The personal touch in business is always important, but it’s even more important in a down economy. Let me share some examples of how businesses have reached out to me, creating a deeper connection that is more likely to last today’s crappy economic conditions.
The Personal Touch: Barney’s New York
No, we don’t spend a lot of [...]

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Social media and business: Two great tastes that go great together, or is the peanut butter scare appropriate for this rotten analogy?

Wednesday morning I head to Babson for a panel with the Babson Alumni Technology Council on social media and business. The panelists will be asked whether this represents a new paradigm or a [...]

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I got asked the other day how to get people to care about a company’s product. I was about to start with my usual social media lecture, but paused for a second. “You know what,” I said. “Nobody outside of your company probably does care about your product. And you know what? That’s okay!”
You [...]

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Marketers beware. If you’re going to engage your audience online, you need to understand the dynamics of online engagements. This has been explained in book after book, in primer after primer, but I’ll highlight the biggest lessons here just to help drill it into your heads.

Don’t get caught snoozing. Marketers, you may get the weekends [...]

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READ MY BLOG! BUY MY STUFF! I’M THE GREATEST! I CAN MAKE YOU RICH! I AM A SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERT, AND YOU CAN LEARN A LOT FROM ME!
Does this still work in today’s day and age? I guess the same can be asked of spam, and the inevitable answer is yes, it does. “He who [...]

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I resisted the incredible urge to add my voice to the post-election noise for most of yesterday and today, but my perusal of InformationWeek has forced my hand. Mitch Wagner wrote a very good analysis of the president-elect’s pioneering use of Web 2.0 and social-networking technologies. Mitch hailed the election as “the end of the [...]

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I didn’t make it out to the Web 3.0 Conference & Expo earlier this month, but I was there in spirit—Web 3.0 has been on my mind lately a lot. First, Adam Green challenged how SocialSphere (and a hell of a lot of other companies) are positioning themselves for the economic downturn:
We got to [...]

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I presented my thoughts on blog marketing at last night’s Boston Blog Marketing Meetup, participants of which included Jeff Cutler, Kristin Schepici, Theresa Rodrigues, Sooz, Al Willis, Nicholas Peterson, Adam Green, Chel Pixie and Matt Searles.
My presentation was broken up into roughly three parts:

What NOT to do. Check out my Delicious “pitching” tag [...]

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What do YOU think of when you see a copy of Reader’s Digest sitting around? If you’re me, you think of a pile of them in your grandparents’ bathroom, perhaps sitting quietly next to Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. I certainly don’t think “hip,” let alone “web 2.0.”
Or I didn’t until I visited their website. [...]

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Are you a PR or marketing professional or a business owner considering reaching out to bloggers, but terrified of what could go wrong? The traditional relationship dynamic with media influencers has shifted dramatically over the last few years, and the old rules do not apply.
Michelle Wolverton, Social Media Evangelist for Vibemetrix (and @chelpixie on Twitter), [...]

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