Lifting the Fog of the Blog: 8 Strategic Questions Before You Write 1 Word
There are more than 150 million blogs, according to Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere” report. Given competition of that magnitude, why should people spend time reading yours? As a frequent blog consultant, I find the success impediment isn’t really the effort required, but rather a planning deficit. Most blogs fail not due to quality, but […]
Breaking Out of Social Disclosure Jail With CMP.LY
It’s been about 15 months since those crazy kids at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) passed their new disclosure guidelines to “protect the public” from inappropriately cozy business relationships being companies and bloggers, tweeters, Facebookers and more. Since then, we’ve been expecting a steady procession of corporate marketers being led to the virtual stockade, given […]
10 Key Points in the New Client Pre-Nuptial Agreement
Guest post by Lori R Taylor, founder of REV Media Marketing llc, is a 20 year marketing veteran, dedicated to direct response metrics and firmly believes “if popularity is vanity then sales are sanity – it’s up to you to decide how crazy you can afford to be.” Remember that first meeting between the prospective new […]
Social Media Success Summit 2011 – It’s On!
It’s an exciting day, and the lineup for the 2011 edition of Social Media Success Summit has been announced. As a presenter, I am of course biased, but this may be the best combination of social media thinking in one virtual conference ever assembled. Do you agree? For a limited time, for $297 you get […]
How to Humanize a Sketchy Industry
Social media is about people, not logos. I saw a presentation at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Forum in Austin a few ago from Eric Granof, CMO of ExpertBail, which seeks to become the country’s first branded network of bail bonds companies. Like video stores before Blockbuster, and ice cream parlors before Dairy Queen, Expert Bail […]
Using a Social FAQ to Kick Start Content Marketing
If you conquered four words, you’d have a better social media program than 90% of all companies. If you just utilized “thank you” and “I’m sorry” appropriately and often, you’d be in pretty good shape. But getting to true sociability requires more than just replying to direct inquiry. You have to use content marketing to […]
Why You’re Pissing Off Half Your Facebook Fans
Sure it has 600 million members and is significantly more compelling than any film made by Nicholas Cage in the past five years, but even with those inherent advantages, Facebook for business is hard. It’s not just that Facebook has a distinctly Favre-like approach to features and decision-making. Or, that Facebook is very clearly in […]
Why I’m Competing With You. And You. And You. And You.
Social media changes the very fabric of corporate competition. It used to be that your competitors were the people that sold similar goods and services, or operated in the same geographical area. No more. Now, you’re competing with Coke. With McDonald’s. With Chevy. And Zappos. And Jet Blue. And every other company on the planet. […]
How to Be a Presentation God
Scott Schwertly is a rabid hockey fan and founder and CEO of Ethos3, a presentation design and consulting company in Nashville. (disclosure: Scott’s company build the presentation Amber and I are using for The NOW Revolution book tour). Yesterday, Scott released his first book, called How to be a Presentation God: Build, Design, and Deliver […]
7 Ways to Thank Someone for a Retweet
If you’re an active Twitter user, you’ve likely seen a “Thanks for the RT!” post at some point. You’ve possibly even posted them yourself. So is a “retweet thank you” polite Twitter etiquette, or is it an overindulgence of bragging that folks like your content? The argument can potentially go either way for both personal […]
Invitation Avalanches, Attention Infidelity, and the Science of the Social Break-Up
Is the golden goose poisoned before it’s even an adult? The current relationship between companies and consumers via social media and email is unsustainable. The backlash has begun, and abuse of any one channel has a spillover effect on consumer attitudes toward other channels. That’s one of my main takeaways from fascinating new research from […]
A Day I’ll Always Remember
And as one chapter ends, another begins. Today is the official release date of The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter & More Social, my new book co-written with my friend Amber Naslund about how companies need to retool from the inside out to meet the real-time business challenges presented by […]
Why Should Old Spice Get to Have All the Fun?
Guest post by Clinton Bonner, President of NoSox Productions; a character based brand story-telling firm out of Westbrook, CT. It was 2010… The Toyota Sienna Family somehow made mini-vans cool and the Old Spice Guy literally rode-in on a white horse and into our social lives. The emergence of amazing character-based brand storytelling on the […]
The 5 Reasons Most Companies Aren’t Measuring Social Media
We hate math. Our abhorrence for calculation enables us to mutually agree on statistically dubious metrics with nary a shrug or arched eyebrow. Consider Nielsen ratings, which are used to determine the popularity of all TV shows and, consequently, how the dozens of billions of dollars in TV advertising is apportioned. Nielsen ratings have a […]
What I Learned About Humanity From a Steakhouse
Last week, in the post “Why Your Special Offer Isn’t” we talked about the importance of humanization. Faced with an invitation avalanche, consumers will respond to the stories that resonate with them on a personal level. And those stories don’t just have to live in social media. Myril Arch’s Story — Humanizing a T-Bone Recently, […]
5 Search and Social Trends for 2011
Recently, I participated in a Webinar with my friend and client Chris Baggott of Compendium. We talked about the convergence of search and social media, and how content marketing is bridging both areas. We settled on 5 trends that we think will be especially important in 2011 (read or print yourself via Scribd, or see […]