Persuasive Picks for the week of 07/12/09

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Verizon Integrates Twitter, Facebook into FiOS TV
Verizon helps consumers take another small step towards TV and online integration with the addition of Twitter and Facebook access via their set-top box.

Verizon FiOS and Twitter/Facebook

Box-Office Weekend: Brüno a One-Day Wonder?
Another example of how Twitter has changed the “product launch” game by accelerating the word-of-mouth process with potentially negative side-effects.

YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye
Fans of Internet Explorer (do any really exist..?!) who frequent YouTube are now being notified that the platform will be dropping support for IE6 in the near future. Gone are the days where web app developers felt the need to continually support aging browser technology as to not “upset” the user base.

Can a Company Take Social Networking too Far?
Chris Pirillo shares this almost unbelievable news about retailer Best Buy’s odd move with their new “social networking requirements” for employees.

9 keys to the perfect corporate blog
Michael Estrin provides 9 tips to help companies to provide a more compelling corporate blog.

Persuasive Picks for the week of 07/05/09

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I generally don’t add any commentary to the beginning of the picks posts, but this week I have to say that you’re in store for some pretty entertaining reading (and viewing). I love when a post makes me smile, and a few of these did just that. Please let me know in the comments if you agree. Enjoy!


Nike Censors LeBron James Dunk Incident; Creates Needless PR Fiasco
Nike takes the heat as they learn a lesson about transparency – the hard way.

Blogging Truth: No One Likes Your CEO
Lisa Barone from Outspoken Media serves up this fun and entertaining post about why your company’s CEO might not be the best person to write the corporate blog.

Since When Are Blogs Not Social Media?
Brian Clark from Copyblogger reminds us that the blogs were the original form of social media and still hold tremendous value in your social media strategy.

Life after 80, or what World of Warcraft can teach you about marketing mastery
Christoper S. Penn channels your “inner-gamer” with this fun look at how World of Warcraft compares to marketing strategy.

How P.F. Chang’s Uses Twitter to Be Awesome
Word of Mouth Marketer, Andy Sernovitz shares this inspiring interview that she shot with Kelly Morehead of the restaurant chain P.F. Changs. Their innovative use of Twitter is a story that B2Cs’ can learn from.

Persuasive Picks for the Week of 06/28/09

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Top 10 Productivity Basics Explained
Every once in a while I like to include a non-social media, PR or marketing pick. This is one of those times. As a virtual worker, I continually find motivational inspiration in productivity-based posts. Here’s a nice basic one from LifeHacker.com.

Comment Marketing for Beginners
Shannon Paul applies a fun “red light, green light, yellow light” approach to the basics of “Comment Marketing.” Be sure to read (and contribute to) the comments for more insight.

HOW TO: Get Retweeted on Twitter
Pete Cashmore posts some interesting data (via Dan Zarrella) on re-tweets and re-tweet behavior. Good food for thought when using Twitter as part of your social strategy.

Timing Is A Critical Success Factor for Blog Posts
Michele Goetz expands on the importance of blog post timing and shares an example of how the great posts can fizzle out of the gate, but come back to life when the timing is right.

Buy Twitter Followers: 100,000 for $3479
It was only a matter of time. Once Twitter started to make a routine appearance on nightly news and mainstream media channels, the scammers and low-end profiteers started coming out of the woodwork. Got some extra cash laying around to buy followers who have absolutely no interest in what you have to say? Read on for pure comedy.

Persuasive Picks for the week of 06/21/09

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Facebook Marketing for Dummies5 Tips for Optimizing your Facebook Marketing
Facebook’s 200+ million users make it an increasingly attractive place to try some social marketing efforts. Paul Dunay of the Buzz Marketing for Technology blog shares five ways you can optimize those efforts.

The Forgotten Social Media Tool
With so many social networks and platforms to utilize these days, it’s easy to forget the countless bulletin board systems out there that still have incredibly active communities covering limitless niche topics. Robert Quigley brings bulletin boards back into perspective with this post on MediaBullsEye.

How to Use Social Media: An Interview with Lee Aase of Mayo Clinic
Guy Kawasaki shares this interesting interview (via Amex’s Open Forum blog) with Lee Aase of the Mayo Clinic on how they have been utilizing social media.

My Top 10 Sources of Content Inspiration
Being able to generate a continuous stream of content for blog posts comes naturally for some. For others, it can be a torturous process. Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch shares 10 places where he finds inspiration for writing a plethora of great content.

Report: Companies Should Organize For Social Media in a “Hub and Spoke” model
Many companies diving into the social media space are still trying to figure out what department actually “owns” social media. Should it be part of an existing internal group or is a re-organization in order? Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang shares three different models of company organization that can be found in his latest report.

Persuasive Picks for the week of 06/14/09

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Building Your Online Brand: Five Basic Strategies
Diana Huff share five tips for building your brand online. It’s amazing how often many of these common sense strategies get overlooked.

Blogging Is Dying; Twitter Is to Blame
Crayonista, Joseph Jaffe shares an interesting perspective via MPDailyFix.com (cross-posted from JaffeJuice.com) on how Twitter might be causing blogs to fade away.

Search Engine Tools, useful resources
As I’ve mentioned in previous Picks posts, we need to continue to always teach the basics. Barry Hurd does just that by sharing a short list of useful (and free) search engine tools to use when doing keyword research.

15 Things Social Media Can Do for You Today
David Finch believes “We often get so engrossed in the ROI, measurements, and tools of social media that we forget real life examples of how social media can work.” To support that notion he shares 15 ways social media can help change the way you interact online.

Google Asks Common Man “What is a Browser?” Common Man Has No Clue [Video]
Adam Ostrow shares this entertaining “man on the street” video that demonstrates how little the general public knows about basic technology. It teaches a valuable lesson on how difficult it is to get people to adopt new technologies into their lives – something Google is currently facing with trying to get people to adopt the new Chrome browser.

Persuasive Picks for the week of 06/07/09

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Facebook

Coming Soon (tonight!): Facebook Usernames Coming soon really means coming this weekend. Prepare for the mad dash as like-named people around the world vie for their own Facebook “vanity URLs.”

10 steps to stop identity hijackers
Theft of brand identity on social networks is nothing new. There have been numerous accounts of it on Facebook and Twitter alone. In this post on Ragan.com, David Berkowitz shares 10 steps you can take that will help reduce the chance it might happen to your company’s brand(s).

Twitter to roll out ‘Verified Accounts’ this summer
Twitter will be rolling out a new identity verification process to help combat the aforementioned brand hijacking. This post from Leslie Katz, senior editor of CNET’s Crave, gives the lowdown.

Content Marketing Strategy with a Side of Social
As a PR agency that’s been entrenched in social media over the last few years – from training, to messaging and strategy, to digital content production and other tactics – we constantly refer back to the “basics” of how it all fits into our clients’ (and our) overall online marketing strategy. This post on TopRank’s Online Marketing blog falls nicely into that level of thinking.

Five Levels Of Social Media Responses
Continuing on the theme of social media basics, Dave Fleet shares “five levels of approach to online listening and responding” to help gauge how effective you are at true and active online engagement.

Persuasive Picks for the week of 05/24/09

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SpymasterSpymaster: The Twitter Game That Will Assassinate Your Time
As if Twitter weren’t enough of a distraction from your day on its own, we now have “Spymaster” to contend with. Keep your eyes peeled for the “#spymaster” hashtag to start flooding your stream, as the wild adoption of this new Twitter-based game ensues!

Nine worst social media fails of 2009… thus far
Ok, so this one technically came out last Friday, but it’s definitely worth a mention in this week’s picks – especially if you haven’t seen it yet! Jennifer Leggio profiles nine of the potentially worst social media efforts so far this year. Online campaigns from Denny’s, Motrin and Quiznos are included in this post that will surely give you an idea of what not to do in the social media space.

When & How To Pay A Blogger
If you’ve considered compensating a blogger in exchange for writing about your product or service, then you better think carefully before executing the plan. Groundswell author and Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff provides some insight of his own along with the pre-requisite guidelines that were recently published by the FTC.

5 Rules for Creating Content that RULES!
Many companies struggle when starting a blog and it’s not necessarily from a lack of content to post. Sometimes the struggle stems from figuring out the best way to position or present that content. Matthew Grant eases the process with this post on Marketing Prof’s Daily Fix with five helpful rules to follow when preparing your content for publishing.

Google Wave: A Complete Guide
The announcement of Google Wave, Google’s upcoming real-time communication platform, received quite a bit of buzz this week. The feature list is pretty impressive and I can already see many ways it could fit into a web-worker’s daily interactions. Check out this guide from Mashable for the low-down. Here’s the video of the Google Wave developer preview from the Google I/O conference as an added bonus:

Persuasive Picks for the week of 05/17/09

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Know and Master Your Social Media Data Flow
The deeper you get into trying and using multiple social media tools, the more data begins to flow in different directions – especially with many platforms providing the ability to cross-post to one and other. Louis Gray touches upon this topic and shares how he handles the flow of his social media data.

Are You Spreading Yourself Too Thin?
Jacob Morgan provides some food for thought around the idea of creating multiple accounts for your business on each of the platforms that you are adopting as part of your overall social strategy. The topic definitely deserves consideration to avoid diluting your efforts.

16 Boring but Important Ways to Make Your Business More Social
It’s all too easy to get caught up in the “cool-factor” of the shiny new social web-apps that get released each week. Trying to figure out how to fit all these tools into your company’s social strategy can often distract you from many of the basic things you can do that will often make a bigger (social) impact. Shannon Paul shares 16 “boring” strategies for making your business more social.

Lessons Learned from 3 Years of Blogging
Are you still struggling with the idea of starting a blog and the what content you should create for it that will contribute to its success? Rebecca from the SEOMoz blog shares a plethora of lessons learned from the last three years of her blogging experience.

Are Newspapers & Big Media Dead? Think Again… My Contrarian Take
The continuing speculation over the fate of print media is far from over and there are certainly a lot of interesting takes on the topic. Chris Treadaway shares six interesting reasons why hyperlocal on-line media won’t win out over big print media.

Persuasive Picks for the week of 05/10/09

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This week a few of the PerkettPR staffers step up with their own picks of the week.

With PR on the Rise, Here’s a Refresher Course in the Basics (picked by Lisa Dilg)
Jonah Bloom from AdAge shares this quick PR refresher course for marketers and business owners who still think PR is “dead.”

Have blogs overtaken mainstream media?! (picked by Greg Wind)
This pick is actually a set of links to the New York Times “Timeswire” site and the recently re-vamped Newsweek site. Both mainstream media outlets have taken on a very “blog-ish” looking format, which could very well be the one change that these sources need to make the transition complete.

To tweet or not to tweet? For execs, that is the question (picked by Johanna Cappello)
Is Twitter for you? It seems executives fall on both sides of the fence and some are even perched at the top. This Boston Business Journal post profiles several Beantown area execs and their take on the subject.

Twitter Feels the Fail for Changing Its Feed (picked by Michelle Stevens van Kriedt)
There was certainly no shortage of blog posts on Twitter’s recent decision to change its “@reply” functionality. The sudden change brought an onslaught of Tweets and posts that made it the “meme” of the week. Here’s NPR‘s take on the situation.

Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management (picked by Jeff Glasson)
ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick announces their first premium report for businesses (written by Kirkpatrick and a team of four). Dive into the post to see what the report offers. At $299, it seems like a great deal when compared to other sources of reports that we’ve seen on the subject.

Persuasive Picks for the Week of 05/03/09

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Social MediaThe Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media
David Griner from Luckie & Company and TheSocialPath blog provides some helpful advice to companies looking to take the plunge into Social Media. He adds an entertaining twist to the subject by aligning the tips with the “Seven Deadly Sins.”

How Twitter Can Drive Your Bottom Line
Stephen DiMarco from the Compete.com blog posts some very interesting stats and examples of companies that have had impressive success in adding Twitter to their overall marketing strategy. Dell’s achievement of $1 million in sales – exclusively through Twitter – is just one of the examples shared. Read on for more.

A Second Look at Measuring the Corporate Blog
Kyle Flaherty of BreakingPoint Labs revisits the challenges of measuring your blog’s success and provides seven areas that he and his team focus on to conduct their own success measurement.

Micro-interactions Get People Talking. Thank You, Corner Bakery
With the rapid influx of “follower” collectors on Twitter, it’s refreshing to see the occasional example of real businesses integrating Twitter into their marketing strategy and doing it well. David Armano shares this quick example of how Corner Bakery is getting off to a great start on Twitter by making the right moves.

Will Social Media Save The Newspaper Industry?
We’ve seen a lot of announcements lately that newspapers across the country are slowly closing their doors. Many papers are scrambling to revise strategies that will allow them to keep their doors open, and many of those strategies involve social media. This post by David Finch on SocialMediaExplorer.com questions if that will be enough to keep them operating.