The Courage Cup Charity Golf Tournament for Snowball Express
The mission of Castle client Snowball Express is to create hope and new memories for children and family members of our fallen military heroes who have lost a loved one in combat since September 11, 2001. Snowball accomplishes this goal by creating events across the country that bring these families together as a community, allowing them to spend time with others like them, share their stories, celebrate their loved ones, create new relationships, and most importantly, realize that they have not been left behind.

On Monday, April 18, 2011, American Airlines and Fort Worth Air Power Foundation are hosting The Courage Cup, a charity golf tournament to benefit Snowball Express. The tournament will be held at the exclusive Army Navy Country Club in Arlington, VA. The event includes breakfast, 18 holes of spectacular golf, an awards lunch for all players and sponsors, and an exciting silent auction. Please join in and support Snowball Express and all of the incredible work they do for military families throughout the year

At Castle, we’re proud to support Snowball Express and its mission to help these families. For more information, contact Callie Ziobro at Castle, (617) 337-9533.

The Pink in School T-shirts are free and provided by Shirts in School, a marketing services company that pays high school and college students to wear T-shirts imprinted with other companies’ messages. Shirts in School started and organizes the initiative as a non-profit version of its services. The concept of Shirts in School is simple and effective. Students sign up on Facebook to receive their free T-shirts; to get paid, they must wear them in school for at least one day. In addition to wearing the shirt, the students must post their photo wearing the shirt on Facebook and other social media outlets, as well as a link to or a post about the advertiser. This way, companies not only get publicity value, but can easily monitor reactions to a campaign based on the posts of the participants and the comments by their friends. The students get paid $ 10 a day and can keep the shirt. Their schools receive an additional $2 as an incentive to support the concept.

Shirts in School’s marketing method successfully combines traditional word of mouth marketing with social media efforts. After the first participants had signed up, the concept “went viral,” says president of Shirts in School Richard Whitney. Now, an average of about 200 students signs up every day. It’s a win-win situation: students get free clothing and Shirts in School gives advertisers access to a highly desirable but hard to reach target group of 14-to-21 year-olds.

Getting rid of old, stale, unused junk; sprucing up a somewhat tired area; turning a fresh eye to something that’s been sitting around. We’re not just talking about our work areas or homes — we’re talking about communications.

Here are 10 communications tools you can refresh with some spring cleaning:

1. Crisis communications plan: Do you know where it is? Do you even have one? This is a good reminder to pull out your plan and do a refresh. If your plan was built even a couple of years ago, it’s likely out of date due to the fast-moving world of social and digital media. Contacts have probably changed. In fact, the world has changed, and your plan must change with it.
2. LinkedIn profile: When did you first create your profile? Chances are your business description, job, professional affiliations (even your head shot) have changed at least slightly. Help your important contacts receive the right messages by putting the right information in there. And LinkedIn is constantly adding and evolving, so take a look at how you’re posting content, participating in groups, using your network to your advantage.
3. Desk: Well, of course you need to unclutter your work area. Today, when so many of us are working from smart phones, iPads and virtual offices, your “home base” work area can get a bit neglected. We guarantee that if you dig through those papers on your desk, you will rediscover a great idea you put aside, or a business card that you meant to add to your database.
4. Unscheduled meetings: We all have them — the appointments we keep meaning to schedule that somehow get postponed and then fall off the radar. Think about the handful of people you meant to have a lunch or coffee with. There was a good reason you wanted to connect. You still can. And should.
5. Contracts: Our events clients, in particular, contract with numerous properties and vendors, and we negotiate on their behalf. We’ve seen contracts that they have used for years, and found ways to better leverage those contracts. Worth blowing off the dust and taking another look.
6. Grammar: “Me” vs. “I.” That’s the one that really gets our goat. In honor of Strunk and White, we can all teach our teams, interns — even our kids — to clean up that grammar.
7. Boilerplate: You use it all the time, in every news release. But do you ever look at it to make sure it reflects who you are today? Does it have links in it? Look it over and clean up that boilerplate.
8. Website: We know as well as anybody, it is a LOT of work. Our new website is ALMOST done, and cleaning up a website (or in our case building a new one) is a massive task. But times have probably changed since you last took a good, hard look. There are more reasons to update your website than we can list here. But the best one: it is the first place your customers and clients will look, and it should reflect who you are.
9. Facebook page: Facebook is constantly changing — maybe a little too much — but its latest refresh presents a very different page layout that will impact your organization’s page. To start, take a look at the photo strip that now sits atop your page and clean it up to reflect your brand.
10. Email lists: You send out email blasts and receive those “undeliverable” notices. Take a few moments to scrub your contact lists. And be sure to add new prospects and clients to keep your database up-to-date and fresh.

Now once that’s all done, go home and start cleaning out the garage.

Currently, Facebook, Twitter etc. promote and support relief efforts in Japan and help the population reconnect. Many organizations and companies like the Red Cross or Groupon use social media to make support for Japan as easy as possible – some as easy as a mouse click. Spark Energy is adding an additional dollar to its donation to Japan for every person that “likes” one of the company’s Facebook pages by the end of the month. So instead of putting your hands in your pockets, all you have to do is give a thumbs up online.

But social networkers may use all ten fingers to help. Facebook’s online games FarmVille and Café World currently include purchases benefiting Japan. FarmVille players can buy Japanese radish crop and the chefs at Café World can buy Japanese décor. All proceeds go to Save the Children.

As for other information and reconnecting people, social media is in high demand in both Japan and the U.S. Despite blackouts, Japan’s Internet availability fortunately is relatively stable and, without a working phone system, an unmatched device to stay in touch with loved ones. Shortly after the quake, 1,200 tweets per minute were sent from Tokyo alone. Google published a Japanese version of its People Finder (see also last week’s blog entry). Within the U.S., the tsunami’s estimated times of arrival on U.S. shores were available on Twitter before the official government warning. And one of Japan’s top social media companies, Mixi, raised more than $1.5 million dollars for relief efforts in only two days.

Stay social.

Finding lost persons is the idea behind Google’s Person Finder. Originally created with the U.S. Department of State to find lost persons in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, the website is presently used to help victims of the Christchurch Earthquake. The Person Finder can be found on a website launched by New Zealand’s Earthquake Commission. The site further features reports, videos and information on accommodation, alerts and volunteers. Its users can easily submit important information via Twitter.

Shopping hub Hubzi blends online shopping with social media. While the website serves a similar purpose to Craigslist, Hubzi lets vendors create a profile listing contact information, contact person, ads, and products links or videos to boost the buyers’ trust in them. Customers can post comments and reviews on vendor profiles.

Kraft Foods uses a combination of tweets to promote one of their products. Whenever two people tweet the phrase “mac & cheese” at the same time, both get a link leading to the “Mac & Jinx” promotion, where they are asked to give Kraft their address. The person to submit their info first gets five free boxes of Kraft’s Mac & Cheese and a T-shirt.

However, there are more sophisticated – and fun – ways to use Facebook as a promotional tool.

NBC, for instance, rewards everyone who watches the trailer for its new show “America’s Next Great Restaurant” on the show’s Facebook page – to date liked by 215,378 users – with a free Chipotle meal. Concurrently, Chipotle is conducting an in-store texting promotion that offers customers the chance to win a catered burrito party.

But carnal instincts are not the only motivation to Facebook users’ attention. The Facebook application FrontierVille serves as a promotion tool for the animated movie “Rango,” which will be released this weekend. Rango, a chameleon voiced by Johnny Depp, appears as a character in the online game, and players must watch the movie trailer in order to add a Rango statue to their homestead. Active FrontierVille users: about 19 million.

More than puppy love was shared this Valentine’s Day by the world’s most famous dolls Barbie and Ken. After their divorce in 2004, the couple was “voted back together” in a genius social media campaign by Mattel including Barbie on Twitter (presently 34,227 followers), a Barbie and Ken website and (back then) individual Facebook pages (since their reunion, Barbie and Ken are “on the same page” again, and share 1,738,557 fans!) Least surprised by the revived romance is Mattel. With the Valentine’s Day reunion, the Barbie and Ken Gift Set went on sale, and Barbie’s (and Ken’s) Facebook page turned into an online store. Can’t buy me love?

Posting Super Bowl ads on YouTube before airing them also turned out to be a winning strategy for creating a social media buzz: Volkswagen’s “The Force” commercial went viral and got 1.5 million views in the first two days. Another Super Bowl social media winner was Foursquare. The location-based social networking website went global for its first promoted venue and attracted 200,000 football fans, making Super Bowl Sunday their most popular venue so far.

Following the Super Bowl, Social Media Week kicked-off this week in nine cities around the globe. In the U.S., New York City and San Francisco are hosting the global conference that features panel discussions and workshops and connects social media professionals to discuss emerging trends. Read up on the event’s local and global blogs or follow it on twitter to keep up with the latest developments.