While virtual technology has progressed to become part of a larger strategy to engage audiences, I believe the holographic performance came closest to achieving the goal of this technology – seamless blending of “virtual and live” experiences.

Relevance

Coachella is a 3-day music festival known for its music – up and coming and legends, cutting and bleeding edge, folk/acoustic to rap and hip hop. Levering innovative technology to showcase a performance by a holographic Tupac was relevant to the nature of the festival and its audience.

It evoked an immediate response

Our industry is about evoking a response with our audience through engagement. Tupac’s performance not only evoked a response – initially shock that transitioned into elation, but also promoted conversation and engagement (between the festival and audience members and the general community) long after the festival concluded. That is the ultimate goal for our industry.

Blended well into the “live” aspect of the festival

The technology was used strategically as part of the festival’s penultimate performance that also included Snoop Dog, Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent. The temptation to do a whole set by Tupac or have him “walk through” the crowd must have been high. Rather, the festival featured Tupac for two songs – achieving the desired result while blending well into the overall nature of the festival. Any more could have negatively impacted the event.

1. Search Engine Optimization: I believe it was Jeramiah Owyang who said that search is your new website. If your website is not optimized to place highly on key search terms related to your business, then you are missing opportunities with your business. It’s important to understand what factors help or hinder your website and the key search terms for your company, products or services.

2. Content Marketing: Placing highly on search engines relies on strong content marketing strategy. This includes not only understanding your keywords, but also understanding your buyer personas and the questions they will ask during the purchasing process. If you’re able to create content that addresses their questions, then not only will your pages ranks highly, but also when they click through, it will be highly relevant.

3. Public Relations: Previously, PR was seen mainly as a way to increase brand awareness for a company, with minimal connections to how it truly impacted a business. With better tracking tools and the importance of online marketing, public relations is an integral element in driving SEO through quality links which promotes traffic to your website – both direct and indirect. It’s integral that marketers understand how to leverage PR and properly measure it as part of a larger marketing strategy and event marketing campaigns related to product launches, tradeshows, and more.

4. Social Media: When you look at the first three things above, then social media becomes an important avenue for distributing your content, driving SEO and increasing brand awareness. I think it’s also important to engage on the channels where influencers, customers, partners, and employees are engaging. This requires understanding where the conversations are happening. For example, new prospects may be asking questions on LinkedIn groups, influencers are on Twitter and customers are in dedicated online communities.

5. Pay-per-click programs: PPC programs are a science. While you may not implement them directly, it’s important to understand the concepts and how they can be leveraged for your overall programs. The goal is to find ways to be present when someone is searching on your company or products/services related to your company. It’s about filtering through all the noise that a person encounters online. An article, a tweet, a search result, a ppc ad. It all adds up and increases the success of your marketing efforts.

I’m curious to hear what other skills are must haves for today’s marketing.

Courtesy of Active Network via Flickr

In November 2011, I decided to leave my consulting business to join Active Network as director of marketing for the Business Solutions division.  It’s been a busy three months with a launch at the PCMA Convening Leaders conference and acquisition of StarCite, a leading strategic meetings management company. And as you know, my blogging has suffered as a result.

While my new position focuses more on the face-to-face events – attendee management, attendee engagement, SMM and more, I anticipate sharing more insights about the role of marketing, PR and social media. I will also continue to have a vested interest in seeing where event technology - virtual, digital and every iteration in between.

As I settle into my new position, I hope to return to a more regular blogging schedule.  Until then, PR meet Marketing, Marketing meet PR =)

And please note, everything on my blog is my own personal opinion and is not representative of my company’s.

by RambergMediaImages via Flickr

I subscribe to quite a few enewsletters and RSS feeds, so it’s always surprising to receive an enewsletter that I never subscribed to. How did they find my email? Then I recognize the “from” address and I realize, I gave someone in that company my business card in the past.

A business card is meant to develop a relationship between people, not a person and a company. However, the first tendency is to take all business cards back to the office, dump them into a sales database and automatically subscribe them to all the company emails. Come on, you know you’ve done it!

From my perspective, this is the quickest path to 1) decrease people’s interest to work with your company and 2) for future emails to be blocked. In the end, this is about permission marketing (as eloquently written by Seth Godin in the book with the same name). Here are my three tips to gaining permission and starting your marketing relationship on the right foot.

Always ask and say please

What did you parents teach you when you were growing up? Always ask and say please. This is no different with marketing. Instead of adding me to a an email newsletter and anonymously sending it to me, consider sending me a personalized note highlighting why I may be interested in your newsletter. My motto is, if you never ask, then you’ll never hear yes, right? So ask first and maybe you’ll be suprised how many will say yes instead of hitting the unsubscribe button.

Treat each business card as a first date

Treat each business card as a first date – you’re seeking to win me over to go on the next date and the next. To do this, you have to understand my likes, dislikes and unique habits that make me special. The same with business. A business card provides a wealth of information to determine what type of information the person may be most interested in. For example, a marketing person may want to optimize lead and demand generation programs while a sales person may want to increase closed sales opportunities. Though similar, the needs of each are different.

Don’t be desparate

Have you ever seen the movie Swingers? Remember the scene where the main character keeps on calling this woman he just met, leaving voicemail after voicemail until she finally tells him to stop. Believe it or not, this happens in marketing as well. While creating multiple “touchpoints” is good for generating awareness about your company, multiple phone calls and emails is not necessarily the right application of this strategy. The key is coordinating between sales and marketing to understand how often a person is being contacted and why. Otherwise, the person on the other line will just hang up.

Conclusion – Long-term relationships

If done well, permission marketing will allow you to develop a long-term relationship that delivers value not only to the customer but also to your company. While this begins with a “yes,” you must constantly maintain that permission by understanding the person’s business needs, likes and dislikes. In a way, it’s like marri

Please share you thoughts, expriences and comments below on holding/producing a virtual press conference.

In the PR Group on LinkedIn (must be a member to view the discussion), some asked, “How do you justify fees to clients in an era of social media?” I believe many PR and marketing consultants have faced this as potential clients believe that social media is “free.”

I think there are two parts to this equation that we need to consider before answering the question, assuming that we’ve done the background work of evaluating target audience, prospect personas, and the channels where these individuals congregate.

First, Defining Social Media Monitoring: This entails helping the client to listen, monitor and respond to what is happening on key channels of import to the client. For example, I rarely recommend B2B clients monitor Facebook while Twitter and LinkedIn are channels to consider. This can be done either through a service or establishing the right searches to encompass 75-80% of their universe.

Second, Positioning Social Media Marketing: This encompasses more than point 1 but looks at how social media fits into the larger marketing funnel for the company. It involves closely collaborating with your client and its marketing team to understand how social media fits into the sales cycle for the organization. Maybe a Twitter inquiry is at the beginning of the funnel while a LinkedIn discussion is at the purchase phase. This intelligence can be drawn from the organization’s existing lead generation programs – yet, you may discover an opportunity to help an organization refine or establish this process because of the focus to start a “social media” program.

I find that many prosepctive clients confuse social media monitoring with marketing. Yes, while the first point is “free” and can be done exclusively by the client, the second part provides the larger context of how social media fits into the marketing strategy. This is the value that consultants  - PR, marketing and/or social media – can provide to organizations. And I believe this is what will sell clients on social media programs.

What do you think? How have you sold social media within your organization?

Photo by Gregg Salomon

Finesse Your 30-Second Elevator Pitch

Let’s be frank, in today’s ADD world, it’s more like the 140 character pitch. The goal – can you succinctly describe what your company does and why should I (i.e. the venture capitalist, potential customer, or average joe schmo) care.

Tell a Story

Whether you’re selling cloud-based software or shoes online, take your 30-second elevator pitch and tell a story. Stories engage and enthrall your audience. Product specifications and features do not.

Create a Company Brand or Persona

To me, a brand is communicating a specific persona to the market place. Are you the know-it-all Uncle Joe, chatty Aunt Sue, or gentle Nana Betty? It’s a technique that marketers use to describe their different target audiences. Why not use it as a way to position the company within the marketplace? Personally, I’d rather relate to a person versus a “company entity.”

Develop a Tagline

This is something I read in Jeremiah Owyang’s blog regarding start-up companies at the Disrupt conference. Lacking the first three points, companies should craft a 4-6 word tag line. The tag line would at least provide a springboard to a larger discussion about your company and value proposition.

Empower Your Employees

In today’s world, a company is no longer represented by its founders but also by its employees. As such, communicate the key messages about your company to your employees and empower them to be your ambassadors.

Conclusion: Memorable is more than buzz

In the end, launching your company is more than creating short-term buzz via publicity stunts. It’s about telling a story with an engaging persona that people will remember weeks and months after the launch.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate for Freshbooks and Zoho.

Dropbox

My husband recently got me an iPad which I’m finding is a powerful and very portable when I want to work outside of the home. By installing Dropbox on my computer, I can easily work on the same documents from home or on the road. Best of all – 2 GB of storage is free. If you refer more friends, Dropbox will give you 250 mb of additional storage (max of 8 GB) for each new member. To get started now (hint hint), click on this link: http://db.tt/cfx24p0.

Freshbooks

One of the benefits of working in-house is not worrying about timesheets, invoicing and receivables. A friend pointed out Freshbooks, which is a nifty online billing system. The service is free for the first three clients with the ability to track time, assign tasks with different hourly rates, invite contractors to work with you on the same timesheet, invoicing system and reports for tracking accruals, revenue, expenses, etc. For those with 4-25 clients, the rate is $20/month and increases slightly from there.

Google Calendar and Documents

Besides Google mail, Google has some great productivity tools. Two that I use quite frequently are the calendar and documents. With Google calendar, I can manage different calendars on behalf my client (best for start ups that don’t have embedded calendaring systems), as well as share calendars for scheduling purposes. This comes in handy when I have to schedule a media interview or determine dates for a prospective speaking opportunity.

While I’m using Dropbox for my internal document sharing, Google Docs has become the preferred way to share collateral with clients. You can either share a single document to certain individuals or a folder (known as a collection). The promise is the ability to collaborate on a single document without sending the file back and forth via email.

Skype

Conference calls have never been so easy with Skype, a free online service for one-on-one or group video and voice calls. Skype is also supplanted Yahoo and AIM as my preferred way to instant message clients or connect with others. Previously, you could even screenshare with a group, but Skype recently relegated this feature to premium only. Despite this, nearly 75% of my calls now occur on Skype.

Zoho Projects

When launching a company or managing an upcoming event, managing the project carefully is key. With Zoho Projects, I found an online service that allows several individuals to create, track, and check off tasks. You can create lists with subgroup of tasks, such as marketing, website, and content development. In the short time I’ve been using it, it’s been indispensible for keeping everything on track or identifying missing items.

by jasleen_kaur via flickr

Social media has become increasingly popular for business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing. I recently did some research on social media by healthcare professionals and wanted to share some of the articles and stats I found in the form of Storify. There are interesting implications in how, as PR and marketing professionals, one would reach and engage with this audience. What are your experiences?

Fast forward several years – the rise of CNN, Internet and social media has systematically shrunk the response times for managing crisis. What used to take weeks and days, now requires real-time responses in hours, if not minutes. Otherwise, brands risk seemingly minor issues quickly running out of their control. Here are three tips for managing a crisis in an always-on, social media world.

Real-Time Monitoring and Listening

The first step is ensuring that you’re monitoring your brand online and listening to the conversations taking place. There are several services and tools available from comprehensive service providers like Radian 6 and Trackur or set up keyword searches on free tools like CoTweet, Tweetdeck or Google News alerts (Note: I use CoTweet and Tweetdeck).

In the case of Motrin (now a classic case study), the company launched a new ad campaign in 2009 over a weekend. The response by mothers was immediate and overwhelmingly negative. However, no team members were monitoring the online conversations around the campaign. By the following Monday, traditional print and broadcast media had picked up the story, forcing the company to retract the ads and issue an apology. Crisis Communications did a great write up at Motrin Mom- A Case Study

Real-time Responses

If you’re monitoring and listening to conversations online in real-time, then the next key is proactively responding to issues as they begin to bubble up. If the response is sincere and demonstrates sensitivity to the issue, then a brand can quickly win over initial naysayers and impact overall sentiment.

A great example is JetBlue’s response to customer issues back in February 2007. While this may be “dated,” it demonstrated the first time that a CEO of a major corporation used social media , in this case YouTube, to respond to a building crisis. The response was timely and from a credible executive. Moreover, by using an informal medium such as YouTube, JetBlue’s CEO seemed more sincere than if he had assembled a press conference and broadcasted a written response.

In terms of a recent example, Airbnb is currently dealing with a crisis after a customer took to her blog to complain about Airbnb’s lack of response to renters trashing the host’s apartment. While the company is now offering insurance to hosts as part of its response to ameliorate the issue, the damage has been done with more stories starting to trickle out about similar experiences and slow response rates by the company.

Empowered Social Media Representatives

Which leads me to my next point – JetBlue was successful because the top executive supported the need to use social media to address the crisis directly. But this may not be the case for each organization and situation. In today’s world, front-line employees, such as sales, service representatives, and customer service, directly reflect your brand and have an opportunity to identify and address bubbling crisis.

By empowering front-line employees as “social media representatives,” organizations have an opportunity to address issues in real-time while ensuring that responses and actions are consistent with your brand messages. Otherwise, you might have a parody song written about your brand as in the case of “United Breaks My Guitar”:

Conclusion: Active Participation and Engagement

While the above tips will help brands to react to prospective issues, brands should actively participate in and engage with its online community. This not only demonstrates your commitment to your customers, but also builds trust with your community through transparency and openness; which in turn creates a community of brand evangelists who will defend your brand in times of need.

And in a 24/7, always-on world, you never know when a crisis will arise. But by listening, monitoring, empowering, participating, and engaging, you’ll have more allies to defend your brand than ever.