Insights from Nebo

Happy Independence Day! Though it’s raining in many parts of our great nation, the spirit of the Fourth of July and all the summer splendor it brings is alive and well. Even if your cookout plans have been put on the backburner, the bounty of summer is still there for the taking. Fireworks, barbecues and pool parties are great, but they can wait. We thought we’d pay homage to one thing no summer would be complete without that can be enjoyed any time: watermelons.

Humanity is at its best when people work together with a shared sense of purpose and a shared goal. We've seen it over and over again: when diverse groups of people come together, they accomplish amazing things.

But it's important to provide room for the individual. Each of us has unique talents and ideas, and many of us strive to be the best at what we do. Without room for individual expression, we would accomplish nothing.

Over the past few years, we’ve talked quite a bit about Nebo being a human-centered agency. About our purpose, trying to bring humanity back to digital. About being more revolution than business. About making our culture our competitive advantage. About putting people before profit.

And every now and then – during those transformative times in our lives – our purpose, our fight, and our vision becomes even more meaningful. One of those moments occurred Wednesday night when our Co-founder and President, Adam Harrell, welcomed his first child into the world, baby Adeline.

As PR professionals, it is often a large part of our daily responsibilities to manage our firm’s social media channels. If you’re new in the field, there can be some growing pains as you try to understand the different platforms and the messaging appropriate for each channel while still maintaining brand authenticity. If you’re a bit more experienced, it can be very easy to forget the small things that make big differences in your social strategies. In this series, I’m exploring some of the most popular social channels for brands to present one of the most commonly neglected elements of brand messaging: social media etiquette.

Today, LinkedIn will be the center of attention. I want to discuss good manners for social marketers who manage their company pages, share common best practices and outline the general do’s and don’ts for interacting on behalf of a company on this professional networking channel.

That said, I want to stress that this post’s intention is not to teach you how to manage your company’s LinkedIn account. There are tons of resources out there that already do that. (Here are some I've found particularly useful - Mashable's LinkedIn article archive, an article about best practices for brands on LinkedIn from Hootsuite and, of course, the obvious yet under-utilized LinkedIn-sponsored resource center for company pages.) The purpose here is to highlight proper LinkedIn etiquette. You’d think good manners would be obvious, but many become oblivious to social standards when they have their company’s agenda in mind. I never cease to be surprised at some of the inappropriate content I see on LinkedIn — from start-ups to Fortune 500 firms alike. Hopefully, these tips will recalibrate you to be more human-centered in your online engagement.

As marketers, we are constantly inundated with data and analytics that are supposed to help us better perform our jobs. These reports, so we’re told, are designed to help us draw better insights from our campaigns and develop actionable strategies based on our performance metrics. The reports are supposed to make us more efficient, more tactical and more knowledgeable of our industry.

The problem with much of the information we receive from these data dumps is that it is often overwhelming, unwieldy or simply too difficult to understand. We’re forced to perform countless repetitive tasks just to get to a point where we understand what the data represents – before we can even attempt to draw any legitimate insights.

Excel, at its core, is a problem-solving tool. When used correctly, Excel can eliminate many of these tedious and repetitive steps from our analytic process and allow us to concentrate our efforts on what truly matters: drawing useful insights that affect strategy moving forward. This week I had the pleasure of speaking on the Extreme Excel Excellence panel at SMX Advanced in Seattle, with the overarching theme of embracing the opportunity that Excel presents for marketers to better analyze their data.

Direct response marketing doesn’t work. In fact, it doesn’t really even exist. Many marketers have suspected this for years, but haven’t really had the analytical tools to back up this sentiment.

Now, I know many will argue with this post and this assertion. There are probably litanies of “success stories” that showcase amazing direct response campaigns. But they’re all BS.

We don’t exist in a vacuum. There can be a direct response component to a larger campaign, but too often we hear clients (and less savvy marketers) say, “let’s just focus on direct response.”

Really??