New York doesn’t have acres of land to grow fresh food. However, rooftop spaces can always be maximized to include growing fresh produce. Brooklyn Grange, the largest rooftop farm in NYC grows salad greens, rainbow chard, kale, basil, eggplant, cucumbers and ground cherries. This is one of the biggest projects funded by Mayor Bloomberg as part of the Green Infrastructure program that will help NYC become “a greener, greater city.”

Further down South (down under in Australia!) from where we call home is a group of like-minded individuals that share the value of going green through sprouting (literally) public edible gardens. Green Square Growers is an inspiring community that shares ideas such as how to create that strawberry vertical garden you never thought you could have as well as “how to green up your workspace.” Apart from their love and knowledge for gardening, they also know how to engage their community the right way. Let’s see how to do things the Green Square Growers way…

1. Who are the Green Square Growers?
We love growing food – at home and in public spaces. We are a local community group based in Green Square of Sydney, Australia and were founded in September 2011.

Basically we are all about sharing our knowledge of growing food with each other and others in the community. We also love installing public edible gardens that anyone in the community can access any time of the day.

2. How do you keep your community engaged, involved and excited to be a part of Green Square Growers?
We meet the 2nd Sunday of every month. Our meeting details are always shared on our Facebook page. Ironically our Facebook community is our local neighborhood community. We meet ‘offline’ to share knowledge, swap excess food produce, maintenance of the community gardens and to plan for future community gardens being installed. We encourage discussions to flow into the online space too.

3. Why did you create a Facebook brand page and why did you download the AA Static HTML app? How have these helped your organization?
We felt a Facebook page was a very simple way for the community to find out more about what we are doing and for our members to keep in touch with each other between catch ups.

We downloaded the AA Static HTML app to easily create a welcome page. We didn’t want a landing page as such (just happy for people to go straight to our wall). However once you arrive at our wall, you will be greeted with a large ‘hello’ button just under our cover photograph. The AA Static HTML app made it easy to create a multimedia welcome using text and video. This made it simple for people to know more about us and to inform them how they can get involved.

5. What advice can you give to other groups/organizations that want to succeed in their Facebook and inbound marketing efforts?
Encourage interaction online and offline and to take the time to welcome new visitors who click that wonderful ‘like’ button. Let people know your community group or business cares.

Not long after, Matt started putting on the Best of Kendal Mountain Festival nights on at Sheffield’s Showroom Cinema.  The evenings proved such a hit that in 2006 the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival was born.  This year’s trailer had more than 100,000 hits and every year for the past 8 years 100% of visitors said they’d come again and recommend it to a friend.

Every summer, Matt partners up with Sheffield City Council to put on the UK’s biggest outdoors festival for outdoors folk – Cliffhanger.  With more than 20,000 visitors the aim of the event is to inspire & involve. Featuring elite competitions and / or professional demonstrations in rock climbing, orienteering,  mountain biking, running, slacklining, adventure racing and more, visitors are able to watch incredibly talented sports-people of all ages at the top of their game, and then take part in the very sports they have just been inspired by.

Matt also runs a successful speaker agency – his ‘Serious Adventure’ Speakers Portfolio is the most comprehensive network of serious (but not humourless!) adventurers, explorers and extreme sports athletes in the world.  As he puts it, if the person you’re looking for is not on his list give him a call as he probably knows them or will be able to track them down.

Two years ago Matt teamed up with Lissa Cook – a former Radio 4 news journalist and PR.  She’d moved to the Peak District to seek the good-life with her adventure sports writer and athlete husband, Nik Cook. Matt was impressed by the serious amount of media coverage she was generating for her handmade childrenswear business, Peak Princess, and got her on board.

It proved a dream team – with ShAFF ticket sales increasing by more than 75% in 2011 and another jump of nearly 50% this year and hundreds of pieces of press coverage.

2. How do you keep your community engaged and excited about your events? How do you keep people coming back to your events? 

We “talk” to people & create a community of people who love adventure sports – we make sure we share plenty of great video content, interesting links to people we’re working with, products we’re reviewing, eye-catching images etc.  We put a lot of effort in to responding via email, facebook and twitter so it’s a 2-way conversation.

3. Why did you create a FB brand page and why did you download the AA Vimeo app?

For a lot of film-makers Vimeo is a great way to share video content in high quality. Downloading the AA Vimeo app meant we can have a one click app where we share our Vimeo content.

4. What advice can you give to other businesses that want to succeed in their FB and inbound marketing efforts?

Don’t just broadcast what you’re doing – ask what your community of fans and followers are up to. Respond and react. Have fun. Share great quality content that fans in turn will want to share.

Olympics fever is on! The past weekend's events brought us spectacles like the Chinese divers, so synchronized, they were like mirror images of each other; a few surprises (and tear jerkers) like World #1 Jordan Wieber not making it to the all-around finals later this week, as well as some shifts in power evidenced by Lochte (the new alpha male in men's swimming) and Phelps unable to carry their relay team to win the gold and beat the French in the 400m relay.

To add to the Olympics excitement, this week's AA Customer Spotlight features Jay Murdock, head coach and trainer of Flight101 Sport Speed Development, a well-known training ground for our future Olympians and World Champions. Coach Murdock has been busy as he just sent off 33 of his athletes to the AAU (US AMateur Athletic Union) Junior Olympics but he still makes sure to communicate and engage with his clients/community. Let's learn how it's done the Flight101 way.

What is Flight101 Sport Speed Development?

Established in 2005 and located in Canton OH – the heart of high school football country, Flight101 Sport Speed Development offers northeast Ohio’s best available sports-specific high performance athletic training. Regardless of the sport, the greatest concern among today’s athletes is how to improve playing speed. Not just another gym or the latest “fad workout” Flight101 Sport Speed Development is a complete approach to improving athletic playing speed, reaction, agility and quickness. No matter what the sport, improved playing speed is often what separates good athletes from great athletes and can make the difference between a “winning season and a championship season.”

Head coach and trainer Jay Murdock has over 25 years experience coaching athletes at every level in a variety of sports. He has worked with young athletes from youth baseball, soccer, football and basketball to track and field at the college ranks. A former educator, on-air radio personality and long-time community activist, during his over two decades of coaching young athletes he has had athletes in national and state championships every year but three. He has coached 1 world champion, 3 national champions, 5 state champions, dozens of state qualifiers, 2 high school district championship and 6 high school conference championship track and field teams. His “athlete first, coach driven, performance based” approach to training young athletes has produced winning teams and championship athletes in an assortment of sports.

What is your coaching philosophy? How do you keep the athletes excited to come to training and be Olympic hopefuls one day?

First, it is important that our athlete’s feel like they are a part of a special fraternity – the Flight101 family. Even though they might come from different backgrounds, schools and communities the thing that they have in common is that they train with Flight101 and that they want to be the best that they can be. Over the years we have had a number of our athletes go on to prominence on and off the playing field and we make sure that our younger kids feel connected to what these athletes have accomplished. Second, we use what I call the ACT (Attitude, Conditioning and Technique) Equation to get them to understand our Coach/Athlete relationship. Conditioning and technique are the things that we can coach but attitude is what they bring to the table and without the proper attitude the drills and exercises we coach are meaningless. One of the things that we try to do in order to make sure that our athletes understand why we might be doing a particular drill or exercise. The days of just running because coach said so won’t work with this generation of athletes. We often put the goals of our workouts in writing so that the athlete can see the specific outcome we are trying to accomplish with that particular training session. Finally and most importantly, we try to make sure our athletes are having fun and enjoying themselves and to help them understand that training is about personal growth and not necessarily about winning and losing. However, with hard work and commitment they can achieve incredible things – like maybe one day representing country on the US Olympic Team.

Why did you create a FB brand page? How has the AppAddictive YouTube app helped your business since you downloaded it?

We had been using our blog and monthly electronic newsletter to communicate with our clients and promote our business for a number of months when we decided to launch our Facebook brand page. Both the blog and newsletter were great but they both required a considerable amount of time and attention in order research and write the articles on a regular basis. The FB brand page allows us to communicate with our clients in real time. By subscribing to feeds and posts that might be helpful and of interest to our clients we can update our FB brand page 2-3 times daily. We can post status updates on our athletes who are doing well on the field and in the class room. We welcome new athletes to the Flight101 family by posting their profile on our page and parents can post their videos of our athletes in various sporting events.

The AppAddictive YouTube app has helped our business in a number of ways. Again, it has allowed us to promote our business by linking our FB Brand page to other brand pages that have similar interests or provide information, products and/or services that our clients can use. We have used the video capability to highlight our clients and promote their athletic achievements to college scouts and recruiters. We have also used the videos as a coaching tool to help our athletes improve their performance.

What advice can you give to other small businesses that want to succeed in their FB and inbound marketing efforts?

We have found our FB Brand page to be the most economical way to promote our business and communicate with our client base. If your business is looking for a “get the word out to more customers” I can’t think of a better way to do it.

So you’re a restaurant owner and business is picking up. It’s pretty standard practice now for establishments to have their own “embassy” on Facebook, serving as a gateway for existing and potential customers to get more information about the menu, the chef behind it and even obvious things like hours and contact information.

This is certainly a big improvement from those days wherein you had to get someone to build a website for your restaurant because everybody else was doing it. We live in a social world today and it’s time to make our Facebook fan pages work for us.

The 15 Most ‘Liked’ Brands in the world, from Red Bull to Burberry, have one thing in common. Their brand pages are highly visual. Simply Measured, an analytics firm that measures brand performance on Facebook, found a 65% aggregate jump in engagement for photos and videos that brands posted on their pages, while photo-less updates fell over the same period.

Content presentation has becomevery powerful.

Red Bull, the most popular energy drink in the world by volume, mixes up athlete profiles, events and comedy that generate thousands of likes and comments, with video and image posts as the most popular while promotional posts receive significantly lower user interactions.

Similarly, Burberry, the world’s most successful luxury fashion brand on Facebook, engages its fans by sharing a lot of unique and exclusive content like posting behind-the-scenes shots from photo shoots and videos from their latest campaigns.

What does this all mean for a restaurant owner trying to lure new customers via its Facebook page?

The bottom line is, everybody loves interactive content over lengthy text. Status updates are great but it is best to mix these up with videos and photos to keep people engaged and excited about the brand. It also does not hurt that videos and photos highly influence Facebook’s EdgeRank ratings, an algorithm to determine the content that an individual user will see in the ‘Top News’ portion of the News Feed.

Once you are ready to add more interactive content into your restaurant’s page, you can install the new and improved AppAddictive YouTube Video Gallery app. In under a minute, your page will literally come to life. It’s as easy as:

Step 1:  Make sure that you have qualityvideo content on your YouTube channel.

Step 2: Go to this page to install the AppAddictive YouTube Video Gallery player.

Step 3: Configure your page and publish.

What can you post? The opportunities are endless…

1. Introductions and features: on you (the owner/s), the chefs and restaurant staff, your customers, new menu items, specials, events and teaser content that will build hype and excitement.

2. How to/tutorials: not only an interactive post but also a helpful customer relationship management tool.

3. Entertaining content that fans would never have had access to without the advent of social media: the design and development of the menu, behind the scenes details from the market to the kitchen to the table. Do you have time to come up with weekly series of life in the restaurant? Share it with the world

Earlier this week, Facebook officially launched the App Center, an online store similar to Apple App Store or Google Play. App Center launched approximately 600 applications, including software from Pinterest, Draw Something, Nike, and other games. The platform is now mobile and accessible through iOS and Android-equipped devices. [Read more…]

We have seen a large improvement in the performance of Facebook Ads around the world. According to a study by Marin Software – who services fortune 500 companies  – performance and buyers of Facebook Ads are on the rise – meaning Facebook Ads are becoming more efficient and more business are jumping on the band wagon.

Here’s a ‘Road Map’ to running Facebook Ad Campaigns: