Organic Online PR Campaigns: Building Brand Staying Power Without Paid SEO

By President Abbi Whitaker

PR is organic in nature. A good story in a well respected magazine is most likely to create conversation and curiosity amongst potential customers. Those customers might post a review online, spread the message through social networks or even take the time to blog about the product, person or idea. That conversation creates natural organic search results that can’t be pushed down the chain when Google decides to shake up their algorithms. It enhances a company’s brand, their positioning and their place in the market. It outlasts any paid SEO and creates customers that are mostly likely to become brand ambassadors, and creates trust through the power of third-party endorsements. A well planned and properly executed PR campaign is likely to have more staying power over the long haul than an expensive SEO campaign. How do you accomplish this? By building a combination of strong content, good conversation, quality reviews, stories and expert staying power. Read on! Continue reading

Power to the Bloggers! And the Facebook Contests!

Facebook contests; created as the almighty way to drive traffic to your page, increase engagement, reward your fans, and ultimately, skyrocket your page’s fan count. But as many failed attempts will attest to, that goal is much easier said than done.

We’ve seen contests crash and burn. We’ve had contests crash and burn.

When we first started with Oxygenics and began to build their contest, we got one big request: since we were would only use ShortStack to build their tab, they put us up to the challenge of Wildfire’s promise of “hundreds of thousands of fans”. We set the bar at 9,000 and began.

Boy, was it slow to start. We got an average of 10 news fans per day for the first two weeks. It was painful. We sent emails, posted to our personal Facebook’s, and sunk hundreds of dollars into ads. And it still came nothing close to what we needed to please the client.

We launched the contest on March 12, 2012, with a total of 117 likes. Every day we picked one random entry to win a $50 gift card to Bed, Bath & Beyond. All entrants needed to do were provide their name, age, and email.

Continue reading

When Good Blogs Go Bad

By Constance Aguilar, social media strategist

It’s an age old tale in business. One party decides to do something new and special to draw attention and profits to their business. Another party sees its success and wants to duplicate it. Why reinvent the wheel, right?

This part of dealing with a crisis takes note of personal feelings, the hard work and dedication it takes to pull off an idea, and what happens when there’s two (or more) sides to the story.

Continue reading

“OH SH*T!” A Social Media Crisis

By Nicole Rose Dion, veteran social media mistake maker
(social media coordinator/graphic designer) — follow me on Twitter @nicolerosedion

This is a follow up piece to my earlier article about preventing social media crises before they happen. This article focuses on managing a social media crisis once it’s already happened.

Continue reading

5 Recommendations for Jumping on the Pinterest Bandwagon

by Social Media Strategist Constance Aguilar

So you’ve heard about this hot new social network called Pinterest. You know your friends get lost in meme’s, cupcakes, home décor, and clothes for hours because of Pinterest. You might even know there are some brands posting masses of photos under their profiles. And now you want to add that slice to your marketing pie.

Continue reading