Media

How Do You Balance Your Personal and Professional Social Media Presence?

  I started on Twitter in 2007 as @MarketingProfs, sharing headlines from the site and representing the brand there. Then 5 years later I resuscitated @AnnHandley on Twitter as a personal ID—a handle I’d been squatting on for years but never used. Why the second account? I guess the easiest answer is that it seemed… I don’t know, time? Because Twitter itself had shifted. In 2007, when I started on Twitter, things felt a bit quieter. A bit under the radar. I started and assumed the ‘Profs Twitter account first on a lark (let’s see what this is all about, shall we?) and then as it grew… I just kept at it. Why? Simply: I enjoyed it. (There’s nothing quite like it.) And it’s worked for us. And now, I’m pretty sure MarketingProfs is one of very few major business-to-business brands whose Twitter account is run solely by a shareholder. […]

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Calling BS on Facebook’s Edict That Writing Is Dead

Facebook is predicting the end of the written word on its platform. And perhaps suggesting that words more broadly are doomed. “The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, who leads Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.” In five years’ time, she added, Facebook “will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video.” Stats show that the written word is becoming obsolete, replaced by hipper, accessible images and video. She did throw writers a bone: Words are disappearing—save for the fact “you’ll have to write for video.” Did you catch that? “have to.” Have. To. Our words are like the last triceratops wandering an increasingly balmy earth. In search

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What Marketing Can Learn from the Most Outstanding Meal I’ve Ever Had

What if we thought about Marketing the way this restaurant thinks about dinner? One of the best things about being a marketer is that your work intersects almost everything. (It’s not like being a professional shepherd, say. The disjoint is greater between the work of sheep-herding and the rest of the world.) One of the worst things about being a marketer is that your work intersects almost everything. We’ll be standing in line at the post office, and a woman behind me, whom I know vaguely from somewhere (maybe our kids played soccer together?), is telling me about renovating her house. She’s figured out who has the best take-out. She knows all the best laundromats. She wonders whether she might launch a crowd-sourced online resource for locals who might value such information… The next thing I know, I start verbally mapping out a whole website and marketing plan for her.

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The Secret to Marketing Event Success (Spoiler Alert: Muffin Tops)

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”―Zadie Smith Want to win a trip and full pass to the MarketingProfs B2B Forum? Enter our essay content here! Registration just opened for the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum. That’s a boring name for a conference, isn’t it? Which is why we affectionately nicknamed the B2B Marketing Forum, which takes place each October in Boston, the “Marketing Muffin Top.” Much like an actual muffin top in an actual muffin tin, it overflows in (mostly) appealing ways. Right now, we are elbow-deep in rolling and setting the program for the 2015 B2B Forum, and the Marketing Muffin Top moniker is on my mind again because there are so many great ideas flying around. (Hat tip to marketing director Jo Roberts for that nickname.) Two Things a Great Event Needs The success of an event hinges on two things: The depth of the experience that

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6 Things You Can Learn from an Unfunny Marketer’s Funny Redemption

Fifteen years ago, my friend Doug Kessler swore off any attempt at “comedy” after an attempt at funny dissolved into flat-out failure. Doug, who runs marketing agency Velocity UK in London, recalls the white-hot shame of it all: “We wrote a script. Sent it to client. We expected some review and back and forth… but when they said ‘Great! Let’s shoot it!’… we did. “It was SO not funny and SO stupid that I’m still blushing 15 years later.” But, more recently, Doug started to rethink things. Because what’s working in B2B marketing is (quite often) the offbeat story and the funny vignette. In October, at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, speaker Tim Washer talked about the powerful pairing of B2B and improv, and Doug realized that “it was crazy to close off such a fruitful direction just because I’d failed once.” So here’s the Velocity shot at redemption, created for

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Scrappy Video Content Marketing: What If We Didn’t Try So Hard?

What if we stopped trying quite so hard with our video content marketing? What if we just told our true stories honestly and simply, and with empathy for the very real problems our customers have?  A video from a tiny Arizona startup busts some common myths about using video as part of a content marketing program. There are three other things to love about it, too: 1. The video is script-less—but still it speaks volumes. 2. It sits squarely in the sweet spot of how I define great content, or content that is useful x inspired x empathetic. 3. It’s a great example of how a scrappy attitude and simple execution can be powerful. It’s made me wonder: What if we didn’t try so hard to be amazing and awesome? What if we just spoke from our hearts, with empathy for the real problems we solve? Details on all that

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Breaking Out of Boring: Tell Unexpected Stories

What does a brand known as buttoned up and boring do to broaden its appeal? I get this question a lot. One great model for inspiration is LinkedIn, which has become the poster child for a staid brand evolving its brand by telling unexpected stories. In the early 2000s, UK musician Matt Henshaw was living the dream as the lead guitarist for Censored, a British rock band he had established with a few friends. Censored became an integral part of the music scene of the East Midlands (a region located roughly between London and Liverpool), releasing some independent singles, opening for some of their music heroes, and at one point being named one of the top five unsigned bands in the UK by the music news site NME.com. Then the band fell apart—“burned out,” Matt now says. And so in 2008 he abandoned his music career and took a humdrum

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Make Your Customer the Hero of Your Story: ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ Video

The Fault in Our Stars opened this past weekend to become number-one at the box office. Which thrills me – because I’m a fan of the young adult novel the movie is based on and of its author (and video blogger) John Green. But more importantly: It thrills me because good writing deserves to find a wide audience. But that’s not why I’m writing about it. Instead, I’m writing about it because the movie’s soundtrack video trailer is a great content marketing example of what I talk about all the time: Make your customer the hero of your story. In this case, the “customer” is (of course) potential ticket buyers and fans, who were made “heroes” when the The Fault in Our Stars (TFIOS) franchise solicited their images to crowdsource the theme song’s music video, Ed Sheeran’s All of Our Stars. The result was like catnip to Lord Tubbington: The

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Honey Maid Takes On Haters, and Now I Want Graham Crackers

A month ago, the graham cracker brand Honey Maid launched a new program that aimed to redefine “wholesome” by telling the stories of interracial, single-parent and gay families. The idea was to align the 90-year-old Honey Maid with a modern yet steadfast narrative on what makes for wholesome. Families might’ve have changed, Honey Maid suggests. But “wholesome” — with both its moral and health connotations — never will. Here’s the original video produced by Honey Maid (which is owned by Mondelez International) and created by Droga5, New York: Accompanying it were longer profiles of real-life families on YouTube, like Jason and Tim — a married couple raising their two sons. Side note: Their lives are pretty pedestrian, and almost boring — like a lot of our perfectly ordinary suburban lives. But that’s precisely the point: The original video, which aired nationally in early March, received lots of public complaints for

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