At an e-commerce conference recently, I was speaking with an online marketing director for a mid-sized retailer. They are purely online (no brick-and-mortar presence,) and I was surprised to hear him refer to social media as being on the way down. He seemed convinced that, by the end of the year, there would [...]

If you are blogging for business, blog promotion has to tie back in to the overall sales and marketing strategy of your company. I see mistakes all the time where, essentially, the business blog becomes a news feed. Your customers, or potential customers, need to see value in your blog and there is [...]

A colleague once told me his theory on aggressive PR as what he called, “Poking the bear.” He felt that some companies were well position to take an aggressive approach to their competition and could be very successful with this strategy, while others would essentially be poking the bear - causing the bear to [...]

Myspace finally decided to break their design, in a move that is sure to make a huge improvement and likely lead to an increase in adoption from people still on the fringe. Why is this relevant to businesses? Good question. Myspace finally getting around to doing a redesign means they could reach [...]

Joining social networks or other types of social media sites doesn’t mean you will automagically start getting valuable web traffic and possibly new customers. Like television advertising and radio advertising, there is a science to good messaging and finding the right audience (does anyone still advertise on the radio?) Since Twitter doesn’t allow [...]

I recently met with a PR firm about deploying a social media campaign and helping them build some processes for clients around social media deployment. Naturally, one of the topics that came up was search engine visibility. Specifically how to make sure their clients sites were able to capitalize on the additional traffic [...]

It’s easy to lump RSS into the blog category, as another way to have people interact with your blog. Subscribers are valuable, and signing subscribers to your RSS feed is important. But here at Internet Retailer Conference 2008 I witnessed a speaker tout the wonderful benefits of Web 2.0 technologies for e-commerce retailers [...]

Lost in the excitement over the announcement of the new, 3G iPhone at the Apple WWDC yesterday was a big announcement from TypePad about their native iPhone blogging application. For you corporate or business related bloggers, this was probably no big deal - you are not likely to be using TypePad. But it [...]

There are different schools of thought on podcasting - some say podcasting IS the marketing, and other argue that podcasts are only tools to help promote other things (whitepapers and case studies, branding, or product marketing for example.) Regardless of which side of the fence your on, these steps will improve your podcasts immediately [...]