By Linda Forrest
There’s an art to successfully pitching and writing effective contributed articles as part of a content marketing strategy for your business-to-business technology company. Why should this tactic be considered as a component of your marketing plan? There are many benefits that support the creation and placement of bylined articles, as outlined in a post on the Idea Marketers blog espousing their virtues:
This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from December 2010. We welcome your feedback.
By Linda Forrest
Customer service is an area of keen interest for us, as those who regularly read this blog will know.
It’s clear that the increased adoption of social media in recent years has had a tremendous, we think positive, impact on customer service. The fact is that online communications can act as a logical extension of effective customer service programs, but can also fail miserably if the organization doesn’t have a solid strategy in place as well as the systems to support that strategy, the people to run it and a commitment to ongoing success in this area.
Am I a customer service expert? No, but I am a life-long consumer, and an adept marketer of technology products and services. These two things combined give me a well-rounded perspective on how online communications, including social media, can be the lynchpin or the undoing of your reputation with customers, prospects and the industry in which you operate.
Let’s first examine the systems that drive your customer relations efforts.
By Linda Forrest
As a marketer and as a consumer of vast quantities of media, I couldn’t help but notice the surge in the use of infographics by my fellow marketers and the media in recent months. This has inspired quite a debate about whether the rise of the infographic signals the end of journalism as we know it.
What are infographics?
According to Wikipedia, “Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge.” In a recent Mashable article, “How marketers can get more from infographics,” the author, Laura Hampton, added the following worthwhile addendum to that definition:
…infographics can communicate just about anything, so long as it’s engaging, relevant and more compelling as an image than as pure text.
Infographics come in a variety of formats, too. Layout, orientation and styling are limited only by the creativity of the designer. We’re even starting to see the rise of “infomotion” — infographics with moving elements and interactivity that further engage the audience.
By Linda Forrest
To be an effective modern marketer, one must be an adept communicator. In the modern world, one where electronic communications are at the fore of our personal and professional lives, that includes a lot of written communication. With the rise of social media, users have many more opportunities to write, whether it’s in 140-character bursts on Twitter or lengthy missives on a blog. While some bemoan that the space constraints of text messages or Tweets are ruining the English language, and dooming younger generations to being unable to string words together in a cohesive fashion, others disagree; the jury remains out on the matter.
Given the increased frequency with which modern communicators must pick up their digital pens and turn out prose, how can they keep their proverbial saws sharp? To what resources can they turn to improve their vocabularies, and improve their writing abilities?
By Linda Forrest 
It can’t all be good news, sadly.
The trick is knowing how to share your bad news using PR so that you come out the other side of it as upright as you possibly can. It’s not just “spin” that needs to be considered here; trying to convince the marketplace of your silk purse when you’re clearly holding a sow’s ear does nobody any favours, but there are proven tactics that can be employed to dampen the impact of your bad news, whether its personal peccadillos of your executive team, bad sales figures, lost deals, lawsuits, or any other myriad pieces of information that your marketplace needs to know about, whether you really want them to or not.
