By Hailley Griffis
Every Friday, we round up some of the best articles we’ve come across in the past week and share them with our readers. Front and centre this time around are Marketing Tech Blog, TopRank, CopyBlogger and Business2Community.
Expectations on your marketing investment
Douglas Karr, President and CEO of DK New Media, goes over the importance of understanding where your marketing dollars are going, and how to optimize that. He compares outbound, advertising and inbound marketing, concluding that for a lot of people, inbound marketing is one of the best investments if you have the right resources and strategy.
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By Leo Valiquette
I remember as a boy the time one of my uncle’s chickens laid an egg shaped like a squat bowling pin. It was quite the thing — it got him a picture and a cutline in the local paper. My mother still has that worn and yellowed clipping in a photo album.
Of course, the question is whether that one-off bit of media attention would have brought new business to the door if my uncle had been a commercial egg farmer trying to grow his market share. There is seldom a downside when serendipitous events entice the media to come knocking with little or no effort on your part. But when you are undertaking a formal PR program that requires an investment of resources, time and money, a stack of media clippings are of little value if they didn’t put your story in front of an audience with the potential to grow your business.
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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 July 2011. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
At the time my PR agency,inmedia Public Relations, was founded, I worked out of a large integrated agency in the city and some of the account executives there loved to push my buttons by declaring that media relations was free advertising. They especially liked to do this in client meetings because they knew it would prompt me to mount a fevered defence of the merits of PR and all the ways in which it differed from advertising.
I knew they were only kidding. I knew they really knew better. I knew it was all a bit of harmless fun.
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By Leo Valiquette
During my years as a full-time journo, I crossed paths with many a startup technology venture that claimed to be operating in so-called stealth mode. It was the early 2000s, before the process of getting technology to market was as socially enabled as it is now, and startup CEOs seemed to consider it hip and trendy to apply the S word to their businesses.
Where, I wonder, are many of those startups now?
We wrote many moons ago about the inherent foolishness of trying to build a business by somehow staying under the radar. You can’t define a market need, develop a product to meet that need, secure the funding necessary for operations or build the team that can pull it all off without telling the world who you are and what you are trying to do.
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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 July 2008. We welcome your feedback.
By Leo Valiquette
In my years as a journalist I endured my fair share of embarrassing gaffes, both my own and those of my staff (which I was often on the hook to explain, apologize for and redress.)
Despite the emphasis on clean, factual and reliable content, the occasional mistake is made in the newspaper business. Nobody’s perfect and the strain of rushing to meet a deadline can easily lead one to skip out on taking the time to check the facts through a second time.
Of course, it’s difficult to feel all that sympathetic about the plight of harried reporters when it’s your good name that’s attached to the error. Maybe they called your CEO Rob when his name is Rod. Or said your flagship product is still in trials when it has been commercially available for six months. There are the little things that don’t matter so much, such as whether your company was founded in 1989 or 1990, or the big whammies that can land you in a lawsuit — like that defamatory off-the-cuff remark that was never intended to be on the record.
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