We have Restaurant Week 2010 as a client again this year. We’re going to make their online marketing strategy a little bigger and lots more exciting this year. Last year we started their online foodie community from scratch and grew it to over 5,000 fans in 2 weeks. We’ve set our hat a tad higher for 2010.

Read the 2009 Case Study: Restaurant Week Jamaica is a new client. 5,030 Facebook Fans in 14 days.

How many Jamaicans are on Facebook now? It’s like THE question to be asking and answering these past few weeks. So I decided to write a how to article that anyone can refer to and pass on to colleagues and friends. Here’s how to find out how many Jamaicans are on Facebook.

1. Login to Facebook as usual and go to the Home Page. Not your Profile Page.

2. On the Home Page, on the left hand in the side bar, from the top you will see your picture and beneath that in the first block of information you’ll see News Feed, Messages, Events, Friends etc. In the Second Block of information you will see Photos, Ads and Pages etc. Click on Ads and Pages. If you do not see Ads and Pages for some reason, don’t worry, use the Search box and type in Ads, Facebook Ads, Ads Manager. Read the rest of this entry »

Foursquare is like a loyalty rewards programme on the go, a fresh way for you to connect with your customers and keep them engaged with “specials “and yes a fresh way of getting free pr continuously for your brand but not in a pushy kinda way – and that’s from the perspective of a brand. “Specials,” which are discounts and prizes you can offer your loyal customers when they check in on foursquare at your venue.

For the user, Foursquare is a way of showing, sharing your lifestyle with friends, family, colleagues and quite a few strangers. It’s a way for you to also show your favourite brands some very public love and to get some rewards for being loyal and their very public advocates. And as the spiel from Foursquare goes, “We’re all about helping you find new ways to explore the city.”

How does it work?

You join using your email address and a password. And you can do this by going to foursquare.com or even more appropriately for Jamaica – on your phone as Foursquare has a free, downloadable application for your Blackberry, Iphone or Android Phone . On your phone, you can search for your favourite spots and see which of your friends or maybe strangers have been “checking in” ( which is simply clicking the Check In button) at this bar, this club or gym or restaurant. You can check in, add tips (which are like reviews and recommendations on what’s great, what’s new and what to try at this place), search and add friends.   More

SiliconCaribe.com – the leading Caribbean Technology Blog is a publication of Connectimass. Over the last couple of months we’ve had some ups and downs from server crashes to slow post production to changing out our site design. Thankfully that’s behind us and totally solved. Today we’re happy with where we are. Based on a year’s worth of analysis on what you our readers want to know, what you find useful, debatable, linkable and what really gets you commenting like crazy and viewing repeatedly- we’re focused on 9 main categories – Tech News, Social Media, Mobile, Startups, Entertainment, Business, How to Lists and Travel We will be posting a mixture of original articles daily starting tomorrow ( Tuesday), including weekends. We are also introducing some new voices in the form of more guest bloggers, as well as syndicating some great stuff. We’ve really appreciated your feedback and we’ve used it to inform our new editorial calendar.

Travel Tuesdays

We’re introducing Travel Tuesdays, as part of our editorial calendar -the Caribbean’s Tourism is a multi-billion dollar industry, our leading hard currency earner and we’ve been curious for a while as to what they’ve been doing online and with technology especially since over 70% of travel decisions are now made online not via expensive magazine and television ads. So we’ll be talking travel tech every Tuesday but not solely on that day.

Expanded Events Listing and new Job Board

We’ll be expanding our Events listing to add more recommended events online and offline in Jamaica, the Caribbean and Worldwide and you can add yours for free by sending details to ingrid at connectimass dot com. We’ve added a Job Board so you can post Jobs – US$50 for a month (5 listings) | Services – US$90 for 3 months | Tech related items For Sale – US$25 for a month (5 listings).

Ads are back and the introductory rates are a steal!
We’re also brought back our ad spaces and we have three sizes for you to choose from,
1. the standard – 468 x 60 pixels starting as low as US$5 a day
2. the rectangle – 300 x 250 pixels starting as low as US$5 a day
3. the small square – 125 x 125 pixels starting as low as US$4 a day
To book your ads, email Ingrid Riley at ingrid at connectimass dot com.

Our Event Kingston Beta is growing significantly in visibility and reputation regionally and internationally. We’re attracting globally renown tech entrepreneur, speakers and experts like Marc Canter, Founder of Macromedia who presented at the last one and we’re ending the year being one of the main events of Global Entrepreneurship week. The next Kingston Beta is scheduled for the last Thursday in this month, August 26th, 2010 and of course we’re always open to Caribbean startups who want to pitch wherever they are in the world.

Our Readers and Online Community
Thanks so much for your continued loyalty. Thanks to all of you 20,000 people who read us monthly, the 530 people who follow us on twitter and the community we’re growing on our Facebook Fan Page. Do, be generous, share us with your friends and colleagues.

FOUR DAYS OF FUN IN THE SUN: THE FIRST EVER JAMAICA BLOGGER’S MEET-UP was hosted by The Jamaica Tourist Board(JTB) on July 15t-19th, 2010. The JTB welcomed twenty bloggers to the island for a special work and play break. They were based in Montego Bay and had day and night trips to Negril and Ocho Rios.

We also invited 4 Jamaican bloggers who also were part tour guides, part local celebrities, but mostly as peers in the blogosphere, people who were sharing the journey and who could feed the curiosity of these American bloggers who were all first timers to Jamaica.

An itinerary was created to reflect some of the niche attractions and experiences the island has to offer – getting away from the brochure and hard sell of the beach and Bob Marley to showcasing the variety and diversity here. These engaging writers all have very active websites, blogs and influential twitter followings that speak to modern travel and lifestyle.

I am glad as a Jamaican, to have been an integral part in developing and implementing this idea, which is now a pillar of the ongoing digital marketing strategy of the JTB.  To establish and build relationships with influential bloggers who write for across varying niches – travel, mommy vacations, eco, music, fashion and beauty is crucial for marketing Destination Jamaica online. We also established a twitter hashtag #oneloveja for us to be able to track, measure the impact of this Blogger’s Meetup. Additionally JTB’s own official blog for Destination Jamaica was launched on July 15th, 2010 to coincide with the first day of the Meetup – it’s called islandbuzzjamaica.com. We also video blogged the entire meetup and you can find the videos on Island Buzz Jamaica as well.

We monitored their twitter, blog, flickr and facebook activity while they were here and we’re monitoring what they have shared so far now that a week has passed since they have been home. Our initial findings are encouraging and the Blogger’s Meetup has been declared a huge success. The next one is already being planned to give another set of amazing bloggers an even more memorable range of experiences worth talking about.

Marketers take note: a new study from research firm Gartner has discovered that a majority of today’s consumers rely to some extent on social networks to help guide them in purchase decisions. Despite this fact, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and others, while critical, are currently an underutilized aspect to the marketing process, the report says.

But not everyone using social networks is worth targeting equally, as it turns out. Instead, there are three types of online personalities which make up just one-fifth of the consumer population but are the key influencers in the purchasing activities of 74% of the population. Gartner calls them Salesmen, Connectors and Mavens. More

Stephanie Leffler the Senior Vice President of Network Solutions defines the 3 most important SEO tips.

Of course we were nepotistic or maybe simpy using our network to get things done and well. This Flyer was done by Kathryn Mullings, the wife of David Mullings one of the event speakers.

David, Khary, Ingrid, Dale

On a hot Football Monday afternoon when Brazil was still thought to be a shoe in for the World Cup finals- we all got together at Susie’s on the Terrace in Southdale Plaza in Kingston to take some photos. Fern Elise Foster from Socialingua did us the honour of taking a bunch of photos for publicity purposes as well as for our flyer. This one however was taken by a BlackBerry 9700. We liked it so we’re sharing it. http://www.reconnecttoday.info