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Michael Fruchter.com - My thoughts on social apps, and a little bit of everything else.

My thoughts on social networking applications.

Interview With Jamie Guse of American Dairy Queen CorporationJanuary 13

Dairy Queen, an iconic American brand that will be celebrating its 70th birthday this year, is no stranger to social media. Dairy Queen like most major corporations utilizes social media to connect with its global customer base. The man responsible for maintaining all of Dairy Queens digital assets, including social media, is Jamie Guse. Jamie is the Web Site Manager for American Dairy Queen Corporation. I sat down with Jamie for a brief Q & A session.

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Mike: How long have you been with Dairy Queen and what’s your official role there?

Jamie: I’ve been with Dairy Queen since September of 2008 and my current title is Web Site Manager which includes managing a majority of our .com properties along with all of our social media properties and anything else considered digital.

Mike: What’s the best thing about working at Dairy Queen and what has changed the most about your role there?

Jamie: This is actually a very tough question because I really love my job and love what I get to do on a daily basis. But what I really love the most is that

Social Media ToolkitJanuary 5

The barrier for getting started with social media is low, it’s dependent on your involvement level, objectives and goals. The facilitators of the message, our tools, are the key components that make it all work. They are the tools in our digital toolkit that every strategist, marketer and PR professional should already be learning and using. The sole purpose of these tools are to; create, manage and distribute content, build awareness, drive traffic, connect with our customers and hopefully turn a lead into a prospective sale.

Tools for your social media toolkit can be broken down into the following categories:

Your Black Box – The flight data recorder for the Web

The default tool in any toolbox always starts with Analytics. On all commercial airplanes there are Black Boxes. They record crucial flight data in the event of  equipment breakdown or catastrophe. Your website’s Black Box is Google Analytics. Before you can get clearance for take off, yo

Google Wave Is The Future of Real Time CollaborationOctober 7 2009

It’s been a very exciting week for me, as it has been with the select few of you who were lucky enough to snag one of  the 100,000 invites for Google Wave.  Being an early adopter, I have been ecstatic trying to get my hands on the next new shiny object. The hype that has gone on for months billed it as the next generation collaboration platform, an email replacement, a Facebook and Twitter killer, and the list goes on.

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So what exactly is Google Wave?

You could classify it as a real-time collaboration tool that enables communication between a group of people. The environment enables a multitude of media that can interact within a wave or be embedded, such as  text, photos, videos, maps, gadgets, bots and more. It’s also  a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves. Just as with Twitter, it’s the developer community that will make or break Goo

Jailbreaking My iPhone: It’s All About The Customization…September 22 2009

It was just a little over three months ago when I bought the iPhone 3GS. I have spent plenty of time getting to know the phone, downloading applications, and testing the limitations of what this thing can and can’t do. I quickly found out that even the most basic features, such as customizing the home screen, icons, changing themes was non existent on the iPhone.  On most phones including my old HTC Kaiser, which ran on Windows Mobile I was able to theme and customize the home screen. Just as we can personalize our desktop computers, the iPhone should no be different. Every iPhone looks the same, there is no individuality or personality on these phones, something that is severely missing. This is not a mistake, it’s by design that Apple does this, and it’s beyond puzzling to me. End users at the very least should have the ability to do basic  home screen customizing on their phone.

Apple says they want to control the user experience and limit users from malicious software and other types of trickery.  To that point I agree, but at least give users the bare minimum to customize their phones. If I want a picture of my daughter on the home screen meaning, I should not have to jail break my phone to do so.

There are thousands upon thousands of applications in the official Apple app store. Most suit my needs, but with

Social Media Marketing: Empower the Crowd!September 21 2009

Internet marketing primarily consists of a few categories in various stages of consumer engagement. Search engine marketing, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, banner/text ad marketing, email marketing and please use whatever buzz word you want for the sixth category, new media marketing/Web 2.0 marketing/, okay I’ll say it, social media marketing, and there’s probably another stage or two of marketing I left out.

The end goal with all of these methods is to drive traffic to a Web Site and convert a consumer into a sale. Remember those  two points traffic and sales. I’m not talking about branding or other components, because in different ways all of the above  categories mentioned achieve this, some more obtrusive than others, some more effective than others. I’m strictly talking about the four Ps here: product, place, pricing and promotion.

Product and pricing is pretty much self explanatory. The place in this case is an online point of purchase, but it could also be an offline point of purchase. Lastly we get to the final P, Promotion.

The principles of social media marketing are the same as everything else, with the exception of comm