New Influencer

Ragan recently commented on Vocus’ acquisition of iContact in an article entitled, Is email still necessary? As a former Vocus product manager (and ardent supporter of the company), my first impression was “Wow, that was a big acquisition.” My second thought was that it makes a lot of sense and here is why: 1. E-mail [...]

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Mashable reported yesterday that Sprout Social just closed a $10m series B round from New Enterprise Associates.  The company, which can “turn social connections into loyal customers,” is a business application that helps users manage their social media marketing across the more prominent social sites (Twitter and Facebook) as well as some of the more [...]

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When Google decided to start showing local business results on Page 1, it basically meant that A. small businesses who were already thinking about marketing through organic search needed to start thinking more carefully about the impact of local results and B. that small businesses who weren’t using search as a marketing tactic had better [...]

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I’ve recently fielded several questions stemming from the article on social networking in the New York Times that came out last week. One in particular caught my attention and I’d like to address it a bit more comprehensively. The question was from a guy about to launch a Bed & Breakfast in Colorado and was [...]

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Over the past several months I’ve shared updates on the research being conducted by the Society for New Communications Research into the ROI of online press releases.  The research group, lead by Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Jen McClure, and Shel Holtz has recently finished the executive summary, available for download in the research & publications section [...]

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Common Craft is a small shop with a big reach. Their ‘Plain English’ video series has been viewed over 5 million times globally and has helped countless people understand Internet technologies such as RSS and social networking. Sachi and Lee (Common Craft) have also helped a number of companies and brands (including PRWeb) explain their [...]

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A few months back I was talking with a former television producer who had recently transitioned to a bi-weekly magazine that was preparing to launch an online version that integrated high-quality video content. She was a bit wary when I brought up the opportunities latent in some of the video sharing sites and it was [...]

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In public relations (and I am sure other professions), you often hear people talk about the distinction between tactics and strategy. Simplistically put, tactics are activities that are executed everyday by PR practitioners while a strategy refers to an underlying approach that drives various tactics. Tactics are easy because they involve bite-sized chunks of activity [...]

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I wrote an article for the most recent version of online news releases. The metaphor that I use as a device in the article was inspired by a discussion that took place concerning the role of the newswire contextualized in the new world of social media. At any rate, if anyone is interested I have [...]

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A close friend of mine Ryan Petersen recently became the managing director at a start-up based out of Scottsdale, Arizona called ImportGenius, a Web application that allows you to search international trade records to find out where your competitors are buying their products overseas, Ryan and I go way back and even spent time working [...]

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