Can we put down the pitchforks? For most of the past year, there’s been a barrage of blog posts bemoaning the social media gold rush, and the number of self-proclaimed experts that seem to propagate like pink eye in a kindergarten class. In fact, there was much hand-wringing a couple weeks ago when Mashable breathlessly [...]
Don’t Lose Your Social Media Joy
Watching the mini-mites play hockey at today’s tournament in Durango, Colorado, it struck me that these kids play for the pure joy of it. They don’t care who wins, who scores goals, who gets to be goalie. They care about having fun, and what the post-game snack might be. And as social media matures, I [...]
5 Sure-Fire Ways to Operationalize Social Media
This post was written originally for Valeria Maltoni’s excellent new ebook about marketing in 2010. It includes terrific, thoughtful insights from Shannon Paul, Olivier Blanchard, Danny Brown, Amber Naslund, Jackie Huba, Gavin Heaton, Mark Earls, Rachel Happe, Jonathan MacDonald, and of course Valeria herself. Download it for free right here. Change Is At Hand Marketing [...]
Finding New Blood With Your Social Media Presence
Guest post by Eric Reid (@ciaoenrico) an SEO, blogger and social media marketer from Tempe, Arizona. He writes about these subjects on his own blog, Ciaoenrico. In his spare time, he writes plays and posts minutiae to Brightkite. There is a wealth of advice on how to get your company to go “social.” But people [...]
Who’s Watching Now?
Social media doesn’t close at 5pm. Or take weekends off. Or go on vacation. I’ve been watching today’s very successful Labor Day-only Chick-Fil-A promotion. If you wear any sort of sports team shirt or hat to a Chick-Fil-A today, you get a free sandwich, driving awareness of the company’s Chicken Wave fan group and contest. [...]
It’s Who You Know – Maximizing Your Company’s Social Reach
Put down your guard. It’s about people, not logos. These are the two primary tenets of effective social media. In practice, executing on them requires that you communicate with your customers and prospects across a variety of social media outposts, with significant frequency. (I tell my clients that if you can’t add at least 7-9 [...]
Passion Trumps Position
Are you trying to embrace social media at bayonet point? Yes, you should absolutely broaden your social media efforts, and get more people from your company involved, and in more places. But, you should not do that at the expense of the secret ingredient of social media – Passion. Why do features and benefits-laden messages [...]
Back Up the Bus – The Changing PR Timeline
Before I got involved in online marketing in 1994, I helped manage political campaigns. In those days, the formula was pretty consistent. You targeted different voter groups with direct mail, radio and TV. Then, with about two weeks left in the campaign, you brought out the big guns and dropped a big TV and direct [...]
Delegation Equals Death in Social Media
Are you just a social media cheerleader? Almost every time I work with a public relations firm or corporation on social media, I hear a version of this statement: “Us old dogs don’t really understand all this new social media stuff, but we’ve got this brilliant young guy right out of school, and he’s getting [...]
Is Social Media Too Fast?
One of the greatest challenges of effective social media outreach is the need to be always on. Speed kills in social media, and that’s a difficult transformation for marketers (and especially agencies). If a consumer tweets something negative about your company, addressing it quickly before it festers and is retweeted everywhere is the best practice. [...]
