It has been months since we have put a post on our blog. Not because we didn’t have anything to SHARE or celebrate as there is plenty of that, but rather because the demands of prioritizing as we continue to grow as a company – became our main focus.
As mentioned over the last year, I joined the millions of adults who faced the “unplanned” reality of a parent facing significant illness and the change to their lives and mine was monumental.
I think we all believe we can do it all and when reality hits you – sometimes we need to rethink “what doing it all means“. For me it has meant being the best daughter I could be first. Second it meant helping our clients understand, create and implement social/digital strategy and tactics to meet their business objectives and establish meaningful relationships with their customers.
Some may perceive this absence – to be a lack of savvy or klout for us as a business or a company. Others may have thought we dropped out of the game. Neither could be further from the truth! Marketing guru Scott Stratten often tweets on Twitter as @unmarketing - the idea that one is better to post nothing on a blog, then to post something that is not of value.
What is amazing about substance – is that we began this blog in November 2008. That was almost 4 years ago and right out of the gate I began writing about social media and digital strategy. At that time, all the clients I visited were curious to listen to what I had to say – but none of them were ready to take the chance and test it out. The information over that span of time shared on our blog and website is now relevant and used by many companies and businesses to meet their objectives and establish honest and true relationships with their customers. Funny, that it is now a mandate for all businesses to be engaging social media as a marketing strategy – for success!
From that perspective, the content, opinions, ideas and many examples from the many posts over an almost four year period are well worth the read! We encourage you to look back and see what we had to say then and see how that information matches up to your goals and needs now.
As the summer comes to a close – we look forward to once again becoming engaged and active by continuing to lead the way with ideas, opinions and new styles of engaging and encouraging you – to leverage social media and digital channels to meet your business objectives.
I have been writing for almost 4 years now about the power of social media. With Linkedin’s success on their IPO – shares closed at Thursday’s closing price of $94, it’s trading at 36 times its 2010 revenue; Google trades at five times.
This legitimizes the power and success of social media and re-enforces for all businesses – it is time to get into the game. It also points to many other big companies, Canada’s major retailer The Bay is rumored to be looking at an IPO for the fall. But how are these retailers leveraging the power of social media – as they step into the future in their marketing and continue to engage their customers? Read the rest of this entry »
Google Canada tweeted this week that there are 2 million business in Canada and 1 million of those businesses are not currently online. Many of the responses to those tweets resulted in how agencies like ours will be very busy – we all hope for that. But more importantly is providing businesses with an understanding of the power -on how to leverage the online tools that include social media, mobile, email, search, linking, video etc. – while not having to drop their current offline communications marketing practices -that these said business feel are successful. Total communications means using the offline marketing initiatives, print, pop, television, radio etc. as tools to leverage your online communications and vise versa. Bridging that gap because both worlds still matter. Read the rest of this entry »
It has been a couple of months since I have posted on our blog. The role of care giver to my father over the last year – has taught me that priorities change, time allows you to do only so much in one day and without your health nothing matters. As he is slowly recovering – I am going to try to get back to posting some of the amazing events this year has to showcase, in the warp speed world of digital tools and social media. I commend all of us out there – who are now adding the role of care giver to the list of tasks and priorities that shape how we live our lives.
Normally I post a link to articles that touch me or incite something that I wanted to talk about and share with our readers. For today I am going to post an article that I though was important as more businesses focus on how to market to women. Most of us are familiar with TED Talks. I have posted many of them on this blog over the last few yrs. Engage Boomers: Media Posts rss feed from today – had a beautiful article written by Stephen Riley who attended the most recent TED Talks. What got me was the line “What Boomer Women Look Like” and the subsequent overview of some of the world’s most powerful women and how they reflect accomplishment – not reflected as a targeted age group – but rather as women making a grand difference around the globe – and as Riley writes “creating goals with a purpose.” Read the rest of this entry »
The latter part of this year has been difficult to keep up with blog writing. As an ongoing care giver for my 90 yr. old father (yes no cane, wheel chair or walker and living by himself) – helping get him back to health – has turned out to be another small business to run! I am sure there are many of you out there that can relate and for me family is always first. As we get closer to our solution of having him get back to his life…I too will be able to focus on providing you with more regular posts of interesting and thought provoking ideas, opinions and happenings in the world of technology and social media.
Search in the world of technology is the main driver and source of revenue for all of us looking to build our visibility online. “As a marketing strategy, SEO is used to increase a site’s relevance. The SEO recognizes how search organics work and what people are searching for. It also initiates efforts to include unique content to a site to ensure that its content is easily indexed by search engine robots, making it more appealing to users.”
As this year winds down it is important to reflect and see what the past year’s successes, failures, tragedy’s and challenges were- in order to help plan and build enthusiasm, goals and growth for the year ahead. I came across this video via Google Zeitgeist 2010 that provides you with a great overview of the top searches in 2010 around the globe. Great way to get the juices flowing as we all plan to search on in 2011.
2010 in Review
Re-live top events and moments from 2010 from around the globe through search, images, and video.
This morning I attended an event hosted by IBM. The topic of the half day conference was The Future of Interactive Technologies. I decided to title today’s post as The Future of Interactive Technologies is NOW. Why? As I sat beside many businesses – both retailers and suppliers such as myself – many of these business on the retail side or B-C sector, are just starting to implement their social media strategy. For me the future is now. Every business needs to be involved in finding ways to engage and build their tribe/community – as so aptly written – by one of my marketing guru’s Seth Godin. There were some great stats about the trends of social media, the emergence and importance of mobile and of course the value and power that is now wielded by your customer. Over the last 3 years we have written about all of these topics. The power of the brand ambassador, the idea that they are talking about you whether you are there or not, understanding how your target market wants to communicate and then focusing on those digital tools to engage them and featuring businesses that have been doing social media right. Read the rest of this entry »
In the last month I have had several large potential and current clients come to us and say that they want to grow their email lists and need innovative ways to do that. With the comfort and now current use of social media – leveraging social media tools is a great way to do this. Social media tools allow for a more targeted, relevant and successful email campaign – that encourages the recipient to get involved and better yet SHARE! Read the rest of this entry »
As mobile continues to grow and more people are now using smartphones – the opportunity to leverage their multi-function applications for marketing of your brand products and services – has become increasingly important. As our world continues to be more connected with social media the ability to use your phone – as your roaming computer – has made information available to you instantly. I am sure you have seen or heard about QR codes. The black and white matrix embedded in a box shape. By using your camera to take a picture of the matrix – it allows you access to websites, images and text. Read the rest of this entry »
PR has been a priority for most major corporations whether they retain a team inside or hire an agency outside of the business. “According to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), public relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. …” In some cases PR specialists were some of the first to embrace social media, in other cases PR specialists have stuck to their more traditional means of fostering relationships with key media in respective areas of print, radio, television and used the news wires to distribute their press releases with follow-up to their ongoing contacts to whom they have formed relationships. Read the rest of this entry »
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