Devoting an entire committee of employees, Geary’s Volunteer Committee is dedicated to driving one of their core values – caring – beyond office doors. Contributing to charitable events and organizations quarterly, the leading real results interactive advertising agency has hopes to increase its occurrence.

With the start of the 2011 holiday season in December, Geary made their most recent donation to the Salvation Army’s 2011 Angel Giving Tree Program presented by JCPenney. Meeting the needs of 387 families locally, Geary’s contribution took part in brightening the holiday season for over 1,000 children and their families.

Each year the Volunteer Committee, composed of four individuals, sits down with the input of all other staff to research well-known and local philanthropic opportunities. Selections are based upon organizations that embody one or more of Geary’s core values – driven, ethical, partnership, accountable, progressive and caring.

Below is a list of past selections, as well as possibilities for the future:

+ Soles 4 Souls
+ Habitat for Humanity
+ San Diego Food Bank
+ Angel Giving Tree
+ Beach Cleanup
+ Adopt A Highway

Have a charity in mind that Geary should look into? Contact Marketing Producer, Ginny Hammes with your suggestions.

Recently, Mashable posted an article in their Social Media section that posed an interesting question: Should the new Facebook gestures allow a dislike button?

Since the announcement at the F8 conference, developers have been enthralled with the new Open Graph system that will allow apps to model user activities based on actions and objects. Instead of simply “liking” an object or page, users will be able to share an action that they perform with an object, such as “watching” a “movie” or “cooking” a “recipe”.

This has raised some scrutiny, however, due to the possibility of creating negative actions such as “dislike” for pages and posts. As stated in the Mashable article, Facebook has blocked the option of adding a “dislike” button, but what about synonyms to this word?

Mashable presents an interesting point: Advertisers primarily fund Facebook, and if the option were there to “dislike” a brand or an update, this could cause some controversy.

Take the recent Chapstick social media nightmare for example, a brand receives negative feedback from a fan and deletes all comments associated with it, causing a social media uproar.

Now, imagine if anyone were able to share his or her negative opinion on Facebook by “disliking” a brand, object or person. Not only would this cause a lot of chaos, there would be a lot of unhappy advertisers on Facebook.

From a brand standpoint, what is your opinion? Do you think a Facebook “Dislike” button is a good idea?

Whether or not you have been hiding under the proverbial lead generation rock you have redoubtably heard the buzz around lead scoring. If your a direct response veteran you know how important lead scoring is to the success of performance based campaigns. Over the last 2-3 years lead scoring in the lead gen space has become the number one buzz phrase used at every conference and networking event and for good reason. Lead scoring adds uber insight into your lead generation campaigns and can drive serious levels of optimization and customization. In the minds of lead buyers across the world the questions still persists: “Is lead scoring right for my company?”

At this point you’re expecting me to give you the magical answer, yes! However, instead I am going to be completely, 100% honest with you – I have no idea. I think we can all understand that each buyer needs to closely evaluate how lead scoring could benefit their operations to be able to answer that question appropriately. The first step for buyers is to determine what questions are they looking to have answered by lead scoring. Answering this question will get you on the right path to deciding whether or not lead scoring is right for your company.

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USNews reported today that online universities might just be the “the rock that disturbs the placid waters of American higher education.” As top traditional universities like the University of Southern California continue to adopt online programs, it seems like pioneers like University of Phoenix and Kaplan University might have sparked a revolution in education.

With so much technology at our finger tips, I am surprised it has taken this long for other schools to adopt the model. We have video conferencing, collaboration software and smartphones that make it absurdly easy to take education outside of classrooms. Read More

Trying to decide if we should head out to SXSW this year. What do you think? Should we “just did it” and be our “south by south best?”

John McKusick is the Co-Founder of Geary Group and GM at GearyPMG.