I am a proud member of the Society of American Travel Writers (www.satw.org) because I have been doing PR for travel and tourism destinations throughout my career, which started back in the last century. I am not a travel writer, but I am a travel publicist, so I am an “Associate” member of this prestigious national organization.

SATW publishes a great newsletter called the SATW Traveler. There is a travel writer named Sandra Friend from Florida who writes a column on professional development and this month’s column is entitled “Build A Better Blog.”  She shared a tip about using the “Networked Blogs”  Application on Facebook in order to share your blog right on your Facebook page.  Since I’ve been writing this blog for several years, and separately maintaining several Facebook pages (for myself personally and for Nancy Marshall Communications), I think it makes a lot of sense to share my blog with my Facebook friends. But the thing I love about the Networked Blogs application is that I can easily see the blogs that my Facebook friends are writing, and see the blogs that they are reading as well!  If you are a blogger, or if you are interested in following the blogs that your friends are following, I encourage you to check out this app. 

Thanks, Sandra Friend!

I’ve had this persona as the “Maine PR Maven”  for several years now, but just today, while surfing the web and researching an article I was writing for my e-newsletter, I discovered another Maven who has a great online persona and community.

This is Wendy Maynard, a marketing expert who works with entrepreneurs to catapult themselves and their companies to high visibility and success.

Check out http://www.mavendiary.com for an information-packed blog by Wendy, who owns a marketing and design firm called Kinesis, Inc. in Portland, Oregon. Wendy has done a marvelous job of building herself as an expert who is approachable, helpful, fun, nice and charismatic!  You go, Wendy!  I’m glad to meet you and although you live on the opposite side of the country, I am grateful that we can connect and perhaps even collaborate across the miles through our blogs, websites, businesses, Tweets, friends and Facebook pages!

This morning my son was leaving for a ski race in Vermont for the week, and he realized that he was nearly out of ski socks. We have a problem with an overly excitable yellow lab who chews socks when people come to visit us at our house. It’s her way of trying to get attention. So our inventory of socks diminishes quickly.  The problem with replenishing the supply is that the type of socks my boys and my husband have been wearing for the past couple of years costs $16 a pair. Continue Reading »

OK. I confess. I have the same New Year’s resolutions for my personal life as I have over the past….well…..maybe 10, 15, or even 20 years! Exercise more, spend more quality time with my family, listen more and better, stop rushing all the time, get organized, and lose weight!  No problem, right?  Hopefully I won’t have the same resolutions again in 2011!

But Ragan.com, on its Daily PR Newsfeed today, had some realistic New Year’s Resolutions. I decided to share them with you here. Many of them apply to what I’m working on with my business, such as updating our Web site and revising our branding. How about you? Do you have New Year’s PR Resolutions?  I’d love to know what they are! Continue Reading »

This morning, Greg Glynn from my agency team and I presented a seminar on Social Media for Small Businesses at the Skowhegan Community Center. The workshop was sponsored by our client, Skowhegan Savings.  We talked about how small businesses need to define their goals, their identity, and their key messages before diving into the pool of social media. We recommended that people who are totally new to social media start by establishing an account on Linked In to start experimenting with the power of increasing your network of contacts. Continue Reading »

You know the expression, “the shoemakers’ children have no shoes.”

I can relate to that old shoemaker. He is busy making shoes for his paying clients. When the day is done, he has to go home and do his chores, including taking care of his children and his home. The poor shoemaker has no time to make shoes for his own children.

Yet if he doesn’t, the children will have cold feet and then they will get sick. (Luckily the shoemaker lived in the day before the H1N1 Virus, but that’s a topic for another day.)

So here at Nancy Marshall Communications, we’re in the business of helping our clients to define their brands, their key marketing messages, and the “look and feel” of their identity. We do this work with great enthusiasm all day long.  But recently it became obvious that due to our business growth and expansion, and we needed to look at our own brand, I was overcome with a certain sense of paralysis. Continue Reading »

When I first learned about Search Engine Optimization(SEO), I was working with a Maine whitewater rafting company that had their accountant optimizing their site for them in his spare time. He was able to easily baffle me by talking about the logarithms for each of the search engines. This was at least 10 years ago, back around the time that we were spending a lot of time worrying about how all our computers were going to crash with the onset of Y2K.  Back then, we didn’t think about Google as much as we did Yahoo, Alta Vista, and even AskJeeves. Today, Google rules the roost when it comes to SEO.

Being a typical PR person, I have always thought more about words and images than about numbers. So when I even heard the word “logarithm,” I was immediately convinced that I would never be able to “do” SEO. The accountant easily convinced me that I needed to pay him to do it for my own site and my clients’ sites. Continue Reading »

Do you have problems with time management? Staying organized? Stress management?  I do! There are so many things I want to accomplish each and every day, both personally and professionally, that I am constantly stressed by my ‘to do’ list. If I’m working, I feel I should be doing things with my children; and when I’m with my children, I feel I should be ticking things off my ‘to do’ list for work. Continue Reading »

My son was born just yesterday….or so it seems.  Yet this past week he went to his junior prom…how could that be? Here he is with his date Kelsey arriving at the prom last weekend. I know you’re thinking he wasn’t born yesterday, but if life was passing as fast for you as it is for me, you’d know how I feel.

I don’t know about you, but for me, time is literally flying by.

The only way I’ve discovered to slow it down is by scrapbooking. Now some friends who know me well are amazed that I would choose a hobby that involves sitting for hours, cutting out pretty papers, applying stickers, writing journal entries and organizing photos. But truly, it is the only way that I can slow the passage of time and try to remember the details of this busy life I lead. Continue Reading »

My son Craig is a junior in high school this year and he has recently started looking at colleges. Over the past week, he and I have visited three different campuses, and today he went with my husband to visit another one. Tomorrow he is actually going to another campus on his own. It’s hard for me to take my marketing hat off when we go on these visits. I find myself being very critical and wondering ‘what were they thinking?’ when tour guides make grandiose proclamations about their colleges.  To protect the innocent and my son, I’m not going to name any college names. Also God forbid I say something negative about the college that ends up being his first choice and then he doesn’t get in because of his opinionated mother.  (But then again, aren’t all mothers opinionated when it comes to choosing a college for their child?)

The tours are conducted by students, which is good because the prospective students would rather hear from an actual student than an adult. However at one college we visited, our tour guide was wearing extremely short shorts. Now I’m no prude, and I try not to sound like my own mother who is always critical of how teenagers dress, but I would think that the Ivy League institution she was showing us around would require at least long pants or appropriate length shorts. Of course my son had no problem with the short shorts and probably wishes that all the girls at the college of his choice would dress like that.

One of the tours was conducted by two students together — a male and a female. It seemed rude at first because they were both drinking these big cups of Starbucks coffee….didn’t their Ivy League etiquette teach them that it’s not polite to drink coffee when your guests aren’t offered any? It definitely came off as if they were trying to show off how grown up they were as colllege students drinking their large cups of Frappacinos and Mochachinos.

Plus they were both walking backwards the entire time around this rather large campus, which was very awkward. At one point they nearly walked into a professor who came out of the library with his nose in a book. I was sure there was going to be a big collision, spilled coffee, broken bones, and embarrassed high school students, but I guess my imagination was running away with me instead of paying attention to the tour. Continue Reading »