Abbreviations and acronyms make our lives easier by packing a series of concepts or processes into a suitcase that is then easier to manage - but only if you know the term. If you don't, you're being handed the equivalent of a communications dead weight. Since much of the work we do is helping organizations and small businesses with communications change management and implementing communications programs internally, we watch our language. Usually the concepts are easy to grasp once you understand the terminology, and at that point the abbreviations or acronym become a useful shortcut. Included in the table below are also some social media acronyms suggested by readers of this blog that have been prompted by Twitter's 140-character limit to pack more into that compressed method of messaging. Click on the Read More for a table of acronyms and abbreviations and their explanation.
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- Written by: Norman Smit
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Many organizations which Coherent Marketing has helped know they need a plan to get set up their social media, but aren't sure where to start, or even why, other than everybody else seems to be doing it. Social media for B2B makes good business sense, particularly when allied with content marketing. Content marketing is a marketing approach that uses the online content for marketing and social media provides a powerful mechanism for distribution and discovery that extends the visibility of your website. It can also be highly cost-effective.
But many companies and organizations, both large and small, don’t know where to start when trying to build a social media presence. Assisting organizations set up and successfully manage the content workflows for effective social media use is something Coherent Marketing does. Here are some pointers.
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Blogs are well-established as an effective means of content marketing, particularly if they are shared using other mechanisms. They provide a range of advantages to organizations who wish to provide more information about their products and services, or their approach to corporate culture or social responsibility. But multimedia capabilities of smartphones and simplifying of non-linear digital video editing has seen an explosion in the use of video. Video can show rather than tell and if the producer has access to good imagery, can be far more vibrant than a text-based blog offering. YouTube is now the #2 search engine and organizations need to develop a plan for integrating video into their content marketing.
There are disadvantages to video content marketing that should be taken into account. As sexy as a video may be, if it isn't found, it's irrelevant, and if its distribution isn't maximized, the cost/minute ROI ratio is high.
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In the course of the hundreds of formation skydiving jumps I did and competing at two national championships, I learned a few lessons that I now apply professionally in business communications. For people who's only exposure to skydiving is the movie 'Point Break', it may come as a surprise that it's not like that at all. Don't expect to exit an aircraft and 'naturally' get it right. Skydivers proportionately spend a lot of time preparing for jumps to get them right - to stack the odds in favor of getting a complex 3D maneuver come together and work. Because screwing up has real and immediate consequences, skydivers have developed simple, easy-to-remember best practices that have given the sport a good track record for safety despite the inherent risk. These best practices translate effectively to crisis communications.
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Content marketing can be a very effective method to boost the visibility of an organization and strengthen business outcomes. In a world in which specialization is an increasing fact of life, the terms and phraseology that may be common to one group is often gibberish to others. 'Content marketing' is an example by itself. It's a term web, SEO and digital marketers will be familiar with but may mean nothing to people outside the communications and marketing field. It basically means using content posted to the web to grow an organization's visibility and rank with search engines like Google, Bing, etc. Acronyms are also often industry specific, so 'SEO' stands for 'Search Engine Optimization', which is getting web pages ranked as highly as possible by search engines. Content marketing uses the specialized language common to an industry sector or service niche and turns it into an asset for web marketing, showcasing an organization's strengths and capabilities and why clients should do business with them.
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"75% of PR agency owners don't know much about social media" That's a headline from a recent PR industry survey showing the extent to which social media is impacting some of the traditional ways of doing business. The survey highlights how 90% of Public Relations owners don't believe social media will replace traditional print and broadcast media, but simultaneously assert that 78% say it's important to offer social media services.
Pitching a campaign with a social media component tacked on doesn't work. It isn't culturally sustainable, and can create and expose brand and messaging dissonance with consumers and stakeholders. Tweets say this, practice says that. New media has consequences for organizations who are being caught flat-footed at the speed with which conversations can evolve and communications should be organized - to use a military phrase - to fight today's war, not the last one.
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