Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...I admire NPR because it is an ever-flowing source of great content. Its content is so good that it can run a pledge-drive every few months. This promotion is heinous because it interrupts programming to do the most pedestrian of things: ask for money. And yet we tolerate, if not participate in, the pledge drives!

NPR earns the right to promote its need for money, and this is a beautiful and enviable scheme. My adaptation of the NPR Model is to provide good content that people would not have found, or would have found at great effort, without me. By doing so, I earn the right to sporadically promote Canva, my books, or anything else that I please....

Here's how a global brand moved from a product-centered approach to a storytelling approach that increased social media following by over 700%.

...Are you looking for creative ways to grow your social media following?

Are you dealing with limited resources?

Then you’ll want to study what Microsoft Dynamics did....

...If you want people to share content, you need to develop content that allows them to help or entertain others, reinforce their identity, or provide a persuasive argument (assuming they agree with you) to reinforce what they already believe or reaffirm their belongingness to a group that believes it. And then? Be prepared to provide reciprocal support and affirmation in return.

If this doesn't sound like a sound strategy for your organization, you are probably right. The model that social networks have devised for marketers to compete in is different than the model consumers participate in on a daily basis. You see, consumers aren't just looking for content that is worth sharing. They share content that contributes to their self-worth. How does that change your strategy?

Social media marketing is about engaging with your customer, listening to their wants, and being able to really respond to your consumer as authentically as you can. It is not about pushing them your products, bombarding them with too much information, or ignoring them when they want to connect.In an article I recently wrote about How to Use Twitter to Drive Traffic to your Blog. It outlined 12 best practices on how to tweet to generate clicks and engagement.

In this post, I will show you 8 worst practices on Twitter, and what common mistakes to avoid at all costs.Get your business trending on Twitter – for all the right reasons.Here are nine fixable methods of how not to tweet....

There have been valid business reasons to use hashtags for years. Twitter started it off. Pinterest added to it. Google+ mastered it in many ways. Instagram, Tumblr… the list of social sites on which hashtags are relevant is long. Facebook was the last major holdout. Now that they’ve joined the bandwagon, it’s go time.

Mastering the use of hashtags takes practice, testing, experimenting, and more practice. Thankfully, there are few things you can keep in mind that will make the journey much easier. Here are some basic techniques for using hashtags that should help you find your own strategy pretty easily…

The winners of the first-ever PR Daily Digital PR and Social Media Awards are diverse—they include a couple of nonprofits, one of the world’s largest automakers, several PR firms, a casino, an airline, and a bitchin’ kitchen. 

Despite their differences, all of the winners share a common trait: They were bold. 

Whether it was a tech company’s bold attempt to hijack its competitor’s conference or a nonprofit communicator’s bold reporting trip to the Horn of Africa, the winners reveal a courageous streak among PR and marketing people in the digital age—it’s a brave new world, and they’re not afraid to dive in....

Like millions of other people today, I spend a lot of my time learning, shopping and interacting online.

Visiting and using Google, Twitter, Facebook and other online apps and platforms throughout my day. Most of the time it's done on my mobile phone and it's all customized to me and my needs.

The mass marketing strategies that worked for my parents generation have turned our world into a noisy one where we're bombarded by somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 messages per day trying to sell us something. The result is that we're so sick and tired of it that we’ve simply evolved to tune it out....

Is the end of the content marketing era in sight?

...Let’s fast forward one more time to 2014 and look at the two factors that impact the economics of content marketing — the amount of content available and the amount of content consumed (supply and demand).

Of course the volume of free content is exploding at a ridiculous rate. Depending on what study you read, the amount of available web-based content (the supply) is doubling every 9 to 24 months. Unimaginable, really.

However, our ability to consume that content (the demand) is finite. There are only so many hours in a day and even if we consume content while we eat, work and drive, there is a theoretical and inviolable limit to consumption, which we are now approaching....

Excellent case study on how a Napa Valley winery hit on a winning social media formula that pays dividends in both increased sales and brand loyalty.How can wineries use social media to increase sales when the law prohibits them from giving away product samples?Whitehall Lane, a 20-year-old Napa Valley winery run by the Leonardini family, has hit on a winning social media formula that pays dividends in both increased sales and brand loyalty....

For many businesses, especially small ones, social media is a time-suck. Being active and creating relevant content has a way of unintentionally consuming precious time. Added to this, businesses can’t easily track or attribute social media activity to sales and profits. In fact, more often than not, social media incurs hidden costs.

So what’s a business to do?

Despite these drawbacks, your small business can leverage the power of social media to get prospects, customers, fans and the public engaged with your brand and content by being selective and targeted in your use of these platforms based on the different phases of the purchase process....

Before you dive into creating your social media marketing strategy, know who’s in your audience and where you can find them.

Once you’ve done your research and have answers to these questions you can create asocial media persona to guide you in planning your editorial calendar and promotional campaigns. To that end, here’s some recent research that you might find helpful....