Old Dogs Learning New Tricks

By Junior Account Executive Bridget Veltri

The days of sending Fido, the family dog, out to fetch the newspaper in the morning may be numbered but newspapers are not dead…just adapting.

Organic Online PR Campaigns: Building Brand Staying Power Without Paid SEO

By President Abbi Whitaker

PR is organic in nature. A good story in a well respected magazine is most likely to create conversation and curiosity amongst potential customers. Those customers might post a review online, spread the message through social networks or even take the time to blog about the product, person or idea. That conversation creates natural organic search results that can’t be pushed down the chain when Google decides to shake up their algorithms. It enhances a company’s brand, their positioning and their place in the market. It outlasts any paid SEO and creates customers that are mostly likely to become brand ambassadors, and creates trust through the power of third-party endorsements. A well planned and properly executed PR campaign is likely to have more staying power over the long haul than an expensive SEO campaign. How do you accomplish this? By building a combination of strong content, good conversation, quality reviews, stories and expert staying power. Read on!

Power to the Bloggers! And the Facebook Contests!

Facebook contests; created as the almighty way to drive traffic to your page, increase engagement, reward your fans, and ultimately, skyrocket your page’s fan count. But as many failed attempts will attest to, that goal is much easier said than done.

We’ve seen contests crash and burn. We’ve had contests crash and burn.

When Good Blogs Go Bad

By Constance Aguilar, social media strategist

It’s an age old tale in business. One party decides to do something new and special to draw attention and profits to their business. Another party sees its success and wants to duplicate it. Why reinvent the wheel, right?

This part of dealing with a crisis takes note of personal feelings, the hard work and dedication it takes to pull off an idea, and what happens when there’s two (or more) sides to the story.

“OH SH*T!” A Social Media Crisis

By Nicole Rose Dion, veteran social media mistake maker
(social media coordinator/graphic designer) — follow me on Twitter @nicolerosedion

This is a follow up piece to my earlier article about preventing social media crises before they happen. This article focuses on managing a social media crisis once it’s already happened.

5 Recommendations for Jumping on the Pinterest Bandwagon

by Social Media Strategist Constance Aguilar

So you’ve heard about this hot new social network called Pinterest. You know your friends get lost in meme’s, cupcakes, home décor, and clothes for hours because of Pinterest. You might even know there are some brands posting masses of photos under their profiles. And now you want to add that slice to your marketing pie.

How to Create a Community on YouTube

By Nicole Rose Dion, social media coordinator/graphic designer

YouTube is an amazing tool that can be used multiple ways. You can passively use it to house all of your video content (most common use) or you can actively use it to engage with the YouTube community. The beauty of this second option is you still get all the benefits of the first option but you kick it up a notch by having constant, fresh content .

You only have to create some of the content and the rest of it will be created by the vlogging community.  Not to mention you are also creating ambassadors for your brand in the process.

Pitch that Party: 5 Tips for Pitching Events

By Junior Account Executive Bridget Veltri

Publicizing events and parties just isn’t like it used to be in the good ole care free days of college. Back then all you had to do was create an event on Facebook (or for the older ones: Myspace), invite some people and promise beer.

At The Abbi Agency, what we enjoy more than attending a good party is pitching one (maybe that is a slight exaggeration) But, we relish the fact that we’ve put on stellar events like Canfest and the CAMPO opening benefit.  And after all, isn’t an event only as good as the number of people that attend it? Here are five tips that help us when pitching our client’s events.

How to pitch bloggers via Pinterest

This blog was also posted on PR Daily. Read it here.

By Nicole Rose Dion, social media coordinator/graphic designer

Bloggers have flocked to Pinterest like seagulls to your sandwich at the beach, especially if their blog involves photography in some way. They love it because Pinterest gives them just another lovely outlet to display all of their excellent photos and the ability to interact with their fellow blogger brethren (because what more do they really want?).

Humanizing B2B brands with visual humor and satire

This post originally appeared on the CMO Site. You can read it here

From Constance Aguilar, our Social Media Specialist

The most unexpected tends to be what works best in social media. When you surprise your audience, they remember it, and aside from tragedy, the most memorable experiences for people involve humor. We like funny things. The Old Spice guy, The Most Interesting Man in the World, Lady Gaga Goes to Farmville, they all resonated with an audience because the concepts and execution are hilarious.

B2B brands find it difficult to be funny. After all, what’s funny about warehouses, processors, supply chains, and microchips?

While nothing may immediately come to mind, the fact is that humor can and already is applied to the B2B world in effective ways, particularly with video. It humanizes B2B brands, invokes positive emotion, and serves a reward to your audience. People love you when you make them laugh.

But how do you get it to work for you? Cisco’s social media manager, Tim Washer, has some pretty great insight to that. He takes riveting things like aggregation service routers and turns them in comedic gems. The process goes something like this: