Guest post by Susan Daniels

New research out in the PR space seems to favor the use of theory-based PR relations techniques. But by thinking inversely, like a person using a search engine’s reverse phone number lookup to stop businesses from doing solicitations, people can build great stories to capture any audience and build better brand recognition.

Catherine Sweet is one that disagrees with those perpetuating the theory-based PR. She says that “my teaching has made me realize the power of ‘story telling’ as being the best form of PR and communication there is. As humans, we are hardwired to listen and learn; it’s how we acquire language in the first place.” To her, storytelling is a much more effective communication technique for PR, and gives those in PR some creative expression to think directly or indirectly. Continue reading

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This year’s edition of The Business Growth Summit, an online event bringing together leading experts to share their strategies on how to grow a business, leverage opportunities, and increase profits starts today and will continue until September 23rd. What the summit actually offers is free, on demand access to videos by well known experts in the social media, marketing, PR and business development fields to help small businesses promote themselves more effectively and sell more.

Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Dan Schawbel, Amy Cosper, Carrie Wilkerson are only a few of the people you must learn from through the Business Growth Summit. If you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur, work-from-home professional or thinking of making a career switch to become either one, you should register for this online event and start watching the 5 to 20 minute videos the best and brightest of today’s business minds have to offer.

Yours truly, on behalf of the Mirror Communications agency, is also part of The Business Growth Summit. The video I have contributed is titles “How to Get More Business from the Social Media Clutter” and will help you decide what’s worthwhile and efficient from the huge social media world, what will help your business achieve better results.

After attending this business online event, please share your experience, your questions or your feedback either here, in the comment section, on Twitter, Facebook or via email.

Wish you all a great week and enjoy the summit!

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Photo by Adam Crowe

Guest post by Jade Evans

It’s all about the brand. When you buy the premium product, the sleek design – say of the King of branding – Apple, you’re buying the projection of the brand and all the marketing that goes along with it. It’s like when you buy Nike shoes or those designer jeans – built into the price is their perception of you after you have ownership of that new, shiny, designer whatever.

What do you associate with Target? Most could come up with an answer on a dime. Who do you think of when you think of Patagonia? Pepsi?

These associations – I can tell you – they are not the byproduct of the environment of the company, or at least not solely. Companies work hard and put millions, hundreds of millions of dollars into creating that emotional and subtle immediate response when customers think of a brand. Emotional buying means impulse purchases. (Which is something that any heartbroken girl can tell you when all of those new shoes arrive at their door). Continue reading

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One of the things we consider when creating online content is it’s ‘shareability’ factor. Meaning how eager readers are to share it with their online connections after reading it. While the content itself is directly responsible for the desire to make people want to post it on their social pages or send it via email, it is not enough. To increase the ‘shareability’ factor, we often add little tools or plugins – google + buttons, Facebook like buttons, retweet buttons, Stumble Upon buttons. We attempt to make it easy for the reader to share that content.

But in the process of website updates and management, we sometimes forget that sharing is supposed to be easy and take as little time as possible. That is why we forget to check the buttons and the plugins and see if they work. When these tools don’t work properly, most readers will give up. They don’t have time to edit the tweet or Facebook update! It should all run smoothly. Others might choose to take the time and do the work, if the story is really worthwhile. But if they are in a hurry, they might postpone it for a bit – which can turn to quite a long time if they forget about it in the craziness of their own day.

So when you’re done nailing down that ultimate headline, when the post and the subheadings and the joke and the questions are done, please remember to check your plugins! If they work properly, you have better chances to have your post spread like wildfire!

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Languages evolve. New words appear, we start using them, they eventually make their way into the dictionaries, and are thus vouched for. Until that point, new words are o sort of mambo jumbo for a lot of people. We all remember when the very common verb ‘to google’ first appeared in the dictionary. It then continued with blog, blogger, tweet, woot, sexting, bromance, and other words that have recently made their way into our every day chats.

PR professionals and communication experts have an interesting position when it comes to these new words, especially when they focus on the online part of their profession. On one hand, we have netizens who expect us to address them in their own manner of speaking and writing, on the other we have serious business people that expect the utmost professionalism when being reached out to, which includes correct use of language and grammar. Officially, until they are introduced in the dictionaries and accepted as real words, what we’re using is not clean English (or what ever other language you address them in).  Continue reading

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