Now that we’re well into the era of B2B on social media, a lot of business-minded companies are seeing their competition building communities and creating marketing value with a robust social media presence. And as these brands begin to recognize the value, they are starting to put their own community management programs into place. For [...]
Share your best stuff, the experts tell you. Give value to your audience and they will become your customers. And it’s absolutely true – not just in the short term, but over time as well. I just proved it to myself without even trying. How? Well – I don’t know if you are on the [...]
I sometimes feel like marketing and PR gets a bad rap. But, I can testify….we are not evil. Marketing, advertising, PR representatives…not evil. A “good” agency will hire and train their personnel on the importance of understanding their clients’ company and, just as important, industry. Not just learning the basics of a company and their [...]
A client just sent us information on an “exclusive opportunity” for an event being put on by a “value transformation company” and targeted to their industry. As soon as I saw it I started shaking my head. It’s a perfect example of how companies who don’t yet grasp the workings of social media can easily [...]
You’ve seen it a hundred times – the cheerful sign, prominently displayed. It might be in a restaurant, a clothing store or a gym, or on a website. There’s the familiar thumbs-up and the text “Like Us on Facebook!” I ignore it every time. Not one of those signs has ever sent me scrambling for [...]
The other day at a meeting with one of our business-to-business brands, I raised the topic of social media. When I suggested that there could be some value in it for their company, the CEO disagreed. “No one is going to buy a five-million dollar software solution on Twitter!” he laughed. His opinion runs parallel [...]
C’mon marketers. How about you impress us by doing the right thing for no other reason than that? Some companies do, and it hasn’t seemed to destroy their business model or hurt their sales. On the contrary, Zappos, Trader Joe’s, USAA and others like them seem to be growing at a fabulous rate. But somehow [...]
When marketers talk about the different types of media, typically you’ll hear about three forms: owned, earned and paid. Owned media is controlled and managed by the marketer and includes your website, collateral, presentations and the like. Paid media is advertising – print, out-of-home, radio, broadcast, online and any other for which you pay for [...]
I was pretty excited the day my Twitter account went over a hundred followers. I’d been building it for awhile, tweeting what I hoped was quality content, engaging with others, retweeting good stuff and participating in Twitterchats. It was always a thrill to see when a new person had followed me, and I usually went [...]
The relationship between client and agency is like any other relationship in our lives – it takes good communication, trust and a certain degree of enjoying each other’s company and conversation (professional or otherwise) to make it successful. There are days when parties on either side of this partnership love the arrangement and want it [...]