News

For those grammar nerds out there, or even just casual business correspondents who wish to brush up on their skills, here are two excellent posts by journalism professor Don Ranly on when to use – or not to use – commas:

Ranly’s Rules for Those Pesky Commas

More Lessons About Those Pesky Commas

Good grammar is critical to getting your point across effectively. Nothing ruins a business letter, a resume, an email announcement more quickly than bad grammar, except perhaps a spelling error.

Cindy Harris

Jack Neff of Ad Age recently (if you call February recent – I’m a bit behind on my reading list) tackled the issue of when and how companies should react to online complaints. The article covers some great examples from both large and small companies that I found very insightful; but what I found most helpful were the questions to ask when faced with online complaints:

WHEN TO RESPOND

Finding complaints about products or marketing online is increasingly quick and easy. Knowing when and how to respond is at best an emerging science — or art. Among factors to consider:

How credible is the source? The tone and track record of the complaining consumer are among factors to consider. A quick Google search of screen names or handles can often turn up a wealth of information on the track record of a particular commenter.

How influential is the forum? Comments on thinly read message boards are one thing. Comments on online retailer review sections, however, can last forever and influence purchase decisions at the point of sale, particularly at big retailers such as Amazon.com or Walmart.com.

How common is the complaint likely to be? A valid complaint is likely to be echoed fairly quickly by others, though it’s also important to determine whether the same person is complaining under different screen names. Correlating online complaints with call-center volume can help verify the scope of the threat.

How serious is the complaint? People not liking an ad because of aesthetic or other creative reasons are one thing. People not liking an ad because they think it demeans an entire race, gender or class of individuals is another, and potentially more serious.

Click here to read the last two suggestions – “How likely is my response to make things worse?” and “How important is my issue to my brand’s consumers?”

Can One Tweet Taint Your Brand Forever?

Mary Grimborg

“64% of consumers have made a first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience such as a web site, microsite, mobile coupon, or email. No other medium has so impacted—or altered—the traditional marketing funnel this way.” (Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Study, 2009)

If your website is out-of-date it may have a negative impact on your business. Even if you do not sell products or services online, your credibility may be damaged if potential clients or donors find outdated or incorrect information on your website. Your business is always evolving and growing, and so should your website.

It is important to keep in mind that you don’t always need a complete redesign. Sometimes you can simply add a few new features and update the information in order to refresh your online presence. The other thing to keep in mind when updating your website, is that you can invest in a content management system that will allow you to update your own website – pictures, content, linked documents and more!

Below are links to a few articles on creating, branding and mobilizing your online presence:

Importance of branding your website

Mobilize your website and stand apart from the pack

Creating a successful online presence

Mary Grimborg

The Associate Press (AP) just release social media guidelines for journalists. Journalists use the AP Style Guide to determine how to address issues such as capitalization, abbreviations, formatting, vetting sources and more.

AP’s social media guidelines define social media and give examples of what social media outlets are out there on the Web. What is important for local businesses to note is that these guidelines also outline how journalists use social media in their work. AP states that some common journalistic uses for social media are:

• Tracking down sources or witnesses to a particular story
• Gathering user-generated content like photos or videos that may be used as part of news reporting
• Looking for news tips or trends that create a lead for a story

There are several more, but these caught my eye they contain valuable information for business owners. These guidelines only make it more clear that business owners/representatives need to be on social media. For instance, if you own a restaurant and there is a problem with potatoes, or something of that nature, nationwide and you offer educated, informative comments on your restaurant’s fan page, the news outlets fan page (if they post a link to an article on the topic), or your personal profile reporters may notice and approach you as a source on their locally-focused story.

Social media engagement can help to establish you and your business as an expert in the community. Just make sure you have clear goals as to what you would like to be an expert on and how to go about it.

A great local example of this is Giovanni’s Restaurant and Convention Center. They have used social media to enhance their position as an expert in the culinary arts – and they are teaching us – always a bonus! Visit Giovanni’s on Facebook and YouTube to learn some cooking tips and tricks from Al Castrogiovanni!

Mary Grimborg

With the oil-rig explosion and subsequent oil spill, BP is facing nightmare scenarios in the Gulf, on Wall Street and on Main Street. Unimaginable amounts of its oil is soiling the Gulf, killing off wildlife and a way of life…BP’s stock price is experiencing a double-digit percentage drop….and its reputation is sliding further into the gutter every minute the spill is broadcast live over the Internet.

The spill’s damage is obviously not just environmental – BP’s continuous failures to cap the leak, combined with communications missteps by its executives (Its CEO said just two days ago he “wants his life back.” Well, so do the fisherman and pelicans.) and barring reporters from some areas effected by the spill have made its reputation even more toxic.  Most reputation-management experts agree that the full-page ads the company has been running in newspapers like the New York Times and USA Today will not be effective in stemming the tide of bad PR until the leak is plugged.

Click here to read a round up of expert opinion on what BP should – or shouldn’t – be doing to fix its reputation.

Cindy Harris

The Tagline: A good one is worth its weight in gold. A bad one is often painfully obvious.

Forbes recently published a compendium of “the best-loved advertising taglines” as judged by a panel of preeminent marketing and advertising experts – with BMW’s “The Ultimate Driving Machine” winning top honors. Click here to see a slideshow of the winners.

Taglines are deceptively simple, as the Forbes list confirms – “Just Do It” and “Think Different” are just a couple of words but convey so much about their respective brands.

When we come up with a tagline for a client, it often is after hours of internal brainstorming meetings, complete with lots of wall-sized Post-It papers scribbled with all kinds of words, phrases and ideas. (Not to mention chocolates and coffee).

Often what a company lands on for their “tagline” is a few steps away from a finished, polished product. We often land on what we think is a solid idea and leave it hanging in our staff break area for a few days so we can all “live” with it for a while.

Then we gather around a table again to make sure it still fits with what we’re trying to accomplish. Many times, what we thought was a final tagline is actually just the first really good idea, and we tweak it more until we all have the “that’s it!” moment.

Sometimes, though, a tagline just comes in the middle of the night, or while you’re having a post-lunch cup of coffee – the “a ha!” moment is unpredictable.

Creativity, conciseness and memorability are all key when coming up with a tagline – don’t shortchange your process when you take on creating one.

Cindy Harris

It can be difficult to determine what a company name says about the brand it creates. How will the public perceive the company and brand offering based on the name.

Many local companies have names that outline what their service offerings used to be, not what they are today. Although some companies have stayed the same, most grow with the time. For instance, a company that used to offer only plumbing services may have expanded the business to include heating and cooling services as well. But should they change their name from XYZ Plumbing? What if people don’t recognize them as the same company?

Often businesses worry about changing their name because they think they may lose brand recognition. In some cases this is true, in others this is not the case. But a name can also hold your brand back if you have expanded your product or service offerings.

Looking at how national brands have changed their names over time is not only interesting, but can help as an example for local businesses and organizations.

Here is an interesting article from BrandWeek on the topic:

One Name, One Brand—One Potentially Deadly Idea

Mary Grimborg

When I was judging the National Student Advertising Competition last month, a few teams included “augmented reality” in their plans. This technology allows the user to, for example, hold a “glyph” in front of their web cams and manipulate the objects and scenes they see on their monitors.

There’s a lot more to the technology and its uses, and some in the ad world are calling it too “gimmicky” to be of true value to a brand. But it does present some interesting applications, particularly for marketers selling a product or companies (such as restaurants or hotels) that are very location-driven. Click here to review some of the ones called out in a piece in Ad Age.

Cindy Harris

It is no secret that Apple and Google are not very fond of each other. I do not foresee the two companies working out their differences anytime soon. In fact, According to MediaPost, Apple has a surprise coming on April 7th.  That’s when they launch their new advertising platform built on top of their recent Quattro Wireless purchase.  The move further places Apple and Google at odds in yet another area, the digital advertising space. Check out the full story, it is an interesting read, and certainly a topic marketing professionals should be aware of.  Here are a few excerpts fromthe article:

With the launch of Apple’s new advertising platform, they could solve a barrier to entry in the mobile advertising space.

“But the gold rush is on for mobile, which many see as Madison Avenue’s next big frontier, even if it still is relatively miniscule compared to established media. According to the last mobile forecast from Interpublic’s Magna unit, mobile ad spending is only expected to reach $331 million this year and $409 million in 2011. One of the obstacles to mobile’s growth as an ad medium is the fact that there hasn’t been any single organizing principle for agencies and advertisers to rally around.”

Location-based advertising? We have written about this topic before. Could this technology have finally arrived? We hope so.

“One of popular scenarios is that Apple will offer a hypertargeting capability that would enable advertisers to target ads to consumers based on their geographic proximity, paving the way for a new generation of location-based advertising.”

Doug Burton

For the first time, spending on digital/online advertising and marketing will overtake print in 2010, according to new projections from Outsell, Inc. You can read the full article here.

A few highlights quoted from the report

• Print magazine advertising will be up 1.9 percent to $9.4 billion despite the popularity of online channels.
• Methods generating the highest B2B ROI are topped by advertisers’ own websites, followed by conferences, exhibitions and trade shows; direct mail; search engine keywords; and e-marketing/e-newsletters.
• B2B advertisers see cross-media marketing as most effective; 78% combine three or more major marketing methods.
• 51 percent of B2B marketers rate Facebook as extremely or somewhat effective, followed by LinkedIn (45 percent), Twitter (35 percent) and MySpace (25 percent).

Doug Burton

A recent hot topic on Facebook is privacy.  Everyone handles things differently – some have separate profiles for professional connections; some just avoid being open and transparent altogether. There are a lot of options to specify privacy on Facebook, and by utilizing them you can enhance your experience and still remain private and professional.

Friend lists are probably the most important. My friend recently ran through her list and I found it smart, yet humorous at the same time. It was something along the lines of – friends, professional, family, close friends and creepy. She then explained how people start in one category and can progress through the levels of privacy based on the development of their relationship. For instance, if someone “friends” her (yes, this is a verb now) she puts them in a low-visibility group such as professional. If they start to develop an actual friendship they may move to the friends category, but if they become a weirdo-stalker they will end up in the creepy category (or possibly blocked altogether) and see very little of what she shares.

With that said, this can take a lot of time to implement, but once you set up your friend lists they are very easy to manage. If you are on your Facebook “Home” page you can click “Friends” on the left-side navigation. You can then click the “Create a List” button on the top left. Then type the name of your list and start adding friends. Once they are in a list you can manage what they see through your privacy settings (click Account then Privacy Settings). Also, when you post you will have the option to select a customized list of those who can see your post or not.

Some other options for privacy are to block your profile from Google and Facebook searches, block photos and tags, keeping your contact information private and so on. In the beginning, Facebook had many of these settings as a default. They notify you once through a pop-up box when they change their default security settings, but you may have been in a hurry or misunderstood the message and not realized what you needed to do.

You would probably be surprised at how much of your profile is public. If you think you have all of your privacy settings the way you want, try having someone that is not your friend on Facebook (or ‘unfriend’ someone who is) and  have them take a look at your profile as an outsider. Can they see your photos even though you thought they were blocked? If they request you as a friend, can they subsequently see your entire profile even though they have not been accepted as your friend? If you are worried about privacy it is extremely important to make sure you are protected.

Photos
Maybe you don’t usually care about privacy, but you are job searching, or maybe your grandmother wants to be your friend and you don’t want her to see “everything” you have out there. The biggest thing most people have issues with is photos. There are ways to block people from tagging you in photos, you can also remove your tags, and so on. When someone tags you in a photo it shows up on your wall and stays in the “Photos of <insert your first name here>” album. It is also perfectly acceptable to ask people to delete photos of you.

I had a recent experience with this. I had gone to a party, and my friend’s camera had an obnoxious flash that made me close my eyes half way in every picture. So, even though I was the designated driver and hadn’t had a drink – I looked wasted. My family and coworkers were all giving me a hard time the next week after my friend posted the pictures. I removed the tags and asked her to remove the pictures.

Overall, when it comes to social-media privacy you need to watch what you put out there (posts, pictures, notes, tweets, status updates, links, etc.) use common sense and keep and eye on what others are putting out there about you. It is okay to delete comments from your wall if they are inappropriate. On the same note, it is important to keep privacy in mind when you’re posting to other people’s walls or commenting – they may not want certain information put out there, and sometimes things taken out of context can be damaging.

Mary Grimborg

Make sure you secure your brand name across a large number of social media networks. Brand squatting: A topic we have discussed in the past, and with the advent of new tools an issue worth revisiting. With hundreds of networks, traditionally this been  an overwhelming task.  Fortunately, there are now tools available that will help save you a lot of time. If you are aware of other tools, please share.

Check out KnowEm. KnowEm allows you to check for the use of your brand or product name instantly on over 350 social media websites across 15 categories. To start, we would recommend you start by establishing your brand with the following more common sites:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Flickr
• SlideShare
• StumbleUpon
• Delicious
• Digg
• Brightkite
• Technorati
• Wikepedia
• Yelp

It’s that time of decade again, Apple has the latest hot product and everybody wants one – the iPad. There are several tablets out there but what makes this one stand out?

Well, it’s made by Apple, and everyone knows if Apple makes it there will be a cult following clamoring for it. It would be easy to get sucked into the let’s compare, spec-for-spec argument – screen resolution, battery life and so forth – but if we did that, Apple would have been gone years ago. Instead, anyone who buys something like the iPad needs to ask themselves,  ”How will I use it and for what?”

Apple has been accused in the past of introducing new products that are cool, but lacking features that other manufactures have included. For instance, the iPad has no camera (or flash) for stills or video, can’t multitask, has no USB expansion capabilities, and what if you hate AT&T? This gets you sucked right back into the spec-for-spec comparison.

Throw that away and go back to, “How will I use it, and for what?” THEN, compare all the tablets out there. If you have already used an iPhone, then you have used the iPad – it has the same operating system and will be easy to use. Some of the greatest machines in the world, spec-wise, are sitting in a corner because no one can, or likes to, use them.

This product line will be one of the fastest growing in the years to come, if one meets your needs today, great –  go get it! If you are still trying to fit it into your needs category instead of the want category, be patient, prices will drop and features will rise.

But, oh, to be the first on your block with the new Apple iPad, hmmmmmm…….

Jeff Klarman

Speechwriting can be difficult, but it’s so important to getting out your message. While I’ve met a small handful of truly gifted speechwriters in my career, most communicators at some point will have to write remarks for a client or an executive in their organizations. So how can you make sure your speech has an impact?

Click here for three suggested metrics to measure your speech’s effectiveness and a few tricks on how you can enforce your message during the speech.

Cindy Harris

So you have a Facebook fan page or you are contemplating starting one. With Facebook recently breaking the four million user-mark, you should be thinking very seriously about participating effectively. This can be a daunting task for even the most experienced marketers out there. You may have started a fan page months ago and you are lacking momentum – no one seems to care that you are “out there.” Maybe you have been thinking about staking your claim in the Facebook territory, but you have no idea where to start.

There are many ways to help create more interest in your fan page, but before you begin (if you haven’t already started) or before you decided to take a new direction (if you already have a fan page), you’ll need to take a step back and create a plan. Minimally, this plan should include an outline of what tactics you will use to create an interactive and interesting environment for fan and how you will manage that interest.

When it comes to creating interest in your fan page, it is good to take a look around the Facebook world and see what others are doing, gage their success and evaluate how you might implement something similar. A recent blog post by Matt Silverman, “5 Fantastic Facebook Page Ideas to Learn From,” Silverman discusses some wonderful examples of how to make your Facebook fan page more interactive and create more interest from fans. The examples include Walgreens’ fan page, which gives fans exclusive special offers and discounts, and Baby Gap, which offers fans an opportunity to upload a picture of their baby in their favorite Gap outfit.

Use these examples to create a social media marketing plan. Come up with several ideas, topics, and tactics that you will test out and measure. Then, come up with a plan to outline how you will manage the interest that fans show and how you will interact with them. Ask yourself: how much time will you spend on Facebook each day, each week; how often will you post;  how will you deal with negative comments? Having a plan will help you be prepared and give you the structure needed to create a successful Facebook presence. You can create the plan and implement it yourself or you can have your marketing department or firm handle it for you.

A lot of our social media clients are concerned about regulations surrounding there industry. Some think there is no way they can have a Facebook presence. Others are nervous about violating privacy or staying in compliance with laws governing their industry. If you are worried about similar issues in your industry, take a look around the web and find leaders in your industry and see what they are doing, or visit the website of the regulating body to see if there are any updates pertaining to social media. At this point, some of the laws and regulations have caught up, but others have not.

In a recent post on The Firm Voice, a publication from the Council of Public Relations, several PR professionals discuss regulated industries such as Healthcare and Financial Services. The nine tips offer advice ranging from training to advice on creating a social media policy.

So if you are asking yourself, “Can I even participate in social media?” Chance are you can, but you need to make sure you follow the proper procedures. In some instances, you may find that social media is not the right fit for your company, but at least you took the time to explore all of the possibilities.

Mary Grimborg