Social Media

After a grueling amount of research, writing, and editing, Online PR and Social Media for Experts, Authors, Consultants, and Speakers is now available. Check it out at www.OnlinePRSocialMedia.com. The book itself is 130 pages, and while it is aimed at “experts”, it is completely appropriate for those with expertise working within an organization, whether they [...]

Just about everybody has heard about Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube. Avid users talk about connecting with family, networking with past colleagues, and meeting new contacts. Social media sites allow this to happen, and much more. You can post photos, blogs, “status updates”, job history, family relationships, event listings, and just about anything you can [...]

With the change in seasons, the venues for networking may change, but not the fundamentals. Consider these five key networking concepts; are you doing them all? 1) Give to Get: Add value to your network by sending magazine clippings, web links, or other materials to them, without asking for anything in return. This concept – [...]

There are no shortage of discussions about Twitter, which is ironic, as each “Tweet” is at most 140 characters, the length of this sentence. Yet most people wonder how – and even why – this so-called phenomenon is being used. Is there an ROI?  Who has the time? (another 140 characters) If you are just [...]

Can you ever have too many friends? In real life, the answer is no, but when we’re talking about social media, the answer is definitively yes. If you have been collecting so-called friends, contacts, connections, and followers online, then you probably notice that some are more valuable than others. Others have very little value at [...]

Social Media is all around us: from blogs to Twitter, from discussion forums to Flickr to Facebook. Yet how do we decide how much time and energy to spend on each of these? Consider the following Seven Steps to Social Media Engagement – each person moves up the hierarchy, step-by-step. Of course, marketers and social [...]

Have you committed to writing a blog, only to find that you don’t quite write as often (or as well) as you’d like to? Or have you decided to use Twitter, only to find that you never really have much to say – let alone time to say it? If so, then you’re not alone. [...]

In an army, every person has a role. The foot soldier is on the front line. The general sets the strategy. But how does the general know what’s happening, beyond the front lines? And similarly, how do senior managers understand the impact – and the opportunity – of Social Media? Like the army general, senior [...]

Go for Gold! There have been miles of newsprint written on the Olympics, the athletes, their training, and their gold medals. To achieve their success, the athletes worked hard – very hard – for years. They sacrificed years of their life, they had to forgo many “normal” growing-up activities, and they often had to make [...]

There is so much written about what TO do with Social Media, there is so little written about what NOT to do. More than any other medium – telephone, written letters, email – Social Media is incredibly risky. Whatever you write can be broadcast worldwide, is archived forever, and can have an impact well beyond [...]

What happens when you are stumped? In the “olden days” of just 3-4 years ago, you would apply time to the problem, researching different alternatives until you had a viable solution. If you were more clever, you’d reach out to your network – working the phone and email until you found someone who could help. [...]

How much do you like advertising? If you’re like most, the answer is somewhere between very little and not at all. This isn’t surprising, since most advertising is not meant specifically for you, and is designed to be loud enough to cut through all of the noise generated by other (irrelevant) ads. Yet, as individuals, [...]

We’ve all heard the horror stories of people whose identities have been stolen. Their bank accounts are wiped out, credit cards maxed out, and they feel terribly violated. Then after the “theft” has been discovered, they are faced with the hassle of rebuilding their financial reputation, one step at a time. Too often, these people [...]

Each day, we are bombarded with information in advertising, news reports, emails, websites, TV, magazines, and social media. We take this in, process it, and then figure out what it means. Some of it we act on, creating more information for others, and some of it we file away for future “reference”. Without question, we [...]