Guest post by Dave Mathews

Since startups and small businesses have limited financial budget, their reliance on a well thought-out marketing plan is a rarity. But the point that a marketing plan makes or breaks a business cannot be emphasized enough.

It has been reported by Forrester Research in their research that from all over the world, more than $200 billion were spent online in 2011 by the Americans alone, with an estimation of the total jacking up to $327 billion in 2016. This proves Bill Gates statement that, “the Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”

It is a reported practice by some of the companies that they stress on sales before actually coming up with, or implementing, a marketing plan. This usually turns disadvantageous because, understandably, a potential client will be hesitant to buy a product/service he is not familiar with. Continue reading

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Guest post by Mihaela Lica Butler

One of the most important components of your PR strategy has to be reputation management. Your business and personal success depend by and large on public perception. Reputation is the essence of who or what a business or person is.

Unfortunately for the SME or even some corporate decision makers, not much information exists in simplistic form, there are no real “simple guides to reputation management.” But, the infographic below, provided by KBDS Digital Marketing , does a nice job outlining some do and don’t practices and possible remedies for negatives. An old Chinese proverb roughly states:

“Don’t consider your reputation and you may do anything you like.” Continue reading

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Dale Carnege’s influential 1936 self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, proudly sits on many PR professional’s bookshelves and in the Kindle queue’s of the digital library of many SEO services. The copy is usually in pristine and proper condition – because it has never been opened or touched since purchase. While playing a great prop in the professional business arsenal, it gets read as often as The Prince by politicians or The Art of War by generals.

If you are curious as to how the book applies to the current social media landscape, there are six guidelines the book gives to make people like you. Here they are with the proper social media advice to accompany them for our modern, networked times: Continue reading

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The Sony PlayStation network hack and the millions of customer whose private information might have been accessed is one of the prominent headlines this week. So was TJX and their security breach at its time, being considered the largest data breach in history as over 40 million credit cards had been stolen throughout their stores in the US and Canada. So was every big financial data breach.

For those of you who don’t know, one of Mirror Communications’ clients, CoSoSys, develops endpoint security and data loss prevention solutions. Since I fist started to work with them, more than three years ago, I have been reading about data breaches every single day. I cannot remember the number of hospitals exposing patient data, financial institutions having client details stolen by employees, laptops and flash drives with important databases being lost or stolen, or the number of instances where military units (in the US or other countries) where either broken into and having data stolen or lost because they either weren’t paying attention, or because they did not care to properly dispose of it.

What lacks more than the obvious protection against such security breaches is knowing how to deal with the PR crisis that follows the data loss or theft. So after personally reviewing so many PR fails when it comes to data breaches, here’s a quick guide made up of useful tips to help you better deal with the consequences: Continue reading

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There are moments when a certain story simply takes over the world. Or a country, or a city or a small town. The scale really does not matter, the effect is the same: every media outlet will cover that major event. It’s a journalistic rule you learn in the first year of journalism school. If something is really big, it takes over and becomes the most important piece of news, regardless of anything else.

Such events are the royal wedding we’ve just had, big elections, the earthquake in Japan, or Osama being killed. For a longer or shorter stretch of time, they have the spotlight and no one can compete. And it’s not just lifestyle magazines or political newspapers that cover them! Tech blogs and magazines will talk about the Twitter user who live tweeted the attack on Osama, financial newspapers will analyze the cost of the royal wedding or analyze the impact on foreign markets a natural disaster has. Travel outlets will talk about the travelers taking over London or the travel warnings issued after the Osama bin Laden death.  Continue reading

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