28Jul 2009 by Bob Cargill

The Importance of Getting Past the Social Media “Dip”

Blogging, Branding, Marketing, Social Media
If there’s one thing I enjoy almost as much as using social media in my day-to-day communications and marketing activities, it’s speaking about these relatively new online publishing tools to friends, colleagues and, frankly, anyone else who will listen to me. I’ve always liked sharing what I know with others, teaching, training, helping others get from point A to point B – regardless of the subject. But there’s something different about social media. There’s something radically transformational about it that you just wouldn’t understand – and be able to take advantage of – till you’ve actually used it yourself for a while.     If you ask me, the key to being successful with social media is patience, perseverance and pushing past the so-called “Dip,” a difficult stretch of time (invariably…
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21Jul 2009 by Bob Cargill

How to Make People Like You on Twitter

Branding, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media
    If you’re one of the millions of people using Twitter to share what’s on your mind, you know what a challenge it is to stand out among the crowd.  To some, Twitter’s a cocktail party. To others, it’s a soap box. But to the majority of its users, Twitter’s more like an uncontrollable scrum in which everybody is competing for a greater share of the discussion.   But it doesn’t have to be that way, not if you do as much listening as talking on this social media communications platform – and, when you do put yourself out there in 140 characters or less, you pause before you post.   That’s right, like a good conversationalist, the last thing you want to do is come across as loud…
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14Jul 2009 by Bob Cargill

Sleepless in Social Media

Blogging, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
At a conference on social media I attended earlier this year, one of the speakers asked the audience how many of us really had the time for social media. Proudly, albeit surprisingly, a large percentage of us raised our hands, thinking...of course, we had the time for social media. Blogs. Twitter. Facebook. A few minutes here, a few minutes there. Piece of cake. But the speaker had actually thrown us a curve ball, going on to make his point that none of us really had the time it took to engage in social media. We made the time. Like our colleagues and peers, we couldn’t help but be busy with quotidian demands on our work lives, too – commutes, meetings, phone calls and the like. Never mind our family time.…
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08Jul 2009 by Bob Cargill

Meet Me at the Intersection of Social Media and Marketing

Blogging, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
While I’ve always believed in the principles and power of direct marketing, as soon as I started blogging in early 2004, I realized I had discovered something that could very well have a huge impact on the future of the industry in which I earned my livelihood. I'm no prognosticator, but I saw for myself what the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto had written in their groundbreaking book, that, among other things, "markets are conversations" and that “there are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone” and that "companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best…
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02Jul 2009 by Bob Cargill

Retrospective: What I’ve Written about Social Media in the Last Year

Blogging, Branding, Cause-Related Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
While I haven’t posted much here on A New Marketing Commentator lately, I have been active in the blogosphere via Internet Marketing Strategies and Secrets, a blog that is published and written by the team at Nowspeed. I’ve written a number of long posts there, most about social media, something I’ve been preaching and practicing and incorporating into my everyday marketing activities – where and when appropriate, of course – like there’s no tomorrow. So as a way of kickstarting this long overdue re-launch of the blog that I reluctantly put on hiatus for so long, I thought I would share some of those posts with you here. If you have the time, reading through this retrospective of mine will give you an idea of what I’ve been up to lately and will, hopefully, help you start, or improve…
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