by admin | Mar 31, 2014 | Brand strategy
Do you remember how in the past, marketing consisted of grabbing your attention with loud colours, catchy (and then later, irritating) jingles, pretty people – and if that didn’t work, huge billboards? These days, businesses are slowly giving those campaigns up in favor of getting in touch with their customers. Pop-ups and other gimmicky ads are moving aside for tailored content – be it in print, image, or video — that a company’s customers may find useful, or otherwise worth sharing. When we think of what businesses use to speak to their audiences, the list most commonly goes like this: email newsletters, social media posts, SEO-optimized blog posts and podcasts. On a general level, the type of content businesses use depends – and should depend — on their target audience’s online behavior, such as what’s more likely to interest them and keep them coming back for more. If you’re looking to use content marketing to drive up your business’s sales through the power of sharing, here are a few content marketing tips you might find...
by admin | Mar 31, 2014 | Brand identity
What does a winning brand vision look like? As I noted in a recent post, the brand vision should reflect and support the business strategy, differentiate from competitors, resonate with customers, energize and inspire employees and partners, adapt to different markets and precipitate a gush of ideas for marketing programs. Creating a brand vision that meets these requirements is a great start to success. However, the brand vision implies a promise to customers and a commitment by the organization. It cannot be an exercise in wishful thinking but, rather, needs to have substance behind it. Read more about whether your brand vision is realistic or not...
by admin | Mar 28, 2014 | Uncategorized
“People don’t take me seriously because I’m a girl,” I said to a friend about the computer science graduate seminar we were taking my junior year of college. “People don’t take you seriously because you talk like a Valley Girl,” he said. Subtlety was not his strong suit, but he had a point. I sounded like I belonged at the mall in Los Angeles, not in a computer science class at Harvard. What a revelation: People discriminated against me not because of my gender, but because of behaviors associated with my gender. Since then, as I am often the only woman in the room at work, I have learned to adapt my behaviors to be taken more seriously. Of course, it would be ideal if people accepted women as they were, but expectations and biases do not change overnight. In the meantime, here are some lessons I have learned during the many years of my PhD program in computer science, a field that is only 20% women. Find out more about these effective communication tips for women...
by admin | Mar 28, 2014 | Brand identity
Facebook as a company is notoriously difficult to read. But news websites that run Facebook fan pages, much like ours, have been noticing an intriguing trend over the past two weeks: Our Facebook page is being liked by far more people than ever before. The numbers don’t lie. The rate at which people are discovering the Canada.com Facebook page has risen by more than ten times. Our numbers are sky-rocketing. Where the numbers of people discovering and becoming a part of our Facebook community were growing predictably, we couldn’t have foreseen such a stark surge so suddenly. And we’re not alone. Find out more about Facebook brand pages...
by admin | Mar 27, 2014 | Concept development
The NSA’s global spy operation may seem unstoppable, but there’s at least one target that has proven to be a formidable obstacle: the Chinese communications technology firm Huawei, whose growth could threaten the agency’s much-publicized digital spying powers. An unfamiliar name to American consumers, Huawei produces products that are swiftly being installed in the internet backbone in many regions of the world, displacing some of the western-built equipment that the NSA knows — and presumably knows how to exploit — so well. Find out more about how this tech firm became a surveillance nightmare for the NSA...
