PinkBananaMedia.com

Reach the Gay & Lesbian Community
Leverage the Power of Social Relationships
Offices in New York and Los Angeles


About Us
Our Team:
President: Matthew Skallerud
Currently heading up our new New York City office
Matt Skallerud began his online career in May 1995 with the launch of GayWired.com, which became one of the top 3 LGBT websites worldwide. Having worked with companies, large and small, for more than 18 years to reach the LGBT online consumer through this site and others, he is now focused on the most cutting-edge global innovations in social networking and Web 2.0 technologies. He empowers his clients to reach the LGBT market using the most advanced techniques taking hold in the online marketing world today, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, blogs and others.

In addition, Skallerud is the former Board Chairman of the International Gay & Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA), a current board member of Travel Gay Canada (TGC) and the interim Executive Director of the California Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (CAGLCC). He is actively involved with key national LGBT organizations including the IGLCC, NGLCC, GLAAD and Out & Equal, just to name a few.
  - Matt Skallerud on About.me
  - Matt Skallerud on RebelMouse

Vice President: Fabrice Tasendo
Heading up our Los Angeles office
Fabrice Tasendo is the Editor-in-chief of the Pink Banana Media Network of sites. Since his full time focus in May 2011, his lead brand GayRelevant.com is seeing double digit traffic growth. Among the other sites he oversees are GayMonde.com--a travel focused portal and PinkBananaWorld.com--a community-focused, social media optimized destination. Prior to 2011, Fabrice worked as SVP of Digital Strategies for Here Media where he oversaw Advocate.com, Out.com, OutTraveler.com and their respective editorial and sales initiatives. Fabrice has been in the online market since 1995 when he co-founded GayWired.com, a portal that became an online leader and was referenced by the Wall Street Journal as the 'best garage start-up.'
  - Fabrice on About.me
  - Fabrice on RebelMouse
  - GayRelevant.com on RebelMouse

 
What We Offer:
  • Interpersonal Marketing Strategies - we work with you to develop a comprehensive media marketing strategy plan, incorporating traditional and digital PR, advertising and social media and bringing these strategies together into a unified marketing outreach.
  • Bringing social media expertise and implementation to advertising agencies and their clients.
  • Managing social media campaigns for clients.
  • Managing LGBT advertising campaigns, integrating social media with an overall marketing campaign, including editorial, print, television, e-mail marketing and banner ads.
 
Our Core Competencies and Strengths:
  • Using social media in a way that ensures that all of the social media elements work together, from the blog to the Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
  • Using multiple platforms synergistically, ensuring that our social media techniques can be managed equally well via smartphone, laptop and tablet PCs.
  • Bringing a social media marketing strategy together with a more traditional online tools, including banner ads, editorial and e-mail.
  • Leveraging a strong foundation and set of relationships with key LGBT media players on local, national and international fronts as well as with media channels including online, print, radio and television.
 
Some of our Recent Online Accomplishments:
  • Social Media Integration: we have developed one of the first sites that allows for social media integration between almost all Web 2.0 platforms, including blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and more. What's unique about this platform is that it does not distribute and share social media content among friends, such as FriendFeed and Google Buzz, but rather it distributes and shares social media content among PEER GROUPS, allowing for people of similar interests to keep up-to-date and informed on what is most important to them.
 
Some of our Past Online Accomplishments:
  • Online E-Commerce: we were the first LGBT company doing online retailing back in the mid-90s. We put a small variety of LGBT products online, including calendars, music CDs and CD ROMs, and for the holiday season of 1996, we were pleasantly surprised to see this incredibly huge, untapped interest in online retail sales. We expanded our inventory, and began working with companies such as 10% Productions and TLA Video to help them put their first products online and show them the power of online retailing in the LGBT community.
  • Online Dating: we put up the first LGBT online matchmaking service, focusing not on creating our own chat rooms and messaging program, but rather to work with existing software, which at the time was ICQ. We created an online, searchable database of gays & lesbians who were able to find one another and communicate instantly using our site and ICQ.
 
About Pink Banana Media:
The buzz around social media is hard to avoid… whether it's all about Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, the conversations people are having about these social media are growing louder and louder every day. Businesses are taking note and learning step-by-step how to ensure their organizations are relevant in these conversations as well… yours should be, too. What we do is break social media technology into bite-sized pieces, allowing you first to understand how Facebook can work for your business, and then expanding from there into the world of blogs, photos and perhaps even video, using these content tools to enhance your reach into your target market, whether they are searching for you on Google, following you on Twitter or monitoring your updates on LinkedIn.

This new medium of social media has a few key concepts that are important to any social media marketing strategy… first, that your marketing efforts are shifting from "speaking to" your customer to "speaking with" your customer. This "speaking with" style changes everything… no longer is it OK to put a message together and simply put it out there in the form of a display ad, e-mail campaign or press release. Speaking with your customer means communicating in a more personable, human voice. Speaking with your customer means they get to speak back. And speaking with your customer means that your conversations are more transparent and available for others who can chime in and participate as well.

They other key concept in social media is that it is all connected and works together. When a blog is posted or a photo is uploaded, these "content elements" are now out there online working for you. Once your social media network is set up, a blog posting would feed into Twitter, your Facebook fan page, your LinkedIn Group and will appear prominently on Google Search. Your photos and videos would do the same, updating your entire social media universe in all of the "touch points" you have set up, whether those are the basics (Facebook and Twitter) or more specific to your industry (TripAdvisor, Yelp, IGLTA's social media feed, etc.) With one click of the "publish" button, social media takes your message far and wide and does the best job of any medium in delivering your message to those that specifically want to hear from you… your target audience!

This is what Pink Banana Media does for you. We help you to build your social media content networks and then develop and implement a strategy that integrates your content into the social media universe that is specifically matched to your industry. We stay specialized in the LGBT marketplace, as we can then reach even deeper into this niche for you, drawing on our 18+ years of experience in the LGBT online industry and putting these years of experience to work for you.

 
About PinkBananaWorld.com:
Centered around highly advanced features of the Internet including blogs, social networking sites, online video and more, PinkBananaWorld.com is designed to bring the best of today's Internet technologies and experiences to LGBT users worldwide, including integrations with Flickr.com, MySpace.com, FaceBook.com and more... integrations with a distinct gay & lesbian flair!
 
Photos:
High-Res Photo 01 | High-Res Photo 01 (CMYK)
High-Res Photo 02 | High-Res Photo 02 (CMYK)
High-Res Photo 03 | High-Res Photo 03 (CMYK)
High-Res Photo 04 | High-Res Photo 04 (CMYK)
High-Res Photo 05 |
 
Downloads:
Our Brochure (PDF)
WSJ 1999 Article - Gay Websites
 
About Us (Translated):
En Français
 
 
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