The Gong Blog

Topic: Hodges Digital Strategies

2022 Most Gonged Blogs

Blogging is a two-way street. As much as you can busy yourself with plans for new, yet-to-be-written blogs and fill editorial calendars with content ideas, it’s just as useful to take a look in the rear-view mirror at some of your past blogs to see which ones are engaging your audiences most. In that spirit, here are some excerpts from our top five most-read Gong Blogs from 2022: 1. Five Examples of Media Interviews Gone Wrong. Our most popular blog of the year actually was…

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Keeping the owned content train on track

Owning your story, which we covered in our previous post, is one thing. Telling it consistently month after month with a fresh and interesting perspective is another. Based on our experience, the reason most owned content strategies fail – or at least don’t reach their full potential – is because not enough resources and time were devoted to the many steps and dimensions that are part and parcel to an effective content strategy. Build the infrastructure A critical first step is identifying subject-matter experts (SMEs),…

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How to write a blog post

Attention public sector communicators, are you archiving your social media content?

Does FOIA mean anything to you? If not, you probably work for a private organization and this post isn’t for you. For everyone else, read along. FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) and other state-level public records laws are a big deal for government agencies and organizations. Essentially, the public is entitled access to virtually any unclassified document, including emails, text messages and social media content. The digital age and FOIA haven’t exactly gotten along swimmingly, so to speak, for a variety of reasons. First, many…

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Video and B2B Marketing

You’ve likely heard the buzz: video is increasingly important for B2B marketers. Check out these findings from Forbes: More than 80% of senior executives said they are watching more online video today than they were a year ago. Three-quarters (75%) of executives surveyed said they watch work-related videos on business-related websites at least weekly; more than half (52%) watch work-related videos on YouTube at least weekly. Work-related video can drive senior executives to take action. Overall, 65% have visited a vendor’s website after watching a…

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The 2015 marketing Crystal Ball: What others think

Sonali and I got together last week to plan our upcoming Hodges Starters presentation for next Wednesday (shameless plug: you can register here). While we have things pretty nailed down I have to admit it was harder than usual to gain consensus around what 2015 will bring in the PR/marketing/social/digital work. So while I know you’re waiting with baited breath to see what Sonali and I say, here’s a rundown of links from other PR/marketing folks as they looked into their crystal ball. I really…

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The Year of ???

So if you’re like me you’ve consumed all of the “year-ender/year-beginninger” marketing guru roundups. You know the ones where marketing leaders are asked about the big trends of the year and they each proclaim it as “The Year of The (insert the cool marketing word here).” I admit I’ve been guilty of doing that in the past inserting words like “social” or “content” or “personal” into the void as a way of simply describing what the coming year will be known for in public relations…

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To Boldly Go…

It should come as no surprise to anyone that we throw around a lot of baseball terms and phrases at The Hodges Partnership. What you may not know is that a couple of us are closet Trekkies, so on occasion the random Star Trek reference is tossed about. When that happens in a meeting about three or four of us get the meaning. Sort of like our inside version of The Big Bang Theory. The title of this post is a reference to taking the…

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AND not OR*: How Mobile, Social and Web are converging

*For a refresher on Boolean algebra go here. Are mobile, social and web three separate entities anymore? Not when you consider the following: The number of smart-phone users, world-wide just crossed the 1 billion mark.  In the U.S., approximately 87 percent use their phones to access the web and other apps (25 percent of whom, primarily use their mobile devices to access the web). More than half of Facebook’s 1 billion users access the platform through their mobile devices, while 18 percent of whom don’t…

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The next great expression of “brand love”

The ultimate expression of "brand love" is an icon on the Home screen of mobile devices.  Our devices are so personal and ubiquitous, that any apps we download and keep, are an extension of our identity.  True enough that many of our devices are a junkyard for apps – long forgotten and seldom used.  But others are so addictive, we wonder how we lived "pre app."  At HDS we just launched an app that I hope will be an incredibly handy resource for many people. …

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I Killed My Blog and Why

Jon's 1.5 is dead. It was time. It's not like I was running out of things to say but the original reason for the blog and the number of voices needed to tell that continuing story has evolved. A lot has happened in the world of PR, social and digital in the three years of Jon's 1.5 and a lot has happened at Hodges during that time.  The initial journal that the blog was started to chronicle is over.  Think of the difference as the…

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Facebook Timeline for Brands: It’s Crunch Time

Don't be nervous. Change is good. That should be the Facebook brand statement. Just when you get used to things, the mother of all social media platforms changes things up.  No change in recent history has given more marketing folks heartburn as the coming change of Facebook Brands Pages to the Facebook Timeline format. The change is official in just a few days (March 30) and Jim Belosic does a great job of helping marketing folks face this reality in this blog post on PR…

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#Rutgers app: Labor of love

Those who know me, even those who have just met me once or twice, know I bleed Scarlet. It seems I was born a Rutgers Scarlet Knight with most of my family members having attended the State University of New Jersey. My first memory of attending a sporting event is as a five-year-old jamming into my dad's green Chrysler New Yorker (the world's largest car) and riding to West Point to see the Knights face off against Army.  He must have had to stop at…

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