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Next week I’ll be heading to Washington DC for the Digital East conference run by those lovely people at TechMedia.

I’ll be there with my Majestic Brand Ambassador hat on and speaking at 9.50am on Wednesday 10th September:

Agile, Delightful & Unexpected: When Social Media and Digital Collide for ROI

Big Data and Content Marketing are all the rage right now, but few marketers are nailing the opportunity they present or integrating them in a cohesive digital PR strategy. In this session, delegates will be taken on a whirlwind journey through what data matters, why content marketing is not such a new thing, how to reach influencers who’ll wax lyrical about your brand, and what it all means for your bottom line!

It’ll be the third TechMedia conference we have attended, and I must say I’ve been really impressed with the content and organization of the event.

If you have a chance to attend this show next week in Tyson’s Corner, then register here!

The cost for a ticket is very reasonable given the amount you’ll learn over the course of the conference.

Hope to see you there!

Mel Carson – Delightful’s Founder and Principle Strategist

Two years after my Seattle Interactive Conference debut talking about the book I co-authored – Pioneers of Digital – I’ll back this October speaking about personal branding and digital PR.

Even though we don’t have a title for my presentation just yet, we wanted to let you know because the “early bird” rate runs out on the 1st of September.

If you’re local to Seattle (or not) you should really make it up to this beautiful city for this fantastic digital event.

I’m proud (no, really I am) to be on the same speaking roster as people I respect like: Jeremiah Owyang, Rand Fishkin, Adam Schoenfeld, Sarah Bird, Joanna Lord and Teal Newland……plus a host of others.

So if you want to see me tear it up (Delightfully) on stage at SIC 2014 and learn a bunch of other digital smarts from the guys I’ve mentioned above, start buying your tickets by registering on the Seattle Interactive 2014 site!

See you in October.

Cheers,

Mel Carson – Delightful’s Founder and Principle Strategist

Do you spend tons of hours searching for media coverage about your brand?

Well, judging from a 30 minute webinar we watched recently, CisionPoint might be able to help you out!

CisionPoint has been a popular tool for PR professionals since it launched at 2007. From identifying key influencers and connecting with audiences, to monitoring traditional and social media and analyzing outcomes, CisionPoint covers a PR project from beginning to end.

During the webinar, CisionPoint’s product manager, Sharifa Abubaker, and product specialist, Sonal Moraes, demonstrated several tips and tricks of monitoring media coverage with CisionPoint.

Below are some highlights of the product in terms of media monitoring that I found very helpful and wanted to share with you:

Solid Database

CisionPoint monitors over 300,000 outlets and has the information of more than 1,000,000 contacts. You can get relevant information from millions of social media sites and other websites, as well as traditional broadcast and print media in a matter minutes. Moreover, you don’t need to worry about getting overwhelmed by the huge amount of information. CisionPoint has detailed filter functions to sort all the coverage as you need.

Ready to Share

One of the solid functions of CisionPoint is that it can automatically generate a nice formatted report for you. By clicking “create press report,” you can customize what you want to include in the report, such as media type, outlet, publication date, full text, etc. A cover page with your company logo is also available. For PR agencies, it’s obviously important to keep your clients updated. CisionPoint allows you to set up and customize email alerts for external recipients, which makes keeping your client “in the know” a lot easier.

Fully Integrated

Besides reporting needs, monitoring coverage can also help you with media research and competitive analysis for a PR campaign.   Using CisionPoint, you can directly transport the coverage information you gather into a media list saving you a lot of time by killing two birds with one stone.

We don’t use CisionPoint yet, but we like to keep up with Cision’s useful webinars which include a lot of helpful hints on how to stay relevant as a digital PR consultancy.

If you have used CisionPoint in the past or are using it right now, please do share your experience with us!

We’re always on the look out for new tools that do the job of monitoring social media well (and that are cost-effective), so let us know what you use and why!

Thanks for reading,

Bianca

P.S. Check out our thoughts on Digital PR and what companies need to be thinking about in an increasingly digital world.

We’re off to sunny San Francisco in a week or so for the ClickZ Live digital marketing conference!

I’ll be speaking on behalf of Majestic at a theatre session on Wednesday 13th August entitled: How to Use Link Data to Boost Your Social Media and PR Efforts

The premise behind my talk will be that Big Data has so much more potential than just being a buzzword, and I’ll provide a smorgasbord of ideas and case studies that will show the audience how to quickly and easily get ahead of the competition with a little bit of lateral thinking across the disciplines of social media and digital PR.

Immediately after that I’ll take the stage with the fabulous Katherine Griwert from Brafton on: Scaling Engagement: How to Drive Results with an Efficient Content & Social Strategy

Here’s the blurb on that session:

If you’re interested in engaging customers online, you’re probably already posting content on social media. Even though the average company uses 6 social networks for marketing, they’re largely “unsure” about the results. So how do you know what to post, and when, and where, if you want social ROI that really matters? A multi-channel content approach sounds like a lot, but a smart strategy has built-in opportunities to engage prospects and influencers. In this session, led by content marketer Katherine Griwert and Digital PR specialist Mel Carson, we’ll walk you through tips and tactics on strategic content for social.

You’ll learn answers to common challenges, including:

• How to tap into social conversations to create engagement-focused content
• How to carry one content asset across your social pages for maximum ROI
• What types of unique headlines, hashtags and interactions work on leading networks
• How to get the right influencers to share your brand’s message for better engagement and reach
• Simple ways to measure success so you can make intelligent, efficient content choices

Brafton were kind enough to interview me a couple of months back on personal branding strategies and I’m thrilled to be working with them on delivering a top-notch session for the ClickZ Live audience in San Francisco.

Hope to see many of you in California for this fabulous event.

If you won’t make it, we’ll be sure to post the presentations on SlideShare soon.

Cheers,

Mel

Every marketer knows that “people are powerful distribution channels for your brand message”, said Jon Dick a couple of weeks ago during a wonderful webinar we watched here at Delightful.

However, the question this poses, he went on to say, is: How can you get people to talk about your brand?

The webinar organized by Klout and Simply Measured answered this question for us by introducing how to successfully manage an influencer program for your brand. Featuring Jon Dick from Klout, Uri Bar Joseph from Simply Measured and blogger and digital marketing influencer Jess Estrada, the webinar showed how to identify, engage, and measure the success of relationships with influencers.

Read More

For the second year running I’ve been asked to judge the US Search Awards which had it’s baptism of fire to much acclaim in Vegas last year at an event few will ever forget.

It’s always a pleasure and eye-opener to see what great work brands and agencies have been up to over the last year and I’m sure 2014’s will be bigger and better.

The entries close this Friday 18th, so get applying here: US Search Awards!

One top tip to bear in mind if you’re applying is: Don’t rush your application and follow the instructions.

It amazes me how some marketing managers charged with submitting their company entry do so in a haphazard way. You have to remember that, as judges, we’re often looking at hundreds of entries, so don’t make yours easy to dismiss on account of its sparseness or lack of signposts that you understand the category and have aligned your success closely to it.

Hoping to see many of you at Pubcon this year to celebrate that great event and the winners of the US Search Awards 2014!

Get submitting those entries NOW!

Cheers,

Mel

I’ve not been to Cannes Lions for a couple of years now, but  I always keep up with what’s going on through these digestible snapshots of what went on on main stage via their YouTube channel.

Sir John Hegarty

In the below highlights from Day 6 last month, Sir John Hegarty from advertising agency BBH, talks brilliantly and hilariously about the (not so) new fad surrounding the obsession with “big data”.

Refering to advertising in particular he nails is by saying, “Data has always been important….it’s called consumer knowledge. The idea that this is going to be the solution to everything and it will give you the answer is BS.”

He continues that if everyone is looking at the same data, everyone will come to the same conclusions and they’ll all produce the same work.

“The idea of data is to take you to a point, and then you go now what do you think about it? What do you feel about it? It doesn’t have the answer. It just asks a set of questions…….call it what you like but it is just data.”

I’ve always felt the same way about the way people have talked about big data in the realms of digital marketing and PR. In our work with Majestic, the remit has always been to use the plethora of data they provide to ask just those questions. To use it to provide additional holes in a problem down which to travel and find a solution. Whether it be an issue with SEO, market intelligence or an opportunity to discover new opportunities to build relationships with writers and journalists.

Big data is not an end in itself as it doesn’t have all the answers. Businesses need to know how to slice and dice it to answer questions beyond the numbers. And those questions often involve asking your customers and potential customers how they feel, something the great Jim Sterne has always encouraged us to do.

When was the last time you got out from behind your analytics dashboard or scorecard and had a real life conversation with a customer?

Try it. You might be surprised by what you uncover and how it relates (or not) the the data you have.

Until next time,

Mel

Picked this up here.

Genius.

Reminds me of some of the people I’ve interviewed over the years.

Cheers,

Mel

One thing I was most proud of during my time at Microsoft were the videos we created at Advertising Week and the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

For about four years I’d travel to these events with a plan to bring them alive for people (as my former boss Jenny Leahy used to put it) “outside the room.”

The videos were then used to promote our presence, be repurposed for other marketing activities and really expand the reach of Microsoft Advertising’s investment in those industry get-togethers.

Recently, the guys from Bing Ads asked me to create one for them. This time I did much of the filming and photography myself and we crowd sourced the rest of the content from other Microsoftees on the ground at the event.

The footage was then sent to my go-to video people >> Cherry Media << in the UK who we worked with in New York and Cannes.

And this was the resulting edit:

You do have to invest in good equipment and editing to create great video, but it doesn’t have to cost the earth. With experience you can start to pick up techniques and visualize how an end edit might look as your filming content at events.

Make sure you check back to the Delightful Blog in a couple of weeks when I’ll be giving some tips on what to look for when filming events for social media amplification.

Thanks for reading/watching!

Mel

Representing Majestic SEO in the US as their Brand Ambassador, I not only get to work with some of the smartest minds in internet technology, big data extraction and actionable analytics, but I get to keep my hand in one of the oldest disciplines that exists in web marketing.

SEO (or Search Engine Optimization if you have stumbled upon this post in error but are still reading) has brought to my professional career some of the best conversations and most endearing relationships I’ve ever had. So when the chaps at the SEO software company, Linkdex, asked to interview me for an eBook on the state of SEO right now, I leapt at the chance to express some of my thoughts on where we are with SEO and what I’ve learned from those conversations and relationships, and what I’ve picked up over the last 18 months through client interaction at Delightful Communications.

You’ll hear not just from me, but read wisdom from people like Danny Sullivan, Bruce Clay, Marty Weintraub, Dixon Jones, Andrew Girdwood, Cedric Chambaz, Eric Enge, Marcus Tandler, Sara Clifton, Rhea Drysdale, Josh Braaten and Aleyda Solis to name but a few.

It maybe 300 plus pages but the insight you’ll glean from its pages will carry your understanding and effectively equip you to navigate SEO for the next 300 years (well almost).

Download the SEO NOW eBook……….NOW!