads based on the user’s search history, the number of insignificant ads declined. And now marketers are turning to a new kind of advertising strategy to cut out more pointless ads from our lives – facial recognition.

Digital advertising displays can now identify the age, gender and race of an individual and will only show ads that would be relevant to them. For example, the Venetian resort and casino in Las Vegas uses facial recognition to provide suggestions for restaurants, night clubs and other entertainment to passersby.

How it works: Essentially, when you stand in front of a display, the camera analyzes your facial features to determine your approximate age. Using that information, the system will only display ads that are marketed towards that demographic. For example, if the system decides the person in front of the display is a woman in her mid-20s, it will show her advertisements for shoes, handbags, cosmetics, and so on.

Companies like Adidas and Kraft Foods Inc. are looking to implement this technology to their marketing efforts. The belief is that consumers will be more likely to buy something if they are offered the right products quickly.

While the thought of getting rid of trivial ads sound great, is it worth giving up your privacy?

Some people fear that the use of this technology will be an invasion of privacy. Proponents of facial recognition think it’s another way for companies to gather information without the public’s knowledge and permission.

In a similar fashion, when Facebook Inc. unveiled their photo tagging system using facial recognition, users were in uproar at the lack of privacy.

Is the risk of losing some privacy worth evading the ads that have nothing to with us? What costs are you willing to pay to avoid being exposed to a plethora of advertisements?

For more information about facial recognition technology and how it works, click here.

The next time you think a press release is ready to be sent out, take a look at PR Daily’s list of misused words and see if you’re guilty of writing something in a release that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense or just isn’t true.

For example, how can you describe something as “never before seen” unless you can actually verify that no one on Earth has seen it before? Or what makes something “exclusive?” Unless it is only accessible to a select group, it isn’t exclusive. Most likely, if it’s in a release being sent out to various media outlets, it isn’t exclusive.

We’ve all done it, but the point is to not keep doing it. At first glance, none of the words listed seem damaging in a press release but do you really want to be known as the person who wrote “breaking news” in a release being sent out the following day?

Another example is the use of the word “quality.” The question you want to answer is what quality – good or bad. Writing, “Our quality product…” says nothing to the reader. Adding that one word before makes all the difference in the sentence.

The only thing worse, than using these words incorrectly on a regular basis, would be to use them all in one sentence. “The official launch for an innovative, somewhat unique, exclusive…” You get the point.

Check out the post for the rest of the list and the correct usage of each word by clicking here.

Boardroom’s very own account executive, Jami Baker, recently joined The Children’s Bereavement Center’s Young Leaders Board.  Last Friday they raised over $5,000 at their most recent fundraising event.  About 300 people attended to taste desserts from STK and have drinks provided by Wodka Vodka, Mar Azul Tequila and Crown Wine and Spirits at Coco de Ville in the Ganesvort hotel.

The Children’s Bereavement Center (CBC) provides peer support groups for children, teens and young adults who are grieving the death of a loved one.  Proceeds from the event will directly sponsor five children to attend the CBC for a full year.

“The Young Leaders have gone above and beyond our expectations and created an incredible event,” said Mindy Cassel, Ph.D. and Executive Director of the CBC.  “We are so lucky to have a board of dedicated and enthusiastic young leaders.”

The CBC promotes the principles supported by research that grieving is a normal, natural process and that people have the ability to heal from their loss at their own unique pace and in their own style.

“We are so excited about the success of this party,” said Lauren Zuckerman, Chair of the event.  “Our goal is to spread the word and really gain visibility in the community; we are looking forward to having more great events like this one.”

For more information about the CBC, please call 305-668-4902 or visit www.childbereavement.org.

Boardroom Communications Account Executive Michelle Friedman was recently named the Publicity Chair for the 10^th Annual For The Public Good Gala. The event is Legal Aid Service of Broward County’s Annual fundraiser, with proceeds to benefit families and individuals in gaining access to equal justice.  As Publicity Chair, Michelle will work with the Publicity Committee to promote the event throughout the Broward community.

Michelle has been with Boardroom since November 2006, and has been actively involved in community and professional organizations, as well as events. She serves as Secretary for NEXT, a joint project between Legal Aid Service of Broward County and Coast to Coast Legal Aid of South Florida. She has also been involved with the promotion of Florida’s Children First events around the state for several years.

The For The Public Good gala will be held Friday, October 14, 2011 at the Hilton Fort Lauderdale Marina.  For more information call 954-736-2429.