Guest Post by the Society of New Communications Research
What Companies Need to Do:
- Don’t over-engineer brand stories –but companies must facilitate and manage
- Must position but the brand story will develop organically based on customer feedback
- New technologies facilitate these exchanges now in ways that are effective and viral
- Companies must re-integrate customer insights into an evolving brand story
How the Co-author Model Works – Leads to Co-Creation:
- More than simply putting customer stories or CGM on your website – baby step
- Means 360 communications and open exchange with your customers
- …

 
Guest Post by Brenna Ehrlich | Mashable
It’s a new year, which means it’s time to make resolutions, take on fresh challenges, learn new things and change our lives for the better. Perhaps you want to lose 10 pounds, travel more, or get the job you really want?
Mashable has been building a vast archive of how-to guides on everything from professional networking to planning a vacation online — what better time to release a combined list than at the beginning of a new decade?
If you’re looking to improve your life in 2010, …

Guest post by Samuel Axon | Mashable
Web technology and social media change radically from month to month, so it’s difficult to make predictions about what The Next Big Thing is, but you can be confident that the real-time web will get bigger and more essential in 2010. It came to a head in 2009, though, and this year’s applications can give you some idea of what to expect after the New Year.
Twitter’s influence and prominence in the growth of the real-time web goes without saying, but even if it’s the flagship, …

Why do today’s companies use social media? Well, the initial response is to drive sales, right? Yes and no. If that’s the objective, the quality of your social engagement won’t go very far. The objective is engagement, interactivity, transparency, and creating an inbound marketing space that allows your customers to come and go as and when they choose, on their time, and creating a brand they know and trust. And yes, in the end, supporting your bottom line.
A recent digital readiness report states 18% of marketing decision makers have no …

Facebook- Facebook is great for promoting events and joining groups to share your brand, ideas and products to those interested in your industry. One of the main characteristics of Facebook is leveraging the news feed feature. You can post to all of your profiles at one time, including Facebook, from Ping.fm.
LinkedIn- There are many features on LinkedIn such as the ability to announce your website or service, drive readers to blog posts, answer others’ questions on LinkedIn Answers and research potential clients or colleagues. There is no nofollow on LinkedIn …

It’s simple: the key to social media is getting involved in “the conversation”. Here are some numbers to illustrate the point:
Yahoo! News receives 44 million visitors per month. YouTube garners 70 million visitors per month. CNN.com experiences 28 million visitors per month. Facebook has 132-million visitors per month. MySpace has approximately 118-million visitors per month
What makes social media different from traditional media outlets such as trade pubs, newspapers,TV and radio, is the interactions between people as they engage in collective conversations about unique and meaningful content.
In traditional marketing, the product …

Brands are used to identify and distinguish goods sold or manufactured from one individual from another.
Brands create trust and attachments, and as a result, they create relationships with your product or service.

Now, why do we bother branding or rebranding, what’s the big idea?
Q: Who knows the three common components brands contain?
A: Brand’s are functional, comparative and emotional.
Why is this? Well, people buy products they know and trust.
-When your customers are familiar with your brand and what it represents, the sales process is easier and the decision making on their part …

The old rules of marketing and PR have changed. Corporations can no longer sing their own praises from a campaign loud speaker, in the same way that they can no longer continue on with a business as usual approach that may have worked for years. This Tweet quoting Rupert Murdoch scrolled across my Hootsuite this morning: “The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.” Since the Web has allowed people to read press releases directly, the rules for …

 Social Media is no longer just for the other guys, or other industry, CEO, niche or entrepreneur with more time on their hands. For the majority of the small to medium sized businesses we’ve spoken with, a few of the reasons why they haven’t adopted social media into their business include the time restraints of managing the social media and the business, single profile adoption (we’re on LinkedIn, isn’t that enough?) and of course, fear of the unknown.
The truth is social media is a collection of free tools that provide …

Kick Ass Content 101
We’ve heard it enough times so we thought the question deserves an adequate answer: How important is fresh content, anyways? Very. Here’s the scenario: You get readers to your site via your blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or perhaps, and more plausibly, a combination of them, but how do you keep them there? Ready? Kick-ass-content. Awesome, relevant material that keeps your readers interested and engaged enough that they’ll come back for more, and if you’re lucky, tell a friend or two in the process. Great, now how does …