Archive for the ‘Marketing Communications’ 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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Your “Industry Experience Only” Requirement Is Hurting Customers, Employees and Shareholders
“Industry only experience” is not a new requirement, of course, and exceptions have always been made for talented candidates. However, in a down economy, it seems industry experience becomes a highly enforced criterion used to close the door on marketing talent.
I am not in Human Resources (HR), so I cannot tell you why it happens (I have my suspicions though). However, I have been a hiring manager and will say industry experience is something I avoid like the plague when reviewing resumes. Why? Because industry experience has absolutely NOTHING to do with the level of experience, talent, drive, problem-solving skills, enthusiasm and passion a candidate has to offer, which should always be the benchmark when hiring. A smart employee can learn any industry. It isn’t rocket science—unless you are handling marketing and PR for NASA.
[Sidebar: Please do not use the ‘regulations excuse.’ Again, a smart employee can learn regulations. An exceptional employee, however, learns them and then figures out how to stay within mandatory regulations without allowing them to chokehold company goals and objectives (Read: Growth).]
According to Executive Staffing Solutions’ latest newsletter, there is good news and bad news when it comes to filling open positions. The good news is that there are many good positions opening up for candidates. The bad news is companies are not recognizing top talent when it comes through the door.
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Tags: communications, customer experience, Customer-Centric, Customer-Focused, Marketing, Marketing Management, PR | 
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Saturday Morning Reads: What’s the Return on Investment (ROI) of Content Marketing?
As content marketing becomes a continually popular strategy to connect, engage, and hopefully provide value, there is no doubt that the question of return on investment will rear its head.
As you can imagine, content marketing takes time, planning, and effort. It is hard work. How then will content marketing find its rightful and respected place in our short-term, short-patience, short-strategy marketing world?
There is evidence revealing that shortsighted interests— just like with social media—are driving marketers to dive into content marketing with a tool first mindset. Cool tools are fun, sexy, and popular. Who wouldn’t want to be seen as all of that? There is just one little thing to consider, tools are worthless without objectives and strategies dictating which tools are required to meet a set goal.
The tools first philosophy is akin to buying a money pit with the intention to flip in it a down real estate market and then asking what went wrong when it does not sell.
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Tags: communications, Content Marketing, Content Marketing ROI, Content Marketing Strategy, Customer Experience Planning, Customer-Centric, Marketing |
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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 |
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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.]
