What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

The first week of spring is officially here and we have some chirpy blog posts for you to read. How you find them as inspiring and energizing as a sunny spring day.

Drew McLellan shared some amazing marketing insight after learnign a few tricks from a dog whisperer. Now that I’ve read the lessons, Drew, could you be so kind as to teleport the dog whisperer here, I think I need some help with my lab!

The newest, coolest thing when going to a conference is to live tweet it. So how exactly do you effectively present to a room full of tweeting birds? The answer comes from Tamar Weinberg on Pistachio.

Do you want a custom design for your blog? I know I did and my dream came true. But before you imlement this project of yours, please stop to consider a few issues explained by Alex Cristache of Blogsessive.

Stuart Bruce discussed PR, SEO and the fact that public relations, while employing quite a lot of search engine optimization, is not really about SEO, it’s about reputation.

We’re all obsessing about elevator pitches. While doing so, Frances Cole Jones, guest writer at Women on Business, point out that we overlook the importance of the FAQ page and the great results such a page can deliver.

What do you do when you want to launch a new product or service and have no idea what customers would think of it? Daniel Secareanu suggest the simplest and best solution: ask your customers.

You’ve all seen your share of teasers before something new hits the market. Michael Martine of Remarkablogger shows us how to get an audience drooling for a blog that doesn’t exist yet. His approach seems a lot more effective than a criptic add!

Google rankings involve a lot of things. It’s a secret recipe everyone’s after. And one of the reason no one has discovered it yet is that it’s learning and adapting to new tricks. Aaron Wall noticed a new trend: Google started placing heavy emphasis on branding.

When organizing an event, keeping the audience interested and excited about it is critical. Barbara Rozgonyi shares 9 ways to keep events alive with social media.

And we’re closing this week’s edition with a business puzzle from Corina Saceanu. Where’s the money?

What great posts have you run across last week? Please share them in the comment box!

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I’ve recently received an email looking like an attempt at email marketing, promising me some world renowned book for free. I was intrigued by a) the fact that the spam filter didn’t catch it and b) my not knowing anything about the book. So I took a second look at the content, thinking it might be some promotional ebook version sent out to bloggers by someone with way too little experience.

I saw the price for the book, big and shinny, along with a promotional discount image. I deleted it and moved on. But it got me thinking about all the promises marketers and PR people make in their emails and how not keeping them makes them lose potential customers, potential exposure on different channels, their reputation and more. Continue reading

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Guest post by Iuliana Butuc-Cerchez

Let’s say you are the founder and the general manager of an Internet company. One of the best in your country. Let’s say that a worldwide financial crisis makes you afraid of the future.

Let’s say that you have a dating portal in your management, besides other websites (a job portal and so on). Let’s say that, in the country where the biggest chunk of your market is, one TV show proposes you, the general manager, to participate and to make fun of yourself right there on the screen, in the front of several million TV viewers. The “prize”, if you happen to be the winner of the TV contest, is to get married to a so-called TV star. Not a nice or hot looking one, believe me!

Would you accept the proposal? Would you choose to be the subject of mockery in blog posts and press articles and, also, to “risk” getting married to a woman of doubtful reputation just to advertise your dating portal? Really, how low can you go with your personal brand to get some awareness on the TV for one of your company’s products?

Iuliana Butuc-Cerchez has been the Corporate Affairs Manager of the Gecad Group for over 4 years. She’s an exceptional PR professional and a true mentor for me. Before starting her PR career, she used to be this hard-core IT journalist at one of the best business and financial newspapers in Romania. She’s also a blogger, but as her blog is in Romanian, only part of my readers will be able to enjoy her articles.

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There a clear difference between work hours and after work fun time when it comes to your employees. Their personal life is something the company can’t control, it’s their private business and what there’s nothing an employer can do to control their activities. If they are high-profile figures in promoting your image, the story is a bit different, but when it comes to the average Joe-employee or Jane-employee, you have no say in matters that can in the end affect you. Like stealing, murdering someone or other such negativity that can be associated with you.

When it comes to breaks, there’s something you can do. You can’t tell anyone when to take breaks or where to take them and I would never recommend something of sorts. But you can kindly ask your employees to display a decent behavior. And if you don’t know what they do or say on their breaks, I suggest you try and find out. Because customers visiting you don’t care you’re staff is on a break, they will associate their behavior with your image because everything happens in your garden.

Why is this important? An example might help. A few days back I went with a friend to get some juice from the bistro in our office building. It was 3pm, long after the rush hour, and half of the employees were taking a break on the hallway. And they’re fun activity of choice? Imitating the sounds of an extremely horny cat! Can you imagine what was going through our minds seeing three grown up men laughing over and over again at the same tasteless joke? Given it was half they’re employees in this category, it was enough to form a pretty general opinion on the company’s staff and the values the employers promoted, the customer care skills they had, etc.

Luckily, I also knew the nice, decent people working there. But for a first time customer, would it have mattered? I seriously doubt it!

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