Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Perhaps most reflective of this has been the award-winning juggernaut of REI's #OptOutside campaign, which won the Titanium Grand Prix on Saturday. If for some reason you weren't one of its 6.7 billion media impressions, essentially the company closed its doors on Black Friday, encouraging its employees and everyone else to get out into the outdoors. Beyond the ad, starring REI chief exec Jerry Stritzke introducing the idea from a wide-open office, the brand also created a helpful online guide to hiking trails and other outdoor activities around the U.S.

By encouraging us to drop out of the annual shopping day, the outdoor retailer aims for more sales and brand loyalty. The company said the brand's social media impressions went up 7,000%, with 2.7 billion media impressions in 24 hours, while overall the campaign attracted 6.7 billion media impressions, 1.2 billion social impressions, and got more than 1.4 million people to spend the day outdoors. Meanwhile, more than 150 other companies joined REI to close their doors on Black Friday, and hundreds of state parks opened up for free.

If Cannes is the ad and marketing industry's Oscars, than this is arguably Best Picture. The Titanium category is meant to honor work that breaks new ground, crosses boundaries, and pushes the industry forward. The win adds to the campaign's Media and Promotions Grand Prix, picked up earlier in the week, and its run of wins at other industry awards like the D&ADs, and Best of Show at the One Show awards in May....

Which domains have the most engaged audiences in five verticals: women, politics, business/finance, science, and technology? My team at Fractl, in conjunction with BuzzStream, wanted to find out -- and we found out some really interesting stuff.

To determine the top publishers, we used BuzzSumo to retrieve the sharing metrics on more than 30,000 relevant articles between May 2014 and April 2015 relating to the five verticals mentioned above. In total, these articles earned more than 58 million social shares. We used BuzzSumo to retrieve the top 1,000 articles in each vertical that were published between May 4, 2015 and April 30, 2015 as well.

With this data, we identified the 10 publishers in each vertical with the highest number of total shares -- and learned a lot about content promotion along the way. In this post, we’ll walk you through six key takeaways from our findings that'll help you maximize outreach during your next promotions cycle...

Lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, lead grading. The bountiful terms we have to describe different actions we can take with leads show how incredibly pervasive the lead is to sales and marketing. Salespeople are trained to pursue the them, convince them that their product is better than the competition’s, and close out the deal.

But according to Forbes.com’s Amy Morin, that’s where the problem lies. Too many salespeople are spending their energy on trying to get the consumer to choose their product. What they don’t realize is that most consumers are not even at the stage of choosing any product – the prospect of them changing their product is not even on the table.

She says, “About 60% of qualified leads fall by the wayside because the customer doesn’t find value in purchasing something new and therefore, they decide to forgo any type of change.”...