The Modern Hobo's Lament

Just a quick blog entry to share with you readers what in the hell my business is morphing into. Well, just as my personal life has been in major upheaval and constant state of flux for about the past year and a half so has my business. I don't know how many of you out there have noticed but I suspect those who have were shaking their heads at many junctures. It actually started just after the death of my father last April 14th. This inevitable event is a significant point in any man's life. Freeing in some ways and confusing in many others. On one hand I was free to do anything I wished without that voice on my right shoulder saying "What would Dad say?" to anything I did. No more would I have to register Republican yet vote Democrat or agree that Roy Clark was a better guitar player than Clapton or have to try to explain Mick's gyrations onstage or agree that we didn't need our own swimming pool because they have a perfectly good one down at the Rec Center. I could put my cart before my horse any damned time I wanted to damn it!

Then again, there were many other things that I must then send up a posthumous "you were right" to like wishing I had finished college and at a minimum gotten my bachelors degree, even if it was in interpretive modern dance, it didn't matter as long as I had the sacred sheepskin. There I was at 52 years old, a ten year gap of employment history due to caring for Dad full time in his last years and going forth attempting to reenter the job market with only a Community College Associates Degree and my horse tripped over the cart and fell down and bumped it's head. All of a sudden CEO's and billionaires were 25 years old and post IPO retirement age was no greater than 35 and gone was the "pension" and "home appreciation" and secure blue chip investments. Score one big one for Dad! So after sending out over 1,500 resumes in the past year with not one single call for an interview it doesn't look like I'm a very desirable commodity. I was a decade ago what changed? Well crossing the big 5-0 line is about akin to job hunting suicide. Then there's a spotty credit history and sub 600 FICO score and a rather lengthy history of brushes with Johnny Law and now this glaring ten year gap and the lack of a 4 year degree. Never mind that I have been building social networks and managing social media campaigns back since Web 1.0 and I finally was ahead of the learning curve of the masses for once in my life on a very hot subject. The kids with 4 years dance degrees had developed automation apps that could do what I did on auto pilot PLUS spit out great analytics and statistics better and faster than I could so I caught a good breeze as that train blew by me and I was back sitting by a rail yard campfire toasting a hot dog on a stick with a bunch of fellow hobos of this century's depression even though we keep our blinders on and don't call it such. Humph! What to do? What to do? Was the hobo's lament. Somewhere tonight there's a portable 8 track playing Framton Comes Alive as the the hobos pass a doob around the campfire.

More in Part II

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How to Use Pinterest to Promote Your Business

Image via Wikipedia

Social media changes on a regular basis and it can be difficult for small business owners to keep up. You've got a Facebook page? Check. Your twitter feed is regularly updated? Check. Well here's something else to keep you busy - Pinterest. The issue with technology changing so swiftly is that you do not always understand what horse to back. You may have wasted your dollars getting your MySpace site custom-designed, only to find all your potential customers have moved onto Facebook. So when you read about a fresh social media experience, you're right to pause and ask yourself, ought I be worrying with this? So, should you be bothering to use Pinterest? Pinterest (rhymes with interest) is an online virtual pinboard. Items which you stick on your pinboard or freezer at home, you are able to stick on Pinterest. I'm not really speaking about a piece of paper stating 'Buy Milk' - more beautiful/interesting/inspiring stuff. If you were getting married and came across a great idea for bouquets you might stick that on the site, or if perhaps you're a fashionista, you may use Pinterest to show a high-heeled shoe you love. Whenever people 'pin' these pictures on Pinterest, other individuals will be able to comment. So when you stick up the wedding flower design you believe will make your eyes look fabulous, your bridesmaids can give their suggestions, as well as suggest alternatives. Ideally, consumers link through their pin to the source, so high heeled shoe ought to link to the company's webpage, or the style blog page you found it on, though not everyone does this. Profiles on Pinterest may be public or private, and individuals can follow other people's boards. All this is visually good, is intuitive to navigate round, and is filled with cool youngsters publishing stuff other fashionable individuals have made. But do you need it? The first thing you'll notice when you visit Pinterest.com is it is visually stunning. The web page has photos of beautiful food, clothes, architecture and everything else that's pleasing to the eye. It's really a very visual social network website, which ought to offer you an idea of what sort of business might benefit from a presence on Pinterest. Aesthetically eye-catching merchandise will work well on Pinterest. If you're in an artistic niche, it's worth investigating promoting your merchandise via the site. Unquestionably anyone who offers a service for the wedding industry needs to look into it - brides looking to plan their special day appear to be big consumers of the service in its early stages. The primary users of Pinterest at the minute are women aged 25-44. If you supply via eBay or Etsy then you definitely ought to be investigating what Pinterest could do for you. Indeed Etsy recently added a 'Pin It' button to their item listings, allowing members to effortlessly share their items in the social network. If however you happen to be an accountant, solicitor or other skilled professional who is offering a specialised service, you probably won't identify much of interest for you professionally. Focus instead on working on your LinkedIn profile. Should you feel Pinterest may be of interest to you, then the next issue is how may you use it to PR your business? Pinterest is a social network site, thus rather than directly marketing your products, the emphasis should be on encouraging visitors to share your items. Direct promoting of your products won't go down well and will not boost your brand. Should you be providing craft items or clothing, it will be straight-forward. Inspire your customers to pin your items via your email list or Facebook account, and think about including follow and 'Pin It' buttons to your results next to your other social networking buttons. You can do this by following the instructions on the Pinterest website. Some other industries will have to be a little more original about promoting their products. Should you operate a cafe or catering service you might share some recipes on Pinterest. Ensure that you've got a good, enticing photograph of the dish, post the recipe on your own website and add a Pin It button. Hopefully customers will pin the shot on the site and others may click through to your website. Don't forget - the key to being successful on Pinterest, and making it to the high traffic homepage, is to always have appealing photos. Make sure that your visuals are first-rate and you will thrive. A possible problem for you is that you are unable to easily join Pinterest at the time of producing this article - it isn't open to the public. The fastest method of getting onto it is to ask a friend who is on the website for an invitation. If not you should ask for an invitation from Pinterest and simply wait patiently by the pc. To conclude, creative people have to have a look at Pinterest. Get an invite today and have a play around to see whether it will work for your enterprise. It's definitely going to grow in popularity within the coming months, so by getting on the website nice and early you might with a little luck manage to steal a march on your competition and grow a presence on the website. Robbie Knox writes about public relations at How To PR, a blog that offers free PR advice to small businesses interested in boosting their brand using the media. Visit the site for more articles like this, and learn how to PR your business. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_Knox

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Public Relations For A Small Business

If your business is small, that does not mean that you can afford to lose client. And - unfortunately - one bad blog comment or forum post that has managed to rank Google page 1 for the name of your brand (product, service, etc.) can seriously damage your sales.

But what if my market is just 100 clients? I cannot afford to pay for the expensive PR games!

Luckily you should not pay any big money, because new technologies will help you to go through the process of protecting the reputation of your brand/product/service at a fraction of a cost.

This is how it becomes possible...

Instead of using simple online PR, you can use PR + SEO. For those of you who do not know what SEO means, this is search engine optimization and the aim of SEO is to push a certain web page to higher ranks in search engines.

This can sound strange, but PR + SEO costs LESS that simply PR. But this is a fact.

Instead of creating tons of info, you can create just a few public opinion units (article or press release or video or forum post or blog publication or blog comment) and then - with the help of SEO instruments - you can push these public opinion units up in search engine ranks. And you control on what keywords you are pushing them.

No longer you need to disperse the efforts, create tons of info and then hope that sooner or later it will rank well. Instead you create just a few different publications, push them up for the keywords you need - and the reputation is protected.

So, do the comparison game yourself. On hand, budget for creation of dozens of articles, press releases, media buzz (most likely this will cost you a few thousand USD at least!) or just a few publications pushed up with SEO instruments to page 1 for the keywords that you need (most likely this will cost you a few hundreds of bucks).

Several thousand USD vs few hundreds USD.

For the owner of small business with small budget the frugality of the later option is obvious. And with a few-to-several sales the owner will compensate the expenses. In any case you will lose these sales if you don't work proactively and do not "control" what people see in search engines for the name of your brand/product/service.

As you can see, PR can be frugal, provided it is done together with SEO. And looks like this combination of PR+SEO has great chances to become a new trend on the market of public relations.

For more information about frugal public relations techniques, please join the discussion held on this blog post.

Article Source

Integrated Marketing Agency Phoenix Arizona - Public Relations Phoenix Arizona - Amanda Vega Consulting

Amanda Vega Consulting is described in many different ways depending on which of our customers or competitors you ask. Many know us as one of the oldest social media management providers in the country (since most of us are dinosaurs in the space and got our start at the first dotcoms ever managing chat rooms and forums – social media before it had it’s name.) Others will tell you that we are a public relations shop because our New York office has a knack for major coups in placement like “Oprah: and the “Today Show.” And many people think of us as an interactive agency, especially the big traditional ad agencies for whom we provide behind the scenes social media services. The truth is that Amanda Vega Consulting is a full-service marketing consultancy. We actually provide business consulting, web site development, search engine optimization, social media, marketing, advertising, and public relations services. But there’s something different here. We are consultants, not generalists

We do things a bit differently around here. We don’t fight over internal budgets between teams, and we don’t bonus people by department to feed that reality. We don’t assign newbies to any account, ever. We don’t chase the most profitable dollar in lieu of doing what’s best for the client. And we have successfully manage a team of over 200 in 15 countries and 4 languages making us truly global. Coined as the "anti-agency" by many, our team is truly a group of specialists in their fields. They work to provide clients with the best solutions to their business needs, even if it means recommending partner agencies or contractors. While we have no industry specific requirements, we do have some special affection for the luxury space, organics, alternative energ, pharmaceutical, anything teen and tween related, complex e-commerce companies, shoes (of course,) and an equal love for Fortune 500 companies as well as start-ups.

Our approach is a bit more abrasive than most firms – but it comes with tremendous results. Would you rather have fancy foam boards, or more revenue to your bottom line? At the end of the day, we service clients directly in the areas of PR, social media, and other online marketing and consulting. Half of our clients are also the top ad agencies of the world that appreciated the value of our interactive and social media expertise to plug us in behind the scenes to implement social media the right way. We believer there are advantages to our locations – NY is the best place to have a PR team to court national media. And there are advantages to our business model – hiring experts for each project to work with the core team gives you the best of breed everytime. And there is certainly value to having been here longer than most. 17 years in interactive is no joke, and it comes with a lot of knowledge (and a huge team of mommy bloggers and other SME’s all over the world that love us.) So come check it out. Read more here and on the blog. We welcome your banter and your partner – and we even welcome your dissent.

via amandavega.com

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