MarCom Professional

The competition for attention is focused on social networks as brands vie for awareness and consideration. Establishing a presence in Facebook and Twitter is as necessary as it is trivial. In the great social land grab, many organizations are missing true opportunities to connect with the fifth P of the marketing mix, people. It’s less about communicating with those individuals who are already following you online and more about those who aren’t.

To excel in social media, engagement has its rewards but it is through the acts of recognition, empowerment and reward that advocacy extends a brand’s reach across social graphs and social networks, online and in the real world. More...

I took part in the #measurepr Twitter chat today on ethics in measurement. These chats are organised by Shonali Burke and her blog post "Influence: From BS to Best Practice" set the scene nicely.

At the most fundamental level, we were asking whether some of the techniques being deployed for PR measurement are compatible with the aspiration of public relations professionals to be transparent and authentic, and, more precisely, whether they are compatible with codes of conduct as published by the likes of the CIPR, PRSA and CPRS.

In one of my tweets I suggested a more straight forward test, what one might describe as a layman's test for those of us uneducated in the matters of ethics: More...

Most U.S. marketers are using analytics. They recognize the importance of measuring marketing effectiveness, especially when they are asked to justify their spending. However, according to a report by eMarketer, there is room for improvement in formalizing approaches and communicating results.

According to a survey of senior marketing executives by Forbes Insights and MarketShare Partners, nearly seven in ten said they used analytics to measure marketing effectiveness. Marketers with large budgets were significantly more likely to do so than those with spending of less than $1 million. More...

Unless you literally run your business with your ears plugged and your eyes covered, you are aware of the importance of social media and its impact on both brand and bottom line. However, while social media is the topic du jour in mainstream news, on blogs, in books, at conferences and at your local Starbucks, we may still underestimate its overall promise and potential.

The socialization of business is comparable to the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or the red pill in the Matrix. If ignorance is bliss, awareness is awakening. Where there’s insight, there’s opportunity – but with opportunity, there’s also a cost. More...

I saw a video on the State of Social CRM post on Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang in which Paul Greenberg talks about how companies are having difficulties with cultural changes internally to execute against the new bread of customer, the social customer.  In case you don’t know what CRM is, it’s Customer Relationship Management as described in Wikipedia as a “technology that allows companies to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.”

What an ear full!

My version would be just an application that keeps track of customer facing activities so you can find the gaps in your service and More...

The new world of Social Media is among the most actively analyzed, misunderstood, and at the same time, celebrated mediums affecting businesses today. At the very least, it introduces a renewed sense of vigor that is challenging creativity and convention and also inspiring more human connections in the process. Social Media also introduces new channels and methodologies to drive and measure sales, service, and marketing. As such, discerning business executives seek direction to evaluate the opportunity costs associated with new media as well as establish the ROI of engaging in popular networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. More...

Privacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be as “off grid” as they can get. And then there are those who actually bolt a camcorder to their heads and stream their life 24/7. Irrespective, I believe there are some things that everyone expects to be private by default; even Marc Zuckerberg! And one of these is your browser history… the log that lists every webpage you visit.

It’s this list that enables modern browsers to suggest auto-completions for URLs as you enter them in the address bar. It’s this list you might visit when you’re trying to find that something or other you stumbled across the other day. More...

For decades, PR has been seen by many marketeers as “cheap reach via editorial” – in other words, the goal of PR was to gain editorial coverage that provided the greatest number of opportunities to see – at a significantly lower cost than advertising.

Because the means of providing a verifiable link between editorial coverage and business impact was either prohibitively expensive or just not possible, there has been a largely accepted assumption that positive press coverage is valuable – period.

In the past, the notion of measuring engagement with editorial content was largely theoretical.  Circulation and readership figures were treated as proxies for engagement (if a newspaper has a readership of 2 million, then we assume that a large proportion must be in some way engaged with some or all of the content – we just aren’t sure which content and to what degree. More...

As we progress into 2010, the rapid growth of social media has allowed more access to information, consumers, communities, and experiences.  This new medium has enabled a new way to communicate and share, from B2C to B2B marketers are all trying to figure out an edge.  Many brands start to focus on the hybrid approach which I believe will be the next phase of digital and web marketing.  The question is what role will it play in the marketing arsenal?

Here are 3 steps to consider when integrating social media to your marketing practices:

Brand Strategy Reassessment

Understand the changing habits of your customers should be the focus of your brand.  Use the 80/20 rule to segment your customers and identify the difference between your old customers and new customers.  The recession has permanently altered the way people think of value and the concept of trust. More...

This coming Friday, 9th July 2010 Reputation Online will be hosting an event at the London Hesperia hotel in Victoria titled “Navigating the online monitoring jungle“.

Having recently presented to an agency who said they had “shortlisted” 12 other monitoring companies, I know that this will be of great interest to those who want to start on the journey of Listen > Learn > Engage > Integrate.

It really isn’t a jungle once you know the right questions to ask to tell if your potential supplier is really up to the task or they offer not much more than the “free tools” everyone likes talking about. More...