Month: July 2012

The Ripple Effect of Company Culture

McClure Company employees team up for the YMCA Corporate Challenge.

By Anne Deeter Gallaher, CEO/Owner of Deeter Gallaher Group LLC

The familiar proverb “The apple does not fall far from the tree” refers to parents and children, but I think it also has meaning for employees and employers. If you want to understand the culture of a company, watch and interact with the employees. What boards do they serve on, what organizations do they support, where do they spend their leisure time?

High-performing, solution-driven, good-citizen companies attract high-performing, solution-driven, good-citizen employees. They create a framework for workers like Dan Kerr to thrive, and they afford them the freedom to give time, energy, and resources back to the community.

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Straight Forward Suggestions for Crowdsourcing Content

Every business needs content in order to be found in search, and to differentiate them from the competition. Without quality, helpful content (and lots of it), you’re lost in a school of fish that are all the same color. Who’s going to find you? Who’s going to pick you?

The trouble with content development is that it can be expensive. Website copy, blog articles, e-books, reports—they all take time and effort (and dollars) to produce. However without them, you really can’t do an effective job of marketing your business—especially in the social age. It’s the classic chicken-or-the-egg syndrome. The more social our businesses become, the more we need that variety of content that speaks to our listeners and helps them solve their problems so we can A: get their attention, and B: develop relationships with them.

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How to Leverage an Opinion Editorial [Infographic]

How we leverage the content we create is critical to any marketing strategy. If your strategy involves multi-channel media, you’ll be using a range of traditional and digital platforms to reach specific audiences. For influence and Google juice, one of the most powerful and persuasive tools is an opinion editorial.

Although we value the information shared in 140-character tweets and depend on “first knowledge” found in social media, the earned media value of 800 words of original content is still an extremely potent currency.

To illustrate how an opinion editorial can be used to tell a business story, follow the Ground Truth in Harrisburg infographic below. The capital city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has experienced a cloud of negativity stemming from the city’s fiscal paralysis. Local media, The Wall Street Journal, and even foreign TV stations have covered the distress in depth. The business community was challenged to tell its story to offset the negative branding effects.

Using an op-ed as their workhorse piece, three business men shared Ground Truth in Harrisburg and leveraged the story for positive regional and statewide mentions in print, blogs, a digital magazine, two radio shows, social media channels, and two in-person presentations—all from 800 words in print.