I had a hunch this was going to happen. While the media trumpeted the arrival of Warren Buffet on Twitter, I wondered aloud if he would have staying power. To help his onboarding process – communicating in staccato-like bursts can throw off the most brilliant of minds – I even crafted 20 evergreen tweets that …more
The most visible intersection of social media and customer support has to be Twitter. At any given time, you’ve got twitchy customers taking their complaints to the masses. A quick look at the tweet stream from one of the whipping boys of social floggings, Comcast, brings us “deep” customer interactions such as: Just in case …more
I never quite understood how social media could actually add new content to the conventional storytelling in news reporting. Until now. Last week, I got an email from a college buddy and fraternity brother – and no, they’re not one and the same – with the subject line, “My story went national.” My first thought …more
I penned this tweet last week: Some background – To show people it’s a new day at J. C. Penney, the company posted a video called “It’s No Secret” on YouTube in early May. The 30-second spot acknowledged past mistakes and plans to change its ways. I took the position that if a company deploys …more
Everyone knows headlines rule. The ceaseless bombardment of information has turned the headline into eye candy. Write a good one, and readers stop to give the body copy a chance. If not, the readers’ attention never breaks stride and they’re on to other things in a nanosecond. Perhaps no media property has perfected the art …more
Eric Savitz at Forbes oversees the CIO Network, a forum for executives to articulate a point of view. If you scroll through a few months of these byliners, you’ll see the number of views at 1,000, 2,000 and a select few tipping the 5K mark for bragging rights. As noted in “Social Numbers Don’t Mean …more
In honor of Valentine’s Day, here’s a story that proves once again that life is better than fiction. Having been married for 20+ years, I never experienced the “anguish” of dealing with social media withdrawls from a romance gone south. Apparently, it’s not easy. NPR recently ran the story, “When Social Media and Romance Mix, …more
As social media and other digital means increasingly blend into traditional PR, the macro goals remain the same: Generate share-of-mind with the target audience(s), and if we’re living right, brand preference. In the old days – say the 1980s after Nixon resigned, but before the Gulf war – correlating a story in a magazine like …more
We completed the eighth of our social accelerator sessions before the holiday break as part of our internal training curriculum. When considering which social media tools to deploy in a given campaign, there’s a tendency to focus on functionality and reach. And rightfully so, since those two variables largely determine traction. Still, there’s another useful …more
