Tag Archives: social media

Marie Baker

Preparing for the SEO of the Future

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Do It YourselfWith less than two months to go, my away-from-work-life has consisted of registering for baby stuff, painting a nursery, complaining about maternity clothes, trying to avoid ice cream – everything and all things baby!

Now my husband just informed me that he bought a domain for our future son as a gift. My first reaction was “We don’t even have diapers yet.”  So, I sent out a tweet about his latest purchase, and got an immediate number of responses.  It seems he isn’t the only one preparing for our child’s SEO future.

Honestly, this would be the last thing I would even think about as I get ready for parenthood, but these days, should it be one of the first? Continue reading →

Marie Baker

In the Event of an Event

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Group of Young People at a Party

I was invited to an event recently that I was really excited about. However, much to my dismay, I was only able to last a half hour before I high-tailed it out of there. From a cramped event space to complete confusion about where I was supposed to go, let’s just say this event didn’t live up to all the hype.

We thought we would use this opportunity as a learning experience, and provide a few tips that you should keep in mind when planning and executing an event. Continue reading →

TJ Dietderich

Going to the Darkside: A Flack Turns Marketer

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low angle view of two fists collidingA few weeks ago, I began a new position. It’s a wonderful opportunity to be innovative and creative, to work with fantastic properties and develop social media strategies. It’s a dream come true for a flack like me.

One tiny thing. I’m not in the PR or publicity department. I’m on the marketing team.

I’ve gone over to the Darkside, guys. Red lightsaber and all. Continue reading →

Danielle Cyr

Sampling Spells Success in SM

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Stacked shirts with sale tag attached on store counter, close-upIt’s evident that social media is a hugely successful endeavor for many brands and companies, while others may as well not have entered the SM sphere. After seeing the disparity in results first-hand, I started thinking about what makes the difference, aside from the obvious differences in levels of engagement, nature of content, audience and relationship building measures. That led me to start thinking about how bakeries use social media (shocking, I know.)  There I found the big difference – sampling.

When you have the opportunity to bait consumers to take their SM love for your company or brand and establish a real life relationship, you are golden. It seems elementary, but sampling is a great way to distinguish oneself from the competition and generate monetized ROI on your SM investment. Continue reading →

Nathan "PRCog" Burgess

Houston, Embedded Tweets Go or No Go: No Go

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Thinkstock Single Image Set

This is a slightly polished version of a similar post that appeared yesterday on PR Cog’s personal blogs.

As some of you have likely heard Twitter recently opened up a system to embedded tweets on web sites, blogs, etc. Initially I thought this could be done well, but had my suspicions, particularly with deleted tweets actually being (more or less) deleted. Unfortunately the worst did happen and as it turns out I’m highly disappointed in the embedded tweets system (though I still love Twitter).

I quote tweets not infrequently and doing screenshots has definitely been a pain in the ass (until I found Screenhunter that is — see post here on that cute lil program).

Here’s my ideal list of what I’d want from an embeddable tweet system: Continue reading →

Marie Baker

What’s Important to Know?

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Climate Change And Global Pollution To Be Discussed At Copenhagen SummitSome of the comments on the personal post of one of our writers brought up some points that I’ve been thinking about for awhile now. See a friend of mine spent two entire work days at a social media conference. After it was over, I asked him what he learned.

Imagine a very long, brief pause.  Then he started talking in circles, so I pushed again, “No, I mean what did you actually learn?” He proceeded to fess up that it was more of a networking event than an actual learning experience. All in all, he didn’t learn anything new. Continue reading →

Danny Brown

Where Next for the News Release

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Thinkstock Single Image SetIf you go with the view that Ivy Lee created the first press release back in 1906, then the bread and butter of what public relations used to be best known for is more than 100 years old now.

In that time, we’ve seen the original idea behind the news release (or press release, depending on preferences) morph into many shapes and ideas. From the standard print release, to the search engine optimized release, to today’s social media news release, it’s evolved as needs have grown.

But apart from adding some nice flashy videos and blog links, or being able to rank a little higher in Google, how far has the news release really come? And is there still room in today’s instant feed market for something like the news release? Continue reading →

Keith Trivitt

Blippy’s #EpicFail Demonstrates Importance of Public Relations

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Credit card cut into mulitple pieces beside scissors, close-upDid you see the big social media news that broke Friday afternoon? Probably best to read up about how location-sharing site Blippy, which allows users to broadcast to their friends any and all of their credit card purchases, somehow managed to allow four users’ credit card numbers to slip through a public Google search.

This whole Blippy incident is an unbelievably epic fail, and frankly, not a good sign for the emerging, yet at times, controversial, location-sharing industry.

Here’s the explanation Blippy gave on its blog (from WSJ.com):

In a post on its blog, Blippy said the problem was “a lot less bad than it looks.” “While we take this very seriously and it is a headache for those involved (to whom we apologize and are contacting), it’s important to remember that you’re never responsible if someone uses your credit card without your permission,” the company wrote. Continue reading →

Nathan "PRCog" Burgess

Fun Tools

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Open toolbox, close-upOver the last month or so I’ve posted a few technical stories over here – Email tracking and Tweet Dilution (as well as an April fool’s piece and the chance to play devil’s advocate).  Today we’ll have a bit more fun with the more websites and services that have popped up around and support our favorite social media sites (or feed our habits)

• FriendOrFollow.com – Remember that person who worked for Widget, Inc. in Chicago that you followed months ago but can’t recall her username to save your life.  FriendOrFollow.com to the rescue.  The service allows you to download your friend, follower and fan lists as CSV (Comma Separated Value – readable by Excel and other, similar programs) including their username, location, bio, etc.  making it easily searchable.  Throwing a party – find all your area fans at once (except those that use coordinates as their location) with a simple resort of the column.  Concerned about your account being suspended, use ForF to keep a backup of all your Twitter people. Continue reading →

Arik Hanson

3 PR lessons from the recent Ning announcement

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Loudcloud Chairman Marc Andreessen Keynote at Oracle Open WorldIn case you missed it, Ning recently announced it will be phasing out its free service to users–one of the core tenets of the platform since it launched years ago. There have a been a few interesting posts about the decision, including a great rant by Shel Holtz.

But, let’s set the actual decision aside for a moment. I’d like to take a closer look at how Ning communicated this key decision. In many ways, they could have improved their approach. But, instead of being critical, I thought we’d look at three PR lessons we can all learn from this experience: Continue reading →