Advertising & Marketing

There’s a really good reason people love apps, and in particular applications from brands. They are often streamlined and simple versions of a company’s website or serve a specific purpose. There’s no annoying copy in marketing speak, no flash banners slowing down the page load, no pop-ups and, often, no confusion on where to go to get what you want. Why? Because mobile or tablet/iPad apps are supposed to be simple, serve 1-2 purposes and get out of the way.

Which is precisely what most users want from a corporate website.

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How To Comment Without Selling

August 20, 2010

Share Someone asked me a question about blog commenting recently that I thought peculiar. It’s a question that many brands, marketers and public relations folks have asked, for sure. But for whatever reason, the question just seemed odd to me. The person asked: “What is the best way for a corporation to comment on a [...]

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Social Media First From K-Mart? Yep. K-Mart.

July 12, 2010

Share Got a hot tip yesterday that this was coming. Kmart announced today during #gamerchat an interesting new (and likely industry and retail first) social media effort to bridge their online gaming community at MyKmart.com with off-line retail activity. Starting today, qualified reviews of games posted at MyKmart.com may start appearing along with the reviewed [...]

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Copywriting For Social Media

June 9, 2010

Share One of my big regrets in my time in the advertising agency world is that I never seemed to have enough time to figure out a good way to talk to the creatives at my former agency about social media. My door was always open, but I was covered up with projects, as were [...]

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25 Simple Ways To Earn Trust

May 31, 2010

Share I’ve been exploring conversational marketing lately, both for some of the talks I give and to advise clients on appropriate and effective ways to not just engage our audiences in conversation, but also persuade them. If we, as social media marketers, are not using the engagement opportunity to motivate those audiences to do something, [...]

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What Is Our Advocacy Threshold?

May 3, 2010

Share Chatting with Chris Baggott is always enlightening. He not only co-founded Exact Target, one of the leading email marketing solution providers on the market, but then moved on to start Compendium Blogware, an enterprise-level blogging solution I’ve grown to know well as a consultant for them. Point being, Chris is really smart and brings [...]

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Waxing Poetic On Email Marketing

April 27, 2010

Share Image by Ross Mayfield via Flickr I probably don’t talk enough about the power and effectiveness of email marketing here. I should do that more often. More and more with clients I find myself recommending email marketing strategies and for a lot of reasons. The main reason I believe in email and email marketing [...]

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Are You Retaining Your Customers?

April 12, 2010

Share My personal interactions with brands are normally the types of things I would share on Twitter or my personal blog. While I’ve occasionally shared some brand run-ins here, I prefer to write about the good things brands are doing rather than the bad. Using Social Media Explorer as a personal rant platform seems a [...]

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The Problem With Conversational Marketing

April 6, 2010

Share Social media marketing essentially evolved from The Cluetrain Manifesto assertion that markets are conversations. The world of social media then exploded and conversational platforms, tools and networks evolved. Markets are conversations … whatever that means. When you translate it into the practical, not the etherial, you have to try and figure out conversational marketing. [...]

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Central Virginia Digital Marketing Summit Planned For April 14

March 30, 2010

Share I’m excited to be partnering with the Central Virginia chapter of the American Marketing Association to present a Digital Marketing Summit on Wednesday, April 14 in Staunton, Va. The day promises to give marketing and public relations professionals, small business owners and entrepreneurs a crash course on a wide variety of Internet and digital [...]

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Good Books On Blogging, PR, Social Media & Advertising

February 19, 2010

Share The inbox of books has gotten high enough that I need to review a few so I can see beyond my desk. Today’s episode of Social Media Explorer TV features four books well worth your time to read, depending upon your need and comfort level with the various topics. And the four books offered [...]

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