June 26, 2013. This guest post is from Matt Ferrucci, who is a student at Boston College. He's spending the summer at Reflection Films, learning a little about video production and marketing.  In a recent webinar, Jill Konrath and Mike Schultz offered a few tips to businesses looking to increasing their sales. Much of what they suggested focused on improving collaboration with clients and buyers. There...

April 26, 2013 The Boston chapter of the American Marketing Association hosted an excellent panel discussion last week: Storytelling, the Art of Moving People. Panelists were Stona Fitch, who is an author and owner of the Concord Free Press; Steve Kolander, who is a VP at Boston ad agency, Small Army; and Doug Lipman, owner of Story Dynamics. A few of the many gems gleaned from the storytelling...

February 22, 2013 The video above belongs to a fellow, Derek Halpern, whose blog I recently discovered. In the very first post of his that I read, he compares text and video. He argues that video allows a person or organization to paint a fuller portrait of themselves. I'm biased, of course, but I would tend to agree. To quote him: The Power of Video (Hint: It's All About Body Language) Your writing...

January 31, 2013 I came across this video earlier this week. We regularly tell people that they don't always need services of folks like us; sometimes they can produce video themselves. If, for branding purposes, your video needs to have a little polish to it, then trying in-house video may not be the best idea. But, in many cases, a homegrown video will do the trick. Here is a very good example of a DIY project....

January 3, 2013 This video, produced by Children's Hospital Colorado, has an inherent advantage: sick children are almost always going to pull at the heartstrings, and this is no exception. Still, it's worth noting that any organization (whether it's nonprofit or for-profit) can create a compelling video if it gathers together a handful of people who can speak in a genuine way about how they have...

The Sloan School and AMA Boston recently hosted a panel discussion on the subject of metrics in marketing.  The three panelists had plenty of ideas to share, summarized below. Branding. Metrics help you evaluate the health of your brand and identify how you should be allocating your marketing resources. Moving the needle. You can define the key things that matter in your business, identify the metrics...

The subject of the October roundtable at SMEI Boston was breaking into the C-suite for sales. Much of the wisdom shared came from George Adams, the CEO of ViziApps. Of note: CEOs are often approving a decision proposed by someone beneath them, rather than making one. If you've done good marketing, and therefore have some brand awareness with the CEO, that will facilitate the sale. Jim Burns...

I attended another good roundtable discussion this morning with Sales and Marketing Executives International Boston (SMEI Boston). The main subject of the conversation today was how and why organizations struggle to integrate social media successfully into their marketing efforts. Here are several of the main nuggets gleaned from the conversation: Tactics versus strategy. The consensus around the table...

We had another excellent roundtable at SMEI last Thursday, discussing the importance of relationship marketing and selling. Lisa Dennis of Knowledgence Associates was in her usual role as facilitator, but she also shared some specific ideas on what relationship marketing and selling is. Most of the conversation circled around maintaining and building relationships with existing customers or clients,...

I attended an informative event last week on the subject of mobile marketing, hosted by AMA Boston. Jeff Peden, the CEO of CraveLabs, and Dan Rowinski, a writer for ReadWriteWeb, had an informal conversation on the topic. Reflection Films is primarily a business-to-business company, and my perception has been that mobile marketing is primarily about marketing to consumers rather than businesses, via smartphones....