While neither marketing nor social media are sciences, one needs to use scientific principles to be most effective when it comes to both branding and prospecting online. It doesn’t take an Einstein to succeed in social media marketing, but to does take a scientist. Are you rigorously collecting metrics and data to see if what you’re doing is resulting in sales conversions or extending your brand or are you relying on things you’ve learned from The Secret? Is your social media marketing campaign relying too much on magical realism, the power of positive thinking, and general superstition?

Or, are you so confident in your social media marketing plan that you really don’t care what your experiment says? That no matter how little pick-up you get in the media or no matter how few followers you garner or how little engagement, it isn’t your fault but must be because the market’s not ready for you or because you knew that social media marketing wasn’t effective anyway.

Well, that’s just bad science. Don’t let your social media hypothesis dictate your conclusion

If you want to be an effective scientist, it is essential that you allow the results of your experiments — your observations — to speak for themselves. While having a hypothesis going into the lab is always part one, allowing the empirical data to realign or even contradict your initial predictions is essential. That said, it’s hard on the ego to see something fail. It’s even harder to take the data as it comes and turn it into something useful in the end. This is how innovation happens, of course; and this is how scientific breakthroughs happen, too: not incrementally but in finding order in the chaos of unpredicted results.

There is a lot of bad science in social media marketing. Even a long decade after the Cluetrain Manifesto brought us the 95 theses that taught us that markets are conversations and that brands don’t own their brands anymore — a hypothesis that has proven itself prophetic — there are still many brands that have adopted blogs and social networks simply as new broadcast channels and have simply used social media as a handy way of listening in on the rude thing that people are saying about them.

Science is about testing. Testing and retesting and being willing and able to cut loose any and all processes that prove ineffective and moving those resources into things that either work outright or show general promise. It is about not being attached to outcome. Finally, it is also about sticking to your guns and powering through on your commitment to seeing your experiments and your tests through. There are too many ghost towns littering social media that are the direct result of abandoned experiments, abandoned dreams — actually, more often, they succumbed to a crisis of faith.

The advertising industry has already adopted science and testing, but not because they wanted to. These were not men who had faith in science — they thought that advertising was an art. While early online marketing started to make advertising nervous, it wasn’t until Google launched AdWords that advertising began to evolve from art to science. The same thing is happening to direct marketing. From A/B testing to sophisticated engagement metrics, the science of advertising and marketing is becoming more de facto than fringe.

PR as the last bastion of magical thinking

PR is the last bastion of The Secret, the last bastion of superstition and magical thinking. The last business communication vocation that struggles against the harsh accountability of hard science, the cruel nakedness of quantitative metrics over the soft fuzzies of qualitative metrics.

Just because you’ve adopted social media doesn’t mean you’re modern. It is strangely possible to map your 19th century PR strategies onto a 21st century media platform without missing a beat. Take responsibility for your campaigns and do not let your hunches and experience dictate your successes and failures — let the data inform you and when it informs you that you’re just spinning your wheels, it is essential to do whatever it takes to adjust your campaign to maximize performance, amplify influence, and optimize for conversions.

Everything else is just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, a sure sign of insanity — or so said none other than Albert Einstein.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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• Don’t Let Your Social Media Hypothesis Dictate Your Conclusion (biznology.com)
• How to Put Social Media Marketing to Work for Your Company (web2.sys-con.com)
• Manufacturer Kicks Off 2012 Social Media Marketing Program – Program to Complement Current Marketing Campaigns (prweb.com)
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To follow up on my last post, Being pretty isn’t enough for social media success, I wanted to discuss what I like to call Social Media Isolationism or Social Media Agoraphobia.

And there are two forms of this sort of isolationism: invitational and exclusionary. They both mean you don’t venture outside your own four social media walls; however, the first is welcoming and the other is dismissive.

The welcoming pineapple

Jay Gatsby was a welcoming pineapple. He desperately wanted to woo his beloved Daisy and opened his grand home hoping he just might, one night, find her at one of his lavish parties. Or, at the very least, create enough buzz so that his lost love might hear of him and ask about him.

Not always the direct result of a grand romantic gesture, the welcoming pineapple is often associated with the feeling that one is so appealing, so compelling a brand, product, or service that your friends and neighbors should very well come a-calling. You host awesome dinner parties, right? You have the biggest television, have your own pool and tennis court, and have several guest rooms. Why would you ever want to leave your own social media home?

Why wouldn’t everyone want to take advantage of your generosity and party favor to want to go anywhere else, to say nothing of staying home in their pallid, beige, one-bedroom apartments? This generosity often comes with the stink of superiority or ego that eventually turns people off.

And if the proffered goodies are so compelling as to compel, this commitment might very well be contingent only upon the bounty, the booty, the swag lavished. In other words, your friends are bought and paid for and are your friends forever (or until you run out of cookies and candies and a subscription to cable).

In terms of a country, this open-border country would be glad to allow anyone in but since this country is obviously so awesome, offering everything and anything you could very well ever want in the first place, people just visit, nobody really ever leaves and a majority don’t even possess a passport.

Good fences make good neighbors

There are other social media isolationists who treat their following like a gardener maintains a Bonsai tree: letting it grow then pruning it back. Limiting its natural growth patterns with the goal of cultivating something elegant, controllable, exceptional, and beautiful — and planned. The operative word here is control.

There is a strong desire among the good fences variety of social media isolationists to want to maintain a semblance of control over brand perception, brand response, and brand buzz. This social media isolationist would surely turn off (or moderate) comments if at all possible.

This form of social media agoraphobic never lowers himself to engaging with riffraff and never suffers fools gladly. In many cases, he blocks competitors, rarely follows anyone back, and limits real engagement to the worthy and the notable. Only A-listers need apply.

This is the sort of social media expert who most likely has a pristine living room with white couches and chairs neatly enshrined in a clear vinyl cover. This is the sort of person who collects beautiful heritage silver and china, never to see the copious staining gravies and beet juice of a holiday dinner.

It doesn’t matter that social media is, by its very nature, chaotic, organic, anonymous, spontaneous, unpredictable, and crazy; it means nothing that the life of something beautiful can readily be strangled out of it when the collar’s too tight; and it means nothing that your detailed business plan and marketing strategy may be too macro, too myopic — that what you’ve made exclusively for one use may well be adopted “off prescription” for something completely different and more profitable — something this sort of isolationist would very well never be able to see.

And, if he could, he wouldn’t want it that way because that’s not the right way and it shouldn’t be done this way. Social media’s just not cricket.

In terms of a country, this walled-up land would be glad to exclude everyone; but, more realistically, it’s willing to limit visas and green cards to only the pedigreed: money, power, influence, esteem, connections, or education. Full funding for controlled borders and everyone had better carry their papers with them. I mean, why allow anyone in, since this country is obviously so awesome.

A majority possess passports; however, why leave? Too much chaos, uncertainty, and people who don’t look like the sort of people they’re used to.

Social media globalists unite

Neither the welcoming pineapple nor the good fences are effective in social media marketing because there are innately no borders in the Internet. Yes, maybe there is are language and cultural barriers, but these are as meaningless as the lines that separate nation states.

The Internet has rendered the world flat. Facebook is expected to reach a billion members in April.

And that’s to say nothing of the bloggers, the tweeters, the pinsters, the borders, the messengers, the redditers, the diggers, the flickrers, the tumblrs, the googlers, and, yes, even the spacers — they’re global, they curious, they’re ambitious, and they have as much right to your attention as anyone else.

Whether you’re an exclusionary or inclusive isolationist, you’re still unwilling to leave your social media homeland. You’re unwilling to go out there and meet your future real best friends. Instead, you either having to buy them or remain too afraid and afeard to make friends at all–or at least the wrong type of friends.

To be sure, you’ll never know where your next windfall will come from. You also don’t know who that fairy godmother is or what she looks like. It’s essential to get out there and spend some of your time and energy going exploring, finding new lands and new faces, and expanding your natural core, your natural base.

While there may well be zero barriers to you because the Internet has flattened the business world for you, there are also zero barriers between you and your best future customers! So, go git ‘em Tiger!

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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I just received this missive from the gang at Miriam’s Kitchen. The email is titled “Homelessness increases 5% in DC” and here’s what it said:

Last week, we shared with you the The National Alliance to End Homelessness‘ new report, The State of Homelessness in America 2012 (you can view the highlights here.)

This week, we’d like to share with you the trends from DC as well as what we’re seeing at Miriam’s Kitchen.

Here’s what’s happening in DC:

• There are 6,546 homeless individuals on any given night in DC, an increase of 5% from 2009.
• The number of chronically homeless individuals increased by 9% from 2009 to 2011.
• The number of homeless families increased by 17% from 2009 to 2011.
• The number of homeless veterans decreased by 20% in the last two years.

What we’re seeing at Miriam’s Kitchen:

• Our guest population continues to consist primarily of chronically homeless individuals. We have also seen an increase in the number of families we’re serving.
• The number of guests we’re providing case management services to has gone up by 23% from 2010.
• The number of meals we’re serving is down slightly from 2010. We served an average of 273 meals per day in 2011 vs. an average of 289 per day in 2010. We attribute this change to two factors: the relocation of emergency shelters to the outskirts of town has made it difficult for guests to join us for breakfast, and 150-200 of our guests are now in permanent supportive housing and no longer dependent upon our meals.

The numbers don’t tell the whole story, but what we’re seeing in DC is troubling. Homelessness is on the rise in DC and is predicted to get worse before it gets better.

If DC hadn’t been making the significant investments in housing solutions that they have been the past few years, the increases we’re seeing now would be even higher. That’s why we know that permanent supportive housing is the answer for our guests, and why we’ll continue to provide the highest-quality services possible while advocating for the permanent supportive housing our guests need to survive.

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I always tell clients that it is no longer enough to be beautiful when it comes to marketing online. The Internet has become more like an Oscar after-party than it is like the airport Ramada.

Online, you’re never the lone beauty in the hotel lounge. Online, you’re surrounded by equal or greater beauties. What’s more, the most successful online social media barflies are aggressive in addition to gorgeous. Too many companies that have invested vast resources in social have Pretty Boy/Girl Syndrome. A symptom of this disease is an expectation that others will go out of their way to pursue you.

No matter how much money you spend on a graphic designer, a social media expert, and a community manager, you may very well not find the kind of success you want and expect from your investment in social media and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Being beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming is no longer good enough when you’re not just competing with the student body for Prom King and Queen, you’re now competing with potentially every other beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming person on planet earth. The Internet has flattened the market, allowing anyone to eat your lunch, so just ringing the dinner bell after you launch your social media presence is not going to work as well as you expect.

Mind you, there are exceptions. If there are holes in the market–a vacuum–then filling that need will result in amazing success. Another exception is celebrity. If you already have an undeniable fan-base, it will translate perfectly into success online. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, we have neither.

In order to compete on a world stage, it is essential to aggressively recruit new members. Not just new members, but passionate, enthusiastic, members who will do what you expected Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to do for you in the first place: create firestorms of buzz and word-of-mouth influence. To become a channel of primary, secondary, and tertiary influence that result in your members sharing your content on their walls, resulting on an organic growth, ultimately snowballing into massive conversions and stellar online sales.

Do some research and you’ll find out, to your astonishment, that a majority of those viral videos with over a million views were not “upload it to YouTube and they will come.” Most of them skyrocketed as the direct result of some form of publicity campaign, be it grass roots or from an agency.

Be the catalyst of your natural social media success. Take your fate into your own hands and get off of that bar stool and walk over and start some conversations with all the folks you want to meet. This can include a long-tail blogger outreach campaign, it should include an A-list influencer outreach, be they on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever.

Membership in your community is a later stage of the hearts-and-minds campaign in which you need to engage. Just collecting Likes or Follows doesn’t often result in engagement. If you spend any time on your Facebook Page Insights, which you do, you’ll understand how important performance is to the success of your social media campaign. You need both quantity and quality of Likes. I won’t kid you: more is better; however, if you have hundreds of thousands of Likes on your Facebook Page but have negligible engagement in your posts in the form of likes and comments, then you will not earn the sort of gravity and popularity to elbow on your members’ Facebook Wall.

If you’re able to prospect passionate followers by going out there–to where they live on their own blogs, forums, Listservs, social networks, and communities–to find them, recruit them, convert them, and win them over, then you’ll start seeing the true power of world-of-mouth marketing.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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Last week, I wrote about how to succeed with B-list bloggers, but maybe some of you aren’t convinced.

So, this week, I want to draw an analogy to successful Google AdWords approaches so that you can see how to apply that same technique to blogger outreach. When it comes to reaching out to bloggers online, there’s a lot you can learn from Google AdWords. Long-tail blogger outreach is like long-tail Google AdWords advertising. Instead of putting all your money on the top 10 most expensive and popular keywords that everyone bids on, smart advertisers segment their markets and hyper-target their highest-performing keywords with their most compelling ads and content while always pruning away their worst performers.

The same should be done with blogger outreach. There will always be blogs that are out of your league and your target audience. Instead of hitting your head against the wall by trying to make it onto TechCrunch and Mashable, learn to segment your blogger list, target more precisely while expanding your pool of bloggers past the top most blogs that tend also to be the most exclusive and difficult to break into — out of your league — to blogs and bloggers who are just starting out, who blog more from passion than ad revenue, and who are naturally more receptive to your content and your message based on a natural affinity.

Affiliate marketers have learned that they can reliably make money by spending money on Google AdWords by finding keyword phrases with such low bids that they can make money from the relatively small commissions or bounty they get from converting the click throughs to sales. Millions in yearly profits cent by cent, dollar by dollar. A cascade of small sales made by people who were so well targeted to that they were almost powerless to resist.

The same thing can be done with blogger outreach. If you’re able to find yourself thousands of bloggers who have yet to be discovered by your all your competitors, you’ll be able to secure hundreds of earned media mentions. In concert, hundreds of earned media mentions both drown out a single post on TechCrunch and also do a better job or finding what you really want: sales.

All the most successful AdWords gurus, such as Adam Viener of imwave, realize that you can only make money in affiliate marketing with Google AdWords if you can make more money from your converted sales than you spend. You can’t do this unless you find the magic sweet spot where there aren’t many competing bidders who are bidding up the price of your keyword phrases so that you can both keep your spending low and also increase the likelihood that those who do stumble upon your ad will not only click through, costing you money, but also make a trackable major purchase, resulting in a commission–in commissions–that cover the costs of the ads and then some. This is not easy and the field fluctuates.

It takes expertise and vigilance, Adam tells me, and a mistake can be costly. One possibly apocryphal story reported that there was a very profitable keyword phrase that suddenly also became popular and the bids shot up without someone noticing, resulting in the equivalent of a Range Rover being lost in one day. Because of such high risks tantamount to the stock market, these folks are very good at discovering and milking the long tail, realizing that making a little bit here and there spread concurrently over hundreds and thousands of ads and keywords is more profitable, long term, than making a single big score.

If you’re loaded with cash and don’t really care about extracting value from your campaign, you can spend all your money on trying to get your ad copy at the top of every Google Search just to see it there but being constantly outbid by others, ultimately clearing out your budget or maxing your credit card; the same can be said with regards to blogger outreach: you can spend all your budgeted time and money pursuing the top bloggers while constantly being blocked by content from bigger, sexier, richer, more impressive national and global brands that have exclusive content and truckloads of valuable review products, better assets, and a promise of more and better traffic resulting in higher advertising revenue.

The most obvious thing you can learn is how easily it is to get outbid. Another thing you’ll learn is that AdWords can rapidly burn all your cash with nothing to show for it. Finally, you’ll learn that Google doesn’t wage a fair fight — they both play favorites as well as giving preference to quality of ad over quantity of bid.

What this means in Google AdWords ads is that you’re rewarded for the following: 1) Having lots of cash: a fool and his money are soon parted 2) Finding new markets: Being willing to hunt out holes in the market — keyword combinations that are not so obvious but are hyper-targeted to appeal to a new segment of visitors, bringing new opportunities for Google to make money 3) Creating an irresistible ad: no matter how much money you’re willing to spend, Google doesn’t make money unless visitors are compelled to click through 4) Becoming a long-term client: there are many cases where no amount or money and wit will claim you the top ad position on Google search, inline with organic search, because that spot almost always goes to the client who has made Google the most money, historically, over time.

These lessons map perfectly to blogger outreach.

The blogosphere rewards specialization and laser-targeting

The most desired, desirable, and “easy” keywords are like the top bloggers with the highest Alltop rankings and Klout scores are constantly being pursued. How realistic are you that you can even compete with all the others vying for their time and copy? If you’re Dell or Sony, you probably have the sort of brand recognition and respect to be able to get a blogger to schedule time to review your new gizmo pretty thoroughly. You’ll probably also have the sort of marketing budget that would allow you to offer a review product to everyone you engage.

You’ll probably have a graphic design department and a staff of copywriters who can develop an amusing and compelling pitch which could include press junkets and personal meet and greets. Finally, a company like Dell is able to commit the long-term time, staff, and expense account towards making sure their communications team developed and professional as well as personal relationship with as many online influencers and online journalists over time — to use Google AdWords parlance, they have learned how to appeal to Google on all levels.

How many levels are you able to compete on? If you’re unable to compete on any of these levels, you’ll go bankrupt trying. It’s not that A-List tech bloggers are corrupt, it’s just that they’re under pressure as well. They have only 24-hours/day and they’re heavily rewarded with traffic when they’re able to get exclusive content from a national player such as Dell. In the same way that Google AdWords rewards its clients for trying harder and digging deeper into the “long tail” in order to find new, under-served, markets, the blogosphere also rewards specialization and laser-targeting.

In a perfect world, one should only spend one’s AdWords budget on keywords phrases that display ads only to people who will convert into clients and customers. The better one knows one’s market and customer and the more time one spends finding out who and where they are and engaging them there, the more value you can extract from your sweat and cash.

Let’s say you’re preparing to launch your new book online and you want to use bloggers as an essential distribution channel, both great ideas. However, let’s think this through. Are you internationally famous crime fiction writer James Ellroy or are you an unknown first-time, self-published, crime fiction-writer? Do you have a huge war chest to fuel your promotional campaign or are you running on sweat equity? Do you have thousands of friends online who are already committed to buying your book because you have been developing your popularity online by sharing chapters and answering questions and giving free advice or have you been busily scribbling your work on yellow pads and consider your work protected by strict copyright and not something to dilute by giving it away?

Novice Google AdWords users waste a lot of money with limited results when they start out because they don’t understand how the competition works in contextual ad-buying: It’s an auction. A complicated auction.

In short, the way it works is that every keyword combination, such as “social media marketing,” competes with four things: the general popularity of the search, the quality of the keyword ad, the long-term success of the campaign, and how much money others are willing to bid for their ad based on their keyword choice, also dependent on their prior successes, ad spends, and long-term commitment. In shorter, while how much you’re willing to bid for a keyword phrase is important, it isn’t that simple.

With blogger outreach, you face the same odds as for paid search. If you are targeting only the top blogs, you’ll face immense competition and can easily be outgunned by bigger foes. If you target the long tail of bloggers, you can more easily land your targets and will build up success one blog at a time, rather than in one fell swoop.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz viaBiznology

Related articles

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• Live people over Robot Armies and Zombie Hordes (chrisabraham.com)
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Via IBM

I laugh all the way through the 30 minutes of 2 Broke Girls every Monday night. And I laugh through reruns, too. There’s no one cooker than Max.

An article this long in the Washington Post says to me that 2 Broke Girls is a force to be reckoned with.

Abraham Harrison’s new client, Nymgo, has now completely re-developed its networking infrastructure and is accordingly re-launching its product, website and brand with a completely new look and set of functions that pushes the envelope of mass consumer VoIP technology in 2012 — and, to celebrate that launch, they’re also offering 5 tickets to anywhere to a lucky 5 folks.

This contest is called the “Nymgo, fly me to visit someone” contest and it takes place on its regional Facebook pages for Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan — one round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world will be available to  each Facebook Page by simply choosing a friend they would like to visit. The contestant simply uploads a picture along with a required caption (maximum 500 words) explaining why they should win the trip to see that person.

Here’s some more information from the Social Media News Release that we produced for Nymgo:

Thanks to an investment from Intel Capital (USA) and Abraaj Capital (UAE) in 2010 and 2011, respectively, Nymgo has now completely re-developed its networking infrastructure and is accordingly re-launching its product, website and brand with a completely new look and set of functions that pushes the envelope of mass consumer VoIP technology in 2012.

With an established user base around the world and fast-growing multi-national workforce, Nymgo is definitely a start-up that you’ll want to pay closer attention to soon.

Nymgo is heating up its social media efforts by celebrating and honoring the hard work of expats and all kinds people living all over the globe by launching the “Nymgo, fly me to visit someone” contest on its regional Facebook pages – Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan. A total of 5 competitions and 5 round trip airplane tickets , Nymgo is awarding one person on each of these Facebook pages the chance to fly anywhere in the world, by simply choosing a friend they would like to visit. The contestant simply uploads a picture along with a required caption (maximum 500 words) explaining why they should win the trip to see that person.

In early 2012, Nymgo will be the first known VoIP software company to bring its extreme pricing to international calls on its native iOS and Android apps.

While both smartphones and VoIP technology have been around for years, Nymgo has married these two concepts together to bring crystal clear mobile-to-anywhere calling at the same rates we have come to expect from PC’s.

Because Nymgo specializes in paid VoIP long distance calling, it is able to focus on giving consumers the first real alternative to that which is offered by the mobile network operators. You always know where you stand with Nymgo. You get a great quality of service, backed by our Fair Pricing and Every Day Low Pricing policies.

We don’t offer you fancy promotions that promise the earth but in reality deliver nothing. Nymgo prices remain to be the lowest in the market of VOIP calls coupled with the best voice quality and customer service. No calling credit expiry dates with our Pay As You Go service.

We give it to you straight, including some great value adds – such as the ability to record your conversations, low cost texting and access the same phone book from wherever you happen to be at the time; at home, around the corner or on the other side of the world.

You pay the advertised Pay As You Go price with Nymgo. And that’s all you pay.

We don’t tie you up in long term contracts either. You can cancel either service at any time, without incurring any penalty charges.

Simply use up your credits and don’t top up again, or cancel your direct debit or credit card payment. We hope you don’t, of course. But you’re free to do exactly that, if you so decide.

I had my television début on Washington Business Report this morning on WJLA ABC7. I was invited on by Rebecca Cooper because she stumbled upon the Abraham Harrison website and liked our humor and our business.  So, here’s the video of the segment for you to check out:

I am so honored and humbled that I have been included in this most prestigious top-25 amongst the most incredible PR bloggers.  Thank you PR Web for including me! Congrats to my fellow PR bloggers for all your hard work in 2011 and good luck in 2012! Check out PRWeb‘s Public Relations Blogs – 25 Essential PR Bloggers You Should Be Reading!

Keeping up with what’s new and interesting in public relations news is important – vital strategies, tips and trends are shared each day that can impact your business.  Whether you’re looking for best practices on press release distribution or simply how to take advantage of social media, these blogs will prove invaluable. To keep up with the hottest and highest quality content, below are 25 essential public relations blogs you should be reading:

PR Squared

PR Squared is a blog by Todd Defren, a principal at SHIFT Communications, which focuses on conversations about social media and marketing.

Brian Solis

Brian Solis, Principal of FutureWorks, gives insights into the convergence of PR, Traditional Media and Social Media at his popular blog.

Peter Shankman

Peter Shankman’s blog looks at thinking about Social Media, PR, marketing, advertising, creativity, and customer service.

Dave Fleet

DaveFleet.com is about communications, public relations, marketing and social media, and the areas where those topics intersect.

Danny Brown

This blog by Danny Brown, co-founder of the SRM group, focuses on the use of social media, PR and marketing,

Conversation Communications

This blog by Arik Hansen, principal of ACH Communications, covers all things related to digital PR strategy and community building.

Social Media Explorer

A blog by Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer, covers public relations, social media, search marketing and many topics in between.

Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison LLC, writes this blog on developing news and updates in the world of public relations and social media.

PR in Your Pajamas

A blog about integrating using public relations and business coaching for results, Elena Verlee, tells how integrating these areas will lead to success for your business.

O‘Dwyer’s PR Blog

O’Dwyer’s blog covers PR, public affairs, marketing and the world of communications.

Online Marketing Blog

The Online Marketing blog maintained by the team at TopRank Online Marketing provides helpful information on areas such as SEO, social media marketing, business blogging and online PR.

Influential Marketing Blog

Rohit Bhargava maintains the Influential Markeitng Blog, a site that focuses on information and resources on creating compelling marketing, advertising and public relations strategies.

AimClear Blog

The aimClear blog is a resource for search engine marketing for advertising agency, in-house and public relations professionals.

A Take on Tech PR

A blog by Drew Benvie, managing director of 33 Digitial, that gives insights and information on tech public relations and how it can help you.

Media Culpa

Media Culpa is a blog about media and public relations – with a focus on social media – written by Swedish PR practitioner Hans Kullin.

Buzz Bin

The Buzz Bin provides a point of view on integrated communications, including PR, social media, interactive and general marketing topics.

Spin Sucks

Spin Sucks is the agency blog of Arment Dietrich and covers social media, online PR and all things in between.

PR Couture

PR Couture explores the ever-evolving role of public relations, marketing and social media in the fashion industry.

PRSA ComPRehension

PRSA ComPRehension is a blog on PR best practices from Public Relations Society of America members.

Beyond the Hype

Beyond the Hype conveys the opinions, insights and experiences in public relations and advertising from senior communications counselors at Lois Paul & Partners.

Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is a Search and PR strategist, helping news and content sites with enterprise SEO and audience development, including social media marketing and other forms of online public relations.

Measurement Matters

Measurement Matters gives insights and information on the areas of public relations, social media and how media analysis and evaluation relates to them.

College Web Editor

College Web Editor is a helpful resource with information about the Web, marketing, and PR in higher education.

Deirdre Breakenridge

Deirdre discusses social networking, blogging, microblogging, podcasting, streaming video, RSS technology and how communications is changing the way that businesses need to think.

Journalistics

Journalistics is a blog dedicated to covering all topics at the intersection of public relations and journalism today.

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