Peter Shankman, founder of HARO (Help a Reporter Out), a service that links bloggers, journalists, and content producers (video, audio, digital, print) with expert sources, has said, “Don’t hire a social media expert. It’s like a deli hiring someone who’s an expert in taking the bread out of the freezer. Unless they can also make a […]
Email Evolution: New Trends in a Proven Marketing Communications Channel
By Deb McAlister-Holland For nearly 3 decades, I’ve had an email marketing campaign of some kind running every business day. Yes, there was email 30 years ago. In fact, email is 40 years old. Back when I sent my first few campaigns, there wasn’t a lot of commercial email being sent. I worked for a […]
Why Distributed Marketing Needs Naked Conversations
Technology industry journalist Tom Foremski wrote recently that social media is not corporate media, and that the current gold rush among consultants and social media experts who are exhorting corporate marketers to turn social media into a powerful sales channel will ruin social media. The trend, he said, is inevitable and sad because as the […]
Friday Roundup: Twits Ruin Social
Twits Can Ruin a Social Media Strategy– A campaign advisor to Senator Scott Brown and presidential candidate Mitt Romney stirred up a media firestorm for his bosses when he created a twitter account using the name @crazykhazei to make fun of Alan Khazei, who is running against Brown for the Massachusetts Senate seat that Brown now […]
What to Do When Customer Service Meets Social Media: 5 Basic Lessons
In June 1984, the first online customer support forum for computer users sponsored by a computer maker opened its virtual doors on CompuServe on a Tuesday morning. Around noon on Thursday, the volume of inquiries was running about five times what the company planners had projected, and by the end of the day on Friday, […]
Defining Measurable Value for Multi-Channel Marketing Automation
Guest Blog By David Potter, Vice President, Professional Services, Distribion, Inc. One of the basic assumptions this blog makes is that its readers are marketers who are interested in improving their multi-channel marketing results through almost any means possible. Another is that there is a place for technology in almost any distributed marketing organization – […]
Friday News Round-up: Tweet Success, Made-to-Order Marketing
Tweet Success = Right Tweet, Right Time – Social Media Today posted an excellent blog post this week on the best post times for various kinds of social media. The blog said that posting to Twitter at noon, 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. midweek and on weekends was optimal. For Facebook, Saturday morning is the […]
New Multi-Channel Marketing Priorities
In July, The Distributed Marketing Blog completed its first survey of marketing executives. We asked about their current spending priorities, spending plans for 2012, their view of how effective various marketing channels were, and how they selected different marketing communications tools. So far, we’ve published three sets of data tables that detailed some of the […]
Marketers Rank Email #1 in Effectiveness
Multi-channel marketing means delivering the right message, to the right audience, at the right time, through the right communications channel. All without blowing the budget. So how do marketers rate marketing channels when it comes to effectiveness? According to 95% of the CMO’s* who responded to The Distributed Marketing Blog’s survey in July, 2011, email is […]
Friday News Round-Up: Size Doesn’t Matter in Marketing, Facebook Takes on Telcos
Here’s this week’s round-up of “must read” news stories for marketers. What makes these stories stand out? They offer key information or lessons that multi-channel distributed marketing organizations should take to heart. Facebook Launches SMS Service — This week, Facebook launched Facebook Messenger, a free app that lets users access Facebook messages from their phone without installing […]
Keeping Up with Social Media As It Evolves, Changes
Social media is evolving, changing, and growing every day. Even seasoned marketers who’ve been involved in social and digital marketing since the beginning have trouble keeping up with the fast pace and new opportunities it presents. That’s why webcasts like the presentation from Distribion, LIMRA, and Socialware are important, regardless of how successful your current social […]
Why, Who, What, Where, When: Social Media’s 5W’s
On Wednesday, the editor of this blog (Deb McAlister-Holland), will be moderating a webcast that features Christie Campbell of Socialware, and Steve Selby of LIMRA. It’s the second in a series of monthly webinars sponsored by the three organizations. Details and registration information is available here. Anyone who’s studied journalism or business is likely to […]