SEO Orange County

If social media is the new hotness does that make PR old and busted?  The relationship between PR and social media is interesting because it’s a combination of best friends who want to hang out together but are also competing … Read More

*Note: For our latest information on blogging, please click here! Business and personal blogs are totally different.  The business blog is an extension of your website and your corporate culture.   I know, you’re a small business with just a couple … Read More

Yes, I do. Thanks for asking. In fact, I don’t go anywhere new without checking it out on Yelp first… or Yelping, as I like to call it. It has saved me from a lot of bad places and has also led me to some of the best restaurants I have ever eaten at.

What do you think? Are we too liberal with our ‘likes’? Have we diluted the pool of fans to the point that a ‘like’ doesn’t mean anything anymore? And – perhaps most importantly – as professionals trying to use Facebook to grow our businesses, are we wasting our time trying to market to a community who may have ‘opted-in’ but perhaps doesn’t care?

‘You were just tagged in a photo’. It’s one of my most exciting and nerve-racking updates I get. On one hand, I am excited to see a picture of what I was doing, but on the other hand, a little nervous about how that picture looks!

Goals come in all shapes and sizes, but the most popular ones are losing weight, working out more, spending more time with friends and family, getting organized, and sticking to a budget. Those are all achievable goals, so why do so many of us fail? Why do we make the same promises to ourselves every year, and never fulfill them? The biggest reason is that most of us don’t understand how to use our own minds to help us get what we want.

And it’s not just us. On an average day, I use social media to talk to my college buddies in Boston, my high school pals in Atlanta, my friends and former co-workers in Maine, Michigan, Oregon, London, Germany, Afghanistan… the list is endless. Sometimes it’s just ‘Hey! How are you? I miss you!’ But more often, we talk about news stories (‘check out this link to npr’), pass along information (‘I made this YouTube video about my job’), share feelings (OMG, I’m sooooooo ready for 2011!’) and recap our day (‘Humiliated! I just hugged three people before realizing I forgot to cut the tags off my new sweater!’)

I have often said that what I love most about social media is the transparency it forces upon us. Hard to lie about getting that big promotion or exaggerate how cute your new boyfriend is, when everyone can check out your Linked In profile and Facebook photo albums and get the truth. But it also forces me to realize that transparency is not always the most polite option.

A pretty standard response. (So standard, in fact, that is is exactly the same response that RTG gives the next three customers who post on their wall… complaining about everything from cracking leather, warranties not being honored, broken furniture and bad customer service.) Each time, RTG promises to ‘look into it’ if you email them. It strikes me that there is rarely an apology, and NEVER an offer to contact the customer. Last time I checked, you can send a private message to a ‘fan,’ but RTG puts the burden on them to take further action if they want something done. Sorry, Rooms To Go, I’m pretty sure those customers thought they were “telling you” by letting you know on Facebook. I don’t think they should have to lodge a second complaint.