Deirdre Breakenridge

A Guest Post By Valerie Simon 1990:  I want to go to a new restaurant. I open up the yellow pages, or a copy of a local magazine to find a seafood restaurant nearby. I call two additional restaurants for more information and reservations. 2000:  I want to go to a new restaurant. I do [...]

Tumblr is certainly growing in popularity. A recent Mashable article mentioned that according to ComScore, Tumblr scored 13.4 million unique visitors in the U.S. in July, increasing 218% from the same time last year. The “blog-meets-social-network service” is experiencing what most are calling explosive growth. Tumblr has been on my radar for quite sometime having witnessed how our teens use it and rave about it.

My 16 year-old-daughter first introduced me to Tumblr when she told me that she wanted to start her own blog.

A best practices approach to social media begins on the inside of the organization, with education and training for employees. In a recent blog post, “Internal Social Media Education and Collaboration,”

I’ve been writing about the subject of influence, looking at it from the perspective that influence increases when your peers are personally involved in the rating process.   In order to build your own influence and in order for someone to influence you, certain behavioral characteristics must be evaluated.  These characteristics range from Trust, Passion and [...]

I’ve been writing about the social media audit process, uncovering what an organization learns when they go through this exercise. My last post “The Social Media Audit: Five Common Missing Pieces” mentioned the fifth missing piece as “Training and Education.”

When you’re in your social media planning phases, an audit is critical to the success of your social communications program moving forward.  The social media audit is usually conducted to identify any of the challenges or problem areas within a brand’s current program, as well as to pinpoint genuine opportunities and what’s been working with [...]

The key to building an effective social media policy is to customize the guidelines to meet the needs of your organization. A well developed policy will guide your employees in the many ways that they engage in social communications. The best practice approach requires that your organization invest the time, resources, and effort to plan and build a policy that empowers the organization, allows people to understand the value of social media and helps them to see how they can better participate as internal brand champions.