Once in a while, I read an article that I find so educational and thought-provoking that I have to share it on this blog. “12 Most Powerhouse Habits of Social Media Pros,” by Becky Gaylord, is one of them. Here is an extract below: What’s the secret sauce of social media? Well, it’s not just. Great Resources social media experts MORE >>

If you are a company, government department or organisation interested in social media training for your staff, this three day class held privately at your premises (or we can organise premises for you) suits those looking for a more indepth course. The courses are a mix of lecture, group challenges and computer based exercises (if you have laptops/computer ). Prerequisites: While the first part of each session is for beginners, this workshop is aimed at advanced users. Facebook personal profile and a LinkedIn or Twitter account is assumed. SEE MORE on ABOUT PAGE. Please enquire. DAY ONE. MORE >>

This is a guest post from Elissa Freeman. Should PR pros take white collar crime more seriously when developing crisis communications plans?  Have we been failing our clients by not doing a better job of warning them upfront of the potential reputational hit resulting from knowingly breaking the law? Ever since I read about the recent Walmart debacle in Gini Dietrich’s Spin Sucks blog , I couldn’t help but think how the role of crisis communications may need to evolve. The usual formula goes something like this: Company X does wrong. We’re all over the New York Times! Now what?”. MORE >>

Paradox: in an age of technology advances being gobbled like Pez, marketing and customer service are somehow getting more labor-intensive, not less. Social media and the rise of self-serve content requires that we actually attempt to fulfill the decades-old promise of 1:1 marketing – winning hearts and minds a few at a time with unprecedented relevancy and transparency and humanization and speed. And that takes time. Flickr Photo by Doc_Brown. Social media and content marketing are not inexpensive, they’re just different expensive. And that’s where the problem starts. MORE >>

If you include unique images in your web pages, then you may want to consider including an image sitemap on your site. emphasis the word “unique” – if you are using images from other websites then an image sitemap may not help. Unique images are a hidden resource for those websites that put in the extra effort to create them. Images appear in search results, and often draw clicks from users in preference to text links. Google has recently published an short advisory on images and how to ensure they are accurately indexed to rank well in search results. MORE >>