commbasics

...if your content is crap it doesn't matter how much you spend on social media, unless people find your content amusing, useful or thought provoking, NO ONE WANTS TO READ IT! With all the negative feelings about Facebook in the marketing communications industry, I gotta say: Facebook has been doing great by me. The big meme blasting the social network recently has been the video purporting that if you pay to boost likes they are probably fake. Then came the fashion magazine magnate who spent tens of thousands of dollars on Facebook advertising and got zero return.  Finally, marketers are pissed that Facebook is downgrading organic feeds. The problem with all of these complaints is the fact that if your content is crap it doesn't matter how much you spend on social media, unless people find your content amusing, useful or thought provoking, NO ONE WANTS TO READ IT!  What marketers forget is, before all this failure of their social efforts, was an uprising of users who ...

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of discovering Jill Rowley, who is known by many people as a #socialselling guru.  Until I listened to her on the #FridayHangout (another weekly event I am growing addicted to) I had never heard of her.  By the time the 45-minute session was over I came to a new appreciation of smart people in sales.  There were many high points of the discussion, but when she said, “Sales people need to stop selling and start serving” their customers,” I actually stood up from my chair and shouted “YES!” while pumping my fist in the air. The bulk of the conversation was around the need of sales professionals to be communication hubs for customers, not just a person pushing a product.  This philosophy has made her an in-demand thought leader in new media and a very unpopular employee .  That’s to be expected especially since the more established a company is, the less likely they know how to communicate in the 21st Century. Jil...

I'm going to save you thousands of dollars on a common marketing practice. And you probably won't like what I have to tell you. I'm going to save you thousands of dollars on a common marketing practice. And you probably won't like what I have to tell you. If you are like most companies, especially young start ups, there comes a moment that you believe you need to let your customer base know about your latest business deal, technology breakthrough, or product update that is industry leading and the quote says your “CEO is pleased to announce it”. The only problem; you spent your entire marketing budget on a trade show booth and brochures, so you don't have the money to put on a real marketing program to reach your customer base. That's the moment that you decide to put out a press release. My 20 years of experience writing and distributing press releases tells me this is what you can expect: It will take weeks to get it ready to go, and you will spend 90 percent...

Five years ago I threw out a statement in a blog about how Facebook gets content, that caused a bit of a stir.  I said, “ Advertising doesn't work the way you think it does.”  No one commented on the focus of the post, just on that statement.  They didn’t like it.  They were mostly advertising people and a few B2B marketers .  A few things have happened in 2014 that makes me want to restate my position (not change it) and get a little deeper. Advertising does not work the way you think it does, especially in the 21st Century .   In the “Facebook Fraud” video, by Derek Muller of the science blog Veritasium, Muller makes the claim that pretty much all the business engagement you get from Facebook is bogus.  For the most part, he’s right because most people use Facebook as though it were a magic marketing box.  They believe that all they have to do is plug in pictures and content about their product and services and the world will be be...