Friday Roundup 17th October 2008

Some say it'll be short and deep. Others, long but shallow. Either way, it's not quite business as usual.

Interestingly, the impact of all this talk of recession so far on MarCom Professional is an increase in the rate of registrations, growth in a page views, and a sudden glut of applications from recruitment consultants (they are politely refused in case you're wondering).

Some great posts to entertain you today, the most apt in the current climate is an upbeat perspective from Stephen Waddington about running a consultancy in a tougher economic climate.

Best regards, Andrew and the MarCom Professional team.

Dressing up for business

by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR

Rainier PR’s Bryony Beynon was featured in an article in the Guardian’s career section yesterday on the challenge of dealing with piercing and tattoos in a corporate environment.

Tags: business attire, Guardian More...

Get more readers for your business development articles

by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets

A former client asked me last week what my advice would be with regard to driving traffic to an article on a website. Articles are a great business development tool because you can write (without being edited) about things you know a lot about, show off your insights and try to prove that you are skilled at what you do. This is a situation I frequently encounter - companies and individuals write great stuff that shows off their expertise and knowledge but nobody seems to want to read it!

Now, until you have a regular blog readership (if your blog is your main publicity vehicle, as it is mine), there are some strategies that you can follow to try and get a wider audience and broader reach for your work. More...

One fur all: PR consultancy response to economic woe

by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR

There’s been a theme building to blog postings from PR industry leaders this week as economic fears build. Yesterday’s edition of PR Week called on the industry to make sure that it was in good shape. Editor Danny Rogers questioned whether upbeat talk means that the industry is in self-denial. It’s not.

PR consultancies are incredibly simple businesses: typically there is only one source of income (clients) and two principal costs (people and overheads). The ratios are broadly standard from business to business. More...

Tech firms global marketing spend: events (22pc - $3.3bn); digital (12pc - $1.8bn); PR (5pc - $750m): IDC

by Andrew Smith of escherman

IDC’s latest report on tech marketing spend came out a few weeks ago and offers some good insight into where the money is (and will be) going. According to a story by Kate Maddox in US B-to-B magazine, IDC breaks down tech vendor marketing budget spending as follows: events will make up the largest share of the marketing budget (22%), followed by advertising (17%), direct marketing (16%), marketing support and sales tools (14%), digital marketing (12%), PR (5%), collateral (5%), market intelligence (4%), analyst relations (2%) and other (3%). More...

Email Marketing Copywriting Tips - Delivered, Opened, Read and Responded to

by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter's Crucible

So as promised, please find below my tips for writing email marketing campaigns which build rapport, relationships and responses from readers: Getting emails past the spam blockers

With spam about as desirable as raw sewage, junk filters are getting ever more zealous in blocking suspicious messages. This means the tactics used by spammers to get their emails noticed and read are constantly being added to the blacklist of unacceptable email marketing behaviour.

So you need to avoid using a spammer’s language if you want to pass the gatekeeper; More...

EMC Corporation and social media marketing

by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott

Every week I encounter people working for large organizations with huge marketing and PR budgets who are resistant to the ideas of The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

They're used to the things that worked in an exclusively offline world (TV ads, tradeshows and events, media and analyst relations, Yellow Page ads, direct mail, and the like) and they don't want to experiment. Or there might be an individual who wants to jump into new marketing, but the bosses are resistant. Or the PR department is scared of "losing control of the message." More...

Landing Pages and the Importance of Selling a Lifestyle

by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International

Ian Lurie over at Conversation Marketing put up a great post yesterday about optimising landing pages to improve conversions. In his post he talks about the "hero shot" or an image on your page that captures the visitor's attention and defines your product or brand.

This got me thinking about not just how important the quality of the images on a website are but how important it is to match the text to the images to convey an overall tone that helps drive the visitor to make a purchase. More...

Mobile marketing to defy economic meltdown?

by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile

Here’s some potentially good news for those of us in mobile marketing. As the economy goes into nosedive, a recent survey by O2 suggests that mobile might benefit from leaner times. The study of 100 IT and Marketing directors in leading brands revealed that the majority of them expected their spend on mobile to increase by around 150% as they looked for increasingly efficient and accurate ways to target their customers and stakeholders. It’s a certainly a theory borne out by our experience in recent times and other survey findings give credence to our long held belief that the use of mobile for CRM and information type services is still at the tip of iceberg phase. More...

Branding – What’s Your Big Idea?

by David Knowles of

'If Coca-Cola were to lose all of its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would survive. By contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business.” – unnamed Coca-Cola Exec

A business’ brand is the set of thoughts and feelings people associate with it. More than just an eye catching logo, a brand can provoke positive emotions, such as excitement, trust and desire, which seduce people into wanting a relationship with it. More...

Twitter updates gone mad - ways not to use social media pt. 3

by Mindy Gofton of I-COM International

It seems that a local Denver, CO, newspaper has been experimenting with using Twitter to provide regular news coverage. Sadly, their early attempts at using the service have gone horribly wrong.

Using the service to give a play-by-play of the funeral of a 3-year-old is neither providing news nor making good use of social media.

Journalism.co.uk points out, sadly, that this appears to be a serious attempt to cover an ongoing story. Had this been a satirical statement on people's inability to get it right when it comes to social media marketing it might have been amusing. More...

Redefining the Echo Chamber to Excel in an Economic Crisis

by Brian Solis of PR 2.0

[My latest post is now up on TechCrunch. What follows is the unedited director's cut.]The point of this article is to redefine how startups (not solely tech companies) view and define early adopters and the "echo chamber" in order to gain momentum in order to “cross the chasm” to the next tier of evolution, adoption, and monetization. This is about uncovering the very people who can benefit from what they’re introducing and in turn, evolve the product/service based on real world feedback. More...

PR agency view of UK social media market status

by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR

A couple of weeks ago Paul Fabretti wrote that the UK didn’t get social media. I printed out a copy of Fabretti’s blog and have re-read it almost every day since. It’s a topic that I’ve been chewing over for some time. I’m afraid that I haven’t got any definitive answers but here are some conversations that I've been having recently and some of the conclusions that I have reached.

1. Media channels have become networks
In his new book Brands in Networks (review to follow) Antony Mayfield provides an excellent analysis of how media channels have become open communities or networks. More...