There’s a lot to be suspicious about anytime you come across a survey-based measure of reputation, especially when you’re working across all kind of international borders and trying to normalize for dramatically different sets of local and regional assumptions about how businesses ought to work. But even given this, the results from a new Reputation Institute study of corporate reputations raise some questions.
Mainly, how come American companies didn’t do better? Continue reading
I’m reading Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba’s Citizen Marketers on a friend’s recommendation. A lot of folks in his agency are starting to tweak on social media and this highly regarded (and extremely readable) examination of viral and customer-generated marketing activity is guiding a good bit of their thinking and questioning. Good on ’em – a lot more companies need to be exploring these issues, as well.
My only complaint so far really isn’t about the book, which is a very worthwhile read, so much as it is a general idea that all this online activity, and corresponding company attention to it, is a very new thing. To some extent this is true, of course – as I note above, it’s not like engaging the blogosphere and the “citizen marketer” is something that a lot of companies are doing, and even fewer are doing it effectively. I guess I’m frustrated because I’ve been carping on this for years and haven’t seen the kinds of uptake and results that I know are possible.
Here’s an example. Continue reading
In my last post I talked about how the Internet can be your online PR friend if you understand how it works and let go of the fallacious idea that you can control it. Now Shelley Jack at Ripple Effects Interactive in Pittsburgh forwards along a Wired story I had missed about how one company turned near-catastrophe into what looks like a major success.
Last year, [Glenn] Kelman was the newly hired CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage firm that was, as he puts it, “the ugly red-haired child” in the real estate world. Continue reading
For years I’ve been talking to anybody who would listen about the basic principles that make online communication efforts work – and the ways in which the Internet has completely altered the rules for successful PR in all arenas. When I talk about openness and transparency, though, the train often jumps the tracks because corp comm pros who have been around since the pre-Net days are obsessed with message control.
What they don’t always grasp is that everybody who encounters a corporate message today – be it advertising, marketing collateral, PR, whatever – instinctively smells the topspin. Continue reading
Imagine. It’s 6:28 am. You slowly rise through the many-layered fog of sleep, edging toward wakening, toward daylight, your body’s clock instinctively anticipating the impending blare of the alarm. As consciousness fans away the haze, realization hits like a drum of icewater and you bolt up in bed screaming. It wasn’t a dream. Oh, gods…
You really are the head of branding and PR for a major pet food company.
42 cat food brands and 53 dog food brands are under recall. It’s bad enough if you’re a bargain or store brand, but it’s positively hell if you’re riding herd on one of the industry’s premium brands – Eukanuba, Nutro, etc.
These last few days, your world has been engulfed by The Suck. Continue reading
wordSmith | Writing / Content Marketing 