(excerpted from Best Practices in Influencer Marketing)
While influencer marketing can yield big benefits, there are some potential pitfalls. Primary among them, is that it can be a lot of work, and results are not guaranteed. As Natarelli notes, “The nature of the media landscape today requires constant optimization and tinkering. You have to see audiences as fluid and fickle. Therefore, it is hard to sometimes identify and hold on to success. Clients looking for sure bets and silver bullets will be disappointed.” (more…)
(excerpt from
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.
Most of us in the marketing business are familiar with the concept of – if not necessarily the term – pull marketing. Pull marketing refers to using your business development strategies to attract customers actively seeking out a product or service to your particular offering. For example, a pizza company might work on increasing its page ranking through search engine optimization (SEO) so that it shows up prominently when a hungry potential customer searches for “pizza near me” in their search engine.
Marketers have a wide range of channels available to them in their efforts to reach potential customers. While some are general – i.e., TV commercials, billboards, radio ads – others are much more targeted and focused. Before the days of email, direct-mail marketing, in which a marketer mails marketing materials directly to a specifically identified group of recipients, was a great way to target likely customers, and it still is. But advances in technology mean that we can take this kind of marketing to the next level through email marketing. 
A Harvard Business Review case study recently posed a provocative question: when should humans listen to algorithms vs. when should they trust their own experience and intuition? For this case study, the issue related to which of two employees to choose for a promotion. But, given the widespread applications for the use of big data and the power of predictive analytics, the question could be applied to any field or area of business practice—including content marketing.
So you want to be an expert? Seems like just about everybody does these days and social media makes it relatively easy, and very inexpensive, to take steps to gain expert status, or thought leadership. We work with a wide range of clients, primarily in business-to-business (B2B) related industries, many who are business consultants wishing to establish themselves as thought leaders in various industries. Here are “3 Steps for Gaining Traction as a Thought Leader”: 
Savvy marketers are always on the lookout for new media through which to promote their companies. From print media, to radio, to television, to the Internet, it hasn’t taken long historically between the development of a new media technology to the adoption of that media by marketers.
Most small business owners are heavily focused on their core skillset. They are bakers, event planners, lawyers – insert job – first, and accountants and marketers second. 
While there are plenty of dire-sounding discussions taking place these days around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning—and their potential to disrupt the world as we know it—this isn’t technology of the future. It’s already gaining traction across multiple industries and professions, including with content creators. New technologies are promising to upend the traditional ways in which content is conceived, produced, and disseminated. Examples already exist. 
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