Fabulous take on all of the snake oil salesmen and women out there. Watch out!

(H/T Black Box Social Media, a really helpful and groovy online marketing firm.)

Hoo boy, have I been out of touch on my blog page! Sorry about that folks, but let’s just say business has been booming. I feel very lucky to be benefiting from new opportunities during still-sour economic times.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of explaining these days about how best to use social media (namely, Twitter) to your brand’s advantage. PR Diva Deirdre Breakenridge explains pretty cohesively the basic steps to getting started in a helpful post.

(more…)

Chances are, I’ll never land a job promoting a wine bar, but if I do, this article from The Buzz Bin will be bookmarked and prominently tacked on my bulletin board.

Author Pia Finkell commends a handful of wine bars in the Big Apple who are not only  ”swimming in the warm waters of social media and doing it well … [but have] already created the perfect blend to make them shine through.”

The secrets?  They include …

1) Unexpected, behind the scenes video:

2) Tweeting and posting to Facebook in an engaging, easygoing way – as Pinkell writes, “offering a friendly face to what could have come across as a stuffy wine bar.”

and

3) Partnering with a number of social media-savvy groups to hold the first, fully interactive wine tasting.

I like articles like these because they shed light on real life examples of how different industries are capitalizing on social media (ie, going beyond the milquetoast option of merely tweeting X number of times per day).  I’ll try to feature more of them here in the future.  Send your suggestions my way!

If recent corporate debacles are any indication, there’s no time like the present to be working the field of crisis communications.

A great article in today’s New York Times looks at the “reputational implosions” of BP, Goldman Sachs, and Toyota over the past year and the wrongheaded PR strategies caused them.

Where did they go wrong?  By making at least one of three fatal errors, according to the article:

In the view of many who are paid to extract corporations from terrible situations, Toyota, BP and Goldman exacerbated their woes by either declining to fess up promptly, casting blame elsewhere or striking adversarial postures with the public, the government and the news media.

(more…)