Fewer events are more hyped, create as much fanfare, attract more interest from celebrities, politicians and average Americans than the Super Bowl. And live is still how viewers like to watch sports with the NFL leading the sports pack in fan base size. Last year’s Super Bowl had an astonishing 110 million viewers – definitely worth mortgaging the farm.

Therefore, we wanted to preview some of the spots that we think will be real highlights this year.

Volkswagen

One of the highlights last year came courtesy of Volkswagen as they unveiled their commercial, “The Force,” which featured a young Darth Vader and a new 2012 Passat.

Volkswagen may have replicated its 2011 success with a memorable ad for the  Super Bowl XLVI. They have a teaser (yes – an ad of an ad) for this year’s Super Bowl commercial, which includes dogs barking the Star Wars theme and is named “The Bark Side.”

As a dog lover, and Vizsla owner (top row-center), I for one am excited to see this ad.

Sketchers
Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, will be guest starring in Sketchers third-consecutive Super Bowl ad. With expectations lowered after last year Kim Kardashian commercial, Sketchers can only improve, right?

It turns out that this particular ad features racing greyhounds that lose to a tiny dog wearing Sketchers.

Doritos
In my opinion, Doritos has been throwing multiple game winning touch downs with its “Crash the Super Bowl Contest” for the last couple of years, and this year looks to be no different. Here are some of the top contenders.

Sling Baby
What do you get when you mix a baby in a swing, a mean grandmother and a bratty kid taunting them both? A great commercial.

Man’s Best Friend
Dog-themed entries always grab my attention. This entry features a dog trying to cover its tracks and a human that can apparently be bought off for just a sack of Doritos.

The Voice
A promo for “The Voice” that will be aired during the Super Bowl, for a series that premieres directly after the Super Bowl, will at least create some conversation at the water cooler on Monday. The spot is titled “Vokal Kombat,” so I can only assume that it features Christina Aguilera ripping Adam Levine’s head off, vocally that is.

So, we are interested to know, what commercials are you most excited to see and , more importantly, do stellar commercials make up for a Super Bowl that is heavy on defense or one-sided? Let us know here on The Side Note, or on Facebook (Facebook.com/WeiseCommunications) or on Twitter (@Weise_Ideas).

Here are a few tips of how to break through by jazzing up your pitch:

1. Have a great subject line for your email or introductory sentence for your phone pitch. A subject line with six words or less is key.
2. Pitch your story as a process story. If your content is not particularly interesting, how did you get to that point and is that more interesting? This might be particularly useful for research-based stories. Did you use any unique processes to achieve your results?
3. Pitch your story to an unorthodox beat. Are you pitching a biking story, how about tying into fashion, food or business related to biking instead of the typical sport beat?
4. Tie into a tread, and I am not talking about fringe boots here. What IS the media covering and how can you be a part of it? Today, if you have a way to tie into SOPA or PIPA, your chances of getting coverage are greatly increased. Or, how about a story about the ubiquitous Tim Tebow?
5. Leverage your existing assets. As any good communicator could tell you, half of our jobs are to repurpose and reconfigure old content, coverage and concepts. Do you have a company mascot and a yearly contest? Can you tie the two together in an interesting way?
6. Make it a multimedia pitch. Use video and photos. Pitch on Twitter and Facebook.

Make your pitch interesting to read, view or listen to, and you just might break through.

Got other ways to jazz up your pitch and break through? We would love to hear your comments – here on The Side Note, @Weise_Ideas on Facebook.

There are countless blogs that provide franchisees and perspective franchisees all the nitty gritty details about franchising. We chose to ignore most of those. We read blogs that help franchisors and their corporate staff who support the franchise system. The following blogs fall within that framework.

Our Favorite Blogs For Franchisors

1. The New York Times: You’re The Boss Blog

This blog is fantastic for all sorts of great information on running a business. They also throw in franchise-specific blogs. Many of the postings are real-life examples, not just theoretical, which makes this our favorite business blog.

2. The Entrepreneur Blog

We love it because you can search for blogs on marketing, franchising, technology, money, etc. Well written and a great publication to boot.

3. Inc’s Franchise Section

Stories in the Inc franchise section are about franchising success, franchise growth and business ideas. It is a great news source and case study section for franchise executives. (Cheers to our friends Ron Lynch of the Tilted Kilt and Shelly Sun of BrightStar for making Inc’s 2012 top Franchises!)

4. Open Forum: American Express

All business executives should keep an eye on this blog. The contributors of Open Forum stay on the pulse of business trends and national news that impacts business.

5.  Duct Tape Marketing

This blog provides great insight into small business marketing. Good for the franchisor leadership and marketing teams for helping their franchisees keep on top of marketing themselves within their communities.

6. The Business Owner Blog

A Franchise system dedicated to growing businesses, The Alternative Board publishes a blog focused on just that – business growth. Franchisors in all areas care about growth and can learn tips from The Business Owner Blog.

7. The Franchise King

Against our original specifications, this next blog is NOT oriented to franchisors, The Franchise King is written for potential franchisees. He provides insight to people looking to own a franchise as well as helping them determine if they are cut out for franchising. Many of his tips can be helpful to franchisors in determining how your franchise system looks to potential buyers. He also points out some grave mistakes made by franchisees – issues that franchisors can use as teachable moments for their system. Because of his significantly high readership, franchisors need to know what he is saying because their prospects franchisees will know.

Finally – don’t forget to subscribe to The Side Note Blog to get your ongoing updates for integrated marketing, advertising and PR for franchise systems.

Did we miss one of your favorite blogs for the franchising industry? Be sure to tell us about it here!

1. Google has NEVER provided a keyword search result tied to a specific individual.
2. They are still providing the keyword search results for someone signed into a Google product if it is PAID search traffic.

Now, our Google Analytics for the Weise Communications website, weiseideas.com and for clients’ websites returns, “Not Provided” as the highest or second highest keyword result.

As someone who creates Internet content, I believe hiding keyword search referral data from unpaid search results impairs my ability to deliver high quality content to my audience and my clients’ target markets.

By creating a black hole of keyword results, I also predict that some websites will turn to black hat tactics to compensate for the loss of data.

However, we send major props to Avinash Kaushik for his post about five steps to Smarter Data Analysis of Google’s https (not provided) change. I have not seen anything close to adapting to Google’s decision and improvising a solution.

What Avinash proposes is not easy to do. Quite frankly, I don’t know any clients that would be willing to pay for this analysis today to improve SEO. However, “not provided” is only at 10 – 18 percent, Google wants that to be as close to 100 percent as possible. I reserve the right to revisit that statement as more and more keyword results are hidden from companies and they feel the pain of not knowing what people are searching to reach their website.

Unless they pay for the privilege.

Let us know if you’ve seen “not provided” search results impact on your SEO. Share your thoughts here, on our Facebook page at Weise Communications, or message us on Twitter at @Weise_Ideas.

Google Places is a free service provided by Google that combines a physical address with the robust Google Maps application. Google Places allows an individual to review and evaluate business listings. For marketing professionals,of of the best reasons to understand Google Places is that Google has a clear preference for businesses listed in Google Places when providing search results.

Here is an example, I entered the search term “copying” and the first page of Google has two paid ads, a wiki entry about the subject copying, two company websites FedEx Office and Staples, then the Google Places results. Interestingly, the top three selections in the Google Places listings all have customer reviews.

Now that you see Google Places is important to Google ranking, there are some to do’s that are important:

• Since Google Places uses an algorithm to list the most relevant results, you should include the most important keywords for your business in the 200-character description of the listing.
• Listings are allowed to include up to five photos. Use appropriate keyword titles for the pictures that will also help with SEO. It is important to control the photos attached to your Google Places listing because with the fleet of street view camera cars, Google reserves the right to use their sources to add photos to your listing.
• Encourage customers to leave reviews on the Google Places page. You can set up a program to give a customer a discount on a return visit for a positive review. One note of caution: Do not submit multiple reviews from the same IP address. The people at Google are smart, if you cram a bunch of reviews from the same IP address, Google will identify and consider this type of behavior a violation.
• Be sure to add your Google Places site to your analytics. In addition to traffic, the analytics dashboard will show you the search terms used to find your Google Places listing. This will provide valuable information as you can focus your content creation on relevant search terms.

Let us know if you’ve used Google Places and seen impact on your SEO. Share your thoughts here or on Facebook at Weise Communications and follow us on Twitter at @Weise_Ideas.

Your policy must have a clear objective and should clearly define what employees can or can’t do on social media. Make sure that the objective is practical, reasonable and applicable to all who are participating in social media for your business. However when it comes to your company data, confidential information is an asset and everyone has the responsibility to protect it. If the social media policy is violated, ensure you have reasonable responses. Depending on the degree of damage or violation, you can go from disciplinary actions like suspension, termination, or even civil or criminal penalties.

Back in September, Microsoft employee Joe Marini tweeted about a Nokia Windows Phone. The trouble was, the phone hadn’t been released yet. This upset his bosses, and Marini ended up leaving Microsoft.

In 2008, Virgin Atlantic took disciplinary action against 13 crew members who participated in a Facebook discussion that “criticized Virgin’s safety standards and insulted passengers,” according to the Guardian. The comments were promptly removed, the group was fired.

When crafting a policy, be sure to:

• Remind employees to familiarize themselves with the employment agreement and policies included in the employee handbook.
• State that the policy applies to multi-media, social networking websites, blogs and wikis for both professional and personal use.
• Tweets or posts should not disclose any information that is confidential or proprietary.
• If an employee comments on any aspect of the company’s business they must clearly identify themselves as an employee and include a disclaimer, that should be something like “the views expressed are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of (your company’s name).”
• Tweets or posts should not include company logos or trademarks unless permission is asked for and granted, and must respect copyright, privacy, fair use, financial disclosure, and other applicable laws.
• Employees should neither claim nor imply that they are speaking on the company’s behalf.
• Require approval on corporate blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc., when the employee is posting about the company and the industry.
• Reserve the right to request the certain subjects are avoided, withdraw certain posts, and remove inappropriate comments.

When the guidelines are used correctly this policy can help increase productivity as well as secure your company from social media disasters on the web. What do you think about social media policies? How critical is it for your business? How would implement it? Tell us what you think on our blog, share it with us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

From the Gowalla Co-Founder Josh Williams, “Gowalla, as a service, will be winding down at the end of January. We plan to provide an easy way to export your Passport data, your Stamp and Pin data (along with your legacy Item data), and your photos as well.”

As with many of the strategic moves from Facebook, there are privacy concerns. In this case, Facebook now owns all the pictures, check-ins and connections entered by users of Gowalla. Early rumors have the Gowalla team working on the new Facebook profile, Timeline. Gowalla’s team and data would add a robust component to the Timeline, but will Facebook risk the inevitable complaints of privacy exploitation?

So, in the world of location-based social media, Foursquare is left standing. In 2009, Gowalla and Foursquare launched in the same week as rival location service apps. Both apps provided a method for people to announce their whereabouts by using their smartphones to “check-in” at real-world locations, such as Starbucks. In 2010, Facebook launched Places as an alternative LBS. Places has received luke-warm acceptance, it is not a huge leap to assume the acquired leadership from Gowalla will be able to improve the user experience of Facebook Places.

In the meantime, Foursquare has a window of opportunity prior to Gowalla/Places integration to capitalize on reduced competition and own the LBS marketplace.  Foursquare should take our advice and use these ways to improve the service.

Let us know if you think Foursquare will seize the day or if Facebook Places with the infusion of Gowalla talent will overwhelm the LBS market. Share your thoughts here or on Facebook at Weise Communications and follow us on Twitter at @Weise_Ideas.

This redefining of the personal profile is a significant change. Facebook knows a lot about us. It knows about the crazy party, the time we went on vacation and when we met specific friends. This is the primary source of Facebook power; it is the online service with the most personal data about our lives. Timeline is the vehicle where a user can harness that power.

In another Facebook surprise, Timeline allows users to control what is displayed. (Three cheers for user control over Facebook content!)

• Certain stories can be promoted, they will grab more real estate on the profile. You are not tied to chronological order.
• Stories and posts can easily be deleted from the Timeline.
• If anything is missing, it is easy to add ‘life events’ to the Timeline. The more info you put into the Timeline, the more robust it becomes.
• It is easy to selectively edit the postings that will shape the view of people going forward.

In the past, I’ve written about my favorite iPad app, Flipboard. It appears that the Facebook team has taken the best of Flipboard to create Timeline. Instead of a random scrapbook, Timeline presents our online life as a high-end photo album.

Tell us what you think of Facebook grouping information to tell the story of our lives. Is Timeline a new, exciting way to detail history or is it a creepy way to reveal everything you’ve done in a potentially unnerving way? One thing for sure, anytime Facebook makes a change there will be a cry over privacy concerns.

Share your thoughts here or on Facebook at Weise Communications and follow us on Twitter at @Weise_Ideas.

Now in India, a project called SocialBlood.org is saving lives. The Facebook-powered campaign encourages blood donations and enables potential donors and recipients to make contact with one another through the online forum.

Social Blood connects people who has same blood type. Choose your blood type from the website and join the Facebook group. It’s that easy. After you become a  member of your blood type group, you can invite your friends, post a message in emergency or respond to requests for blood donations.

“A recent post from a man asking for blood for his daughter received 74 responses in 24 hours,” said 22-year-old Social Blood Founder Karthik Naralasetty.

This simple idea of connecting via Facebook is taking social media to the next level. Could your health organization benefit from a similar campaign?

Let us know what you think about Social Blood, we would love to hear your feedback and comments here on The Side Note, or via Twitter @Weise_Ideas or on Facebook.

Manning has taken the phrase “lead by example” to heart. Rather than sitting on the sidelines coaching people about fitness, he is on the front lines showing them by example that it can be done. He is demonstrating an excellent way to communicate. People can understand more when they are shown rather than told what to do. People of all professions can learn a thing or two about Manning’s message.

I for one am looking forward to seeing him accomplish this goal and see the many people he will inspire. You can follow his journey at http://www.fit2fat2fit.com/.

P.S. Thanks to our long distance intern Jeff Larsen for this post.