By Megan Totka
Missteps are increasingly becoming a part of the landscape for business social media. While unfortunate, those of us who run social media pages as businesses are still only human – and make human mistakes.
Some of these gaffes have more dire consequences than others. One of the most recent posts-gone-wrong was on the night of the first presidential debate. This particular post came from the KitchenAid brand and quickly became top business news. KitchenAid tweeted:
“Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president’. #nbcpolitics”
Many people found this tweet to be rather offensive. It was shocking, too, coming from such a neutral brand as KitchenAid. We don’t typically expect the company that manufactures stand mixers to have a particularly strong political view. This tweet was broadcast to about 24,000 of KitchenAid’s followers before it was deleted from the company page.
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Gabriel Weinberg, Mark Evans, David Crow, Amber Naslund, and James Carson.
Leaky bucket vs power law problems
Gabriel Weinberg offers a great analogy for the kinds of problems startups can face. Is your startup addressing a leaky bucket or a power law problem?
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are CIO, V3, Fast Company, MarketingWeek and Dave Fleet.
Big data analytics a big benefit for marketing departments
Today’s companies collect a lot of consumer data, but much of it sits on servers. Here’s how firms in a variety of sectors can mine that data and turn it into increased revenue (and how IT departments can help).
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Social Media Explorer, TopRank, Financial Post, Forrester, Forbes, Copyblogger, and Startup North.
How data hype is destroying your social media ROI
We are all looking for the latest nugget of data that will help us optimize our social media strategies for success. Every time we see a post with an infographic about the best time to tweet or what social networks our audience is using we get excited thinking it’s just the right information to help us take our social media strategy to the next level. That’s why you see so many status updates hyping the data because it’s finally the answer we’ve been looking for … or is it?
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By Leo Valiquette
A couple of weeks back, I expressed my firm belief about the portability of strong writing skills between disciplines, with particular reference to journalists who make the career transition into public relations or marketing. Here’s my promised followup on the importance of not forgetting your roots in the newsroom when it comes to writing copy and placing a story.
(DISCLAIMER: Everything I am about to say stems from the assumption that you are great at what you do. And, frankly, most writers are not, but that’s a subject for another time.)
Strong writing remains at the core of effective public relations and marketing activities and this has become even more apparent with the rise of content marketing. From the ubiquitous and often maligned media release, to blog posts ghost-written for CEOs and thought leadership articles placed with leading trade and industry press, the lessons learned as a journalist remain relevant. In addition to my points below, you might also want to read Alex’s post from a couple of months back, 5 tips content marketers should take from journalists.
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By Megan Totka 
