When is the right time for PR?

Don't hire a PR agency until you get your product and sales channel set, according to Sachin Agarwal of Oneforty.  That's sound advice.  PR is a marketing service, not a product development or market sizing discipline.  PR does it's best work when the go-to-market strategy is clearly understood and mapped out.

In developing a go-to-market strategy, ask yourself the following questions.  Are you going direct to customers or through intermediaries?  What channels are you using to connect to your customers?  What's your unique value proposition, and how are you delivering it to your target market?


Sachin's article can be found at Business Insider:

Avoiding Death by PowerPoint

One of the great things about my job is the chance to meet people from all walks of life. Mountain climbers, ministers, PhDs, students, engineers, fashion designers, biochemists and so on. My newest acquaintance is Omar Khan, who I "met" through his writings and videos at his consultancy, Sensei International.

Omar is a global leadership expert based in New York who has led leadership retreats all over the world. Omar, however, calls them leadership journeys, which are somewhere between the classroom and the outdoor adventure. The best of them involves a team that embarks on an actual journey that combines the hard data and analysis of the classroom with the excitement and buzz of a physical adventure.

Recently, Omar led a Fortune 500 management team to the wilds of Illinois and Wisconsin in a program designed in part by Ed Graziano and his team at Corporate Event Interactive. 

To learn more about leadership retreats, read the article I wrote for Ed and Omar that was just published in Illinois Meetings & Events magazine.  Here's a hint:  they don't use PowerPoint.

Twitter Etiquette

Here's a handy list of Twitter best practices that I use in designing social media programs for my clients.

Re-Tweet
It’s the equivalent of email forwarding. Your followers can benefit from the content, and others outside your network will want to learn who you are.

Grow Your Network
Follow people talking about your market, especially the experts, and they'll follow you back.

Respond to Messages
Click on your Twitter ID to see who's talking to or about you.

Avoid Direct Messages
It's OK to send some DMs once in a while, but a lot of spammers DM people all the time, so use these with caution.

Monitor Your Name, Brand and Keywords
Use the search feature to find out who's talking about you and your products.

Tweet Often (But Not Too Often)
Avoid constant Tweeting, which can be annoying. Three times a day works for most people. Monitor your followers and if you notice too many people are leaving you, you're probably tweeting too much (or your tweets are boring or not interesting).

Invite People to Follow You
Add a link to "Follow Me on Twitter" to your blog, website, business cards and email signature.

Contests, Content, Events and Specials
My four favorite kinds of content to tweet about are contests, events, content (article, videos, resources) and specials.

Share Other People's Content
Most people tweet about their own content. This is not a good idea. When you find stuff you like, tweet it.

Balance Following/Followers
If you follow a lot people and very few people follow you, you'll be seen as a spammer. If a lot of people follow you and you don't follow them back, it's not very nice of you. Use FlashTweet (http://flashtweet.com/) or FriendOrFollow (http://friendorfollow.com/) to balance your ratio.

Help Others
See what your followers need and try to give it to them. A lot of people use Twitter to ask questions; answer them.

Use Hash Tags with Caution
A hash tag is a keyword preceded by the pound sign. Used right, hash tags can be very beneficial, but if you use them to stuff your tweets with keywords, people won't like it.

Calling All Mentors

Call them the accidental mentors. They didn't sign up for the role. They simply took a minute and stepped outside their jobs as teacher or boss or minister to give advice that turned out to be memorable, and important. Some of the advice can stick for life, like this gem I got from an old boss:  "When you are responsible for judging your staff, get in the habit of saying something positive. If you do this nine times out of ten they will be listening, and hear you, the tenth time."

Today an e-mail arrived from a networking site called iHaspano.com that reminded me of the lingering importance mentors have played in my career. iHispano.com is launching its online mentorship program this month and they're looking for mentors from various industries nationwide. If you're looking to help either a student seeking career guidance or a professional looking to grow their career, sign up and become a mentor.

Details and registration can be found at http://www.ihispano.com/content/becoming-a-mentor-sign?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mentors

Twitter / Home

'Catcher in the Rye' author J.D. Salinger dies http://tinyurl.com/ybqz7x2

Word Maps

I've always liked maps and wordplay. Now I can integrate those interests at a cool website that let's you see words and their synonyms. It's called the Visual Thesaurus. Plug in your favorite word and see the 10 or so like words in an interactive map that shows how distant the words are in likeness. This tool lends itself to a bunch of communications exercises, such as brainstorming a new product name, identifying keywords for a website, and, at a stretch, maybe even stakeholder mapping.

Read. Write. Repeat.

One of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century, Herbert Simon, remarked that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Howard Slokin brought this insight to my attention in his recent post on LinkedIn. I couldn't have summed up the challenge of marketers better.