The past couple of weeks have brought in quite a few articles and blog posts about driving traffic as the new leverage of PR professionals. Pitch the story and have the traffic to back your pitch. But is this practice really new? Haven’t PR professionals already been driving traffic to online stories? I know I have and I doubt I’m the only one.

What stories do we drive traffic to? Well, almost anything showing up online.

Product/service reviews – all independent reviews, neutral and positive, are a gold mine for PR and Marketing pros. They are seen as objective points of view by customers and the bigger the publication, the more valuable the endorsement. Reviews are usually posted in a special website section, added to newsletters, used as literature to close new deals, twittered and blogged. Continue reading

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It’s not slang, it’s not cute, it’s just bad grammar. Slang does not mean you are entitled to behave as if grammar never existed, there are some mistakes native speakers will never make, no matter how much slang they add to their songs. Please, pretty please, when you decide to write songs in foreign languages, get someone to proofread them for you. Those singing won’t look good. Frankly, the result is just the opposite, it makes them look bad.

Now, repeat after me “Listen….to”, ” Listen….to” not just “Listen”. It’s “I never listen to what they say”, please don’t take out the “to”. Oh, and it’s “has come” not “has came”. And if you’re singing about a boy, please call him “moreno”, not “morena”. Unless he’s a girl who used to be a boy. Or she’s a boy who used to be a girl!

I know English songs are trendy. I know adding a little bit of Spanish spice is also cool. But handle with care, it will make those singing your lyrics look better. Don’t help them damage their brand. They are perfectly able to do so themselves. I know, I’ve heard some interviews on the radio that have made me laugh so hard I could barely drive.

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There’s been so much virtual ink spilled on building relationships on social media sites that one needs to be blind not to run across one article giving a few tips on the matter. Yet some still try their own obnoxious techniques that don’t work anyway.

One trend that I’ve recently notices and got an “oh, really?” from me was the following: add a friend, wait a bit for them to follow back and if they don’t, send them a message saying you’ll unfriend them if you’re unwilling to return the favor. Now how does that threat work? Simply put, it doesn’t.

The reason to friend or follow anyone is that you somehow find them interesting enough. If you want to get their attention, start a conversation with them, ask the right questions to get their attention and make them feel valued and interesting. They then might return the favor.

But if you act like and impatient, self-absorbed nuisance,  they will at best ignore you. Or choose to block you all together or report you. Why risk that when you can spend 5 minutes forgetting about what you want and think of what other people need. They will definitely respond in a much more pleasant manner than they would in the case of virtual blackmail!

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Do you really listen to those around you? Family, friends, employers, employees, clients, acquaintances, bartenders, would you say you actually know how to and can really listen to them? I’d say that theoretically, a lot of us know how to. Everyone who had a few college classes talking about active listening, please raise your hand now! But I think we phase out our knowledge, the very same way as we tune out commercials, product placements in movies, people we’re not interested in, things that bother us. And I also believe we sometimes overlook and downright forget the benefits of opening our mind and souls to those around us by listening.

It took reading a great book, Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Dr. Mark Goulston – to remember the benefits of listening, the techniques and the investment it takes to make it all work. I know what some of you would say! All shrinks think they know how to listen and help you, but what does it have to do with business? I for one know for sure you can pretty much find valid business advice almost anywhere, so a psychiatrist that gets hired by businesses to get them to work better sounds like a sweet deal to me.

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The new year came with some changes on the Words of a Broken Mirror blog. I was feeling quite inspired so I finally caught up with some tweaking and tuning that I kept postponing for a few months.

So WoBM now has a completely rewritten About page, a new Work with me page, a Guest posting page and a reshaped policy page, containing any potential bias disclosures and a few friendly but firm comment guidelines. I have also updated the list of guest posts authored by yours truly on other blogs.

Another thing that has changed almost entirely is my blogroll which now contains a more relevant list of business resources for WoBM readers.

Please check all these new shiny pages out and let me know what you think!

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