How do we integrate social media with our other marketing and communications channels/activities?
Look at social media as a place to involve your audience in conversations about the messages you're delivering through other channels. Where those messages and your brand are resonating with your audience, you can use social media to give them tools to take your brand out to their own networks. Yes, they'll transform it and make it their own - but what you lose in control, you'll gain back in the credibility, authenticity and reach that come from peer communication. And if you've found a genuine patch of shared ground around your brand's or message's underlying values, whatever changes your new messengers make to your message won't alter its fundamentals.
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Advice to social media mavens...from media pros
The essential rules of social media share much in common with other kinds of bottom-up marketing campaigns. We compared notes with our colleagues at ttweak, who reminded us of some of the fundamentals: Let participants speak for themselves. Production values matter. Invest in your local community.
Best practices for non-profits using web 2.0
Web 2.0 isn't just about delivering a message; it's about engaging in conversation, and nowhere is that more true than in the non-profit space. Here are six basic principles for non-profits (or any other organizations) venturing into social media.
Engagement planning to bring your social media project to life
Your engagement plan is the roadmap of what you want to achieve in the first 3 to 6 months of your project, and how you're going to get there. Here are the ingredients of a winning engagement plan, from blogger outreach to incentives and contests.
Giving smarter and more to your cause, through mashing a holiday tradition with online fundraising tools
An innovative player in social fundraising has introduced a new take on the old UNICEF coin boxes. Like their predecessors, kids take GiveMeaning's Pig-e-Bank BankBoxes from door to door at Halloween and collect change from their neighbours. But once they get those boxes home, things take a decidedly modern - and thoroughly social - turn.
NetSquared: Online tools changing offline politics
Online activism has many faces, but two of the giants in the field are Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! and Joan Blades of MoveOn. Read this account of a panel with these two online leaders, facilitated by Micah Sifry, at the 2006 NetSquared conference.
Reflected glory marketing: building brand with Web 2.0
For a few lucky brands – like media companies, Nike or Apple – customers care enough about the product or brand that they’re happy to come and talk about your products. For everybody else, the best way to tap the power of Web 2.0 is to create an online community that has intrinsic value, and let the activities of that community reflect positively on the parent company's brand. We call this approach reflected glory marketing.
Resurrect your rhetoric: six (re)uses for a speech
The lectern has been disassembled, the coffee cups are cleared and the crowd has moved on to their afternoon agenda. The major speech you worked on for weeks is over, and you can’t help but think: is that it? Here are a few ways you can get the most from your next big speech — well beyond the actual delivery itself.
Work Smarter with Evernote
Get more out of Evernote with Alexandra Samuel's great new ebook, the first in the Harvard Business Press Work Smarter with Social Media series!