pruneau

LivFit, a growing personal fitness training provider located in Marin county, CA, has recently launched a new online website and blog. This new online property presents their upgraded service offering and addresses our research into what their prospects and customers were looking for when evaluating one of the many training and fitness resources in their [...]

My how things have changed. I can remember a time when it was really important to have a cool business card with a custom logo that attempted to embody the qualities of a brand while differentiating it from competitors. Yet, as businesses of all size have flocked to crowdsourcing web sites to have their logos [...]

Lately, I’ve been attending a number of meetings, networking events and business gatherings and I’ve met a lot of interesting and fascinating people. Many of them are pursuing some amazing ventures with passion and a clear vision. Others, who describe themselves as being “in marketing”, talk an interesting game and profess to have lots of [...]

Unquestionably, there is nothing more valuable to a brand today than the online presence it presents to prospects and customers on the Internet. It is the most essential marketing component that an organization has to have to be found and considered for a product or service.

  After recently completing a purchase online, I received a request to participate in a survey from a large well know retailer brand. They were attempting to gain some insight on how many touch points I have with their brand through social media. And, more importantly, they were trying to determine why I had not [...]

I recently attended the #140 conference in San Francisco. At the event one of the many presenters made a rather poignant and relevant presentation titled “Why Small Business sucks at marketing”. While the title may be arresting, the sentiment might be right given today’s rapidly changing marketing environment. Let’s examine, for a moment, the impact [...]

Integrated marketing used to be fairly simple. But as Steve McKee recently pointed out in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, it’s now become somewhat of a mess. In the olden days, if your television and print ads were tied to your newspaper and direct mail campaign, you had an “integrated” communications campaign. Today it’s much, much more complicated. [...]

We seem to have moved to the next phase of social media. And, I might add, not a moment too soon. The first painful phase of exploration, experimentation and endless posts about someone’s lunch or dinner fare has become so very passé. The early adopters and category gurus who I respectfully “listened” to and attempted [...]

I recently attended a seminar titled: Building Brands with Social Media in SF. While the content was prepared for marketers and agencies, two themes in the day’s agenda kept popping up: Social media is not a one-time event or a marketing campaign. And second, no one should underestimate the investment required and how resource intensive [...]

Business Week recently published a rather skeptical report on the current state of social media. The take away from this report is that the rapidly evolving social media trend has become the wild west of marketing, rife with “experts” selling the equivalent of “snake oil” that delivers little business value. While it’s easy to dismiss [...]

With the proliferation of Facebook fans, twitter followers and social media communities for virtually everything, why exactly do you need email marketing? The medium seems a little over the hill at the moment. Sure you may have invested in building, maintaining, and cleansing a prospect and customer list. But the idea of sending them emails [...]

Today, the highest value in marketing is now being assigned to the ability to be “found” on the internet. What’s more, if all the digital methods, mechanisms and techniques you’re using aren’t facilitating this task, there’s little reason to invest in them. So, it’s appropriate to take inventory of what are the essential components required [...]

After discovering the WordPress platform on the Internet somewhat by accident, I created a publicly hosted blog and posted content to it over the course of almost a year. Recently, I chose to move from this public hosted, WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog. Part of my decision to make this significant transition was [...]

I attended this great presentation by Matt Cutts at the 2009 WordPress Camp earlier this year in San Francisco. I just reviewed it again and found it so simple, entertaining and informative on removing the mystery of SEO, I thought it was worth sharing. Be forewarned, it’s a bit long but well worth the investment [...]

I’ve been aware of an organization called NO SPEC for a while and have been following their commentary online. While I support their efforts in education and outreach, I do find it rather perplexing that this kind of organization has to exist. Why is there a need to “educate” people who deliver creative communications services [...]