Shamable isn’t just about calling out BS in the social media world but also giving recognition to those folks in the trenches, working the channels and making a difference for their companies. This week we’re shining the spotlight on Chelsea Marti, Manager of PR & Social Media at TurboTax.
Category : Mobile, Public Relations, Social media, agencies
This post originally appeared on DavidBinkowski.com and is republished with permission.
Last year TechCrunch outed PR firm Reverb Communications for astroturfing in the iTunes app store on behalf of their clients. As it turns out, the FTC took notice and recent revealed that they settled with the firm that posted misleading reviews of their clients products. As someone that’s been intimately involved with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and drafted our Association’s FTC guidelines, my question is: Why not go after the app makers too?
I wrote over on my blog a quick post about last night’s Mad Men episode (spoiler alert) where Roger refused to go after the Honda business because of the company being founded, managed and operated by Japanese. Now, we all know this way of thinking is absurd, but Roger was reliving feelings from the war and he just couldn’t get past them (a top for another day).
However, this got me thinking about the communications business, specifically the agency side, and how we don’t decide who we work with. In fact, clients choose to us. It’s never been the other way around and never will be, especially when you’re talking about social media or digital communications (whatever term you want to use).
In my experience in being the director of digital communications for MS&L Boston, I’ve found that the only want we land business is typically because of the following reasons: Continue Reading
Category : Social media
Last year, some of the best and brightest minds in the social media sphere got together at the Audience Conference, an event put on by Loren Feldman of 1938 Media (disclaimer: Loren is a good friend of mine and did not pay for this post in any fashion). I helped out coordinating the video and as a plus, I got to spend some time with the attendees, see the show, and even lunch with some of the brilliant folks that were there.
It was one of the best experiences of my life.
Here’s what I wrote the day after last year’s event:
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend Audience, a conference that should be the model for how tech conferences are handled. How so?
In the first words Loren said, he reminded people that there would be no open laptops during the show and no Twittering during the conference or “I’ll throw your ass out. I’m not even kidding.” At that moment the tone of the conference was set. Put down the tech, pick up the notebook and pen you were given, and be an audience, rather than a participant.
There’s no shame in being an audience.
I don’t shill for things on here at all, and you can bet I’m gonna get a slap across my virtual face for doing so the next time I bump into Big Dave, but here’s the takeaway, people: If you’re going to be in New York City on Saturday, you need to be at this conference. It’s not some Web 2.0 geeky backchannel tweeting hashtagging piece of crap a lot of these sucky face fests are; it’s real people who have succeeded in business, media, and so on and know how to do the one thing we’re always striving to do better at: get and maintain an audience for our work.
After all, what good is writing, vlogging, blogging, and tweeting if no one is paying attention?
A lot of my posts on here are directed at businesses, usually warning them about what not to do. Now, for the first time, I’m telling you what to do. Get your butt over to Caroline’s in Manhattan on Saturday morning, sit back, and soak it in. You won’t regret it, you’ll learn something, you’ll meet some cool people, and you can shake my hand for telling you about it because I’ll be there!
Category : Advertising, ROI, Social media, Twitter, Video, business
Ahhh yes, the Old Spice ad campaign. You know it. You love it. We all do.
But did it actually increase sales? Don’t ask cheerleaders like Mashable. They already have declared the campaign a giant success.
You know those YouTube videos with that manly Old Spice guy and his hilarious responses to Twitter fans? Of course you do. So does everybody, it seems, because Old Spice body wash sales have increased 107% in the past month in part thanks to that social media marketing campaign.
107%? Wow! Sign me up! Teh internetz will make us all rich!
Mashable’s irresponsible cheerleading for Old Spice’s campaign creates a hell of an impression with marketing departments and branding managers because it shows that you can do a lot on a relatively low budget by hawking your wares to the digital plebes.
Of course when real experts review the campaign, you’re more likely to get some actual analysis. Continue Reading
There are some smart minds in social media these days. Brilliant ideas, brilliant thinking, new ways of doing business… They’re all part of the social media landscape. It’s a veritable salad of brilliantly chopped ideas combined into one great bowl of incredibleness.
The problem? The smart people aren’t the ones being heard. Continue Reading
Category : Advertising, Advice, Marketing, Social media, Twitter, agencies, business
For the love of God, put your shirt on.
For the longest time I used to think that PR agencies didn’t get social media. “Give me impressions!” was the public relations mantra because it meant that they could easily transfer their knowledge of publication circulation multipliers into the emerging field called “social media”. Screw the long tail, screw review web sites, screw message boards and all of the other “unimportant” groups online because “they don’t have reach”.
“We want to take on the ad agencies head on!” was the PR agency rallying cry, and even though most ad agencies are going down the wrong route, and no matter how many decks you presented to them that this gimmick marketing was the wrong approach, they continued to push to ignore the long tail, ignore communities and ignore what actually drives sales. What’s come full circle is that the coveted social media reach play online that ad agencies have been great at have one thing in common: they don’t work.
For those who may’ve missed it, a new top level domain (TLD) was released yesterday called “.co”. Surprisingly Inc.com, a site and magazine I respect, went with a blog post advising readers to “run, don’t walk” to buy your .co domain today. Don’t fall for it, this is yet another domain registrar ploy and is a waste of your business’s money. Here’s why…
Category : Advertising, Marketing, Social media, business
For anyone following this meme on Twitter, Fast Company recently launched a site called “Influence Project”, where they’re essentially pitting online “influencers” against one another to vote for their influencer ranking. The Project is being pushed left and right on Twitter and Facebook and I’m sure elsewhere, but at this point I’ve tuned out from it, not because I don’t want to vote for my friends but because it’s like watching cattle being lined up onto a conveyor belt only to be lead to slaughter.
What would you find if you removed the curtain?
A lot of discussions take place day in and day out over the use of social media in the workplace. “Is it productive?”, “Why do we need it?”, “Where’s the return?” and “Should we allow it?” have been uttered more times in board rooms and meetings than any of the bullshit bingo we all snicker at when folks who don’t understand what they’re talking about use to fill space. There are some great resources online to see what the big companies are doing regarding social media, but given the prevalence of sites like Facebook and Twitter at some point it becomes an issue of personal use versus company use, to which I can only say one thing…
