By Leo Valiquette
Last week I talked about how any media coverage can be good media coverage if it provides an opportunity to establish rapport with a journalist.
Of course, this statement comes with a big fat caveat – it’s only true if said journalist is not on a witch hunt and sizing up you or your organization for a stake and a pyre. But if you have bad news to share, or find yourself embroiled in some kind of juicy scandal, then what you need is a program for crisis communications. That’s a different beast and not my focus here.
Instead, let’s look at how you can go about getting the media’s attention when journalists don’t have an obvious reason to come to your door or don’t know your story well enough to understand why they should.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
As companies increasingly opt to bypass the traditional press in favour of content marketing, journalists are being increasingly sought after to tell company stories, communicate with their audiences, and deliver information that is valuable to their marketplaces.
Journalists are known to employ a number of practices to share news and other information with their audiences so that it is persuasive, easily understood and remembered. They tell balanced, well-researched, newsworthy and engaging stories to win the hearts and minds of the masses. Companies are beginning to realize that this style of communication works extraordinarily well for inbound marketing. The content marketing bar is rising as more journalists are hired to these positions and those marketers without journalism backgrounds are now obligated to learn and apply journalism best practices to improve their content marketing activities.
Here are a handful of best practices that I learned during my journalism years that I use to carry out content marketing activities for our agency and its clients:
Read More
By Denzil Doyle
Productivity is a topic that attracts a great deal of attention at both the federal and provincial levels of government in Canada. Most observers paint a grim picture of Canadian productivity across all sectors.
A recent entrant to the debate is Donald Drummond who authored an article in the June 26 issue of the National Post which carried the ominous heading, No more excuses for business. Mr. Drummond is described as “one of Canada’s foremost authorities on economics and an avid contributor to and commentator on Canadian fiscal and public policy.” He is obviously someone we should listen to on a topic of such importance.
I scanned his article carefully to see if it elevated the debate beyond the quagmire in which it has been trapped in recent years. Unfortunately, it did not. Like the others, it leaves one with the impression that Canadians must run a little faster on the treadmill and apply more technology in our manufacturing sector if we are going to close the alleged productivity gap that exists between us and our major trading partners, the U.S. in particular.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
As usual, we covered a lot of ground last month on our blog. We talked about social media, customer service, content marketing, trademarks for small businesses, neuromarketing, the trials of RIM, government funding for startups and what they have to get right to go global. In case you missed any of our posts, here’s a handy roundup:
July 9: Trademarks for small businesses in little towns
July 23: What technology firms must get right to internationalize quickly
July 25: Have the feds finally found the right way to back winners?
July 30: The pitch from a neuromarketing perspective
And on a related note…
In addition to our series, our associates and guest bloggers were also busy writing on a great range of topics. Here are our other posts from July, as ranked by the enthusiasm of our readers:
July 26: Hard-cabled for success
July 31: A nice little story about the value of storytelling in content marketing
July 16: The best time to start a business
July 17: 5 qualities of a great ghostwriter
July 24: Throttled by those five ubiquitous rings
July 10: 7 reasons why people hate your B2B business blog
July 11: Your audience will judge you by your cover
July 3: The top 10 truths of social media
July 18: Where is Ottawa’s International Startup Festival?
July 12: Managing perceptions and product at RIM like Apple did
July 19: Why I like customer advisory boards
July 5: The price of everything, the value of nothing and customer service
Image: Cynthia Frenette
By Francis Moran
An article in The Verge this week posited the not uncommon suggestion that as goes RIM, so go the fortunes of its home town, Waterloo. Now, I’ve been travelling down to Waterloo every couple of months for the past four or five years, and we’ve written a heck of a lot here about what’s going on in the tech scene there. And I just don’t see any circumstance wherein that town needs to throw itself on any RIM funeral pyre. (And, for the record, I’m a long way from believing that RIM’s demise is in any way yet predestined.)
Read More
-
Any press is not always good press, but it may pay dividends down the road
August 01, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
Business and trade press journalists regularly find themselves in the position of needing owners or executives who are willing to talk about specific issues in their industries and how their businesses have dealt with them. For a PR practitioner it’s the classic dilemma […]
Read more... -
A nice little story about the value of storytelling in content marketing
July 31, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
I’ve been volunteering at Big Brothers Big Sisters Ottawa for about a year now, running the child and youth mentoring organization’s online accounts and helping with its blog. As a non-profit, its budget for marketing activities is tight and so it relies greatly on word […]
Read more... -
-
The pitch from a neuromarketing perspective
July 30, 2012 by Bob Bailly
In the July 13 post on Francis Moran and Associates blog’s Great Articles Roundup, this excerpt was referenced and it caught my eye: The startup pitch in the corporate context […]
Read more... -
Great articles roundup: Advocate armies, controversy, susceptibility, social media, startup ideas, and an Innovation Map
July 27, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Marketo, NextGen Journal, ReadWriteWeb, B2B Bliss, Ventureburn, and Montreal Tech Watch […]
Read more... -
-
Hard-cabled for success
July 26, 2012 by Jeff Campbell
I recently had a very refreshing day in terms of strategic marketing. I spent several hours with two entrepreneurs in Toronto who are building a great business. It is the way they are going about building the business that is so refreshing to me. It is a well-focused […]
Read more... -
Have the feds finally found the right way to back winners?
July 25, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
Government, particularly Canada’s federal government, isn’t known for being a bold early adopter of new technology and certainly not an entity eager to play the role of guinea pig […]
Read more... -
-
Throttled by those five ubiquitous rings
July 24, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
The International Olympic Committee is launching a host of programs with the goal of making the 2012 London Games the “most social and tech-savvy Olympics ever,” but restrictive social media guidelines reveal the organization’s inability to move beyond its old […]
Read more... -
What technology firms must get right to internationalize quickly
July 23, 2012 by Tony Bailetti
Conventional approaches call for a technology startup to gradually internationalize from local to home continent markets before entering the global market. Unfortunately, these conventional phased approaches take too long, cost too much, increase […]
Read more... -
By Leo Valiquette
Twitter
Tweets by @FrancisMoranRecent Comments
The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]