I sat down with two members of the Westerville School board this morning to discuss the tough situation facing the district. Westerville is, like many communities, experiencing a financial crunch with decreased property valuations, delinquent tax payments and less money from the State. A levy to close the gap recently failed by a large margin (60/40) in a district that rarely fails levies.

“Rarely does the rumor mill
work in your favor.”

What happened and what does it mean for me and my business or organization?

I believe the levy primarily failed because of lack of communication – basically lack of a marketing plan. Even though the district was experiencing financial hardships, no real information was communicated or marketing campaign launched until just before the levy.  The information that was available was either hard to understand or high level. This … Read More »

Some people still say “social media is a fad”. In fact I have heard several individuals say they will not advertise or spend time on social media marketing because they do not think that people use it. They think it’s for teenagers to chat with each other after school. But new reports are showing this “fad” is now being seen by business and marketers as a way to influence brands and build their relationships with customers.

According to a new report from The Nielsen Company, in August 2009, 17 percent of all time spent on the Internet was at social networking sites, up from 6 percent in August 2008. And the marketers are well aware of this. Estimated online advertising spend on the top social network and blogging sites increased 119 percent, from approximately $49 million in August 2008 … Read More »

According to Nielsen, the total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700% year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009. Strung together, those minutes translate to over 26,000 YEARS!!! SO we can safely say social media is being used and is not going away anytime soon.

Now, with all those minutes people are on the social media channels, there are going to be times when your school, company or organization comes up as a topic for discussion. It will be very important how you handle the situation. If you handle it wrong or don’t even have a policy to handle it, you could get burned and your brand reputation may suffer. United Airlines had this happen to them: United Breaks Guitars

What can you do to avoid this? Well, for one thing, make … Read More »