relationships

Building relationships with bloggers has been the hot topic of the last year, with an emphasis on the last couple of weeks - courtesy of Mr. Chris Anderson.

This session featured Jack Philbin (President, Vibes Media), Bob Wesley (CEO MobileLime), Dean Macri (Founder/CEO Cielo Group) and Brook Pitts (Senior VP, Marketing Innovation - Bank of America). What started out as a very dry session turned out to be a very insightful lesson on ways to create conversation and user engagement using the power of mobile. 2 of the most interesting uses of mobile campaigns were mentioned by Bob Weasley and Dean Macri.

I read in the WSJ a couple days ago that agency/client relationships are becoming harder to sustain… not surprising as marketers are under increasing pressure to drive results. In the good old days, clients were happy with increases on brand awareness and preference metrics. But given that the average tenure of CMOs at top-branded companies is only 23 months, there’s an intense pressure to demonstrate results – fast – and often at the expense of the brand and its customers. 

Many folks cringe when we start talking about the experiences that we have with outsourcing anything from the company.

While it may be your first reaction to make new sales or pursue bigger clients, the truth of the matter is that you should be paying attention to your existing customers as well.

Over the past many years, in speeches, workshops, books and articles, I have steadfastly preached two axioms of public relations:

"...entrepreneurs need to interact with their target market and then communicate effectively with them in order to build any relationships that may lead to a sale. How do you reach your customer if you can't afford well-placed advertising, need a larger budget to produce a radio or tv spot and want more of a connection than one night networking events?..."

Do you enter into business relationships, acquisitions, property investments, partnerships, or enter into a transaction without first verifying a companies identity, associates and affiliations?