For those of you who aren’t sports or baseball fans, please indulge me for a second. This post will eventually make sense. As many of you know THP is named for Gil Hodges, the manager of the World Champion 1969 Mets. Any great baseball team has its stars and for Gil’s Mets that star was starting pitcher and eventual Hall of Famer Tom Seaver. But Tom wasn’t the only terrific starting pitcher on that team. The starting rotation boasted left-hander Jerry Koosman and rookie right-hander…
Read MoreI recently attended an event where one of the speakers made an off-hand remark that implied LinkedIn company pages aren’t worthy of our attention or effort. The audience had a good chuckle, but I found the remark strange because Hodges has seen some great results for clients using LinkedIn for sales, recruitment and marketing. Whether or not LinkedIn is to your taste, responsible marketers owe their clients the best advice they can give, and for some clients, you may find that LinkedIn is a great…
Read MoreThis past week, I digitally attended (aka streamed) The Digital Innovation Summit. The event brought together experts from business and the media who each spoke to how they’re driving innovation, both from a technology and social perspective. The streaming, in and of itself, was kinda interesting and something I personally had never done. We took that approach for several reasons: it allowed other Hodgers to pop in and participate, was very cost effective and it placed minimal burden on my family (which includes 2 kids…
Read MoreWe all know that content is king in the social media game, but for those of us actually producing the content, we know how difficult and time consuming it can be to churn out a constant stream of original posts. Content curation helps fill the gaps where you don’t have original content to post, and at Hodges, it’s a big part of our social media mix. When done right, content curation isn’t merely just a re-post of someone else’s content. Companies and brands who do…
Read MoreFor those of you who I’ve bored to tears in recent (the last year or so) new business, client or professional presentations on the intersection of PR, content and social platforms, the idea of the “hub and spoke” is not a new one. The hub and spoke is our way of explaining our approach to content curation and social media. Originally, we (I) thought of the hub as a way to convince a hesitant client to start a blog. In most cases it got the…
Read MoreWhile I won’t go into a blow-by-blow grading of the Super Bowl fare dished out by our ad agency brethren (although special kudos to Radio Shack and our friends at CarMax just to name a few), I found myself underwhelmed by the latest batch. After spending more of the game on Twitter watching reaction to the Broncos’ lack of action and to the knee-jerk reaction to the spots, something screamed at me loud and clear. It’s not about the ads anymore, it’s about the PR…
Read MoreWhen we sit down with a new client to plan out a social media strategy, the first question that always comes up is “what kind of content should we post?” Over the past few years, we’ve developed a process for helping clients identify content types and sources, and we’ve shared pieces of that process on this blog before. Last week, I had the opportunity to do a presentation at ConnectVA’s Social Media for Non-Profits Conference. The talk was called “Enchanting Your Audience” and was aimed…
Read MoreFirst, sorry for the radio silence. Not from THP, but from me in particular. Truth be told, I really didn’t have anything I thought was particularly blog-worthy. Until now. It’s amazing how one move in the social world can turn on a light and become the one thing I seem to be talking about over and over again in just about every meeting I’m in. That move came in the past few months as LinkedIn announced the creation of “Sponsored Updates.” The ripple effects of…
Read MoreAsk anyone who works with me on a social project will tell you: I love myself a social editorial calendar. I love pulling, creating, developing, curating, cultivating, nurturing and delivering content. I’ve lost count of how many editorial calendars I’ve made (okay, that’s a lie: 20 – stay tuned for a future post on documenting and reporting), and while there is no right or wrong way to create and utilize an editorial calendar, I’ve learned a thing or two along the way. The benefit of…
Read MoreAs you may recall from my last post, I’ve had a relatively unique agency experience here at Hodges, working on only one or two clients at a time. While it certainly had its benefits – namely keeping track of hours worked on each project – I didn’t get to experience the fast pace and the diversity of topics that most people ascribe to agency life (and love). Now, as I step into a more traditional PR role, jumping from pitching our newest accounts payable client…
Read MoreHere’s a brief look at some interesting stories we’ve read this week, delivered a couple days early because of Independence Day. We call it HodgePodge. Social Landscaping Just when you were thinking perhaps social marketing was maybe getting simpler, Mashable has the details on the latest “Conversation Prism” (or, as Jon calls it, the social media peacock chart) from industry analyst Brian Solis. That’s a lot of logos. Make Money. Live Better. For the second year, Walmart is holding a contest that offers entrepreneurs a…
Read MoreAs Jon Newman has pointed out, some of us are rather fond of Star Trek references here at The Hodges Partnership. Personally, I’ve been known to watch a little Star Trek Voyager. In one of the worst episodes of that series, titled “Threshold,” Tom Paris successfully breaks the Warp 10 barrier and soon thereafter realizes he’s transforming into a pink salamander. I thought of this episode as I considered the speed at which organizations must make communications decisions when faced with fast-escalating scandals. Things can…
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