Business Cards Do Not Equal Permission

A business card is meant to develop a relationship between people, not a person and a company. However, the first tendency is to take all business cards back to the office, dump them into a sales database and automatically subscribe them to all the company emails. Come on, you know you’ve done it!

From my perspective, this is the quickest path to 1) decrease people’s interest to work with your company and 2) for future emails to be blocked. In the end, this is about permission marketing (as eloquently written by Seth Godin in the book with the same name). Here are my three tips to gaining permission and starting your marketing relationship on the right foot.

Ten Tips for Virtual Press Conferences

On my other blog, The Virtual Buzz, I wrote a blog post regarding 10 Tips for a Successful Virtual Press Conference. With web conferencing, webcasting, live streaming and virtual event technology, I believe it’s important that PR and marketing practitioners understand how to hold online press conferences.

Please share you thoughts, expriences and comments below on holding/producing a virtual press conference.

Selling Social Media to Your Organization

In the PR Group on LinkedIn (must be a member to view the discussion), some asked, “How do you justify fees to clients in an era of social media?” I believe many PR and marketing consultants have faced this as potential clients believe that social media is “free.”

I think there are two parts to this equation that we need to consider before answering the question, assuming that we’ve done the background work of evaluating target audience, prospect personas, and the channels where these individuals congregate.

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Five Tips for Launching a Memorable Start-Up Company

So you’re launching your company in a few weeks. You’re focused on getting the product to work. If you’re one of the lucky ones who was selected to launch and can afford to go to DEMO or Disrupt, you want to make sure that nothing fails. But whether or not it’s debuting at a conference or getting noticed, there are several things that start-up companies can do to prep for a successful launch.
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My Top Five Free Online Productivity Tools

I’ve been a consultant for just over a year now. When I first started, I didn’t realize the tools I would need to help manage my clients, invoicing, billing and more. I wouldn’t be able to manage my business this smoothly without some of the free tools I’ve discovered online. Here are my five favorite free online productivity tools. Try saying that 10 times in a row!

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Social Media for Health Care Professionals

Social media has become increasingly popular for business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing. I recently did some research on social media by healthcare professionals and wanted to share some of the articles and stats I found in the form of Storify. There are interesting implications in how, as PR and marketing professionals, one would reach and engage with this audience. What are your experiences?

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Get to Know Your Reporter Better – Three Tips

Media databases, such as Vocus and Cision, are great resources for finding reporters and bloggers who cover specific industries and topics. These databases helped augment the day-to-day research that practitioners did to identify, research and verify the best reporter for that particular news story or company.

While these databases have tremendous amount of information, not all of it is accurate or up-to-date. And this is where the problem begins. For companies and practitioners who rely solely on these resources, they cease to be “pr practitioners” and risk becoming “email spammers” as the pitches will be irrelevant and unwanted. Or much worse, being blacklisted by the very reporters they are seeking to reach.

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