My friend Christopher S. Penn recently offered a video explaining why he includes a giant unsubscribe button in his email newsletter. Ironically, I had the topic of unsubscribes on my own editorial calendar for Chip Shots, too. The truth is that unsubscribes used to bother me. I would get a notification from my email list…
Our industry typically likes to refer to itself as purveyors of media intelligence. This stems from the fact that we grew up out of media monitoring and analysis and continue to uncover valuable insights from the public media. Yet that’s not really the most accurate description of what we do and the value we offer….
There seems to be a lot of angst about content marketing these days. Perhaps its a reaction to the term itself (Christopher Penn points out that use of the phrase seems to have peaked). Or maybe it is a lack of innovation and meaningful use of metrics, as Gini Dietrich laments. Or might it be…
In communications and in business, too many people get hung up on measuring for the sake of measuring. Just because you can generate all sorts of metrics with impressive numbers and charts doesn’t mean that what you’re looking at will really make a difference in your ultimate success. I tackle one specific element of this…
I had a conversation yesterday that spurred me to think back to the “old days” of the World Wide Web. You see, I’ve been at this game long enough to remember Yahoo before it was at Yahoo.com. Most of you probably don’t know that it used to live at http://akebono.stanford.edu. In any case, I took…
I get a lot of email. And a lot of that email reflects pretty poorly on the sender. Some of the emails I receive wouldn’t even make the cut as amateur ransom notes. They are often laden with misspellings or typos. Frequently they fail to make a succinct point. They routinely seem to be disorganized…
While listening to the latest episode of FIR Live over the weekend, the concept of “energy efficiency” of marketing and communications campaigns came to mind. No, I’m not talking about how “green” the effort is. This isn’t about recycled paper or carbon emissions. I’m thinking more like the energy efficiency of a furnace. Is 95%…
Earlier this year, we provided our clients at DCI Group with a white paper I wrote to forecast trends in digital public affairs for the next 12-18 months. We recently decided to make it available publicly, and you can download your own copy of the document for free at the DCI Digital web site. Like…
Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article in The New Yorker magazine continues to generate discussion, so I decided to offer up my two cents over on the DCI Group blog. Though the bonds created by social media may be weak, they can be the glue that binds more lasting and impactful relationships. Read the full blog post…
I do my fair share of speaking, and I attend conferences regularly. After having done both over the past month, I have some observations that hopefully may help other speakers as well as those who recruit people to speak at events.