PRBreakfastClub

I’m old enough to remember the days of bringing a Walkman into my bed at night to try and listen to baseball. On the clearest of nights, I could hear the radio home of the Chicago Cubs, the St. Louis Cardinals, and sometimes, the Boston Red Sox from my New Jersey bedroom. However, most times, I’d have to deal with plenty of static and interference.In our social media world today, we have the same issues. While we can “hear” some of the most influential PR/social media/marketing folks, we still need to get through the “static” to actually listen. Why? Our Facebook and Twitter streams are clouded with too much noise and clutter that affects what we take in.

So, how can we better listen and engage our followers? Here are five tips to fine tune your focus on social networks. Read the rest of this entry »

I was scouring the blogosphere last week after getting some recommended posts via re-tweets. Of the three I read, all had different definitions of engagement in social media. In our ever changing world, we’ve had to define and re-define certain aspects of PR and marketing. I would think we’d have engagement pretty well narrowed down by now.

However, I don’t think having a solid definition of engagement is a real issue. Why? Because we all talk about engagement in certain ways. Some see that re-tweet that directed me to a blog as the ultimate form of engagement, while others believe that it is responding to a post on Facebook. And if you got into an argument, both of these answers COULD be correct. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently began that much-maligned exercise of apartment hunting with my wife in Minneapolis and if I learned anything from the pursuit (other than a realtor’s idea of ‘spacious’ is from the point of view of the cockroaches) it is that businesses need to engage with hate online.

Much of our hunting utilized social media – we searched ads and sites and used accompanying blogs, tweets and reviews to assess where best to rest our hats. It is safe to say that there is a lot of hate in the social media sphere – from security deposit battles to strange-smelling hallways, the dramas of rental life in the Twin Cities were laid bare online. Read the rest of this entry »

While building a community around a brand is viewed by many as a business tactic, the manner in which you build your community has very little to do with business. Building a community has a lot more to do with people.

In order to build a strong community, a business must treat their community members like friends. Here’s the why and how: Read the rest of this entry »