Brands are learning that it isn’t enough to just advertise to women online. Real influence happens when brands form relationships with women/moms and participate in the conversations that women are having with each other. And it’s no secret that the online consumers with the most influence are those actively engaged in social technologies like Facebook and Twitter, and those leveraging blogs to publish original content and build their own niche loyal readership.

Bloggers represent online influence and women represent a powerful consumer demographic.  Put them together and you have the Holy Grail for brands trying to reach women and moms online. What are the most effective ways to partner with women bloggers to generate brand affinity and loyalty, and drive purchase behavior?

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In case you haven’t noticed, the blogosphere no longer needs to stand separate and apart from the mainstream media. Blogs have quietly joined the mainstream, at least in terms of their place in the editorial elixir that influences the court of public opinion.

It was late ’04 or early ’05 when Richard Edelman and I presented an introduction to weblogs to The New York Times Company’s communications teams — our focus: blogging’s burgeoning value to public relations professionals. Richard recently had become the first large PR agency CEO to blog regularly. (To this day, he may still be.)

At the time, we hadn’t yet predicted that blogs may one day usurp the news release as the primary deliverer of corporate news. At a minimum, they could serve as a means to publicly present one’s point-of-view, unfettered by the media filter. What’s more: contradictory perspectives would be addressed openly in the blog’s comments section or through comments on other blogs.

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Don’t be the last to hear what is being said about your company and brand, or issues affecting your business. Attend our session, What Are Your Customers Thinking — Right Now: How to Use Real-Time Media Analysis and Data Visualization to Make Better Business Decisions, and see how other companies use analytics to better anticipate rumors and as a result have a better and timelier reply to attacks on their image or brand.

Continue reading " Did You Hear The Rumor? "

As we get ready to meet at the end of the month in New York for the Digital Impact Conference, I thought I’d share with you my thoughts on what I think is the biggest challenge for public relations professionals regarding digital communications today. Of course, this naming of “biggest” is a judgment call at best, and therefore open to debate, but I’ll take a stab at it anyway!

I have been active in the world of digital communications for years, focusing most recently on how organizations can successfully use emerging social media tools such as blogs, social networks, communities and so on. I guess you could call me fluent in the language of digital communications. And yet, I often feel as if I am drowning in that selfsame world. There are so many tools, and so many ways of using them, that the complexities of it all can be overwhelming. And this is what leads me to claim that the biggest challenge facing us in digital communications is simply keeping up with it all.

The challenge I am describing here is many-layered. 

First, we must teach ourselves about the tools themselves: what they are and how they work. But it goes much further than that. It has become common for the various social media platforms to interact with each other, giving us the ability to aggregate all of our different digital personas, activities, etc., into one “lifestream,” visible to all, should we choose to make it so. This is also true for brands. So not only do we need to understand each of the tools themselves, we need to understand what happens at the intersection points of the tools. With new tools being introduced all the time, simply keeping up with the technology is a major challenge.

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The Conversation Prism debuted in August 2008 to provide a visual representation of the true expansiveness of the social Web and the conversations that define it. In this short time span, over one million people have crossed its path.

When Jesse Thomas, of JESS3, and I initially mapped “the conversation,” we recognized that the act of categorizing social networks within a visually rich graphic would be momentary at best, demanding endless iterations in order to accurately document evolving and shifting online conversations as well as the communities that promote them.

Continue reading " The Conversation Prism "