When I make my occasional rounds on LinkedIn—to find out if all those jerks from college have jobs and stuff—I’m invariably drawn to the always enticing “Who’s Viewed Your Profile?” section. The last time I did this I was thrilled to learn that six people (six!) had viewed my profile over the past month, but [...]
Do your customers and prospects prefer your offerings to that of the competition? Needless to say, if you can prove that they do, it can be a boon to your marketing efforts. The most famous “proof” of competitive superiority is the Pepsi Challenge, which Pepsi launched in 1975 to prove that they were better than [...]
We all know that being a commodity is the kiss of death in business. The second you start to sense that sales prospects are viewing you as a commodity, you’re on the cusp of business failure, unless you immediately embark on the proactive actions that I’m going to prescribe to you below. The Problem Before [...]
When considering the right time to do a PR push for your startup, you should make sure that it’s truly ready for a media blitz and all the kinks are ironed out before you announce your company on a large scale. There are tactics for executing this in a smart way, which end up being the most successful in the end.
Getting an internship at a marketing firm is an important first step for those who want to work in marketing. Once you’ve obtained a good marketing internship, be sure to make the most of it. We’ve hired quite a few interns over the years, and, based on my observations and experiences, here are three tips [...]
When Bears quarterback Jay Cutler broke his thumb, most of us in Chicago were thinking (no pun intended): “What a bad break for the Bears!” Being a twisted PR junkie and practitioner, I thought: “What a great opportunity for the nation’s experts on broken hands!” If you are in the PR biz long enough, and [...]
We love data-driven PR at Walker Sands. Whenever our clients can mine their data and come up with newsworthy statistics or trends, we find we are able to hit a grand slam for them on the PR front. Does your organization have access to data that could be used to get better PR results? To [...]
It’s annual marketing plan time! If you are not done preparing a 2012 marketing plan, or if you are not in the midst of writing a 2012 marketing plan, then you are behind the eight ball. Last year, we posted an annual marketing plan template that should come in handy again this year. We use [...]
The internet has been abuzz since social networking giant, Facebook, launched a series of rather radical changes to its platform Wednesday. These changes are the largest overhaul to the site since 2008 and although Facebook deems these changes “improvements,” many users are in an uproar. This happens every time Facebook unveils a new series of [...]
Is Google+ going to be the perfect social media for marketing? Well, until we see what the business pages are going to look like and how they will work, we don’t really know.
