Marketing Communications
Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on July 26th, 2010
Shel Holtz has a very interesting piece on whether writing is a core skill for a professional communicator. He did a round up, asking several strategic communications professionals for their take and their responses are thoughtful and relevant. It’s an interesting topic and this piece is definitely worth reading.
AHA TAKE
There are some communicators who focus more on the actual craft of writing in their day-to-day work than others, but I can’t imagine that a professional communicator doesn’t need solid writing skills to do their job. Communication is at the very foundation of what…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on May 13th, 2010
Our friend and colleague Della Smith of Della’s Q Workshops gave an excellent presentation last night for the Canadian Public Relations Society. In the presentation, Della discussed how a communicator can (and should) integrate social media into the communications plan for their organization.
Della and I have developed an interactive workshop for organizations that addresses the challenge that communicators face: How do you integrate social media into your communications plan? This workshop is unique because it takes participants through the planning process and, at the end, they walk away with a first draft of a communications plan that…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on April 22nd, 2010
We hear it from clients, colleagues and friends all the time. Keeping up with what is going on in social media is overwhelming. Just recently, Facebook rolled out community pages and began to group people based on likes. They have also stopped supporting Facebook Lite, which appeared to be a Twitter-like approach to Facebook. Ning has announced that it will eliminate the free component of its service…and the list goes on and on. How can anyone keep up not only with the changes, but what they mean to your organization?
At the AHA office, we understand…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on April 20th, 2010
There is a great piece on Hubspot.com entitled 4 Ways To Make Your Corporate Website More Social. This is a recurring topic here on the AHA blog and with our clients. An organization has a real opportunity to use their website to provide relevant information and to connect with stakeholders. Unfortunately, more often than not, websites don’t receive the attention they should because the focus is on some other online tools or technology that have more buzz, hype or profile at the moment.
Take a good look at your website or have a professional provide an audit on…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on March 18th, 2010
iMedia has a great article with the headline: Does Facebook Work? It goes on to showcase some of the purchasing stats of retail customers, stats that don’t quite live up to the hype of Facebook.
I think one of the challenges that we face in using social media is that we are looking for this magic thing to come along and replace all the stuff from the past that didn’t work. Currently, social media is being hailed as the best tool ever for sales people, for marketing people and for PR—as well as for consumers, non-profits, businesses and other organizations.…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on March 01st, 2010
Measurement in PR has always been a challenge and that hasn’t changed with social media. Understanding and showing the value of what we do isn’t always easy for communicators.
There is a good article on Socialtimes.com that addresses measurement in social media. It’s more from a marketing viewpoint, but it applies to the use of social media in PR or communications efforts.
One of the points in this article talks about bounce rates. It asks: Are people coming to your website from social media sites or networks, but leaving quickly? This is a good question and one that…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 26th, 2010
Joel Postman has a good post on socialmediatoday.com that touches on 5 social media myths. It’s worth a read.
There are quite a few myths out there. We hear quite a bit about them at the AHA office. Many of the standard ones are listed in Joel’s piece.
We’re always interested in how organizations perceive the use of social media and what the misinformation or misunderstandings might be.
One of the myths that is sometimes overlooked is that social media is “different” than PR. This doesn’t mean that PR “owns” social media or that, depending on the scope…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on December 18th, 2009
The NY Department of Health and Hygiene’s video campaign to wean the people of the big apple off soda has certainly generated a great deal of discussion in both traditional media and online.
When you think about the number of people that this video has reached, it is quite impressive. It had national coverage in both the U.S. and Canada (and I would imagine around the world). If the objective of this video is to change behaviour, I think it works. I will think twice about having another drink of pop, that’s for certain.
Shock value works in…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on October 22nd, 2009
Jeff Bullas has a great post on his blog that outlines many of the reasons that companies aren’t using social media. The post showcases many of the points that we, at AHA, have heard from senior communicators and CEOs. What I also found quite interesting are the comments. They put forward a range of perspectives and are worth a read.
In the world of a communicator or marketer, there is a great deal of focus on social media. It’s important for those of us who work in this area to keep in mind that not everyone has embraced…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on August 05th, 2009
Twitter is still the hot social media tool, despite not being “for everyone.” At AHA, we participated in a social media teleseminar yesterday with Peter Shankman and Chris Brogan (you can check out the tweets at #broman). It was very interesting and engaging and, as always with Peter and/or Chris, we learned something.
After the call we discussed the value of different social media tools and when we got around to Twitter, it was very interesting. We have clients that wouldn’t benefit from being active on Twitter, but we think it’s important for them to…
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