Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Goodbye Blog… Hello World!
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
T. S. Eliot
The Beginning
When I first put up my blog in June 2008, I had no plan and certainly no ambitions for it. It was just a place to put my thoughts on customer-centric marketing, public relations and communications. With all of the millions of blogs out there, heck, I really didn’t expect anyone to actually read it!
But then… slowly, people did begin to read my blog and comment. It was humbling to know that people were actually reading my words, my thoughts. People didn’t always agree with me and my sentiments, but there was a great conversation around the topic.
As you can imagine, a lot of the conversation included debates around social media. Here are just a few of the lengthy conversations:
- Is Social Media the Same As Marketing?
- Social Media Certification: For the low, low price of…
- Top 25 Ways to Tell if Your Social Media Expert Is a Carpetbagger (written with Geoff Livingston)
- Social Media Ghostwriting: The Great Marketing/PR Debate*
- The Four Faces of Social Media
The End
There are many (!) blogs out there for people to read and for the past three years, I have really appreciated you all for taking the time out of your busy days to read my posts, generate conversations, provide insights, and share experiences. It has been a pleasure to get to know everyone throughout the years!
All things must come to an end, including this blog. I’ll leave it archived, but I won’t be posting to it anymore. I plan to spend my “off-hours” with the really important things in my life that I am called to: family and friends, volunteering and outreach, reading (even more!), getting to old and new hobbies, and teaching.
I am not done with blogging. I hope to share some posts at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix and over at the Ruters University Center for Management Development blog. And maybe—if I am lucky—some of my blogging friends will allow me to come visit and drop off a guest post now and again.
Here’s to a new end!
[Image Source: incourage.me]
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Saturday Morning Reads: Celebrating Mom-Centric Marketing
It’s Mother’s Day weekend! Let’s celebrate moms and how they have turned marketers upside down.
As a marketer, I have been impressed with how moms have worked with companies to make their voice heard and to get companies to understand that if their needs (and the needs of their children and families!) are met with applicable solutions, they will become brand loyal. As people become as comfortable with social media tools and sharing their voices as moms, I am confident that they will follow this path and forge partnerships with the companies that serve them.
I have tapped into four wonderful moms (of all boys!), Christa Miller, Shelli Johnson, Jeannie Cusick Walters, and Becky Carroll who just also happen to be some of the smartest communicators I know. Here’s the advice they’d like to share with fellow marketers and communicators:
Christa Miller, owner of Christa M. Miller Communications and mom to two boys:
“Don’t assume that all mothers’ experiences are alike. Some are very similar, of course, but motherhood is so intensely personal that even our reasons for (example) going back to work, self-employing, or leaving the workforce altogether to stay home are not as cut and dried as the actions you see. (Mothers forget this, too.) Parenting cuts to all our deepest wishes, hopes and insecurities, our most personal life experiences and the way we see this awesome responsibility. Respect that, whether in humor or seriousness, and you’ll win my trust.”
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What Integrated Marketing Is Not (Hint: It’s Not Integrated Tactics)
I just received an interesting comment on my “For Hire” post that asked:
“Are there really any leading authorities – aside from published authors – on integrated marketing and communications? There are a lot of self-promoters who claim expertise in what is usually “the obvious”.
This comment, while obviously an attempt to discredit my experience, made me realized that there are probably many marketing professionals out there that have the same misunderstanding and misperception when it comes to understanding the theory and benefits of true integration.
I want to help fix that.
From the dawn of its time, which would be about 1993, when the “Fathers of Integration” Schultz, Tannenbaum and Lauterborn wrote The New Marketing Paradigm: Integrated Marketing Communications, integration has always been based in customer-centric (putting the customer at the center of the organization) and data-driven marketing. Unfortunately, marketers conveniently ignored the customer-centric, data-driven part of integration. We’ll get to that in a bit…
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Tags: customer experience, Customer-Centric, don schultz, IMC, integrated marketing, integrated marketing communications, Jay Galbraith, Ranjay Gulati | 
3 Comments »
Saturday Morning Reads: MADD Reading
I was going to read about social media tools that bring customers and companies together, but then I realized digging into that would take more time then I have this morning.
Instead, I am sharing what I have actually read this morning. This week’s reading is so inconsistent compared to how I normally prepare for this weekly endeavor (which to pick a topic and stick with it) that it seems to be a sudden flare up of MADD (marketing attention deficit disorder). Enjoy!
Jason Keath: Sometimes brilliant creative tells the whole story
Proves that smart advertising just might not be dead, just yet…
Mack Collier: Ford CMO Jim Farley: Social media leading to ‘massive cost savings’ for Ford
“As Jim explains above, social media is lowering the amount of money that Ford has to spend on traditional advertising. That’s money that can then be spent on product development, customer service, and other areas that improves the quality of the product, as well as customer satisfaction. Which ultimately…increases sales. So this is another example of social media working indirectly.”
Keep Reading…
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Tags: Marketing, social business, Social Media |
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Dear CEO: Your Customers Really Want You To Know Them
Dear CEO:
The last two years have presented us with a rough economy and no doubt, many people—employees, stakeholders and customers alike—are feeling its tight squeeze and so are you. Layoffs, cutbacks, delayed product and service upgrades, lack of innovation, competitive pressure, unsure stockholders, lost supply chains, and more, likely keep you up at night or at least in the office for countless hours when you would rather be home with your family.
With or without a bad economy, the business tides have certainly shifted over the past five years.
Customers are now more vocal than ever when it comes to your brand and the promises made on its behalf. Yes, even B2B customers.
Keep Reading…
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The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.theharteofmarketing.com. [If you have a question about what you can use from this blog, click on the above Creative Commons link to learn more.]
