From Our Brains to Yours

March 30th, 2009

Tools are not strategies

Colin Delaney has an excellent post up on techPresident: Twitter is NOT a Strategy.  Mr. Delaney does a bit of reminiscing:
A classic observation from the early days of online marketing: a website is NOT a strategy. I.e., when you ask the client what they’re trying to do online, and they reply that they have a [...]

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March 26th, 2009

Remember when sharing your list

 If it’s Thursday, it’s time for Three Things. This week: three things to consider when before sharing your list
Most organizations have been in a position where they have been approached by other groups about sharing their list or list-swapping.  It can be a way that your organization can make some extra revenue (by renting) or build [...]

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March 23rd, 2009

Interact first, ask second.

As always, Seth Godin simplies something most would think is obvious with his post, The pandhandler’s secret.
First his story:

“One day, I’m walking down the street and a guy comes up to me and says, “Do you have a dollar for four quarters?” He held out his hand with four quarters in it.
Curious, I engaged with [...]

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March 20th, 2009

What are you saying to make people feel better?

This morning I fired our financial planner (a relative, natch). Not because our meager retirement savings plummeted on his watch; clearly he’s not to blame for that. I lowered the boom because we never heard from him. Not when the econopalypse started, not when we got our end-of year statements indicating that [...]

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March 19th, 2009

Audience Segmentation

If it’s Thursday, it’s time for Three Things. This week: three things to consider about audience segmentation.
By now it’s conventional wisdom: your audience is not a monolith, and you shouldn’t communicate with them that way. Online communications are particularly well suited to segmentation – thinking about your audience in terms of subgroups – but [...]

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March 16th, 2009

Just like everyone else (or maybe a tad better…)

I haven’t seen any hard numbers on it, but I’d guess that not very many people articulate an impulse to be just like everyone else.  We’re a world of individualists, independents.  We make our own decisions, forge our own way, pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and stay out of each others’ business.
Which is [...]

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March 12th, 2009

What should you know about your email list?

If it’s Thursday, it’s time for Three Things.  This week: three things you should know about your email list.
You would think these three things are your number of subscribers, open rate, and click-through rate (plus perhaps a fourth:  churn rate), but Richard Rushing at Email Insider suggests something different:
What if you knew:
1. The value your [...]

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March 9th, 2009

Return on engagement

Sarah Evans has a great checklist over at Mashable: “Social Media for Business, The Do’s and Don’t for Sharing.”

Be transparent and authentic. Be Human – Create or join a discussion, don’t yell to a crowd.
A profile pic is worth a thousand tweets – does your pic help tell your story?
Leaving a Legacy – what you [...]

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March 5th, 2009

Evaluation

If it’s Thursday, it’s time for Three Things: three quick things to think about as the week comes to a close.
This week: three things about evaluation:
1.  Evaluation should be closely tied to goals. If you’re evaluating the traditional PR component of your communications program, are you counting press clippings?  Is that because you care most [...]

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March 2nd, 2009

Isn’t email sooo 2008?

Email is dead. Email is dying. Email is sick? Email might have a bit of a cough.  Every few months we have a conversation about the impending death of email.  Whether due to spam or decreased attention or too much noise, reportedly email will cease being the “killer app” of the internet any day [...]

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