DAM Blog

Grace Villamora wins Award of Merit

A surprised Grace Villamora wins the 2008 Award of Merit during the DAM business meeting at the SLA Annual Conference in Seattle. She received the honor on June 16 from Lynn Strand-Meyer, co-chair-elect.

Green marketing

"The Green Consumer" featuring Mandy Levenberg of Iconoculture drew an engaged if not a large audience compared to other DAM sessions in Seattle. That's probably because of its Wednesday morning slot.

I'll cover the presentation in the fall/winter DAM Bulletin, but I thought I'd hit some highlights and mention some cool Web sites Mandy shared.

2007 was a banner year for green consumerism and cause consumption -- subjects that Mandy researches. They've become mainstream behaviors and are "hot, hot, hot" topics for marketers.

She credits the success of the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and celebrities promoting green products, such as the Prius, for this change.

Consumers that marketers want to reach come in all shades of green and many want "greenvenience," affordable and accessible products, straightforward information about the eco-friendliness of products, and simple tips to affect meaningful change for the planet.

As a result, specialty Web sites have emerged, including:

Global Cool
Learn ways to reduce personal CO2 emissions and track your progress with a CO2 workout card

Green Dimes
Sign up to reduce junk mail

Greenwashing Index
Consumers rate ads based on a greenwashing index ranging from 1 (good ad) to 5 (total greenwashing)

Ideal Bite: A Sassier Shade of Green
Offers easy eco-living tips delivered via email each weekday

-- Dru Frykberg

No-host gathering at SLA

Just a reminder the DAM no-host gathering is 6 p.m., Monday, June 16, at The Chapel Bar, 1600 Melrose, just about a half mile from the convention center.

Please disregard the information about tonight's gathering that appears in the conference guides. The details are incorrect.

Hope to see you there!

Spring / Summer 2008 Bulletin!

Read our latest newsletter!  With articles on:

• Seattle conference
• WARC interview
• and more!

http://units.sla.org/division/dam/bulletin/summer08bulletin.html

Daniel Lee and Winter Shanck - Diversity Award winners!

Congratulations to DAM members Daniel P. Lee and Winter Shanck who will be awarded the SLA Diversity Leadership Development Program Award at the Annual Conference in Seattle this June.

This award goes to SLA members who represent a traditionally under-represented minority group within the association.

Click here for more information about SLA's DLDP committee.

DAM Events for Seattle!

Click here to see a listing of DAM events for the June conference

http://units.sla.org/division/dam/events/2008programs.html

Fall 2007 / Winter 2008 Bulletin!

Read the latest DAM news here:

http://units.sla.org/division/dam/bulletin/winter07bulletin.html

HTML version coming soon...

Google - Tips, Tricks and Tidbits

Google hosted a session on Monday 6/4/07 which was so popular they immediately expanded the room.  Jodi Healy talked about some of Google's background and mission.  She said it would take 300 years for Google to organize all of the information available in the world today. 

There recently has been an interface change - refered to as Universal Search - links/tabs are on the top left.  The vertical searches will become more and more integrated.

Tips & Tricks

"Advanced Search" can be used to refine your search

"-" excludes words

"~" similar words

"site:" site specific

"linl:" linked pages

"weather denver, co" gives you a weather report

"13 euros in usd" does currency conversion

"24 degrees c in f" will convert temperatures

More fun tricks - www.google.com/help/features.html

Translate text or a website: translate.google.com

"Hot Trends" used to be their Zeitgeist - what are people searching right now?

Customized Search Engine (CSE) to embed in your website - www.google.com/coop

Book Search - books.google.com - Linked to WorldCat - some fulltext is available

Patent Search - www.google.com/patents

News Archive Search - news.google.com/archivesearch

News Alerts - www.google.com/support/news

And now some fun stuff - the clean Google interface down to the number of characters on the screen is carefully monitored.  You can set up your own home site at iGoogle.com. And, to see all of those fun Google logos done for holidays go to www.google.com/holidaylogos.html.  An employee has the job of designing these and carefully picking out the holidays on top of his regular Google job.  Finally, you can read about even more tips and tricks at librariancentral.blogspot.com/

Advertising and Marketing Division Open House

WOW!  Almost two weeks since we all left Denver and returned to our daily lives and I am still glowing from the awesome turnout we had at this year's DAM open house at the annual conference in Denver.  Many veteran members of the division were there to meet and greet new division members as well as talk to SLA members that are considering joining our division.  Several attendees that I spoke with, including a current library school student, were interested in what kinds of libraries/environments DAM members work in and what type of research we perform as advertising and marketing professionals.  Lots of networking and revelry took place among the dessert station and the real food.  And thanks to our sponsor, LexisNexis, several lucky open house attendees received doorprizes!

Kudos to our current chair, Deb Rash, for organizing such a fun and informative event.

If you didn't get a chance to attend the open house, consider attending next year's open house in Seattle.  It's a great time to get to know other professionals in the advertising and marketing world as well as a good place to get involved with the Division.  See you in June 2008!

Rebecca Butts
DAM Chair-Elect

New Tools for Handling Reputation & Risk - SLA 6.6.07

This session, presented by DAM, the Competitive Intelligence Division & the Information & Technology Division, featured Andrew Bernstein, CEO of Cymfony and Simon Bradstock, VP-Corporate Products, Dow Jones, and was moderated by Amelia Kassel, President, MarketingBase.

The presenters stressed the opportunities for information professionals to become involved in the reputation monitoring activities of our corporations, as we have the expertise to work with these tools to insure effective search strings, identify appropriate media to be tracked, etc.  If the function is already handled by another department (likely candidates would include P.R. or Corporate Communications) we might fine a way to partner in this activity. 

For more details, stay tuned for the Fall edition of the DAM Bulletin.

Thank you to Thomson Scientific & Dialog for sponsoring this session!

While many of us have long participated in reputation management by monitoring the press for our companies, these 'second generation' (so to speak) tools also monitor social media (blogs, wikis, discussion sites) thus allowing us to sniff out the first signs of an issue, alert our management, and turn on a dime and set up new searches to track new issues as they arise.  Net/net: we can help our companies become proactive rather than reactive! 

In addition to performing the tasks of traditional media monitoring tools (such as tracking numbers of mentions, identifying thought leaders, etc.) these new tools deliver qualitative data and analysis (in graph form), such as comparisons of positive and negative coverage and identifying the weight of various topics of discussion.  Of particular interest to DAM members is the inclusion of ad spending data as Cymfony was recently acquired by TNS (Ad Spender).

Robin Feuerstein