Think from My Creative Team

creative briefs

Here's a quick overview of some of the things we've blogged about recently:

Fighting For The Middle Ground

An Audience Of One

Dropping Breadcrumbs

Subscribe to our blog by email or RSS reader.

Note to marketers: if you are going to allow customers to contact you via email, you need to answer them in digital - not geologic - time.

B.L. Ochman has a nice piece on having some actual live humans monitoring customer service email accounts.

PR is not dead, according to Brian Solis. And I believe him.
Says Solis, "Perhaps the most troubling theme of this discussion however, is a very dangerous insinuation, disguised as expert advice, that suggests great products and services do not need PR."

Etiquette is missing from many areas of life these days. Chris Brogan wades in to the topic from a social media etiquette standpoint. He has some good advice.

Random Links:

Worn out social media executions that should be retired.

The myth of the creative class and the wisdom of the crowd.

Digital colleague Rodger Johnson has been downsized and now is attempting to implement a social media strategy into his job search.

What's happening to journalism? That's the question our digital colleague DJ Francis addresses in Journalism at the Crossroads.

Hello. Email and ethics: we'll explore those topics this time. Let's get going.

Creatively yours,

Harry Hoover
harry@my-creativeteam.com

Stop The Funeral

By Harry Hoover

Email is not dead, no matter what you have heard from other sources. So, let's stop the funeral right now. I was talking about this last night with a friend whose brother is interested in starting an email program for his small business. My advice: start the program from a customer retention perspective. More on this in a moment.

This much maligned business communication tool has its merits, even if it has been misused by misdirected and even malicious marketers. Just because a bunch of spammers are clogging in-boxes everywhere doesn't serve as a death knell for this solid communications vehicle.

Technology's early adopters typically are the ones spouting this nonsense. But most of us aren't early adopters and are comfortable with what we have. What is out there to replace email? Well, there is RSS and XML.

But - as Christopher Knight points out, "RSS and XML do not pass "does my mother or father understand how to use it" test. Email passed the test, even though they needed my help setting up spam filters."

IM (instant messaging) and social media platforms like Twitter also offer some solid options to email but they too have drawbacks. And let me ask you, if email is so dead, why is it such an integral part of communication strategies for Twitter (direct messaging) and blogs (alerting readers of new content)?

Business Ethics: An Oxymoron?

By Harry Hoover

Why do I believe good PR and business ethics are inextricably linked? It comes down to definitions. Ethics is learning what is right and what is wrong and then doing the "right thing." PR involves providing counsel on the "right thing" to do and then helping the organization get credit for it.

The business and political excess of the last 20 years have taken some PR practitioners to the dark side because they felt it was the only way for their company to profit. Although I personally believe doing right for right's sake is enough, there are some who may not share this view.

OK, here's a reason that any good capitalist can embrace: research now shows that socially responsible behavior is good for the bottom line.

An analysis of overall financial performance of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens shows that this group of firms did significantly better than the remaining companies of the S&P 500.