From Our Brains to Yours
Organizations Don’t Have Friends
A couple of weeks ago the Washington Post set off another kerfuffle among online communications devotees (we like our kerfuffles, evidently – the infamous newsletter kerfuffle is just now dying down) when it published an article on the disappointing fundraising numbers turned in by Facebook Causes. It turns out that it’s not as simple as [...]
Presentation: Strategy for Communications
This morning I gave a presentation at the NACCDO/PAN Marketing Conference on strategy for communications: what it is, how to diagnose if you’ve got it, and what do to to be more strategic. It’s a fantastic group of talented folks – the Communications Directors, Marketing Managers, and Public Affairs professionals at the nation’s cancer centers [...]
Do you have a strategy?
If it’s Thursday – whoops, Friday! – it’s time for Three Things!
The most important lesson of the class I teach at Georgetown is this: a plan is not a strategy, and you need a strategy to make your planning and execution as effective as it can be.
The first few weeks of class is vocabulary and [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Online is not IT
The building blocks of direct mail are paper, printing, and postage. But would you put responsibility for your organization’s direct mail program in the hands of the folks who buy your office supplies, or the person responsible for buying stamps for the office? Of course not. You know that the success of a direct mail [...]
“It sure seems like we spend all our time on #4″
Seth Godin identifies the The Five Pillars of Success:
See (really see) what’s possible
Know specifically what you want to achieve
Make good decisions
Understand the tactics to get things done and to change minds
Earn the trust and respect of the people around you
and suggests, “It sure seems like we spend all our time on #4.”
Agreed. The tactics are [...]
The secret for growing a giant list, revisited
Shayna’s post from a few weeks back, The secret for growing a giant list, asserted that “delivering true value is a secret of communications success that is easy to recognize, but hard to deliver.” So true.
Adam Singer over at The Future Buzz continues the argument with his post As Your Content Expands, Things Get Easier. He makes [...]
The secret for growing a giant list
It turns out that delivering something of value is the secret to building a giant list of supporters, members, clients, etc. Stunning, no?