From the Internet tools file: a "press release grader" that will tell you whether your press release will be an effective marketing tool. Powered by HubSpot, an Internet marketing company, the "press release grader" will "evaluate your press release and provides a marketing effectiveness score. This score...
-35, -83, -88, -67, -47, -51, -51 That's the change in payrolls from the establishment survey for each month since January. These famously volatile numbers have seemingly turned a new leaf in 2008. In fact, the rolling seven-month standard deviation was the lowest on record in...
You have a finite amount of marketing dollars to spend, and an almost infinite number of ways to spend them. How much should I earmark for word-of-mouth to existing customers versus WOM to non-customers? Which products do I highlight in a catalog, and whom do I send...
Joan Kratz, senior vice president of marketing at Premiere Global, discusses how to manage people and technology to align sales and marketing teams with the goal of improving the overall sales process.
Joan Kratz, senior vice president of marketing at Premiere Global, talks about how her company's sales team videotaped customer testimonials as part of a marketing campaign.
The Find: An astonishing 50 percent of advertising and marketing executives report having been stabbed in the back by a colleague at some point in their careers. The Source: A national survey from The Creative Group, which provides specialized staff to the marketing, advertising, creative and web...
The Find: The global middle class is set to more than double between 2000 and 2030 offering massive opportunities -- and massive challenges -- to managers at multinational companies. The Source: "The New Global Middle Class- Potentially Profitable but Also Unpredictable" in Knowledge @Wharton. ...
As people continue to pinch pennies in a slowing economy, how does the seller of upscale products and services convince them to buy items that are impractical Hummer, unnecessary Amazon rain forest excursion, or expensively luxurious Lobster of the Month Club? The answer is simple. Lay...
When you're in PR, it's easy to get lost in the day-to-day dramas, crises and opportunities, and to lose sight of big picture. The name for that big picture is "reputation management." Essentially, reputation management is everything you do over the long-term to protect, enhance and burnish...
The Find: According to one recent survey, complacent western managers "hugely underestimate" their Chinese counterparts while overestimating their own skills. The Source: The Global Management Challenge study from the Institute of Leadership & Management ILM. The Takeaway: The ILM surveyed 325 managers...
When in trouble, change the model radically. That's the message for book publishers, a business badly in need of saving. The argument on how to reinvent the book publishing business is to have authors self-publish, use word of mouth to gain sales, and then whoever gets buzz will get publishing...
The Find: One Harvard Business School professor crunches the numbers and comes up with a startling conclusion for those in the media biz: forget the long tail, aim for the occasional and old fashioned blockbuster. The Source: An alaysis of sales patterns in the music and home-video...
It's time for another CEO pay survey. This one, by the Associated Press, shows that "fireman CEOs" -- those hired from the outside to pull a big corporation through a crisis -- get a lot of money. The AP came to its conclusions after surveying documents from...
On the heels of Apple's announcement of a $199 iPhone and the company's continuing surge, it's instructive to recall that CEO Steve Jobs isn't always right. Enter the year 2001 into your Apple Time Machine to a period when the company was recording a $195 million loss...
Following the historic 9 percent run up in oil futures June 6, expect your customers to be more concerned than ever about prices. But it's not just customers you have to worry about -- you need to be thinking right now about how to manage your business through the deepening...
You don't need a headquarters -- you need a federation of autonomous hub offices in different regions. So argue C.K. Prahalad and Hrishikesh Bhattacharyya in their article Twenty Hubs and No HQ in the latest issue of strategy+business registration required. Prahalad, a...
Talk about pay inequities. If you are a CEO at a small to middle-sized firm you probably got a puny 2 percent pay raise last year. Yet if you were a big shot at a Standard & Poors 500 firm, you fared a heck of a lot...
Search engine optimization SEO is hugely important these days, but most small businesses are fairly clueless about how to make their sites look as good as possible to the spiders of the web. An extremely cheap (actually, free) way to see if your site is up to snuff is to...
Porter Novelli trendspotter Marian Salzman spots trends for a living. In a recent interview, she shared some of her secrets for identifying the latest craze (UPDATE: Salzman sent her white paper to Catching Flack: Porter Novelli's 10 Trends) There are basically three stages involving trends related to...
