commbasics

Companies large and small worry about online reviews, almost to a point of paranoia, without ever finding the value in them.  In today’s social world, the best review may be a bad one, depending on how you react to it.  Let me offer two bad examples and two good.  A winery owner was freaked out over bad reviews on Yelp and asked for our help in “getting rid of them.”  We did an analysis of the reviews and found that one of the 72 reviews was negative about the product of the winery and two were from a former business partner that went their way acrimoniously.  Most were glowing reports of the wines and, in particular, the unique collection of ports they produced.  Several were highly complementary of the facilities and and the services.  However, within the high praise for the product were multiple negative comments about the lackadaisical attitude of the staff and the public arguments between the owners of the business.  What was “killin...

"Super seller" Jill Rowley is a new professional hero for me. She recently posted the following in Facebook: Social selling approach does take more effort because you are not initially selling—you are adding value. You are showing that you have earned the right to sell by doing your homework. It's a great statement because she emphasizes that personal commitment to communication is the most important aspect of modern marketing and sales. It inspired me to come up with the following video lesson on what investment in communications looks like: Related articles Jill Rowley, social selling, and finding a kindred spirit Jill Rowley's Discovery of the Real Challenge of Social Selling: A Change of Culture

I've been involved in a discussion on Linkedin for the past week regarding finding affordable media directories and most of the discussion has been pitches from sales people at media directors and press release services.  Funny how that works.  Of course, none of the pitches actually answers the question asked.  Funny how that works, too. Here was the question: I'm interested to know if anyone can tell me of an inexpensive online media directory vs. Cision and others. I just need it for some circulation figures and a few other items. The questioner wasn't looking for  how to reach editors or produce content, or send out press releases.  She just wanted to get some circulation figures.  The answer, of course, is at the public library where you can find the information in several directories for free.  You can also sign-up for a free membership to BPA Worldwide  and do a search.  I'm actually surprised how many PR and...

Net neutrality by no longer be an issue  I’ve been following the debate regarding net neutrality for sometime and recently gave a talk to a group of small business people about how it could affect them directly.  But in the past few days I’ve become increasingly sanguine about it all.  From where I stand today, whether it is mandated by federal edict may be entirely unnecessary.    There are four reasons for this: It died long ago on the receiver end It’s almost dead on the transmission end Technological advances in compression make any difference in speed unobservable The Federal Clown College ( FCC ) has so little understanding of the issues they would screw it up even if they did it right. Let’s take a look at reason #1.  I buy the highest speed possible from Comcast because I need it for my business.  I do a lot of video work and I need the speed.  But I live and work in an area of my town where there are only a few Comcast customers...