This tip came from Franke James, editor and founder of Office-Politics.com. When holding a meeting with your team, try using the “six thinking hats” model. It’s meant to build consensus and get people thinking in the same direction.
It also allows for optimistic ideas to grow, while letting negative ideas be aired, she says. It can control the naysayers in a group. Read more…
During my quest to find best practices about how marketers should defend their 2009 marketing budgets, I came across some useful information that didn’t make it into the special report.
Franke James, editor and founder of Office-Politics.com, contributed the idea of making a “mind map.” Her advice is to take out a piece of paper pre-budget meeting and map out the relationship between you and key decision makers (the people who will be in the budget meeting). Read more…
I am a huge fan of the AMC television series Mad Men — a drama about the ad men and women of Madison Avenue in the 1960s. That’s why a blog post about the shutdown of Mad Men Twitter feeds caught my eye.
Apparently, fans were posing as Mad Men characters, creating Twitter profiles for them, and posting regular Twitter updates. AMC asked Twitter to shut down the feeds, which angered fans. Read more…
Granted this is just one consumer’s complaint, but it’s something to think about. A consumer named “Rob” recently was quoted in a Consumerist post about how Amazon ruined his wife’s surprise Christmas gift this year by sending email recommendations about the present after he purchased it.
His wife actually saw a subject line referring to the surprise gift (a TomTom GPS) on the couple’s shared Google homepage enabled with an iGoogle email widget showing recent emails.
Read more…
Most of you know that one way to drive people to a website is by putting the address on everything that might get in front of the eyes of potential customers.
I’d like to provide another suggestion: Give people an incentive to actually go to the website.
If you’re a college or university trying to increase admissions, for example, try including an MP3 card in direct mailings. You could have whatever message or logo you want printed onto the card, which looks like a credit card.
It could say visit our site to receive one free MP3 music download. That gets your target audience through the gates, so to speak. Hopefully they will look around the site while waiting for the song to download.
“This has been incredibly useful for private schools and colleges,” says Fred Snyder, VP of Sales, Eastern Region, for Geiger, one of the oldest and largest privately held promotional products companies in the world.
Snyder provided some background information for a Sherpa report on how to maximize the ROI of promotional products in a tough economy. He also provided this tip!
I had the pleasure of speaking with Dennis Hernreich, EVP/COO/CFO, Casual Male Retail Group last week. We mostly discussed how the U.S.-based big and tall male apparel retailer is expanding into Europe, England in particular, and the lessons Hernreich has gained from the experience.
Read more…
I love hearing about Google’s early days and its meteoric rise. When National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” segment ran an interview with New York Times columnist Randall Stross, author of Planet Google, I was all ears.
Much of the interview was old news for search marketers, but I heard some good tidbits:
Read more…
Even though more B2B marketers consider a role for social media in their marketing strategy, I still hear them express confusion about measuring the impact of creating blogs or participating in social networks. Typical questions:
How do you measure engagement? What’s the value of one Twitter follower? What’s the direct ROI of that blog post you wrote?
Read more…
Is this marketing genius? Pontiflex, the self-dubbed first open and transparent cost-per-lead (CPL) market, yesterday announced the revealing of a free Online Advertising ROI Calculator.
It allows online advertisers and marketers (Pontiflex’s target audience) to compare the costs of online advertising campaigns based on CPM, CPC, and CPL pricing models.
Read more…
Finally, finally, finally. I’ve been waiting for someone to enlighten me about the ways journalists and PR professionals are using Twitter to interact with each other. Thanks to the launch of a new Twitter resource called MicroPR, I can really see the value.
MicroPR was developed by Brian Solis, Stowe Boyd, and Christopher Peri. Here is a quick guide provided by Brian’s blog post:
- Journalists, bloggers, and analysts, send a tweet to @micropr (www.twitter.com/micropr) with what you need help with. The PR subscribers will read it and only those who can help will respond. Always start your message with @micropr.
- PR, follow @micropr to monitor the inbound requests from the media and to determine how you can help. This is a listening and response service for you, not a broadcast channel. Do not send a message to @micropr unless you need the assistance of the PR community.
- If you want to refer to micropr on Twitter, please use the hashtag, #micropr.
It didn’t surprise me to find out that Brian was a key player behind this wonderful tool. He is the person who inspired me to write, Essential Guide to PR 2.0: Social Media Dos, Don’ts. Thanks to him for allowing me to interview him for that article.
I should also mention, this tool reminds me of Help A Reporter Out (HARO) created by Peter Shankman. The idea is similar though Peter uses a different medium, namely email, to get requests from journalists to a list of experts and PR professionals.
For more information on HARO, check out the Fame article I wrote in March. Check out MicroPR as well. Both wonderfully useful tools from innovative thinkers. Thanks guys!
