Weekly Reads for June 25, 2012
29 June 2012 by Ashley Biondich
The top 10 PR and marketing stories this week:
8 Ways to Make Your Content More Like Personal Conversations
from Savvy B2B Marketing
In an ideal marketing and sales world, we’d all enjoy the opportunity to talk in person with each and every prospect. But the reality of dealing with huge numbers of potential prospects—not to mention the need to focus on those most qualified—make initial face-to-face meetings resource- and cost-prohibitive. We take the next best steps by developing outstanding content and delivering it to the right prospects via the right media formats defined in our outbound/inbound marketing mixes.
Most consumers prefer social media customer service
from PR Daily
If you manage a brand’s social media presence, chances are you’re an expert in customer service. But how is customer service faring in social spaces? According to an infographic from British firm Fishburn-Hedges, pretty well. Sixty five percent of respondents think social media is better than call centers. Meanwhile, only 7 percent believe call centers to be better than social media. See more of how social media is changing customer service in the following infographic.
Five Ways Small Marketing Teams Can Take Advantage of Big Data
from HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog by Rick Burnes
What value do marketers see in big data? Big data promises to make everybody — buyers and marketers — better off. It enables optimized and personalized marketing, which means marketing that’s more useful to the buyers and more productive for the marketer.
Seven Tips for Pitching — From the Client’s Side of the Table
From Ad Age
Over the last month I was given the opportunity of a business-development executive’s lifetime — I got to sit on the other side of the pitch table. And in doing so, I embarked on a journey of discovery full of lessons that I’m guessing some of you in agency land might be keen to hear. Everything below is based on the post-pitch discussions in the client-selection committee. This is my interpretation of what I heard as I listened and guided the evaluation discussions.
Lead Generation: When To Use Registration Forms
from B2B Marketing Insider by Michael Brenner
When most people encounter an online registration form from a company they either don’t know or who they feel hasn’t earned the right to ask for their information, they either abandon the form or they provide incorrect information. Maybe you do the same? One of the biggest challenges in Online Marketing is the over-abundance of late-stage, product-specific and gated content.
The Subject Line Strategy That Gets 541% More Response
from AWeber Communications
It would appear that while creativity and clever writing are very good things in general (and I still cling to the fact that they’re good in the body of a post), they have no place in post titles and subject lines. People want to be told directly what they can expect to find inside, and they don’t have time to puzzle out what an overly creative subject line could mean.
Sorry, Marketers, You’re Doing Twitter Wrong [REPORT]
from Mashable Social Media
Most marketers are tweeting too much on the wrong days, not using hashtags enough and almost never do the one thing that will dramatically boost their retweets — ask for them — according to a new study looking at how marketers use Twitter from Buddy Media. Twitter engagement rates for brands are 17% higher on Saturday and Sunday compared to weekdays. However, most brands aren’t taking advantage of this phenomenon and, on average, only 19% of the brands’ tweets were published on the weekend. If a brand spaced its tweets out evenly throughout the week, then 28.6% should occur on the weekends.
The best day of the week to tweet and update Facebook
from Ragan.com
On Twitter and Facebook, Tuesday is the best day of the week for engagement, according to a new report from Yesmail. Unfortunately, the brands in the study most often tweeted and updated their Facebook pages on days when engagement among followers was at its lowest. Are you making the same mistake?
A Facebook Like Does Not Equal an Opt-in
from Brian Solis
Facebook’s Like button is often confused as an “Opt In” by marketers. All too frequently people who have clicked the Like button are thought of as a captive community where customers have opted in to marketing and engagement. Likes do not represent the actual size of a community, yet many organizations confuse the overall number with actual audience size. The difference between Like and other direct response triggers is that the Like is an act of fleeting value that must be earned over and over again.
Report: PR pros should not edit their client’s Wikipedia entries
from PR Daily News Feed
Have you noticed an error in your client’s or company’s Wikipedia entry? Don’t dive in there and correct it yourself, according to new guidelines from the U.K.-based Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR). “Public relations professionals should not directly edit Wikipedia under any circumstances where they have a conflict of interest and should instead suggest amendments for consideration by Wikipedia’s editors,” the CIPR said in a press release.
