On Friday, June 3, 2011, Don Silver, COO of Boardroom Communications, will be the guest speaker at the Broward County Bar Association’s Breakfast for Bloggers event. The event titled, “What Should I say on My Blog?”, will provide ideas that will help bloggers build his or her audience, attract prospective clients, and gain media attention. With Don’s 25 years of successful public relations and marketing experience, he will defiantly have helpful tips for getting your personal or business blog up and running.

Don has been published extensively in local newspapers and in state and national trade journals. He is a frequent speaker on topics ranging from crisis management and public relations to marketing, new business development and community relations. His innovative ideas have proven to be successful for many of  his clients and he is always ready to provide helpful tips for getting your buisness noticed.

The event is free to BCBA members and $25.00 to non-members. It will take place at the Norma B. Howard Center, 1051 S.E. 3rd Ave., in Fort Lauderdale at 8:30 a.m. Continental breakfast will be served.   

To register visit www.browardbar.org or contact Traci Lewis at (954)832-3618 or traci@browardbar.org.

Hope to see you there!

The debate over using one’s personal social media outlets to promote client events or activities remains an ongoing topic in PR circles.  Those on the pro side argue that social media has already blended our work, social lives, personal and professional contacts anyway. While those opposed like to keep their personal and work lives separate and don’t want to barrage friends and family with impersonal work updates. 

Whichever side you fall on, it helps to keep a few tips in mind when talking about clients and their achievements on your social media, so that you don’t find yourself unfriended by half of your contacts.

1. Limit client updates and event invitations to a few a week. Let’s face it, your friends friended you, not your entire client roster.  It’s great to be proud of your and your clients’ work, but people will quickly grow tired of hearing you crow about someone who, in all likelihood, they have never met.
2. Don’t hit up friends or family for business for your client or try to solicit money for their causes.  If it is a client’s 5K event that you are participating in, for example, be sure to stress your participation.  It’s great to help your client bring in business, and if you think a Facebook friend would be good for a client’s business, arrange a personal introduction. Then step away.
3. Don’t clog up news feeds with 770 photos of a client event.  Be choosy-pick your 5 favorites.  Preferably some with bigwigs or celebrities in them to keep it of general interest.  No one, not even homebound shut-ins, would care enough to scroll through 770 photos anyway.
4. If you have friended clients, don’t ever, ever EVER complain about other clients (even if they aren’t friends), bosses or coworkers-this seems obvious, but it bears repeating.  At the least, you could end up with hurt feelings and at worst, you could end up fired. It isn’t professional, anyway.

 The blending of our social and professional lives is creating a brave new social media world. So let’s be careful out there.

Boardroom Communications COO, Don Silver, participated at a recent event hosted by the Southeast Florida Caner Control Collaborative for healthcare professionals. He spoke about using social media and traditional relationship building and communications techniques to build your professional brands. Don suggests creating a brand for your company. “You want patients to always remember your facility over competitors,” explained Don. This can be achieved through repetition with their aggressive ad campaigns promising patients what they want – hope, caring professionals and innovative therapies.

 Another suggestion would be to create a strong message to build the brand. This message should represent what you want to be known for and where you want to take your career. Once you’ve done that, you need to define your various target audiences. The people you choose for this should be in the same field that you work with.

 At Boardroom Communications, we view social media as just one additional platform to convey your expertise, news and work with you to create the best strategy for your business.

The world has gone gaga for Lady Gaga— Stefani Germanotta, that is.  Germanotta’s pseudonym formed the foundation for the outrageously fabulous pop star that dominates the music scene on an international scale. But would the meat dress have been cool if NYU grad Stefani wore it?

As Fast Company magazine article “The Quest for The Perfect Name” reveals, Gaga’s genius is all in the name. Now everybody wants an original name that pops for their product. Authors of the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard and contributors to the article, Dan and Chip Heath, use boutique firm Lexicon’s branding strategies as an example.

They explain that Lexicon has come up with some of the most recognizable brand names: BlackBerry, Dasani, Febreeze, OnStar, Pentium, Scion, and Swiffer.  Lexicon’s founder and CEO David Placek will even trick his own staff into coming up with the perfect name by splitting them into three teams of two and often withholding the name of the client. Meanwhile his team of linguists brainstorms buzz-words that describe the selling point of the brand.

For BlackBerry, Placek wanted to counter the annoyance we feel when our phones buzz and vibrate. They thought of long walks on the beach, a glass of wine, or strawberry-picking. Eventually strawberry became the favorite, until someone mentioned the word straw sounded like “slow.” So the “Strawberry” became the BlackBerry, which grew to be the king of the business phone world virtually overnight.

This is just one example of successful brand marketing. After all, can you imagine text-messaging someone from what was almost called the EasyMail?

There are over 126 million blogs on the internet according to a Miami Herald article. So the question is how do you make your business blog stand out? Tasha Cunningham, web entrepreneur and PR expert, suggests the following tips to help boost your ranking in the search engines.

Tip #1: “Be Free” – Creating free blogs through Wordpress or Blogger will increase your chances of ranking higher in search engines.

Tip #2: “Good words are key,” – Instead of using your companies name all over the blog, pick a keyword related to your business and center your blog around that word.

Tip #3: “Think like an editor,” – After you have found your key word, do not over use it. It is recommended to use it in every other post.

Tip #4: “Inform,” – Make sure that when you post you are informing your readers about your business, not just using the blog to post advertisements.

Tip #5: “Educate,”- In your blog posts, teach your readers something they didn’t already know. You can also post instructional videos.

Tip #6: “Persuade,” – In each post, end with something that persuades the reader to try something or view something else. For example add a link at the bottom of the post relating to what you just wrote about.

Tip #7:  “Compliment your competitors,” – It is recommended to comment on the blogs of your competitors. Do things like talk about how well an article was written and then post a link to an article you wrote on the same topic.

For more blog marketing tips visit www.BizBytes101.com

Don Silver, COO of Boardroom Communications, was recently quoted in a Miami Herald article providing insight to the growing luxury magazine industry in South Florida. According to the article about 77 magazines across Florida have folded since 2008, however South Florida magazines have found their savior­­— affluent readers. Luxury lifestyle magazines have elicited a variety of techniques and media platforms. For example, Latin Trade Magazine holds the Bravo Business Awards, an event that hones in on its target audience. Cravings South Florida, a chic women’s magazine that launched in 2009, has created a radio show on 790 AM. Cravings has also added a wedding section to its publication and has created a preferred customer card, named “Cravings Card,” to get its name out to readers. Ocean Drive and Miami Magazine have already invested in apps for the iPad and the iPhone— despite the hefty 25,000 to 100,000 price tag. And just this March, Plum TV launched its luxury magazine titled, Plum Miami.

Having worked with many luxury lifestyle magazines, Mr. Silver shed light on the ongoing changes with lifestyle publications, emphasizing the transition of relying on luxury real estate to displaying South Florida’s thriving culture of art, fashion, food and entertainment. “In the days of luxury condo parties, that was a whole industry for these luxury publications,” said Silver. “That crashed and burned and fell off a cliff.” 

The template that has lead these luxury magazines to stay afloat despite the economic woes facing the industry today is targeting the wealthy, and do so by engaging readers across various platforms.

In the May issue of Website Magazine, Linc Wonham updated readers on the recent disruption of “shady” SEO tactics in his article titled, “Grow Profits From the Farmer Update.”  According to the article, nearly 12 percent of all Google searches in the U.S. were affected by this change. Google is encouraging all online businesses to reassess its own content because of the change, especially merchants. 

Many e-commerce sites have seen their rankings slip since the change, without knowing they were practicing shady SEO tactics. Now the goal is that merchants’ content will be original, and this will help online consumers easily find the business and products they are searching for on Google. 

To ensure your rankings go up, start by auditing the content. It’s important to review all existing content from recent to past blog posts and clean up or remove anything that has errors, copied from another site or both.Then check the links. Linking your business to poor content will hurt your rankings.

Finally, produce great content. In Google’s eyes quality, originality, authoritativeness, presentation and value make for great content. Make sure you avoid misspellings, factual errors and outdated information. Don’t copy what users can find somewhere else. Lend expertise, make it easy to consume and that it’s visually pleasing and engaging for users.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Google Inc. admits to adding a social twist to keep up with other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Those companies have gotten its users to publically and privately share information on the Web, including videos, articles, personal interests, and their whereabouts. The Internet search engine is going to add a feature called the “social search” that allows its users to recommend useful search results to friends and even reorder the way the results appear. Similar to Facebook’s “like” button, this feature will install a “+1” or “plus one” that will change the way some people use Google’s search engine. The social search feature won’t replace Google’s traditional search results, which are based on the mathematical algorithm that attempts to rank sites based on how relevant they are to a user’s search query. Only users signed on their Google accounts will be able to see the changes to the search results.

On Wednesday, May 25, the South Florida City Group of the Legal Marketing Association, Southeast Chapter will be hosting a meeting on an important topic affecting law firms and legal marketers, strategies for coaching attorneys in new business development. The meeting, graciously hosted by Berger Singerman, is in the community room of 350 E. Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale from 11:30-1 p.m.

Tracy LaLonde, Partner at Akina Corporation, will discuss such topics as how to get buy-in from the attorneys, what coaching methods are effective for coaching attorneys, how do you help interested attorneys take it to the next level and how do you motivate attorneys who might be resistant or difficult? This meeting will provide a high level framework for business development and specific tactics for coaching attorneys.

For more information on the event or to RSVP, please contact Jennifer Clarin at jclarin@boardroompr.com or (954) 370-8999, or via SurveyMonkey, http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/K8LRDG5..  The event is $20 for LMA members and $40 for non-members.

We look forward to seeing you on May 25!

In O’Dwyer’s May issue Boardroom Communications was included in the Top U.S. independent PR firms.  O’Dwyer’s is the nation’s leading public relations and marketing communications publication. Each month the magazine focuses on a specific industry and informs readers of current trends, marketing strategies and industry related issues. This month’s issue will exhibit the top PR firms in the U.S. and arrange the information in a double-sized issue that will rank PR firms by the total net fees, PR specialty, geography, percentage gainers, and more. Boardroom Communications was honored to be ranked as one of the top PR firms in the U.S. in this issue.