Aviva Rabinovici

Great writing starts with a great process

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Outsourcing great b2b writing—content that reflects your company’s style, tone and overall brand—can be a tricky process. Not only do you have to find a great writer (or agency of writers), but you have to be able to establish a writing process that works for both parties.

 

The writing process can be different for every company. So, while an experienced writer will be able to offer suggestions as to how things could work—or how other companies have done things in the past—you ultimately have to know what will work best for your specific organization. To help, here are some questions you may want to consider:

 

  • Will you provide the writer with content ideas or will they be expected to come up with topics themselves?
  • What materials, information or interviews with subject matter experts will you provide? How will interviews be arranged and conducted?
  • How hands-on are you going to be? Will you write something first and simply ask the writer to fix it up? Or will they be expected to write the articles from scratch?
  • If you have a larger in-house team, how will you streamline the outsourcing process and keep track of the external writer’s workload?

 

Feel free to involve your writer in the discussion and acquire insight into their preferences. The ultimate goal, after all, is to find a system that works well for both parties—and is most likely to elicit great results.

 

To hear more tips on how to improve your company’s content with an external writer, download the new AR Communications Inc. ebook—The Right Fit: How To Outsource Great Writing.

 

Aviva Rabinovici

Why would you ever pay someone to write?

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Writing is a skill most of us learned in the early days of grade school—and one that we practice every day writing emails, notes and LinkedIn status updates. So why would you ever pay someone to do it for you?

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Michael Rabinovici

You Like it Now but You’ll Learn to Love it Later

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Last week, I tweeted that if you only read one business article for the week, it should be the one in I referred to in Fast Company about chaos being the new order. I was wrong. If you only read one business article this year, that’s the one you should read.

The whole subject of chaos, and how we know we should embrace it but yet are afraid of it, is best summed up for me in a few lines from Robbie Robertson’s classic “Somewhere Down The Crazy River”

Wait, did you hear that
Oh this is sure stirring up some ghosts for me
She said "There’s one thing you’ve got to learn
Is not to be afraid of it."
I said "No, I like it, I like it, it’s good."
She said "You like it now
But you’ll learn to love it later."

Indeed we will.

Read the Fast Company article here http://bit.ly/chaos-is-the-new-order

What are your thoughts?  How has your company dealt with chaos? Comment below.

Michael Rabinovici

Dollar Impact of Social Media – How does a Cool Trillion or so Sound?

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One of the most frequent questions we hear from clients relates in one form or another to the dollar ROI from social media.  As the industry matures, more data is becoming available to shed light on this question.

A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute examines the current usage of social technologies in four commercial sectors:   consumer packaged goods, retail financial services, advanced manufacturing, and professional services.  It concludes that the potential value to be unlocked by leveraging these technologies across the four sectors could potentially contribute $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in annual value.

Although the value that can be captured varies from industry to industry, all of them can benefit.  The key to success? Creating the conditions for the full and enthusiastic participation of employees.

Click here for a copy of the study. Click here for a review of the report in Fast Company Magazine

For the latest information on, and best practices for, Mobile and Social Media marketing follow me on Twitter at Twitter.com/mikerabinovici

Michael Rabinovici

Go Mobile or Go Home

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A recent study covered by the tech site Mashable indicates that consumers are now spending more time on mobile apps than the Web. In June, consumers spent 81 minutes per day using mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes of Web surfing (see chart below).   This change in user behaviour is further confirmed by a recent report by Mary Meeker, a partner at the legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which found that for the first time combined tablet and smartphone shipments eclipsed those of desktops and notebooks.  All this data also backs Wired Magazines’ article last year “The Web is Dead”, which predicted that apps would soon overtake the Web.

What does that mean for your company? If you’ve developed and implemented a mobile strategy, you are well positioned to benefit from this coming shift.  If you have started to give some thought  to this and you move the process into high gear, you should be OK as well.  If you’ve done neither, you better drop everything else and make this your top priority.  Now.

Will mobile rule everything? No.  But a significant segment of your current audience and your future one will spend an increasing amount of their time on their mobile devices.  The question all companies have to answer is whether not they will be able to serve and create value on the devices and media on which their customers choose to spend their time.

You can find a links to the reports mentioned above here:
Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear-view Mirror
Top 10 Mobile Internet Trends

 

 

Michael Rabinovici

Is having 600 million friends a good thing?

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Some of the greatest challenges our clients face today include managing their employees’ use of social networks and enacting social media policies that work in the real world.

Crossing the line between the personal and the professional happens in the click of a mouse and most often, in my opinion, on Facebook.  This largest, and Oscar bound, of social networks began primarily as a gathering of folks looking up, and connecting with, school and summer camp chums.  Businesses soon realized the potential and started to get in on the action with corporate Facebook pages.

The most important means of getting yourself noticed on Facebook is by having lots of friends and being “liked” by lots of people – just like in high school.  Natuarally, companies figured out that the best way to build their Facebook presence was by “friending” their employees – one big happy family, right?  Not quite.  Although Facebook is fairly easy to use, it also makes it easy to forget who all of these newfound friends are.  This can prove to be a challenge when one of these friends is your boss.  For one of the epic Facebook exchanges between an employer and an employee – click here (I would have replicated it in the post but this is a family blog).

Let me be clear. I believe that a corporate Facebook page can have a profoundly positive impact on your business.  The wrong approach, in my view, adopted by numerous companies, has been to block Facebook in the workplace.  This solution is both counterproductive and unworkable.   It takes most or all of your front line team (your employees) off the social media playing field, and they can all still use Facebook outside the office.  Sensible social media policies coupled with employee training are a better answer. For Social Media Training information click here.

For the latest and greatest in the world of Web and Social Media, follow me on Twitter at Twitter.com/mikerabinovici