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CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

Within the grand taxonomy of consumer touchpoints, e-newsletters hold a sorry position. They're the longwinded busybodies who never get invited to the cool parties. Porcelain-skinned print campaigns turn up their perky, sans-serif noses at e-newsletters' frumpy templates and canned copy. Super Bowl spots kick sand in e-newsletters' bespectacled faces. Yet, these boxy embodiments of mediocrity move product and build loyalty. Marketing people are aware of this—they've proven it with charts and everything. You need an e-newsletter and you know it. So to that end, please review the following six bromides from a recent how-to article phoned in by a reigning email-marketing magnate... and then read why you should ignore them.

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Everyone wants brand equity. But building it, when you are more likely to qualify for the Inc. 500 rather than the Fortune 500, can be a puzzle. Particularly when the role models for brand equity are global icons like Coca Cola, Volvo, or Sony—hardly your peer set. The good news is that the path to building brand equity is clear. Here are six simple steps you can take to get started.

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Last week Google released Chrome, its new standards-compliant Web browser. But what does that mean to you? Though Google offers a great comic that explains the big changes, it is a bit jargon-heavy and, frankly, long at 32 (comic) pages. Here's an introduction of Chrome for the layman.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

Clearly, Abraham Lincoln knew the difference between the almost-right word—and, the right word. A distinction famously defined by Mark Twain some 25 years later as "the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." With that thought in mind, here are a few choice words on word choice to help you get more of the right words into your communications. And, make your writing more effective.

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The vast red and blue oceans of the marketing world tsunamied into our awareness and vocabulary a few years ago, when two professors, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, claimed that competition can be rendered irrelevant. Their book, Blue Ocean Strategy, heralded the news to marketing managers and CEOs all over the world: After years and years of surviving in red bloody oceans, swarming with murderous competitors, finally there's a better alternative! Let us consider an example of a company that supposedly followed the Blue Ocean strategy.

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Is your company guilty of throwing dollars at campaigns to increase Web traffic, only to turn around and squander sales opportunities due to poor telephone and email handling? Make sure that your telephone system isn't preventing prospects from reaching out and touching someone at your company. As soon as you finish reading this article, pick up the phone and call your company's sales lines and test the process for yourself.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

There's probably no better case study on how a business leverages social media to connect with customers and grow itself than Gary Vaynerchuk's Wine Library. Here, Gary shares the reasons your company should pay attention to social media, and what impact these tools will have in the years to come.

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With the rise of search engines, Wi-Fi, and a Do-It-Yourself mindset, today's consumers are more empowered than ever before. They not only believe that they're entitled to information but also have unprecedented access to information on a global scale. An increasing number of consumers turn first to the Internet when they want to make a purchase—even if the product will be bought offline. That's why any PR strategy focused solely on media gatekeepers is missing a large piece of the market. While there's still value in sending your message via traditional media, more and more prospective customers are doing their own research online, bypassing newspaper, magazines, radio, and TV completely. Here are five tips for creating successful direct-to-consumer PR.

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Performance management has been applied to various parts of a business for quite a long time, particularly when it comes to manufacturing, logistics, and product development. Applying the concept to marketing is finally coming of age.

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Businesses today are hunkering down. With consumers clutching their wallets more tightly, companies are scrutinizing every budget item in an effort to maintain profitability even as revenues are flat and costs rise. And with marketing commonly viewed as a discretionary spend, it is one of the likeliest victims of the ax.

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In the luxury brand business, stretching brands too thinly across market segments may gain short-term revenue increases, but it also almost guarantees long-term loss to the shareholders, brand owners, and, well, consumers. So, set your limits for how much you really want to stretch your brand before you open your doors to the public.

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Email is not dying in the midst of the social-media revolution. In fact, the question we should be asking is: How can email marketers best leverage the new social-marketing applications?

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It is essential that you make it easy for customers to find you, and one of the most effective ways to do so is search engine optimization, which focuses on getting your Web site listed in the unpaid, organic search engine results. How do you actually get your Web site ranked high in search engines? The answer is quite simple, but getting there can be a bit more difficult.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: None

Michael Antman's recent article, "Six Reasons Word-of-Mouth Doesn't Work," struck a chord. He raises reasonable points about the limitations of WOM; after all, it can't completely replace other forms of marketing communications. However, we can't ignore the impact of WOM. What's more, here's what companies should be doing to leverage it.

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Email continues to be a highly effective channel. But for too many marketers, email revenue per subscriber is not growing, and more and more subscribers are simply ignoring the messages. How can we continue to grow our email programs?

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It takes time and experience to stay on the cutting edge of SEO, and more than likely you don't have that kind of time, considering your other marketing efforts. So here's a quick update on what's hot and what's not in the world of search engine optimization.

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Change is inevitable: As an economy matures, ages, and ultimately evolves into something new, adjustments must be made to our business development, marketing, and branding. Failure to adapt to new realities results in potentially unwanted and dramatic consequences. We are all aware of how modern economies have developed from those based on agriculture, to those based on industry, and then on information. But where do we stand now? Is the information economy dead? If so, what's replaced it?

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Now that we know that 85% of B2B customers use the Internet at some point during the buying process, why is it that so many business executives still contend that online marketing "doesn't work" for businesses with enterprise solutions or complex sales cycles?

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It's a marketer's dream. Customers are so passionate about your product they actually crave it. In fact, outside of the US, your product is the number-one consumed fruit. However, here's where the dream hits reality. You're in the US, where two-thirds of US consumers have never tasted a mango. You've been hired to generate sales during the Mexican mango season—which is only four months long. One thing is crystal clear: You have to get it right the first time. Or mangos will be out of season and you'll be out of a job. That's the situation that our firm, Lewis & Neale Public Relations and JRS Consulting, faced when EMEX, an association of Mexican mango producers and shippers, retained it to conduct a four-month campaign (limited to Mexican mango season) to increase fresh mango visibility and consumption in the US.

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You already know the importance of a permission-based email list. You even practice list segmentation to improve the relevance of the emails you send to your customers and prospects. But how much time do you devote to cleaning your email list? If your email hygiene is lax, you're greatly limiting the success of your campaigns.