Social Media Content Marketing

Segmenting your digital marketing department into buckets? Careful... As reliance upon digital marketing continues to grow, some corporate budgets have completely displaced (rather than supplemented) traditional marketing. The new normal sees companies with separate departments for email, SEO, PPC, display, social media, content creation, branding, and so on. However left unattended, this can create a marketing army of islands. The classic "left hand not knowing what the right is doing" - just with many more hands. I'm not against the trend of marketing function specialization, in fact the larger the organization, the more sense it makes in my eyes. The danger for companies is the often complete lack of communication - or better - coordination of efforts of these departments. And that seems exactly what's happening. So many companies I meet with have hyper-segmented to the point that campaigns across channels look like they've been designed by differen...

Otto the Texas Dog seen rescuing his kibble after Hurricane Harvey.  No shame here. If you've lived in South Florida for any given time, you've endured flooded streets, downed palms, broken roof tiles, and power outages for hours. But this week was gravely different. For many, Hurricanes Irma and Harvey lived up to their devastating hype. Towns were decimated and lives tragically lost. And now, oppressive Florida heat continue to claim victims . Facebook provides a helpful "mark yourself safe" feature for those in affected disaster areas to let loved ones know they're OK with just one click. But what about  businesses? Many of the South Florida and Houston-area companies who endured the recent hurricanes and came out virtually unscathed, have been oddly silent. And not because they're without power. Many corporations are trained to highlight only positive news, and bury the negative in fear of losing business. Human life is irreplaceable; so no compa...

Let's all give Senator Ted Cruz a collective "thank you" for what happened on his Twitter account today . Reportedly, someone was signed into the senator’s official Twitter account and clicked the heart symbol below an adult video creating a "@tedcruz liked this." It was taken down less than an hour later. “It was a staffing issue and it was inadvertent,” the senator said. “It was a mistake.” But Cruz's mistake hopefully got your attention and perhaps may just save your company from experiencing a similar public relations nightmare. Apparently, multiple staff members have access to the account and post on his behalf. Redundancy is not a bad thing when it comes to social media access. But who has access and where they access from is . And that lesson is an invaluable one. When you're in technology marketing, you tend to be on the forefront of new media. Being an early adopter goes with the territory, and social media was no diffe...