McVey Marketing Inc. has received a new testimonial from one of its valued clients. The firm has been working with the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minn., for the past several months to advise and guide the institution through a change in status from a college to a university. As part of its work with St. Catherine's, the firm developed new brand architecture and strategies, a new system of key messages to advance the brand, options for new taglines, and other deliverables.

St. Catherine's enrolls more than 5,000 students in its associate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs at campuses in St. Paul and Minneapolis. In May, the college's board of trustees approved moving forward with a change in name and status to a university, which will officially take effect in 2009.

More information about the decision, as well as the process and timeline for changing the name, are available on the St. Catherine's web site. The firm's work with the college and its great team of professionals has been engaging and rewarding.

Here's what Amy Gage, St. Catherine's Director of Marketing and Communications, had to say about the college's work with the firm.

"We retained McVey Marketing Inc. to help St. Catherine's evaluate and advise the institution as it was planning a change in name and status from a college to a university. This included working with college leaders and staff to develop new brand strategies, key messages to advance the brand, and sample taglines to position the university going forward. The branding and messaging work the firm performed, and the quality of its presentations and recommendations, were instrumental in helping St. Catherine's make the historic decision to change from a college to a university.

"Firm President Gary McVey has deep knowledge of branding and marketing, is extremely professional and responsive, and is a valuable and trusted partner. I highly recommend Gary and his firm to others who want to reposition and build their brands and advance their organizations."

If you haven't already, check out the new additions to the McVey Marketing website. The new features include a link on the biography page to President Gary McVey's profile on Linked-In, a fast-growing professional networking website. And from the news page, you can now access past issues of the McVey Marketing online newsletter.

During the coming weeks, we'll be adding more client testimonials and other new content to the website. If you have additional ideas for enhancements, please let us know. We love hearing and sharing ideas with clients, contacts and friends.

Can Social Networking Live Up to the Hype?
It seems you can't open a business magazine or a marketing newsletter these days and not read about how important it is to integrate social networking into your marketing strategies and tactics. The level of attention is reminiscent of the early days of Internet marketing. Like then, it's important to be strategic about how web 2.0 and social influence marketing fit into your overall marketing plan to advance your brand and achieve your most important organizational goals.

McVey Marketing has been working with a number of clients to integrate social networking and other new-media strategies into their traditional marketing plans. As we've done this, a few points have become clear:

*Social influence marketing has become the third dimension of marketing, alongside brand marketing and direct-response marketing. And social influence marketing requires new strategies, rules and tactics, along with a good deal of experimentation.

*Social networks now matter as much as websites. Think about it. Many of your prospects and customers now spend most of their time on social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Linked-In, Flickr and others. Any organization developing a new or enhanced website, product or marketing campaign needs to consider how it integrates with key social networks. It shouldn't be an afterthought.

*Social influence marketing will require that marketing metrics change, and that's a good thing. One of the key advantages of web-based marketing has been the ability to track and measure results. Social influence marketing will require further changes to metric models and tools in order to evaluate whether it's effective and how it compares to traditional brand and direct-response marketing.

What does this all mean for you and your organization? Simply put, if you've been waiting on the sideline to see where social influence marketing is headed before strapping on your helmet, it's time to get in the game.

How to Track Your Web Reputation
The rise of social influence marketing now requires that your organization be even more diligent in protecting and advancing its reputation. Social networking gives disgruntled customers, employees and others more power to damage your organization's reputation than ever before. Here are a few helpful tips for monitoring your brand online:

*Google Alerts - set up a daily alert for the names of your organization, its president and other chief officers, and names of key divisions or products.

*Yahoo Pipes - set up an account at pipes.yahoo.com that aggregates information from search engines and other web portals such as Twitter (a miniblogging site) and Flickr (photo sharing).

*Social media buzz -use serph.com to search for mentions of your organization's name and key officials that Google Alerts may miss.

Tracking your brand online is just the start. You also need to share information and protect your organization. Having an organizational blog where your organization can set the record straight and defend its reputation is a good first step to going beyond tracking and beginning to shape the debate.