Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

I’m currently reading a fascinating book: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. You’re already familiar with the invisible gorilla experiment if you’ve watched the popular “awareness test”
video that got passed around in 2008 (and has been viewed nearly 10 million times). That test was essentially a clone of the original experiment.

If you reach the level others are reacting to your content in a critical light, consider yourself successful. The fact you are being mentioned organically at all is a positive signal even if it does not seem that way initially. Media outlets have known this for years and by embracing it have formed pretty thick skin. They don’t take criticism personally, rather, they quietly (and sometimes loudly) leverage it to increase their own exposure.

First impressions count. Malcolm Gladwell popularized this familiar notion recently in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: we make snap, lasting judgments and decisions that in many cases may be permanent. Your website is offering that all too important first impression to prospective customers daily.

Last week, I presented at Search Engine Strategies Toronto on the intersection of PR, marketing and social media. After my session, a woman from the audience came up to introduce herself: she was a writer for Social Media Examiner (and extremely pleasant to speak with). We talked a bit about the industry and about blogging in general. To which she remarked I had actually upset some people over at Social Media Examiner from my response to their post on social media addiction.

Businesses and marketers continue to misunderstand how to effectively leverage the web for increasing returns on traffic and leads month over month. They place too much emphasis on a limited amount of static web pages and mentally put each one on a pedestal. Change a product page!? What? We can’t do that. Okay, we can make a tweak – but hold on while that goes through our 5 layer approval process designed during a pre-internet world.

Previously, I shared an interesting situation that erupted between Fortune Magazine and TechCrunch. It appeared to me as a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing (essentially, it looked like legal got upset with something the PR team executed on). Either way, Fortune did not come off looking good in the situation and they should know better than to agree to things they can’t fulfill.