ION Digital

Sometimes I walk away from a conference with as many questions as answers. Such was the case at the recent Inbound Marketing Summit in SF. Great speakers, great content, great ideas– an idea-fest for social media types. But after the two day session ended, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why is this so hard? Why aren’t more companies getting it?

The answer is both simple and amazingly complex: It’s woven into the very fabric of the the way we think about marketing.

My company has worked with many companies the last three years on social media programs, from Fortune 100 giants to small shops, giving us ample experience to see how good intentions come up short in making the transition to the new marketing world. The mistakes usually fall into one or more of the following areas, the seven deadly blind spots of traditional marketers: (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…)

Several people at last week’s Cisco Partner Velocity 09 conference in Miami (the Web 2.0 skills training sessions) asked us how they could separate their online personal and professional activities. They worry that the two worlds would overlap as they moved deeper into social media, with embarrassing results.

Others worry they’ll just say something that will backfire;
either way it hurts their reputations.
This is a growing issue, thanks to the way social media is evolving. Facebook is a crazy quilt of personal and business
interests and activities, which all flow through the personal news-streams. And on Twitter, rapid fire observations and comments may seem honest—that’s the idea, right?—but come back to haunt you (see Ketchum example below). It’s the dark side of the transparent web.

The good news is there are actions you can take to manage your online identity, while keeping your  business and personal presences separate (for the most part). This post will look at what you post, your content. (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…)
  

Bert Decker, the presentations skills guru, published his annual list of the top ten best (and worst) communicators recently, and it’s worth a peek. It’s a reasonably good list, with some blatant exceptions.

First, where is Barack Obama? While Bert listed Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, he left out Obama, who’s hands-down the most eloquent public speaker running for office, as he showed in the recent NH debate. He has an uncanny ability to distill complex issues into simple but compelling messages–and deliver them with passion and even fury, engaging with audiences on an emotional level we haven’t seen in years. (more…)