Tag Archive for PR

Product Design Strategy

Self-Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses, Non-profits, and Schools

by Olga Werby • May 21, 2014

If you are running a small business, or a non-profit, or a school, marketing budgets tend to be very small. There’s just not a lot of money to spend. But institutions that are lacking in money can use time — of their volunteers, family, friends, staff, and students — to support their marketing and PR efforts and to generate some buzz about their organization, work, and services. The chart below focuses on just five media outlets: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and a blogging platform WordPress (other blogging SMS systems can be easily substituted). The idea is to spend time to continuously generate fresh and relevant-to-your-industry and audience content and then share it. Some things are very easy and don’t take much time: sharing articles and photos, tweeting and retweeting, liking and favoring, and pinning. Other activities take a bit more time: writing reviews and comments, creating galleries and image collections, etc. The hardest is blogging — this can take a lot of time and small organizations have to be careful how they allocate their time. But students and friends and volunteers can help. Used together, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and an organization blog, can form a powerful do-it-yourself marketing strategy:

How to brand a disease — and sell a cure

by Sheetal Elangovan • October 30, 2010

Elliot, C. (2010). “How to brand a disease—and sell a cure .” CNN. Retrieved on 11 October, 2010: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/10/11/elliott.branding.disease/index.html?hpt=C2 Carl Elliott in his article for CNN cites examples of how pharmaceutical companies sell a cure by disease branding. Drug companies today are embracing the ideology that Edward Bernays’, the father of PR proposed—The public relations business was less about selling things than about creating the conditions for things to sell themselves. Why disease branding works? As Carl Elliott states in his article, disease branding is particularly effective in two types of situations. Let us consider the first situation, a shameful condition that can be de-stigmatized through disease branding. If a condition, however shameful, is prevalent enough in the common population then a ready market exists for the cure. It is the rare shameful condition for which a market typically does not exist where disease branding will help ‘create’ a market. Individuals with this rare condition would need to overcome the stigma attached with such conditions and discuss them with their health care providers. By branding a disease and de-stigmatizing the condition, the pharmaceutical companies act as catalysts and enablers to the process of individuals coming forward and discussing the condition…

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

by Andrea Carroll • June 30, 2010

Wright, A. (2009). “Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts.” The New York Times. Retrieved on 30 June, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html Online presence is a valuable commodity in today’s digital market. As companies seek to track exactly how their brand is discussed via the web and where these discussions appear, it becomes apparent that even a team of employees devoted to such research cannot tackle the shear size of the medium. Thus, algorithms are being employed by marketing research firms as well as companies themselves to handle not only the amount of information present on the Internet, but also in what context it amasses. These algorithmic tools are applied all over the web, but are concentrated on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as sites that allow large amounts of user-generated content. Theoretically, in this way a computer can track not only when a company is mentioned but also in what connotative context it appears. Differing from previous brand tracking, these new programs seek to determine subjective opinion as well as objective knowledge. By programming computers to scan the Internet for words that hold certain connotative meanings, marketers and brands can preemptively address user satisfaction issues as well as…