With 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 →
Some of you may have noticed that my Twitter stream isn’t as robust these days. There aren’t as many blog posts, news articles and conversations flowing. To be rather blunt, I simply haven’t felt like tweeting. I’ve snuck onto the web occasionally and opened the TweetDeck a couple of times, but the ‘new tweet’ alerts haven’t been as alluring. Some days, I’ve felt self-imposed pressure to tweet, as though I wasn’t living up to expectations. Other days, I’ve felt like the site of that demonic little black and red alert box blocking the ability to close documents was more than I could take.
While the motives for my lack of tweeting are a bit unclear, even to me, and I really have no clue where I would have found the time to tweet more than I have been, I’ve learned some really important lessons while tweeting less. Lessons that I will carry with me if/when I decided to start bombarding your Twitter stream again. Continue reading →
It’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 →
This is a slightly polished version of a similar post that appeared yesterday on PR Cog’s personalblogs.
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 →
. . .billboards, that is. They dominate Times Square and distract drivers across the U.S. There’s no denying that these brightly lit, monster-size ads are hard to miss. But are they effective?
Personally, I’m just not a fan. Perhaps it’s my natural aversion to anything bold and glitzy. Or that I’m a fan of content that you can consume on your own time and terms, i.e. not just when in Times Square or driving down the interstate.
The cause of my digital distaste aside, I wonder if digital billboards are really worth the space. Is it worth thousands of dollars to attempt to snag drivers’ attention as they zip by at speeds in excess of 65mph? Continue reading →
With all of the buzz around the new Twitter “Promoted Tweets” (really, ‘sponsored tweets’), and how that will impact our viewing and tweeting and other fun times on the increasingly addictive platform, one facet of the new ad-based service that got a bit lost in the all of the buzz was the role this service may play in PR professionals’ lives, particularly the ability to utilize promoted tweets during reputation and crisis communications situations for clients in which it is imperative that an official viewpoint, messaging or news stays at the top of a relevant search-based (for now, until Twitter debuts ads within personal Twitter streams later this year, as it plans to do . . .) Twitter streams. Continue reading →
It’s a common, and possibly over-analyzed, topic. One that has been discussed at nearly every social media conference I have attended. Yet, I’m going to broach the topic again. Should you engage in social media?
Instead of debating the pros and cons of engaging in social media, I’m going to take a slight detour. If you can’t or aren’t willing to engage, you at least need to monitor.
I think one of the largest misconceptions among organizations not involved in social media is that, if they don’t have a social media presence, nobody is talking about them. Continue reading →
Despite all of my love for social media, digital communications, community engagement etc., something that is beginning to particularly strike me as a clear fact of 21st-century PR is that yes, media relationships do matter. A whole lot. And dare I say it? It does matter who you know. More importantly, how well you know/trust them.
Let me put this into a bit more perspective: Say you’re working on a pretty time sensitive client announcement that has a lot of moving parts (e.g. 2-3 parties involved with multiple executives/personalities and many different times zones), which requires you to be both confidential with how closely you hold the client announcement/information and also proactive enough so you obtain the desired outcome from the announcement with a little extra audience reaction thrown in from a good pre-announcement story or two. Continue reading →
A few days ago a minor firestorm brewed over the importance of your (whether that’s you, your brand, your company, etc.) follower count over at Kate’s post. Everyone providing commentary had valuable input (in my opinion) and certainly each has a different goal, or at the very least different way of approaching the issue. One even found great pleasure at the hypothetical situation that an account would have more followers outside its target audience than inside of it because then at least there’d be confirmation you (or the account) was in-fact doing something right.
All of these conversations centered on how many followers the account itself has. There is another factor to consider in this formula to determine reach — How many people are your followers following? Yes, I’m serious. We’re talking TweetDilution people. Continue reading →
Even though I know better than to wonder why my follower count is what it is, and I’ve come to let it rise and fall on its own accord, I couldn’t help but be a bit irked by its vacillation between 699 and 700 multiple times over the course of just one afternoon. Was it something I tweeted? Something I hadn’t tweeted? In the end who knows and who cares. That said, it’s still fairly annoying, especially to someone who dislikes odd numbers.
My own ridiculousness aside (yes, Cog, I did read and do recall your post about Twitter 101 and getting over the importance of the follower count. And, yes, I do agree that Mack Collier’s recent post ‘The Fast Food Approach to Social Media’ said all that needs to be said about counting your followers) there must be an art to the unfollow. I’ve done it on occasion, mostly to correct what I consider to be an error or my early days – following celebs. I’m not talking one or two, I’m talking dozens. Continue reading →
With 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!
