Free Clean And Simple Social Media News/Press Release By HowToPhil

by Phillip Rhoades on February 9, 2012 · 0 comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on Marketing Conversation, but I return bearing a gift!

I was setting up a social media news release for HowToPhil and decided to try out Bootstrap from Twitter as a framework. After a few hours I constructed my SMNR and then also stripped out all the HowToPhil branding to make a template I could release to all of you:

Check out the HowToPhil SMNR
Clean And Simple SMNR Template by HowToPhil

Download the Clean And Simple Social Media News/Press Release By HowToPhil

Take a look at what the Clean And Simple Social Media News/Press Release Template looks like before you modify it

You can quickly set up a social media news/press release using this template if you have a fairly decent understanding of HTML, CSS, javascript, etc.

The latest version will always be available on HowToPhil.com.

Let me know if you have questions or suggestions for making the template better. I’m also interested in links to sites that are using my template and just good old fashion compliments.


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Online PR Infographic from PRMarketing.com

by Chris Abraham on February 7, 2012 · 0 comments

Sixty percent of Americans will judge your company based on your online presence, think about that for a moment. Though your website plays an important role in your online presence, there is more to it. People search for your brand and judge your company based on what comes up on search engines as well. Investing in online PR helps you manage your online presence and it isn’t something that solely belongs in the future. In fact, it is becoming a vital part of any marketing strategy in this day and age. Having a powerful online presence can put your brand leaps and bounds ahead of the competition with minimal effort on your behalf. Do you want to set your brand apart? Well you need to be tech savvy in our tech-savvy world.

Via PRMarketing.com

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How Social Media and New Technologies Will Affect Marketing Strategies

by speters on February 7, 2012 · 2 comments

The status of marketing is at a crossroads right now, where the paradigms of the past are fading away concurrently to the birth of future ones, with little to no place for the present. Sound confusing? Well, it is. The rise of the online reputation managment company, for example, isn’t the only harbinger of the changing of the guards. As far as the value of the Internet in corporate branding, social media and several new technological phase-changes are sweeping in a new era of marketing strategies. Here are some of the tops examples:

Real time communication. Because it is now possible to undertake projects collaboratively and in real-time using a combination of cloud services and social media, marketers possess the ability to micro-manage their campaigns far more effectively. Real time social media interactions make it so that companies can now custom-tailor their marketing campaigns to meet the latest developments in the real world and mirror the latest online trends.

By integrating Google alerts with keywords you can even stay on top of the international dynamics of real-time marketing. The resistance to using social media in marketing is rooted in not understanding that the benefits of social media lie fundamentally in its real-time nature. Facebook Hangouts is just the beginning. Fusions of services like Skype, Google docs, and Twitter will make marketing an incredibly fluid process that requires sophisticated online skills and entirely new divisions.

Virtual reality communities. In addition to traditional advertising and newer strategies like inbound marketing, the future of online marketing will be heavily focused on virtual reality marketing that can target people spend much of their time as avatars. Digital TV, strengthened fiber optic networks, the bundling of cable, phone and Internet services and 4G networks, as well as the popularity of cutting edge gaming platforms like Wii and Kinect make it clear that in the future more and more people people will use the Internet for much of their recreational time. It’s also likely that more and more people will take part in communities like Second Life, which already has a burgeoning niche economy and online currency. The coming years should see a growing emphasis on marketing to virtual reality communities.

Smartphones everywhere. The incredible rise of the smartphone as a ubiquitous personal assistant puts it in the crosshairs of all marketers as the next great battlefield. Accompanying location-based social media sites like Foursquare and Gowalla will come a legion of marketing teams. They will look to utilize smartphone advertising in conjunction with advanced real-time communication, augmented reality browsers, and other coming developments. The public sphere will continue to be the hunting ground of marketers, but it will the public sphere 3.0, the one infused into our mobile devices.

These three examples—real time communication, virtual reality communities, and smartphones—underscore the rapid change in marketing strategies. As the commercial world sees physical space merges with cyber space, we can expect consumers to demand more of their Internet providers and more savviness from marketers.

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What Do You Do When They Throw You A Curve Ball?

by nina on February 3, 2012 · 1 comment

It is an undeniable fact that everyone has started to take notice of the powerful impact that a well targeted blogger outreach campaign can have on a product.

http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/c-foto/c-foto1009/c-foto100900057/7846780-a-sweet-teddy-bear-is-sitting-on-a-white-background-holding-a-red-rose-flower-and-a-red-heart.jpgPR shops tailored specifically at reaching bloggers are popping up all over the place, and why shouldn’t they? There are millions of bloggers and even more blog readers. It would be a tragedy to leave these influencers untapped.In my position at Abraham Harrison

I am fortunate enough to serve as a bit of a gate-keeper in regards to the various pitches that come in for Chris Abraham.

Since we are in the industry of blogger outreach, and have been for 5 years now, I find these pitches to be quite interesting (even if they aren’t necessarily pitches that are applicable to Chris).

I like to look at the layout of the pitch. Are they tracking the email? Do they include links? Where are they linking to? Is there a social media news release? How easy are they making it for bloggers to post about their product?

Now I have a confession to make. On occasion, I like to take this curiosity one step further (I view it as scoping out the competition) and well, I like to respond. But not with your typical responses of “Great, I’ll make sure Chris sees this!” or “Thank you, but no, this isn’t a fit”. I like to throw them curve balls.

Most recently Chris received a timely pitch for a Facebook app called The Mural of Love (here, I will even throw y’all a bone and provide the link he was sent http://apps.facebook.com/themural).

What caught my attention was this email was a follow up email to an earlier sent message that I had merely chosen to ignore. I admired their persistence, it is something we incorporate into our campaigns as well. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

So, I read the pitch and clicked the link.

Side note: to access the application I had to grant permission to my Facebook page, that is where I declined and lost interest altogether. I find whenever I do that, “I” end up posting on ex-boyfriend’s walls, or inviting my 75-year old Nana to play “Drug Wars” with me, completely without my knowledge or endorsement. Had I been provided with a Social Media News Release and more information before having to allow access perhaps I would have continued. I digress, back to the story.

Now, if any of you know anything about Chris you know this…While he may be a hopeless romantic/social media guru, the odds of him combining these two things and paying to send virtual teddy bears, flowers, and chocolates to his potential suitors’ Facebook pages are pretty slim. At his age, and this point in his seasoned love life, I truly hope he has advanced past this type of digital flirtation. For goodness sakes, he is a Forbes Top 50 Most Powerful Social Media Influencer, he can’t just be posting teddy bears all over the place!

Curiosity killed the cat and I had to email back. I said….

“Thank you, XXXXXX, but Chris is a middle aged bachelor so I am not sure that this app has much relevance to him.

I do admire your persistence, the brevity of your message model, and as a fellow practitioner I have some suggestions. I really think you all could benefit from incorporating social media news releases into your pitches.

When you are “cold emailing” and asking someone to click on a link and grant access to their Facebook wall more information prior to making that request would be beneficial. We do social media news releases for all of our clients. They not only make it easier for bloggers to post, but they also provide any and all information available for the blogger to research.

So they can rest assured that this is a legitimate pitch, offer, product, etc. I would love to hop on a call with you and/or your CEO and talk a little bit further about SMNR’s and how we might be able to help you offer them for your clients.”

What response do you think I got back?

………….radio silence……………

Which resulted in what? Me writing this post as a precautionary tale of how you need to have a contingency plan for all kinds of responses.

Bloggers are an eclectic, cheeky, and brutally honest bunch. You can’t just fire and forget because you don’t like the response you get back, or it is something out of the ordinary.

The out of the ordinary responses are the ones you have to be the most careful with!

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Drop magical thinking PR for social media science

by Chris Abraham on February 2, 2012 · 0 comments

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20Government/Communism/einstein-communist2.jpgWhile neither marketing nor social media are sciences, one needs to use scientific principles to be most effective when it comes to both branding and prospecting online. It doesn’t take an Einstein to succeed in social media marketing, but to does take a scientist. Are you rigorously collecting metrics and data to see if what you’re doing is resulting in sales conversions or extending your brand or are you relying on things you’ve learned from The Secret? Is your social media marketing campaign relying too much on magical realism, the power of positive thinking, and general superstition?

Or, are you so confident in your social media marketing plan that you really don’t care what your experiment says? That no matter how little pick-up you get in the media or no matter how few followers you garner or how little engagement, it isn’t your fault but must be because the market’s not ready for you or because you knew that social media marketing wasn’t effective anyway.

Well, that’s just bad science. Don’t let your social media hypothesis dictate your conclusion

If you want to be an effective scientist, it is essential that you allow the results of your experiments — your observations — to speak for themselves. While having a hypothesis going into the lab is always part one, allowing the empirical data to realign or even contradict your initial predictions is essential. That said, it’s hard on the ego to see something fail. It’s even harder to take the data as it comes and turn it into something useful in the end. This is how innovation happens, of course; and this is how scientific breakthroughs happen, too: not incrementally but in finding order in the chaos of unpredicted results.

There is a lot of bad science in social media marketing. Even a long decade after the Cluetrain Manifesto brought us the 95 theses that taught us that markets are conversations and that brands don’t own their brands anymore — a hypothesis that has proven itself prophetic — there are still many brands that have adopted blogs and social networks simply as new broadcast channels and have simply used social media as a handy way of listening in on the rude thing that people are saying about them.

Science is about testing and retesting and being willing to cut loose any and all processes that prove ineffective and moving those resources elsewhere

Science is about testing. Testing and retesting and being willing and able to cut loose any and all processes that prove ineffective and moving those resources into things that either work outright or show general promise. It is about not being attached to outcome. Finally, it is also about sticking to your guns and powering through on your commitment to seeing your experiments and your tests through. There are too many ghost towns littering social media that are the direct result of abandoned experiments, abandoned dreams — actually, more often, they succumbed to a crisis of faith.

The advertising industry has already adopted science and testing, but not because they wanted to. These were not men who had faith in science — they thought that advertising was an art. While early online marketing started to make advertising nervous, it wasn’t until Google launched AdWords that advertising began to evolve from art to science. The same thing is happening to direct marketing. From A/B testing to sophisticated engagement metrics, the science of advertising and marketing is becoming more de facto than fringe.

PR as the last bastion of magical thinking

PR is the last bastion of The Secret, the last bastion of superstition and magical thinking. The last business communication vocation that struggles against the harsh accountability of hard science, the cruel nakedness of quantitative metrics over the soft fuzzies of qualitative metrics.

Just because you’ve adopted social media doesn’t mean you’re modern. It is strangely possible to map your 19th century PR strategies onto a 21st century media platform without missing a beat. Take responsibility for your campaigns and do not let your hunches and experience dictate your successes and failures — let the data inform you and when it informs you that you’re just spinning your wheels, it is essential to do whatever it takes to adjust your campaign to maximize performance, amplify influence, and optimize for conversions.

Everything else is just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, a sure sign of insanity — or so said none other than Albert Einstein.

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