ION Digital

The news that BusinessWeek is now up for sale puts to rest any doubt that traditional publications are in a death spiral. This may  be old news to my counterparts in Silicon Valley, who have been writing off “traditional publications” for years. But I always felt there would always be a handful of business publication stalwarts—BW, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, etc—that would resist the tide, somehow survive, even thrive again one day.

Now I’m not so sure, and the future of another big name publication–and the lives of 190 BW editors–is in limbo.  (more…)

Twitter is a great tool for companies seeking to connect with key audiences, build their brands and much more.Once you  get the swing of Twitter (last blog) , you’re ready to get fully immersed and start growing. The goal is to attract followers, and eventually build your own community.

Twitter communities are generally loosely organized at best; that’s the beauty of it but it’s also the challenge. Connecting with so many different people is like herding cats.

My approach is this: rather than thinking about hundreds (or in some people’s case, thousands) of followers, I’ll choose two or three representative followers to focus on at a time; that’s my “audience.” This is based on techniques I use in public speaking. Rather than scanning a big audience, I’ll find 2 or 3 audience members  in the front row and focus eye contact on them, providing me a chance to focus my energy and thoughts. When I’m answering a question or corresponding with someone on Twitter, they have my full attention.

I’m trying to build a  community one contact at a time–slow, yes, but steady and (I’m hoping) enduring. I’m really focused on quality of community vs pure quantity, so Guy Kawasaki (100k plus followers) has nothing to worry about with me.

Below are a few tips to get you started. (more…)

1) The Yelp “extortion” debacle (also note the responses: “Yelp Extortion: True or False?”  and “PR 2.0: Yelp Gets a Bad Review: Embracing a Crisis to Shape Perception”)

2) Top 100 Social Media and Internet Marketing Bloggers

3) “25 Most Shocking Crimes in Social Media History | Masters in Criminal Justice” 

4) Demystifying social media for companies–some good tips, steps

5) NY Times, Wash Post lead top 10 newspaper sites

(more…)

After posting my favorite Twitter articles earlier this week, several corporate managers I work with quizzed me about it. What’s Twitter? What’s that about? Some seem to wonder what’s going on behind the Twitter curtain. What are all those people doing?
But most of all, they want to know what can it do for me?

The answer is: a lot. It’s still early in the game for Twitter but you can already see the potential for businesses. Twitter is a fascinating, raging river of comments, observations, opinions, links and more—Facebook on steroids—and provides a potentially powerful tool for communications and other professionals, from sales and marketing to product development.

I’ve only been on Twitter a few months, but already I can see the potential for it on so many levels–as a tool for communications, to build brands and manage customer relations, just to name three. More on these later. But, for starters, it may be best to think of Twitter as a listening and research tool, even a new form of news service—both which are just starting to be appreciated.  (more…)

Every day I marvel at the tidal wave of postings, news, comments and observations about social media. Out of this stream I handpicked a few samples of blogs this month I thought were particularly good, either because they provided useful tips, insights, or understanding—or I just liked them for other reasons. So this is far from a scientific sampling but a great array of postings by any measure.  I also threw in some misc favorite articles and blogs, such as one looking at Apple in a post-Jobs world.

My next piece will focus on my favorite postings about Twitter, a platform that is exploding in popularity. 

Social Media

• Obama’s social media toolkit and strategy (Edelman)
• Why companies should embrace social media, the good, the bad and the ugly (w/ an example of the ugly) (more…)