commbasics

If one company finally decides to go strategic, it will dominate not only their niche, but will be come the de facto thought leader. Publitek recently released its second annual report on “ Who’s winning the social media battle in the Semiconductor industry ,” with an expanded list of selected companies.  The good news is more companies are getting into the social media game with vigor.  Even better news is the amount of primary engagement (likes and follows) obliterates the belief that engineers don’t use social media with more than 30 million Facebook likes of posts in one month for the top five companies alone.  You could discount as much as half of that as bogus traffic from clip farms and even a significant number of corporate hacks boosting their numbers, but that means millions still are attributed to customers. The bad news of that last point is companies are still, by and large, ignoring that potential channel of conversation with the customer.  One comp...

Read a  great story in the SF Chronicle  today about a restaurant that has decided to go all guerrilla on Jerry Stoppleman, why are you smiling? Yelp by rewarding customers for giving bogus one-star (i.e. "bad") reviews.  It is working so well that they've received a threatening letter from Yelp about posting false reviews and "paying customers for reviews."   The latter is forbidden by Yelp and could result in them being removed from the system, which happens to be exactly what the restaurant wants.   This strategy could backfire on an unknown and less than popular restaurant, but this place is generally packed to the walls and has a loyal and vocal clientele and it demonstrates a potential path for getting out from under the Yelp umbrella.  It's also another indication that the review company is heading into serious problems. This could turn into a new version of the  Dell Hell story  that cost the computer m...

I’ve talked a lot about the lack of strategy in modern communications, primarily because, according to number of current studies, it seems that almost no one actually approaches it strategically.  It’s been a personal frustration in dealing with companies that say they want to go strategic but can’t seem to get there.  So I decided to start writing about strategy.  My first stop was to do a search for a definition of “strategic plan” and found this: “A strategic plan is a document used to communicate with the organization the organizations goals, the actions needed to achieve those goals and all of the other critical elements developed during the planning exercise.” I shook my head reading this and looked for something else, because this was the wrong approach, but I found that every definition said, essentially the same thing.  No wonder everyone seems to get it wrong.  Here’s where we need to change: First, we need to edit the first phrase to, “A strateg...

In the past, I’ve advised several business on how to deal with negative reviews on Yelp and the damage can be fixed with proper content and engagement, but based on what I’ve seen, I can’t advise any business to engage with them. Yelp ’s recent court victory is was the worst possible outcome for the company.  I’m not sure it’s going to survive.  (Wait! But they won!  How can that be bad?)  Glad you asked.  There were three potential outcomes for this trial.  The best outcome would be the judges finding that Yelp does not, in fact, alter reviews to favor advertisers.  But that didn’t happen.  The second best would have been a finding that they actually did and were guilty of extortion for advertising.  The worst possible outcome would be what was actually ruled: that there is nothing wrong giving advertisers an edge on the site.  The court said, tacitly, that it was pretty obvious that is what was happening but there is nothing...

What does this mean? With the DesignWest/EmbeddedSystems/EELive (or whatever it called this week) conference in decline along with all the other high-end, electronic focused conferences UBM sponsors, we can probably expect the publishing arms of the organization focused more and more on the consumer side of the business. Marketing and advertising budgets continue to shrink and large corporations are investing more of those srhinking budgets into being their own publishers. They aren't doing it very well, but they are investing in it. Yesterday I saw the announcement that UBM completed their annual reorganization and about three hours later got an email from Paul Miller that he was shown the door.   Miller was the CEO of the UBM Tech division that has been around for a couple of cycles at the ever-morphing British corporation, and has been a senior executive all the way back to the CMP days.  He survived several putsches and has been central in redefining the organizatio...

If your company does not have an active employee engagement program, you’re missing out on so much more than you realize. By Joe Basques Vice President, Footwasher Media Most managers we come in contact with on a daily basis tend to think they have a relatively happy workforce, but according to a recent survey 87% of global employees are not happy to come to work.  That’s almost 9 of 10! You may not want to believe it, but your employees don’t like coming to work. Llya Pozi, in a recent post to LinkedIn discussed some of the reasons workers give for hating their jobs.  I thought I’d list a few of them and add my insight on how to solve these problems. The old “grass is greener thinking” Social media has made it easier for people to share when things are going good at work, while most people who are not happy tend to keep it to themselves.  The unhappy ones see friends at other companies doing well and they get unhappier with their current job.  If your employees...