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  • @mhbusiness tweets on the most current thinking in business from McGraw-Hill
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  • @govtwit the world’s largest government twitter directory
  • @socialmediajob1 source for up to-the-minute social media jobs in major US metropolitan areas

Layoff alternatives: How to cut costs without cutting staff

April 2nd, 2009

Unemployment rates are as high as employee morale is low, and C-suite executives are starting to take drastic measures to cutback on expenses without resorting to layoffs. And in these cases, protecting their workforces doesn’t entail handing out millions of taxpayers’ dollars, a la AIG—for those executives who responded to the Financial Executives International/Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business 2009 Q1 CFO Outlook Survey, more pragmatic options are being explored, such as: more »

IBM Global Mentoring Program Enhances Employee Experience—or does it?

March 12th, 2009

Timing can be so poetic. Just a few days ago, I wrote about the issue of underutilized employees and how leveraging this untapped potential can enhance productivity without costing more money. One of the tips I suggested for doing so was to institute mentoring programs. more »

viral videos killed the guerilla marketing star

January 16th, 2009

Remember the days when guerilla marking was all the fashion and friends getting friends just to try the newest and coolest tech gadgets would score you some cold hard cash. Those were the days, especially in this economy. With the Internet now usurping everything money and replacing it with FREE corporate executives are left scratching their heads to ponder ways to monetize. more »

Archive for October, 2009

Measuring the ROI of Social Media Campaigns: A Few Perspectives

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

Stephen DebruynAs social media and social media platforms increasingly become promising targets for marketing professionals, the question of return on investment (ROI) of social media campaigns is gaining in prominence, specifically in comparison with the returns generated by alternative marketing initiatives and tactics that can be employed.

The case for ROI

Social media is obviously a relatively new phenomenon, and therefore social media measurement models are still undeveloped, but a number of individuals in the social media arena have made attempts to address existing confusion and lay down some basic ground rules. While many in the field have compiled lists of key performance indicators (KPIs) by which the success of social media initiatives can potentially be measured, Olivier Blanchard and Jacob Morgan, among others, quite correctly emphasize that ROI is by definition a financial equation that specifies the correlation between an investment and its financial return. (more…)

A Funny Thing Happened on the way back from Town Hall

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

What a difference a President’s personal involvement can make.

When we left off a few weeks ago, birthers, tea-partiers, grandma-killers and others from the wing-nut fringe had been verbally assaulting their elected representatives with charges that health care reform was the medical equivalent of the Wehrmacht blitzkrieg in Poland. Town hall meetings, a hallowed American ritual of representative democracy harking back to the nation’s founding, had previously stood for the right of the people to engage in reasoned debate with their elected officials back home from Washington. In the steroidal 2009 version, these otherwise frequently boring gatherings had been jacked by extremists armed with vitriol, cameras, made-for-tv signage, pre-printed press releases – and in several cases – exposed handguns. (more…)

The Digital Complaint Department: Social Media Becomes the Next Crisis Communication Minefield

Monday, October 12th, 2009

The advent of Twitter roused little curiosity in corporate communication circles until savvy consumers started taking aim at brands for bad service and poor products. As social media platforms transform into business tools and applications, business leaders are taking note and integrating strategies and platforms into company strategy plans.

The reason is quite simple: Customer connectivity. As digital platforms become the preferred consumer communication platform, businesses are forced to follow their customers online. And by connecting with clients and customers online businesses must deal with the good, the bad and the ugly. (more…)

Inbound Meets Outbound: the push-pull dynamic of modern marketing

Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Ims Boston Tim Marklein Oct809
View more documents from Tim Marklein.

Weber Shandwick’s Tim Marklein talks advocates and “badvocates” at this week’s Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston. The presentation, shown here, has a number of great tips and takeaways for upsetting the proverbial apple cart–in a good way, of course.


Speak No Evil: How to Avoid Online Libel Lawsuits Against Your Blog

Monday, October 5th, 2009

If a blogger makes a malicious or libelous statement in cyberspace, does it make a sound? It’s a question more and more individuals and businesses are asking lawyers, corporate counsel and human resource executives. In fact, according to the Media Law Resource Center, there have been 95 new libel cases filed against bloggers in the last three years–a 216% increase over the previous three-year period.

While the reason for such an upshot is still unclear, the rise in prominence and use of social media tools and applications almost certainly played a role. Loyal readers that tally in the millions follow such top bloggers as Robert Scoble of Microsoft fame and Arianna Huffington, founder of HuffingtonPost, and they are increasingly chiming in with their own comments, too. (more…)

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