This week we had another excellent guest speaker in our Emerging Media class – Laura Gainor, social media strategist at Comet Branding in Milwaukee. Gainor has an extensive background in client services management, personal and business branding strategies. She excels in creative talents through photography and graphic design and is an expert on how to create a successful personal and business brand through social media after landing a job by showcasing her expertise using various social media tools.

"One big thing about personal branding is to be involved in as many things as you can as time permits ..." Gainor told our class. She added: "The only way to build up a company without a huge marketing budget is to get heavy into social media" and "social media allows you to get real-time results." And, while noting the various places to leave a personal stamp (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc.), Gainor stressed that it's best to create a top-notch blog or website. "It's really important to bring them all into one place – your personal brand – so it's easy to navigate," she said. Beyond that, she said, know your message, know your audience, be consistent.

I especially liked how Gainor uses SlideShare.net to share and her slideshow presentations, documents and videos with the masses. This is done most notably via her blog and on LinkedIn. For example, here below is her presentation to our class, which by the way she promoted before and afterward on her site. I only know one other person who shared multiple presentations on LinkedIn via Slideshare. I will aim to do this more myself in the future.

Our Emerging Media class focused on reviewing how many of the largest and best-known corporations use social media to enhance, protect, expand and reposition their brands in today's digital age.

Professor Menck broke down each of The Vitrue 100: Top Social Brands of 2009 into groups of five, according to descending order, and then passed out sheets with numbers to the class. Each student's number would reflect which group of five to pick a single company to research and present findings to the class. The person with No. 20 got to choose from 96 to 100. No. 19 chose from 91 to 95, and so on. I somehow (smile) got No. 1, which meant that I could choose to study one the five best: iPhone, Disney, CNN, MTV and the NBA.

I chose to study the NBA. I have an iPhone and visit CNN.com from time to time. But I pay lots of attention to the National Basketball Association – because of my lifelong love for the game and because my brothers and I are heavy into fantasy basketball. Anyway, I presented my finding according to the different dimensions of social interactivity for which Vitrue based its findings: social networking (general sharing), video sharing (high engagement of viewing time and authenticity of dimension), status updates (aka micro-blogging; key influencers who chatter and actively push content), photo sharing (social media data), and blogs (general blogosphere, commentary mentions).

Based on my findings, it is easy to see why the NBA finished in the Top Five this year, up from No. 29 the year before. Nearly 4.7 million people like the NBA's Facebook page and more than two million people follow the NBA on Twitter. Please download a PDF of my class presentation as produced in Apple's Keynote software.

Tonight's Emerging Media class featured a wonderful and insightful guest speaker, Tonise Paul, president and chief executive officer of Energy BBDO, an exceptional advertising agency in Chicago.

But we interrupt this blog posting ... to bemoan that while we were in class, Roy Halladay, the pitching ace of my beloved Philadelphia Phillies threw a no-hitter in the team's opening game of the National League Division Series matchup against the Cincinnati Reds. A NO-HITTER. In the PLAYOFFS. Only the second pitcher ever to do so. History was happening and I was sitting in a conference room with my classmates in Johnston Hall at Marquette University. I understood that graduate school would mean sacrifices, but OMG!

Anyway ... I digress ... Paul, a self-described "brand believer" and "a resurrector of brands," said of her company, "Our job is to build brands." She used a nicely done PowerPoint presentation to offer us "a window into the conversation in the company and the industry today." In the 1980s, advertising campaigns focused on television, radio and print. The 1990s brought forth the advent of integrated marketing campaigns, with a focus on one sight-one sound, more synergy and similarity (multiple ads, one voice). Now, of course, it's all about digital, and that has "fundamentally changed the way we function," Paul said.

The new definition for modern integration is emerging, she said. (Hence, it seems, why we have a Emerging Media class.) The goal are holistic creative solutions, moving from ads and execution to ideas and going beyond trying to solve the client's problem to focusing more on the consumer's problem. For example, Paul shared with us a really impressive marketing effort her company helped produce for the Art Institute of Chicago. The museum's problem: attracting more customers and visitors. The solution became the Red Cube Project, which focused more on getting people to engage with art as a passion. That passion would seek outlets and the museum would be a natural fit.

Check out this video to learn more about the Red Cube Project. It's not as compelling as no-hitter in the playoffs. But it is inspiring and an excellent example of understanding the problem you're solving for – and making a difference.