What do a kid’s sandbox, critical state theory, automobile purchases, and marketing automation have in common? They’re all part of tomorrow’s webinar at SHIFT Communications on Critical Influence in Social Media. Learn from SHIFT a new way of thinking about how earned media and public relations are impacting consumers and businesses, learn how to measure the influence you have over your audience, and learn ways to build and strengthen that influence.

Sign up now for free!

Core values help you to implement the essence of strategy: knowing what to say no to. Without them, you’re a car without a GPS, and you’re just as likely to drive into a bad neighborhood as you are to get where you want to go.

If you want to learn more about what the values mean, read this series by SHIFT Senior Vice President Catherine Allen on each of the values and how we interpret them.

• Honorable
• Dedicated
• Connected
• Creative
• Ballsy
• Positive
• Smart

If you want “the secret sauce” to longevity as a business, it’s adhering to values like these, especially when the temptation to do something easier or more profitable arises.

It’s becoming fashionable to take a bite out of Apple. There was Jean-Louis Gassée’s scathing article in the Guardian. There was Jon Gruber (of Daring Fireball) damning Apple with faint praise: blaming the media for cherrypicking the news to weave a narrative about Apple’s slow demise. I expect the chorus to grow louder before it weakens. Blood in the water, and all that.

Apple doesn’t do itself many favors. Its trenchant secrecy used to seem cool – and I daresay it would still be considered cool – if not for the fact that a) competitive technologies are legitimately “catching up” to the iDevices and, b) the company’s accounting tricks seem increasingly slinky and mean-spirited.

Bloomberg reported: “Apple avoided as much as $9.2 billion in taxes by financing part of a $55 billion stock buyback with debt rather than offshore cash that would have been billed by the U.S. government.”

Juxtapose that legal money laundering with the typical mindset of the prototypical iConsumer. I daresay most of Apple’s biggest fans are Obama supporters, and certainly the media tastemakers skew more liberal. At some point the corporate accounting chicanery will sound a discordant note that continues to toll. “These guys at Apple? These are not good guys. They are not pro-American. They’d go to any length to avoid paying taxes that would benefit America’s defense, infrastructure and education. And worst of all, sin above all sins: their tech is now only on-par with everybody else.”

In other words: not cool. Not anymore.

What do you do about this if you work at Apple PR?

Find out my suggestions on the SHIFT Communications blog.

Todd Defren
SHIFT CEO

…at least some of the time. That’s the latest in our findings after reading through Facebook’s Q12013 SEC Filing. See what other surprises are on tap for marketers in our summary on the SHIFT Communications blog post.

When we sat around a conference table and battled through the process of defining our values a few years ago, SHIFT changed as an organization – we now had criteria that helped us define what it meant to be a SHIFTer and helped guide us through decisions, whether it was about our people, clients or services. We had a roadmap in a way we never had one before – sure, the instinct had been there, but now it was tangible and the fact that those values have lived far beyond a poster on a wall, is something we all take tremendous pride in as an organization.

Want to see what we did with those values? Read the rest on the SHIFT blog and join us as we celebrate the first 10 years of the agency’s life, with many, many more to come!

Learn more and download the free infographic now!

Measuring PR and earned media has always been something of a challenge in the past, but thanks to digital marketing and metrics tools, it’s easier today to find the impact of PR, even with businesses that have significant offline components. In this series on the SHIFT blog, we’re looking at 7 different ways to see how PR is improving the performance of your digital marketing and sales programs for organizations of all kinds. Take a look at the whole series, just finished today:

1. Sales/business goals
2. Marketing metrics
3. Social media
4. Search marketing
5. Paid advertising
6. Primary research
7. Standard media metrics
8. Analysis and conclusion

Be sure to subscribe to the SHIFT newsletter for roundups of all the blog posts there.

Measuring PR and earned media has always been something of a challenge in the past, but thanks to digital marketing and metrics tools, it’s easier today to find the impact of PR, even with businesses that have significant offline components. In this series on the SHIFT blog, we’re looking at 7 different ways to see how PR is improving the performance of your digital marketing and sales programs for organizations of all kinds. Take a look at parts 1-4:

1. Sales/business goals
2. Marketing metrics
3. Social media
4. Search marketing

Be sure to subscribe to the SHIFT newsletter for roundups of all the blog posts there.

Over on the SHIFT blog, our team took a look at influence – the psychological phenomenon, not the social media metric – and how public relations can be used to grow your influence. Take a look at the entire six part series:

1. Scarcity
2. Authority
3. Consistency
4. Social Proof
5. Liking
6. Reciprocity

Our next series, 7 ways to measure PR, is just getting underway. Be sure to visit over the next couple of weeks as it rolls out!

Over on the SHIFT blog, our team is taking a look at influence – the psychological phenomenon, not the social media metric – and how public relations can be used to grow your influence. Take a look at the first three pieces of a six part series:

1. PR and scarcity
2. How PR boosts your authority
3. Consistency ties PR and sales together

Stay tuned to the SHIFT blog for the rest of the series!