Yes, you read that correctly: How NOT to use customer demographics in your marketing. Under pressure to avoid making decisions based on intuition or hunches, small businesses and nonprofits may rely too heavily on the copious, free demographic research available today. Let’s look at two recent experiences that illustrate the 'data fog' problem, as well [...]
Your business or nonprofit faces copyright dangers on both sides of the copyright law: For violating someone else’s copyright, resulting in hefty fines and a public relations embarrassment, and For having your creative materials used improperly, violating your copyright but requiring extensive time and money for small organizations to enforce legally. Let’s look at the [...]
Visual Thesaurus: Mindmap of Withdraw Words are a year-round pleasure, but with November's shorter days and longer nights, words seem to take on added significance — and heightened pleasure. Word candy seems an apt description. I find myself eager for wordplay and freshly appreciative of masters and scholars of language. Words, nuances and [...]
Keeping up with multiple social media platforms has become a full-time job and it's easy to fall behind. There have been 5 social media changes recently that content marketers should know about. Within a week Google announced four significant changes, Twitter made one major change, while Facebook and Pinterest continued tweaking their networks. Let's take [...]
Thoughts on the psychology of words, word use, pronouns, and social issues have been scurrying across my brain lately.
Social ads, sponsored stories, endorsements and reviews…reflect a business reality: “If you’re not the customer, you’re the product." The companies providing the Internet services you use but do not pay for must make money somehow to survive. Though done with more transparency and style, Google’s announcement of “Shared Endorsements” follows a predictable pattern begun by [...]
Between Super Bowl advertising and the holiday season, there sometimes seems to be an advertising wasteland. There are some advertising bright spots out there though, despite the ease with which I’m able to find deplorable sexist or ineffective ads to critique. Since the annual football advertising extravaganza, here are the four best ads of 2013 [...]
