Highs and Lows in the Parent Blogging World

by Stephanie Schwab · May 17, 20130 comments

There’s never a dull moment in the parent blogging world. This past month has brought new highs and lows to this group, a group I’m firmly enmeshed in both as an agency which works with bloggers and as the founder of a conference bloggers attend. (I also happen to be married to a parenting blogger – my husband blogs on his own dad blog as well as in a number of other outlets.)

Read More →

Stephanie Schwab

About the author

Stephanie Schwab is the Principal of Crackerjack Marketing, a digital marketing agency specializing in social media planning and execution. Stephanie is also the founder of the Digital Family Summit, the first-of-its-kind conference for tween bloggers and content creators and their families. Throughout her 20-year career, she has developed and led marketing and social media programs for top brands and has presented on social media and e-commerce topics at numerous conferences and corporate events. Stephanie writes about social media at CrackerjackMarketing.com and Tweets @stephanies.

Forget about Personas. Meet some real people.

by Doug Kessler · May 16, 2013

As new disciplines emerge – like content marketing in the digital age – new jargon blossoms like wildflowers in a new meadow. Or sometimes like clods of cow shit.

Whichever category you put the term ‘Persona’ into (for me, it’s bovine-centric), you can’t deny that it’s won a permanent place in the B2B content marketing canon. “Don’t even think about doing content marketing without personas.” is Commandment Six last time I checked.

At Velocity, we’ve propagated the cult of the persona ourselves, with round-up blog posts and the occasional tirade about using personas properly. And yes, there’s a Persona section in the content marketing playbooks we create for our clients. But, to be honest, I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with them. For two reasons:

Read More →
6 comments

The Trick Is Applying General Knowledge To Specific Needs

by Jason Falls · May 15, 2013

How does this apply to me?

That should be the question we ask when encountering learning about the digital marketing world. Whether you’re reading a blog, a book, attending a webinar or conference, the one thing you won’t likely get is advice and examples that are directly applicable to your specific business.

Conference speakers are generalists. People who write books are, too. Their job is to be informative and helpful but appeal to as broad an audience as possible. If I were to speak at an event about how to leverage Twitter in medium-sized floral shops, I would only help a few audience members. If the talk is how to leverage Twitter for any business — a general approach — there’s more appeal.

Read More →
5 comments

More Articles By Category

Social Media Marketing

Public Relations

Social Media Monitoring

RSSRSSRSS

Media & Journalism

Digital Marketing

Search Engine Marketing

RSSRSSRSS

SPARK – #GivingTuesday

by Marc A. Pitman · May 14, 2013

While doing some fundraising training in Philadelphia last week, I was introduced to an incredibly cool program called Spark.

Spark was founded by a 7th grade science teacher who wanted his students to see why school mattered. The premise is really simple: place 7th and 8th grade students in apprenticeships with people in their community. They’ve placed students in apprenticeships with all sorts of professionals: fire fighters, chefs, pilots, artists, and tech folks.

The results speak for themselves

Spark Program Logo for Social Media Examiner's #GivingTuesday featured charitySpark has grown to serve in students in at-risk neighborhoods in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. And the results have been phenomenal. Despite very high high-school drop out rates with their peers, 98% of Spark alumni stay in school.

Read More →
1 comment

Recharging Your Digital Marketing Batteries

by Nichole Kelly · May 14, 2013

As I write this, I’m listening to the waves crash along the beach during my own recharge. The Social Media Explorer team trekked its way down to Oak Island, North Carolina for a workation designed to evaluate and refresh our perspectives on every part of the business. It got me thinking about the importance of recharging our digital presence. I’ll give you a look at what we’ve been reviewing over the last 10 days in an effort to help others step back and recharge their perspective.

Read More →
11 comments

Will Thinking Beyond Social, Ruin Social

by Jason Falls · May 13, 2013

The thematic meme running through the social marketing world of late is that we’re about to move beyond social media marketing as a primary practice to thinking more broadly about our marketing and our business. Social is part of a greater whole and social-only thinking won’t get you very far for much longer.

Part of this is driven by the social consultants threatened by those of lesser breadth of experience. Part of it is the reality that the industry is maturing. Social is now part of marketing. Marketing is almost impossible today without social.

Read More →
24 comments

When Less is More in Your Content Strategy

by Kat French · May 10, 2013

Recently, a friend and fellow marketer asked what aspect of their favorite podcasts did people enjoy the most. I admit, I didn’t give my most honest answer.

My favorite thing about my favorite podcast is that it’s only 15 minutes long. I’ve been listening to the very excellent Writing Excuses podcast for over a year now. While the writing and publishing advice is solid, I love their tagline.

“Fifteen minutes long, because you’re busy, and we’re not that smart.”

Most marketing and business podcasts run at about 45 minutes to an hour. If you asked most business professionals if they could spare an hour a week to listen to a presentation, they’d wince.

Read More →
14 comments

(How to) Write a Headline and Become a Media Star

by Barry Feldman · May 9, 2013

This ain’t Back to the Future. It’s Top Gun. We’re going time traveling—backwards. You with me? Here we go…

Is that Whitney Houston on the radio? Great song. Crank it. Oh, and did you hear? Mike Tyson’s the youngest heavyweight champ ever and the USSR doesn’t want to fight.

Aviator glasses? Right on. You don’t look quite as slick as “Maverick”  (Tom Cruise in “Top Gun”), but those screaming neon-colored parachute pants and your big hair are just perfect.

Read More →
7 comments

How to offer your ecommerce customers more paths to temptation

by Nichole Kelly · May 8, 2013

Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes all the way from the UK via our friend, Michael Truby, Outreach Executive for Oxford based SEO company SEOptimise.

As a marketer striving to make your mark in this competitive world, you’re probably constantly looking for solutions to help you devise the most innovative marketing program.  One that is also quick, has greater reach, and lowers cost would make great business sense too.  As such, using the web to reach customers has become central to modern marketing. Within this online world, email marketing and more recently social media are two tools that have emerged as ones wielding considerable power and influence over customers.

Read More →
5 comments

← Full Archives

Subscribe to SME via email!

Close (X)

Probably the best thing you will do all day.