Fresh off the season for pretty packages, I thought I’d share some tips for creating nonprofit promotion packages that will help you build awareness for your organization’s cause, product or service.

It doesn’t matter what type of business or sector you work in—nonprofit, for profit, consulting, B2B, B2C, government, you name it—maintaining a positive relationship with your customer is vital to your organization.

In previous posts, we’ve shared the basics of event planning: how to make your event newsworthy and a top 10 list for every event. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the before, during and after details that can make or break any event.

I had the opportunity to take off my “marketing hat” this summer as I took a leave of absence from work. But in reality, we marketers never really remove our marketing hats whether we leave the office for the day, a week or a few months—that’s because marketing lessons abound and always seem to find us even in our ordinary lives as consumers.

While we often write about social media in this blog and how businesses and organizations can use it strategically as part of an integrated marketing plan, it's not often first-hand field research on social media use by tweens and teens can be shared.

Inbound marketing could be considered part of the new marketing-speak. We’ve written before about the importance of keeping your communications jargon-free—no inside acronyms, no technical language (especially when writing for a non-techie audience), keep it simple. Every industry has its own language it seems and sometimes it’s easy to forget that you need to communicate with those outside your world — assuming you want them to buy your products or services.

Recently, I came across a post entitled, “10 things clients get wrong about the media.”  Admittedly, the author—a publicist (aka a PR person)—was being a bit harsh to make his point in the article, but tone aside, I could relate to a couple of the items on his list.

This baby boomer has concluded that building your social media team is more a matter of depth, interest, and judgment than it is age. Personally, I’ve never been an early adopter of technology. I think I was the last one in the office to get a smart phone (and now, of course, I can’t imagine living without one). Social media tools like Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and the rest were not around when I entered the advertising industry more than 20 years ago. I guess you could say I grew up on traditional PR and marketing. How times have changed! I have been around long enough to feel (and see) the effects that social media has had, especially in the PR world. Social media has not replaced traditional PR (nor will it ever), but it has greatly added to how we can develop relationships with the media and help our clients communicate their key messages and stories to their audiences and strengthen their brands.

I never thought I’d be writing about septic tanks on our marketing blog, but here goes (and there is a marketing lesson here). I was standing at my child’s bus stop the other day chatting with a few parents and mentioned that we were having our septic tank pumped that afternoon. That comment reminded another parent that she needed to have her tank pumped as well. She decided to ask some others in the neighborhood if they needed their septic tanks pumped. (She was working to get six others so they could get a better price than going alone.) The next day she reported she had three others that needed to have their septic tanks pumped—and she was confident she would find the six to get the price break.I chuckled to myself and thought, “This is good old-fashioned social media in action.” This parent was demonstrating the power of social media only without using any technology at all—just word of mouth. And you can’t get much more social than that. Kind of refreshing in this day and age of technology overload!