Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I'm a big believer in lifelong learning and the importance of listening before crafting a communications strategy, much less a campaign. 

But, I recently learned a very painful lesson by violating my own code of listen first, last and always.

The setting was a new business presentation to a professional services firm. Because I'd done so much work in the field over the years, I just assumed I knew what the prospect's challenges would be. Even worse, I was so blinded by the brilliance of what we'd built at Peppercomm over the past 18 months or so that I didn't listen when the prospects began to explain why they were firing a global, holding company and looking for a smarter, nimbler and more creative partner....

Telling people to “create compelling content” is not marketing advice. It’s common sense. And if this is the type of content you create or share, you’re part of the problem.

I hear some of you already “yeah, but this and other marketing 101 concepts aren’t understood by everyone.” Perhaps not. But if someone doesn’t get it by now they aren’t going to. Ever. The web is not new and you’re wasting your time writing stories on painfully clichéd and obvious concepts that could be solved by a simple web search (btw: the people you want to reach are smarter than you think). The industry has moved past the people writing the overdone. If you’re not a publisher but you share these types of stories, you aren’t adding value to your network. In fact you may be carving out a reputation for yourself that’s not so positive.

We need to push our peers, our trade publications, our consultants and agencies to stop with the obvious and clichéd advice. It’s not helping and merely succeeds at making the people sharing or creating it look like they publishing for the sake of publishing (instead of doing so because they have passion). It’s boring at best, spam at worst....