Do you think you know why people share your posts? How to fool search engines? How to leverage personal brands for business? How to manage a crisis? How to gain exposure by pretending to do good?
You might want to think again.
Here are five posts to remind you why bullet points, best practice duplication, and pat answers are not the end-all to communication. They are only the beginning. They also make up five timeless and compelling fresh content picks.
Best Fresh Content In Review, Week of February 15
• The Psychology of Influence and Sharing.
John Bell believes that psychology is the next rediscovered territory for marketers, and he is right. (Whether marketers will truly understand psychology is a different question all together.) Inspired by new information from a column sharing a study by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Bell adds value to New York Times trends that suggest people tend to share positive, long-format, and challenging topic articles.
• 3 Reasons PR & Communications Pros Need to Know SEO.
Not many people know more about SEO than Lee Odden, which is why we were thrilled to see a shift in optimization thinking. With 91 percent of journalists, editors and reporters surveyed using standard search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing to do their jobs, Odden's three divisions of optimization can be summed up as considering people first.
• Your Business Is Worthless if It Depends on You.
With so many people talking about the importance of personal connections, it's refreshing to see John Jantsch remind entrepreneurs that a business only has value when it can stand on its own. He doesn't mean that individual-reliant businesses can't be profitable. He simply means that if you ever want to sell it, you have remove yourself from the sales and marketing first. (Maybe that explains why the Zappos success story is often told in past tense.)
• Brand Crisis: 10 Crisis Response Myths.
Shel Holtz might have hated it, but Bob Conrad's post perfectly debunks patented assumptions often employed in modern crisis communication. Sure, using the proven points of crisis communication are worthwhile, but unless public relations practitioners are prepared to see how that stacks up in unique situations, the prescription might fail. My personal favorite among his points is number six. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to crisis management.
• Authenticity in Corporate Social Responsibility.
Corporate giving and strategic communication have been around a long time. What has changed, however, is the visibility of these various programs via social media. Geoff Livingston suggests companies might slow down before they turn otherwise good corporate citizen programs into thinly veiled marketing campaigns. Given that 90 percent of organizations cannot discern the difference between cause marketing and corporate social responsibility, he might be right.
