John Raymond

Facebook Campaigns and Campaigns on Facebook are new ways to promote your Columbus Ohio business. If you don’t have a presence on facebook, I would encourage you to create one for your business. But John, what’s the most effective way to utilize facebook? That really depends on the type of business you are in. Let me address a few questions that you may have:

Why should I start one? Who should I befriend?

Treat facebook as another email list. As you build your following of friends, you can email them and update them on any happenings or events with your business or product.

By now some of your real life friends will be on facebook. Go ahead and befriend them and possibly befriend employees (depending upon if they feel comfortable) These people will help you build your companies friend list.

But what’s the best way to start? Should you create a facebook profile or a fan page?

This is a tough question to answer. In the summer of 2008, my intern Danny Cox and myself both debated this question when working on internet marketing strategies for athenshub.com. We decided to go with a profile. The reasoning is that it’s more likely that you will appear in a “news feed” section. Sure, when “fan” profiles make updates, you will see an “update” notice on the news feed page but that’s about it.

What kind of exposure did you get by creating a facebook profile?

We would appear on our friends news feed when we were invited and chose to attend people’s events. You can also show up by befriending other people, posting pictures, and posting a status. These are all great ways to create awareness of your company and increase your following of friends.

Another advantage of creating a profile rather than a fan page is that you can join groups. Research groups on facebook and identify which groups would contain your target audience. Athenshub.com is a free classfieds site and in the Summer of 2008 we were targeting students looking for rentals for the 2009-2010 school year. We wanted to show students that we were a resource to find information on rentals. We did some research on groups and found groups of students that would be looking for rentals. We then joined the group and then emalied the group administrator and asked that they would pass along a message to the group (1000 + members) that the website was a resource for them.

This strategy paid off huge dividends as these admins passed along word to group members via facebook email. We saw large spikes in traffic both on the days the email went out and in days going forward. And there’s nothing better than having the group admin market for you.

These are a few tips to get you started. We plan on doing some more great interactive things with athens hub and for my new coupon website. Happy facebooking!

A goal of mine for grad school was to challenge myself as much as I could on all levels. I participated in a student produced sketch comedy show called Fridays Live. I wrote sketches, helped with their e-marketing campaign, helped get sponsorship for the show and also did a little acting.

This is one of my favorite commercials from the show that I was in. It’s for Fharmony and parody’s those e-harmony commercials.

I was accepted into the Graduate program at Ohio University in 2007. I decided to pursue an M.A. in Interactive Multimedia. The cost of college was going to be expensive. So I created a Web site where people could sponsor the homepage for a fee and I would put the proceeds toward my masters. While I was not able to raise funds beyond the costs of the web site, this was a great exercise in learning about internet marketing. I was able to get traffic to the web site initially, however, I could not sustain it. Ultimately, this drove me to learn more about search engine optimization.

The Soul of Athens 2008 Web site was a special project completed by students in the School of Visual Communications at Ohio University. The project was started and completed in a span of three months during Spring of 2008.

My role was to coordinate the marketing strategy of the site and help with other small aspects such as the construction of the youtube.com video player. Please check out the Web Site. It’s a truly amazing piece of work and the stories, images, and videos on the site are excellent.

The Ohio University Visual Communications grad program evaluates you after one quarter of work. The purpose is to make sure that you are pushing yourself and not slacking off in Grad School. Three members of the faculty evaluate you and determine whether to pass you into the program, evaluate you next quarter, or kick you out. I created this website for my presentation. It showcases the work I did my first quarter as well as my work on Fridays Live, a student produced sketch comedy show.

While I was working on my core master’s classwork at Ohio University, I was employed at the Ohio University Digital Media Studio as a Graduate Assistant. It was a new and innovative computer lab that sought to help tutor undergraduate and graduate students in programs such as Final Cut Pro, Adobe Flash, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Dreamweaver. My primary duty was to serve as a tutor for the people who came into the lab. Since the DMS was new, I helped create a logo and a marketing brand for the lab to try and help differentiate it from other labs on campus. Part of that marketing plan was to create a website with information about the lab. This is the look I created for the lab. The website was launched after I finished my graduate work at OU.

I coordinated the creation of this commercial for the Center for Student Legal Services in Athens, Ohio in the Spring of 2008. The Center wanted to come up with a video that would expand their exposure for students. I proposed doing a parody of one of the most memorable songs of the 90’s – Crash Test Dummies MMM MMM MMM MMM. They approved the concept and I coordinated the production of the video. I co-wrote the script as well. The video was shown for about 6 months before every movie played in Athens, Ohio. The video stars Eric Herron.