Omnipresent PR: It’s in Every Action

In case you have been living under a rock, May has been a terrible month for Spirit Airlines. Sometimes good PR is just common sense. Sometimes a company just has to do the right thing, regardless of corporate policy and rules. It’s mind boggling that in this day and age, when millions of Americans use Facebook and Twitter, Spirit Airlines thought they could get away with not refunding a dying veteran’s ticket and that they wouldn’t pay a heavy price in the court of public opinion. What should have been a non-story was headline news for days and proved that bad publicity is much worse than no publicity at all.

READ MORE

Dur, that’s what she said.

Ah, back to the good old days of double entendres.

After The Atlantic announced last week that they would make no further effort in the arena of SEO, it got me thinking about where SEO and SEO content writing were headed.

Was The Atlantic on to something? Were we all suddenly living in a world where all things clever had to be rewritten for optimization to the detriment of readers everywhere?

Or was there a bigger question about how SEO content writers, and journalists for that matter, are doing their jobs? READ MORE

Is the Internet truly making life easier?

As society continues to evolve and technology continues to advance, it appears as if history has started to repeat itself here in the Digital Age. Newer, bigger, better products and updates are constantly coming out. We have access to everything at our fingertips. With the vast amount of products and choices out there though, how easy is it really to find exactly what you are looking for?

READ MORE

Personal branding: how to win friends and influence others on Twitter

Never underestimate the power of creating a personal brand. The goal of personal branding is to get the audience to know and like you. Having your own website and using social media networks not only helps connect you with other like-minded individuals and brands, it gives your brand a human voice and personality, thereby increasing your personal following.

Currently, Twitter has 140 million active users, expressing themselves 140 characters at a time. Twitter provides one of the best platforms, allowing you to build your personal brand across a vast social network and to connect with countless people and businesses.

READ MORE

Facebook Timeline: Limiting the conversation between brands and fans

On March 31, Facebook made it mandatory for all Facebook pages to switch over to Timeline. General users have had the privilege of using Timeline for a few months now. I don’t really have any quarrels with it for personal use, however, when it comes to the pages I manage for our clients, I’m not a fan.  READ MORE

The public sphere, the Digital Age and your online community

When philosophers of the past like Jürgen Habermas and Gerard Hauser explored their theories of the public sphere, where ideas were discussed and political action was born, they could have never imagined how their theories would take shape in 2012.

Habermas’ theory alluded to a place where anyone, with any set of beliefs, could provide immeasurable value to the sphere by challenging ideas and making the community stronger by changing, confirming or forming new beliefs.

Hauser, on the other hand, developed the theory of the rhetorical public sphere where a level of discrimination was needed to include only members with shared values.

The Digital Age has morphed their models of a public sphere into what we now know as online communities. Be it a community for consumers of a top cola brand or a wedding planning blog, community managers are the glue that hold these groups together. READ MORE

How do you want to be led?

 

If you’re like me, graduating from college and landing your first job is one of the most exhilarating, self-fulfilling, albeit nerve-wracking and anxiety-ridden times of your life. Reaching your goal of getting hired is not often a quick and painless journey, but a process that begins long before you don your cap and gown. These days, academic advisors put so much emphasis on what it takes to get a job, there is little, if any dialogue about what happens after you’ve actually got one.  READ MORE

#MarchMadness: If the coaches can tweet, shouldn’t the players be able to?

Being that we have just entered into one of the best months for college basketball and, dare I say, the best month for college sports in general, I couldn’t help but be fascinated with a local team’s coach who tweeted during halftime. Colorado State University’s coach Tim Miles took the Q&A into his own hands and sent out this tweet regarding the first half of the game:

  READ MORE

If you build it, they will come. Then what?

You thought long and hard about how to bake good search engine optimization (SEO) practices into your website. You crafted a gorgeous design, tested top-to-bottom to ensure a flawless user experience, and slaved over a cacophony of keyword analysis tools (that’s the proper term for a group of those tools, I swear) to make sure you were speaking your target audience’s language in just the right way. And sure enough, as the weeks passed after you implemented your perfect SEO strategy without a hitch, your average daily site traffic began to climb. Success! Right? Maybe not. READ MORE

Four Ways to Waste Your Social Media Budget

There are lots of companies out there that use social media in smart ways. They listen to their customers. They respond appropriately. They take this feedback into consideration and then they refine their message.

Too many companies, however, use social media as a megaphone, not a conversation tool. I ran into one on Friday.

Papa John’s is a Case Study for Everything You Can Do Wrong READ MORE
Copyright © 2011 Metzger Associates