From the monthly archives:

October 2011

Have We Grown Weary Of Brand Attacks?

by Jason Falls · October 31, 2011

The dust has settled from the Ragu Hates Dads incident from a few weeks back. I’m sure it could have been worse had C.C. Chapman not been resolved to just shrug it off. Several others chapped by the incident, including me, voiced some lingering concerns, but all-in-all it wasn’t an overly egregious violation of consumer trust. Just a minor wrinkling of the nose in the grand scheme of things.

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30 comments

Tarnished Silver Bullets and Other Reasons Your Business Fails

by Heather Rast · October 28, 2011

Is your business waiting for a big, shiny solution? OK, maybe not waiting – you guys probably do some stuff each day. But are you really attacking core problems in a systematic way? Or merely having meetings about more topical stuff and pontificating what to do about it? Are you waiting for silver bullets to be withdrawn from a velvet-lined box?

Ah, the fabled silver bullet. Heralded for its ability to banish evil threats and transform the despairing neighborhood once more into an idyllic place of joyous recreation and swift commerce. Surely those will make the hairy problems go away, right?

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26 comments

Breast Cancer Gets Glammed

by Nichole Kelly · October 27, 2011

In honor of breast cancer awareness month, I decided to take a look around and see if I could find an inspirational story of a breast cancer survivor who is using digital media to give back. There are a lot of stories out there about breast cancer awareness and the campaign has become so huge that it’s quite literally impossible not to think of your cha-chas all month. It’s fantastic that the movement has caught on and clearly it is working as the most recent statistics show us that the survival rate is up to 68% of diagnosed patients. This post is designed to help the 1,596,670 new patients who will be diagnosed with breast cancer THIS YEAR, according to the American Cancer Society!

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34 comments

Developing a Twitter Workflow

by Mark Smiciklas · October 26, 2011

I’ve been noticing a common thread running through many of the conversations I am having with clients and colleagues regarding Twitter.

Despite all the great content available online regarding Twitter do’s and don’ts, there still seems to be a significant amount of confusion (across my network) about “what to do on twitter.” People seem to be struggling with the actual day-to-day tasks that pull together all the best practices.

This post is designed to highlight Twitter workflow and aims to help you organize and plan your own “twitter routine”.

Workflow Components

A Twitter workflow consists of four main activities:

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51 comments

What You Should Know About Email Delivery

by Jason Falls · October 25, 2011

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is our monthly visit from a member of the Emma team. Emma is the email marketing provider for Social Media Explorer. Today’s post is from Art Quantstom of the Emma Delivery Team.

Technology adapts and improves at a dizzying rate, and if you neglect to pay attention for a moment, it seems you miss something really important. In some ways, this perfectly outlines what has happened with commercially sent email. Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Emma — businesses built in large part upon the service of simplifying the email process — take care of almost everything when it comes to delivering your emails, and it’s easy to take that for granted. But should you?

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4 comments

The State And Future Of Social Media Management Solutions

by Jason Falls · October 24, 2011

The social media management solutions landscape is vast and fractured. Altimeter Group identifies over 150 social media monitoring solutions and over 30 specifically defined Social Media Management Systems. The vastness of the options makes it hard for brand-side marketers to determine what platforms and tools they should be using.

Exacerbating the problem is that even among the 30 tools Altimeter identifies as Social Media Management Solutions, none of them do the same thing. And there’s no clear definition of what social media management solutions should do. Some of the 30, like WildfireApp, provide a very narrow sliver of functionality (network-specific engagement tools). I wonder if these should even be classified as SMMS at all. But I’ll leave the classification up to other analysts.

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57 comments

Are Your Fans Talking About This?

by Eric Brown · October 21, 2011

Is bigger really better? Social media marketing is a low barrier-to-entry business and every small to medium business that hires that 20-something for social media, “because they must understand this stuff,” suffers. They rarely know how to generate scalable numbers. Said different, they typically do not know how to generate more leads for your business that wind up positively effecting the bottom line.

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33 comments

Escaping The Sandbox

by Jason Falls · October 19, 2011

As much I as I have beaten the drum lately of bridging the gap between the echo chamber it-getters and businesses that are still fearful and skeptical of digital and social media marketing — I did, after all, co-author a book that helps businesses jump that gap — I think we’re starting to see a maturation of the social media marketing space. Whether it’s full-scale corporate evolution on the enterprise side or entry-level social media tactics implemented by small business, it seems the market place is maturing enough so that companies are escaping the sandbox.

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35 comments

Education Is The New Marketing

by Ilana Rabinowitz · October 19, 2011

The internet has democratized education and businesses should take notice.  You are in business because you have some area of expertise.  Sharing your expertise is a way to help you build your brand and provide value. By using a combination of digital and offline tools, business can take advantage of the opportunity to add teaching to the marketing mix.

I’ve been reading The Education of Millionaires, a book by Michael Ellsberg that proposes that the best investment in education is one that offers lifelong, relevant knowledge that will make you financially successful.  He urges people to find mentors and experts to teach the skills they need, rather than investing six figures in a traditional college education that is unlikely to contribute to their ability to earn a living.

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52 comments

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