Archive for November, 2020

Following the Trends in Influencer Marketing

Friday, November 27th, 2020

While it may seem like it’s a 21st-century thing, influencer marketing has been around since the early 20th century. One of the earliest influencers was Santa Claus, a character modernized and reinvented by Coca-Cola. Today’s influencers tend to be real people—PewDiePie, Logan Paul, Zoella, and others—many who leapt to fame thanks to the wide reach of social media channels, such as YouTube and Instagram. But influencers today come in a lot of forms depending on the target audience. Business-es, products, and services of all types leverage the audience, reach, and endorsement power of influencers to grow awareness and preference for what they have to offer. (more…)

Content IS King – Regardless of Who Said It!

Tuesday, November 24th, 2020

While there’s a debate about where the phrase “content is king” originally emerged, Bill Gates is widely given credit for the phrase and wrote what Fox Business calls a “remarkably prescient piece” back in 1996 in which he “accurately foresaw the content boom years before Google, WordPress, Facebook and YouTube even existed.” The rest, of course, is history.

Organizations of all kinds have jumped on the content bandwagon, recognizing that the trusted relationships they have with patients puts them in a prime position to share content on a wide range of topics of interest to, and representing value for, their audiences.  (more…)

The Blurred Lines Between PR, Marketing and Advertising

Friday, November 13th, 2020

There’s a raging — and quite interesting — debate that I continue to see taking place in various online forums about the relationship between PR and marketing. I’ve found it especially interesting because I recently was engaged in the same debate while teaching PR courses at a local university. Surprisingly to me, there is a group that believes quite strongly that PR is not part of marketing: that it is a separate and distinctly different function within an organization.

Frankly, that’s just “crazy talk” to me. (more…)

Communication Best Practices Learned From COVID-19

Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

Communication Best Practices During COVID-19It’s fair to say that few, if any companies—or their communication staff—were prepared to respond quickly and appropriately to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, a pandemic that has swept the world and decimated lives and economies.

As millions of employees suddenly found themselves working remotely from their homes and millions of customers found themselves suddenly shut off from the companies and brands they typically engaged with, communication professionals found themselves grappling with important questions:

  • How do we continue to communicate with a suddenly dispersed audience?
  • How do we find the right balance between standard key messages and the need to address the ravages of the virus for employees, customers and the community at large?
  • How do we strike the tone—certainly not too flippant, but also not too alarmist?

There have been some important communication lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked content marketers to share their key takeaways—what has worked well for them, what hasn’t, and how the experience will shape their communications for months, maybe years, to come. (more…)

How To Demonstrate Your Productivity When Working Remotely

Monday, November 2nd, 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot about remote work lately. Not only because of the coronavirus, and not only because I’ve been working from home since 2008, but because my new book “Managing Remote Staff: Capitalize on Work-from-Home Productivity” was released by Self-Counsel Press, a publisher I’ve written a number of books for.

I received a lot of input for the book from both those who manage remote staff and those who work remotely. Some have been doing this for a number of years; others only since the pandemic emerged and changed the work landscape forever. Companies have historically been hesitant to allow employees to work from locations other than their official workplaces. This is true for a variety of reasons, many revolving around trust, concerns about communication, and the ubiquitous concern managers have of being able to successfully manage employees when they are “out of sight, out of mind.”

(more…)