So, the time has come and you want to be your own boss. Maybe you’ve been forced into this because of a company’s downsizing or maybe you would rather work from home to have additional freedom. If you do a Google search, you are sure to find a ton of links to books and seminars to assist you along the way.
I’ve been contemplating my own future, so when I had an opportunity to read Richard Walsh’s book, “The Start Your Own Business Bible,” I jumped at it. If you are even close to thinking like I am, this book is worth a read.
Walsh breaks down each business into how much you will need to start, with statistical information at the beginning of every entry. It shows you potential earnings, start-up cost, advertising, and the bottom line, to name a few. Continue reading →
As the title suggests, “How To Market To People Not Like You” is all about understanding people who are very dissimilar from yourself. In my case, that would be the entire world, more or less. Author Kelly McDonald does an excellent job of opening your eyes to entire audiences you aren’t getting. In other words, increasing your business by expanding into new markets rather than increasing your existing one(s).
I found the book extremely readable. My biggest fear when reading a “work related book” is that the material will be a bit dry, making it tough to get through even if the information is great. McDonald cites many examples of various businesses and people who had their eyes opened to audiences they weren’t even considering, targeting those audiences, and reaping huge benefits. Continue reading →
Social media is a wonderful tool that brands and organizations can use to tap into a vast pool of individuals receptive to their messaging. Unfortunately, a misconception exists by too many that have yet to establish a presence that as soon as they jump in, they will see an immense return. Just like any carpenter can tell you, one tool cannot build a house; social media is simply one tool on the belt that builds a successful marketing strategy.
The fact is, there exists only a handful of brands that can expect to create a Twitter or Facebook account and see a mass exodus of people follow right away. For the other 99.999% of the companies not named Apple, the “if you build it, they will come” mentality is completely false. Unfortunately, many organizations interpret this to mean they don’t belong in the game of social networking and abandon all their efforts before they have a chance to ramp up. Continue reading →
Aside from the hoopla over the Royal Wedding, one thing was pretty evident last week: big international events often bring out the worst in brand marketing.
From silly tie-ins like Royal Wedding sliding doors from Spaceslide.co.uk (Hey, you never know when you need to see Wills and Kate’s smiling faces while walking in and out of a room!) to the utterly ridiculous £500 pizza from Papa John’s made to look like the happy couple to constant debates about whether Kate’s dress would be a boon for fashion PR, marketers were out in full force last week trying to hock just about anything that could possibly … just maybe … be connected to the Royal Wedding.
All of which left many annoyed and ready for the whole show to finally come to an end.
Thus, two recentop-eds in MarketingWeek could not have come at a better time. While neither dealt directly with the marketing/Royal Wedding mashup, each made its point plainly clear: brands need to be especially careful when trying to tap into the cultural zeitgeist of the moment or teaming up with potential partners. Continue reading →
After shying away a few offers to write a PRBC post, a recipe for chicken ironically inspired me to pipe up. Have you heard about Engagement Chicken? According to Glamour, this chicken turns boyfriends in to fiancés, and they have four staffers (and 70+ readers) who baked the recipe and received a ring to prove it.
Now Glamour is parlaying the success of Engagement Chicken into a book of “100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know.” To promote the book, Glamour’s May issue highlights seven of these recipes that will “get you everything you want in life.” Let’s discuss the highlights: Continue reading →
Much fuss has been made in various marketing, PR and advertising circles about the supposed “death” of traditional media and marketing. They were to have become a sort of vestigal organ of the new-wave social and digital marketing scene.
As reality would have it, things haven’t quite worked out that way. Whether it’s continuing reports of traditional media – such as newspapers and TV – feeding much of the content we consume via social media, or collaborative efforts on behalf of competing marketers to increase their power, today’s marketing scene is more about the vast opportunities now available because of digital opening new doors, rather than who is winning which battles and how.
The CMO Survey looked at the rate of integration of social media within companies’ marketing mix, as well as how well social media is actually being integrated. Some of the results were quite surprising. Let’s take a look at the key takeaways:
Over the next 12 months, social media spending will nearly double to 9.8% of surveyed CMO’s marketing budgets, up from a current level of 5.6%.
In the next five years, that percentage will increase to 18.1%.
Service companies on the B2B and B2C will experience the biggest increases, as they look to promote product-focused digital and social media initiatives.
via eMarketer
That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is that the confidence level among CMOs that they and their companies are successfully integrating social media into more traditional work and marketing strategies lags behind the increase in spending.
According to eMarketer, a full 25% of survey respondents said social is not effectively integrated at all within their companies. So, on the plus side, budget allocations toward social media are up — significantly — with the expectation that it will continue to rise in years to come. But, we still have a ways to go before we can say that yes, social media is as fully integrated and understood within marketing services as more traditional service offerings.
The timeliness of this report couldn’t have been better, as recent trends, revenue reports and a general feeling of buoyancy within the PR and ad industries point toward big agencies going into a buying and M&A frenzy to boost their agencies’ digital chops, as I wrote about last week.
As PRWeek pointed out in a recent editorial, “right now the conversation in PR is all about social media and digital, and no agency can seemingly have a glut of these skills and services on hand.”
The question is, will our industry’s bravado in the digital sector match clients’ expectations for top-level digital and social media services that just two years ago, we couldn’t match, and even now, ad agencies are chomping at the bit to reclaim?
Confidence is on the rise right now in PR; but do our marketing industry counterparts feel the same bluster?
Now that it’s February, there are several trends emerging regarding what B2B companies will focus their marketing and PR efforts on in 2011. The contribution of the B2B Practice Group of the Worldcom Public Relations Group, the world’s largest network of independent PR firms, is a collection of insights shared among partners in North and South America. Through a roundtable discussion, a few trends emerged about the direction of the Public Relations profession in 2011: Continue reading →
It’s that time of year. Everyone is making New Year’s resolutions, and if you’re like most other PR or marketing professionals, measurement is on your list initiatives for the year ahead. If not, it’s likely that you want to continually improve and be able to make a greater impact with the same budget, for example. And if you’re like most other people in this world, you’ll probably lose some (or all) of your motivation as the year goes on.
One of the most important ways to ensure proper measurement is to set benchmarks. It’s hard to measure if you have “moved the needle” or made an impact if you don’t know where you started.
The tricky part about using benchmarks to measure, though, is that you have to measure or set the benchmarks in the first place. And as new clients and campaigns emerge throughout the year, sometimes setting the proper benchmarks gets lost in the shuffle. Below are a few tips to ensure measurement will be a part of your New Year. Continue reading →
Ever since the debacle of Gap unveiling its new logo last week, I’ve been a rather outspoken critic of not only the design, but Gap’s somewhat bizarre and poorly articulated attempts to make it appear that the rebranding effort was all part of one big crowdsourcing exercise or a PR stunt. (Why is it every time a brand does something odd in the digital space, we have to label it a “PR stunt?”)
It wasn’t.
News this week that Gap was abandoning its new logo—after just seven days on the market, and before the new logo had even hit stores or merchandise (the new logo was rolled out via a “soft launch” on Gap.com—left me wondering one thing: Does Gap even realize how badly it’s hurting it’s brand right now? Continue reading →
