While browsing through my LinkedIn account, I just noticed this question about apps that allow you to schedule tweets. Some of the answers stated no one should ever schedule tweets, as it is spammy. Automation is bad, don’t do it. And I started wondering. Is it really spam? Or is it just a way to make work easier and give your followers a break? And the answer is, like always, it depends

I should first say I manage a few Twitter accounts. On some I schedule tweets, on others I don’t. On those who are there to provide news on a certain topic, I do schedule tweets. I usually find the news all at once and just sending them all out at ones is actually more spammy to some users than scheduling them throughout the day. That does not mean I ignore the conversation. I check the stream every couple of hours, check what others are saying, retweet, reply, thank people for their comments and retweets.

When it comes to blog post, a lot of what I write is scheduled. And when I set the publishing time and date, I also set the tweet. Basically because I tend to get caught up and I might forget. I do check it, I do interact, as I said before. And I really don’t think programming tweets is a form of spam.

When all your tweets are programmed and you are never there to talk, reply or answer questions, it is definitely spam. You are there to broadcast more or less forcefully whatever you please and you really don’t care what your followers have to say. But from that to saying any form of automation and of rendering your work fast and effective is spam is a long road to be traveled.

What bout you? Do you schedule tweets? Do you think it’s spam when others do it? Should we ban all automation, good or bad from social media? I say not, yet it all needs to be approached with great care. And over to you…

RSS might very well be one of the most overlooked technologies out there. We all use it, to read, to get content on different pages, to promote our content and our influence, but we rarely talk about it, there are a handful of articles on strategies, best practices and the likes. But there are special plugins to enhance your feed, there is RSS feed advertising, there are buttons showing RSS readers numbers. So here’s the paradox: if the technology is actually important, why do we fail to talk about it?

As it happens to some technologies, they are extremely useful, but lack a certain coolness factor, so we ignore them. We use them, we appreciate their value, but they are almost nonexistent in what we say, write or recommend. And then a comment someone makes that they have subscribed to an RSS feed reminds us that we depend on it!

For example, the RSS technology powers the following for me:

• my blogs’ feeds, which makes them easier to keep up with for my readers
• my reading list – blogs, online magazines, you name it, I have subscribed and I check their feed daily. I only go on their website to comment, tweet the article if I find it relevant for those following me or download something if needed,
• promote content – my blog feed is on my LinkedIn page, Facebook page and a bunch of other profiles I have created all over the internet. The RSS delivered version of what I publish here is definitely a more powerful hook than a simple link.

We claim it’s dead, we say it’s not earth-shaking, but how would our lives be without RSS? Wouldn’t we still need a tool to help us keep up with everything that’s published in our field, wouldn’t we need some way to plug in to our blog content from other pages? I know for sure I wouldn’t be able to create new notes for all my posts, I’d forget a few time, and would stop sharing on Facebook. I know I would probably bookmark the several hundreds of blogs I currently read, but would fail miserably at reading them each time they publish something.

How about you? What do you use RSS for? Would you miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? And most importantly, why do you think we’d ignore what’s clearly useful technology just because it’s not as cool or as trendy as others, sometimes less useful, newcomers?

The past couple of weeks have brought in quite a few articles and blog posts about driving traffic as the new leverage of PR professionals. Pitch the story and have the traffic to back your pitch. But is this practice really new? Haven’t PR professionals already been driving traffic to online stories? I know I have and I doubt I’m the only one.

What stories do we drive traffic to? Well, almost anything showing up online.

Product/service reviews – all independent reviews, neutral and positive, are a gold mine for PR and Marketing pros. They are seen as objective points of view by customers and the bigger the publication, the more valuable the endorsement. Reviews are usually posted in a special website section, added to newsletters, used as literature to close new deals, twittered and blogged.

Interviews, press release coverage, other articles – these are also sent out to partners and customers. They are a great way to support the company’s image and the team’s values, and their being made public through media coverage gives them more credibility. If CEOs are interviewed and also have twitter streams or blogs, they will be advised to mention them and link to them. If not, the corporate blog will do. There are also media sections on most business sites linking to all these stories.

Blog reviews – these are sometimes promoted as much or even more than the magazine/newspaper reviews for a simple reason: they are personal. They are sometimes more vivid and describe a real life experience, sometimes with much detail, less focused on steps and stages than those written by journalists who have done dozens of reviews in the past month alone.

The reasons to drive traffic to all stories published online is simple: it helps build trust, it helps position products and services in a certain way, it boosts your partners’ efforts to promote your offers as they are definitely reliable and well received by the media (and they surely see a possibility for local media to cover their company’s stories if their valued partner is such a hyped up topic). Other than that, all interviews make the company representatives identifiable and thus make the business look human. It’s no longer a faceless entity; there are people all customers can approach, even if only in theory.

As I said before, this is definitely nothing new. Some of us have been doing this for a while. But I doubt we have properly used it when reaching out to journalists. Saying something like “publish my story and I’ll get hundreds of readers who are genuinely interested in the topic for it” sounds a bit like forcing their hand. Yet is it so? If the product is no good, if the story isn’t interesting, they won’t bother. But if they incline to publish it, the idea of incoming traffic might just suddenly make the story more important. The more words they publish, the more chances it would be an important enough coverage for the PR professional to promote it.

It sounds devious. But is it? Journalists and bloggers alike already publish stories based on what they can bring to their websites. Would the story interest readers, would it bring new ones? They have a clear picture of what there is for them to gain from each story they run. They are not in the business of making anyone favors. The bigger your brand, the bigger the coverage, even for lousy stories (and I can give you a few examples if you’d like), just because readers are interested in such brands, not to make said big corporations happy. So why not finally admit what a company can do for a certain medium, old or new, is important? Why not be open about it and state you, as a PR professional, can and will drive traffic to a published story?

It’s not slang, it’s not cute, it’s just bad grammar. Slang does not mean you are entitled to behave as if grammar never existed, there are some mistakes native speakers will never make, no matter how much slang they add to their songs. Please, pretty please, when you decide to write songs in foreign languages, get someone to proofread them for you. Those singing won’t look good. Frankly, the result is just the opposite, it makes them look bad.

Now, repeat after me “Listen….to”, ” Listen….to” not just “Listen”. It’s “I never listen to what they say”, please don’t take out the “to”. Oh, and it’s “has come” not “has came”. And if you’re singing about a boy, please call him “moreno”, not “morena”. Unless he’s a girl who used to be a boy. Or she’s a boy who used to be a girl!

I know English songs are trendy. I know adding a little bit of Spanish spice is also cool. But handle with care, it will make those singing your lyrics look better. Don’t help them damage their brand. They are perfectly able to do so themselves. I know, I’ve heard some interviews on the radio that have made me laugh so hard I could barely drive.

There’s been so much virtual ink spilled on building relationships on social media sites that one needs to be blind not to run across one article giving a few tips on the matter. Yet some still try their own obnoxious techniques that don’t work anyway.

One trend that I’ve recently notices and got an “oh, really?” from me was the following: add a friend, wait a bit for them to follow back and if they don’t, send them a message saying you’ll unfriend them if you’re unwilling to return the favor. Now how does that threat work? Simply put, it doesn’t.

The reason to friend or follow anyone is that you somehow find them interesting enough. If you want to get their attention, start a conversation with them, ask the right questions to get their attention and make them feel valued and interesting. They then might return the favor.

But if you act like and impatient, self-absorbed nuisance,  they will at best ignore you. Or choose to block you all together or report you. Why risk that when you can spend 5 minutes forgetting about what you want and think of what other people need. They will definitely respond in a much more pleasant manner than they would in the case of virtual blackmail!

Do you really listen to those around you? Family, friends, employers, employees, clients, acquaintances, bartenders, would you say you actually know how to and can really listen to them? I’d say that theoretically, a lot of us know how to. Everyone who had a few college classes talking about active listening, please raise your hand now! But I think we phase out our knowledge, the very same way as we tune out commercials, product placements in movies, people we’re not interested in, things that bother us. And I also believe we sometimes overlook and downright forget the benefits of opening our mind and souls to those around us by listening.

It took reading a great book, Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Dr. Mark Goulston – to remember the benefits of listening, the techniques and the investment it takes to make it all work. I know what some of you would say! All shrinks think they know how to listen and help you, but what does it have to do with business? I for one know for sure you can pretty much find valid business advice almost anywhere, so a psychiatrist that gets hired by businesses to get them to work better sounds like a sweet deal to me.

Just Listen has got it all, explanations, how it all works scenarios, tips, tricks and you can take it all, learn it and apply it in both your business and your personal life. Reading the book will make you a more effective listener, that meaning you’d also be a more effective communicator, problem solver and basically you’ll lead a happier life. As an added benefit, it will also help you rid yourself of all the toxic people in your life.

What most captured me while reading this book was the wide range of applicability in business: sales, negotiations, motivating employees, getting through to unresponsive clients, getting audiences on your side, getting noticed by powerful people or by the trend setters in your field, it all can be eased into by listening first and then knowing what and when to say it. Because you see, knowing how to listen is one thing, knowing what response would be best at a certain time, that’s something else and mixing the two skills can be a little tricky.

Dr. Goulston is great at explaining why things happen in a certain way in a language that’s easy to relate to for those of us lacking proper medical training (and who weren’t listening during a few anatomy lessons). While the book is divided in a way that allows you to skip to the  juicy recipes and overlook the explanatory part, I advise you to go through all of it. It will make up for a complete, wonderful experience.

The new year came with some changes on the Words of a Broken Mirror blog. I was feeling quite inspired so I finally caught up with some tweaking and tuning that I kept postponing for a few months.

So WoBM now has a completely rewritten About page, a new Work with me page, a Guest posting page and a reshaped policy page, containing any potential bias disclosures and a few friendly but firm comment guidelines. I have also updated the list of guest posts authored by yours truly on other blogs.

Another thing that has changed almost entirely is my blogroll which now contains a more relevant list of business resources for WoBM readers.

Please check all these new shiny pages out and let me know what you think!

Happy New Year! Hope you’ve had a great celebrating the arrival of 2010. And now that it’s here and we’ll soon be back to tasks and plans to make it a great business year, what better way to start that with trends and events predicted for 2010? I’ve gathered a list of PR and communication forecasts published at the end of December. The posts are listed as they appeared in my reader and I am sure you can add your collection of predictions to it

2010 Predictions for Communications
2010 PR Predictions: More Social Media Blunders
2010 PR Predictions: Growth Returns, M&A Activity Increases
PR Trends in 2010: The Future of PR
2010 PR Predictions: A New Player Will Emerge To Challenge Facebook Supremacy
2010 PR Predictions: Ketchum Edition
PR Trends 2010: Real Time Search Speeds up the News
2010 PR Predictions: Crisis Firms Will Adopt ‘Pay-By-Performance Model’
Euro RSCG’s Salzman on 2010 Trends: ‘Co-Creating the News’
PR Trends 2010: Branded Content
2010 Predictions: ‘The Days of Press Hits To Justify the PR Budget Are Over’
PR Trend 2010: The Death of Print

What do you think? Who has better chances of getting it right? What are your own predictions for the new year?

2009 has definitely been a wonderful year. Twists and turns, drama and excitement, all for the better in the end. After a thorough review of what has happened in the past year and with a little inspiration from Chris Brogan, I’ve moved on to putting my 2010 wish list on paper. Virtual paper that is!

So after a lot of thinking, prioritizing and plotting (yes, I love the added evil touch), here is what I’ve come up with, in a more or less particular order.

1. I wish to help more companies in the IT filed to better communicate with customers, partners, the media and their employees and show these different audiences how their products and services manage to solve real issues and make their business or personal lives a little better.
2. I also wish to gain more customers from the tourism and travel sector. I have started with a hotel in 2009, but I want to expand my portfolio and work with other companies, be it hotels, online booking sites or travel agencies. I know my mixed knowledge of PR & Marketing and the travel industry (I’ve studied it for about 3 years) is perfect to help them attract more local or international customers.
3. For my PR blog, Words of a Broken Mirror, I wish to write more posts helping my readers with their PR and Marketing activities. More readers and subscribers would also be great I also wish to extend my article writing on my PR and Marketing agency’s website. I also wish to guest post more, so that I’m able to reach and help other audiences with my content.
4. I wish to help companies integrate social media tools into their overall PR and Marketing strategies. I really, really hope I’ll be able to and see at least a few companies switching from misuses to effective campaigns targeting online communities. As part of this effort, I plan to help them realize it’s not only new tools they are adapting to, but also a new way of doing their marketing. Although we kept talking about conversation, dialogues, engaging the customers, a lot of businesses are still perfectly happy with just broadcasting on new channels.
5. I wish to adopt a Romanian NGO, preferably one dealing with children/women/animals rights. I always complain I don’t do enough to make things a little better and doing what I’m good at for free seems like the best possible investment of my time. But this I plan to write more on in Romanian, on the PRwave Blog.
6. I’d like to participate, as a speaker, in more PR, Marketing and Social Media dedicated events. I feel I have a quite relevant experience worth sharing with other professionals in both my field and other industries. I’ve started doing this in late 2009, together with Loredana Pascal and it turned out pretty great!
7. I wish to turn my Travel Spells blog into a fun and profitable project. I have a few plans for it and I am sure I can make them work. Up to now it has made me about 25 euros so there definitely are a few possibilities.
8. I also want to work with my partners and turn the online magazine for women, Cenusa de trandafir, into a profitable one. It’s been 4 months since we’ve launched it, we have a great community supporting it, all the stats look good, so let the money pour in in 2010
9. I wish to be a published author by the end of the year. That’s the worst case scenario plan. The optimist view is that my vampire story will be published on my birthday, April 3rd. Either way, I’ll be extremely happy to see people reading and enjoying it.

These are the big things I plan to focus on in 2010 in what my business life is concerned. I hope I get to accomplish most of them and make new ones for the future.

Is your business wish list for 2010 ready? If it isn’t, hurry up, you’ve got a few hours left to put it all on paper

Among 2010 predictions, plans and strategies, I ran across a very interesting and explicit definition of what marketing is, what it does and what a marketing team is expected to do. It belongs to Linda Smith, one of the authors of Women on Business. I just loved her idea of explaining what her plans and predictions are all about. It helps put things into perspective, reconnect with your thoughts and values and only then act.

Her take on marketing will shortly follow. After reading it, please make sure you read her post to find out what she thinks 2010 will bring in this line of business.

Marketing is telling everyone, everywhere:

• what your business is, where it is, how to find it
• what your product/service is, what it can do for the consumer, why they need it, why they want it
• how your business differs from others that are similar – what your uniqueness’s are, what makes your business so very special
• why the consumer should/ought to exchange their precious dollars and cents for your product/service

Marketing is telling everyone, everywhere in every way that people can and do receive information:

• newspapers, magazines and direct mailers – the hard copy kind, the newsprint ink that smears on your fingers and the flyers, brochures and sales letters that come in the snail mail; AND the online versions: newspapers online, magazines online and email ads that come both solicited and unsolicited
• television ads, radio ads – both via traditional tv and radio vehicles and online versions
• internet banner ads, classified ad sites, display ad boxes on social media sites
• social media relationship building
• weblogs and forums and other self-publishing arenas where messages about anything and everything under the sun, moon and stars can be shared

A business’ marketing department is usually tasked with:

• designing the message
• crafting the message delivery system
• delivering the message
• measuring the results of both the message and the delivery system