Last year, Robert Scoble and Darren Barefoot debuted the Social Media Starfish to visualize and document the rapidly evolving landscape for social tools, services, and networks. If you work in marketing, public relations, advertising, customer service, product development, or any discipline that’s motivated, shaped, and directed by customers, peers, stakeholders and influencers, monitoring and in some cases, participating in online conversations is critical in competing for the future. Over the last month, I worked with Jesse Thomas of JESS3, to…
PR Tips for Startups – The Director’s Cut
Note: This post was originally published on TechCrunch as “PR Secrets for Startups.” Many thanks to Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld for giving me the opportunity to share my experiences with the startup community. Due to space constraints, the original draft, which was entitled “PR Tips for Startups,” did not run in its entirety. Some of the edits actually wound up changing the context of the post and its intentions. I’ve included the full draft for you here, as I…
Ariel Waldman vs. Twitter, When TOS Doesn’t Apply to You
Credit: Ariel Waldman This is part of my ongoing series on Crisis Communications 2.0, which helps companies and marketing professionals learn from each other to more effectively communicate with customers, stakeholders, media, and peers. I purposely waited to write this post until this discussion cleared techmeme so that I could reach a fresh set of people who could see things clearly, while also calling attention to something we overlook everyday. When’s the last time you actually read the terms of…
Will The Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up?
Social Media is everything you know and nothing about what you think or do in marketing. Sounds strange eh? It’s true though. Think about how you approach marketing campaigns today and the picture will become a bit clearer. – You evaluate target demographics. – Develop strategic messages. – Conduct an audit or focus group. – Revise messages and fine-tune the plan. – Determine the broadcast mechanisms to push your content. – Go live. – Monitor the response. – Evaluate the…
New ebook: Customer Service, The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
Engaging with and empowering your customers as an extension of your marketing efforts isn’t new. However, in the era of Social Media, there are new tools and philosophies to more effectively listen and engage with customers and in turn, cultivate a more significant community, enhance your brand, build relationships, and hopefully create evangelists along the way. Participation is marketing. Intention is everything. Actions speak louder than words. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t about spam or doing what marketing seems…
Social Media is Not The Final Frontier of Marketing
Pierre Far has a thoughtful post asking whether or not Social Media is the final frontier of marketing. He concludes that if you could answer the question, then you might be the next Seth Godin. Well, not even Google can help me turn up the consensus on the subject. However, the Holy Grail of marketing is an active discussion. To be fair, Pierre’s path to staging the original question and exploring potential answers is interesting and insightful. The history of…
Transforming Customers into Evangelists: The Art of Listening and Engagement
I recently hosted a workshop at the Satisfaction event, Customer Service is the New Marketing. The topic I’m focused on was, “How to Listen to the Market and How to Engage Customers Online.” Fellow workshop leaders include Christopher Carfi, Deb Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Becky Carroll, and Douglas Hanna. Empowering your customers to become an extension of your marketing and sales forces isn’t new, but it isn’t widely embraced either. In fact, the function of most customer service has…
PR for Startups Now Available as a Free ebook
I recently spoke at an SVASE StartUp University event in San Francisco to discuss PR and how startups can effectively leverage the right strategies, tools and tactics in order to gain visibility at every stage of their growth – without breaking the bank. Early stage and bootstrapped startups must embrace DIY (Do it Yourself) or outsourced PR as their product reaches advanced alpha in order to build strategic visibility without losing precious time. It all starts with answering a several…
New ebook: The Art and Science of Blogger Relations
Happy New Year everyone! The discussion around blogger relations is more relevant now than ever. And quite honestly, with every debate, exploration, and analysis, these conversations only fuel the advancement and improvement of Public Relations overall. It makes us think. Lest we forget, there is a significant percentage of bloggers, reporters, and analysts who think we’re useless – we’re merely spin artists who focus on pitching, blasting, and cranking out poorly written press releases. We contact people without caring or…
PR Advice for Startups
In celebration of Alex Iskold’s brilliant toolbox for startups on Read/Write Web today, I’ve decided to join the conversation to help startups make PR work for them now and in the long term. PR is one of the most misunderstood disciplines in the marketing department and many startup entrepreneurs and even veteran executives are quick to under estimate and under value it, or on the contrary, expect PR to solve all of their marketing needs all with just one email…
