Category Archives: Social Media

DRESS FOR SUCCESS: CASUAL DOESN’T MEAN HOMELESS

banner james carlini - Carlini's CornerBy James Carlini

When you go to a business meeting today are you dressed for success or dressed casually? Do you look like you flew in on the corporate jet or were you one of the people washing it down before the flight?

7K0A0603Image consultants seem more concerned about social media tools today than they are real barometers of professionalism and success. Having a Smartphone with an obnoxious ring tone is not cool and won’t make any points unless you Continue reading

USING COPPER CABLING? BEWARE OF THIEVES

banner james carlini - Carlini's Corner

By James Carlini

Copper cabling is still used in both electrical and telecommunications applications.  Both the power company as well as the telephone companies, still use a lot of it for distributing power as well as distributing communication signals for voice, data, and video.  Because of its value, many are thinking it is an Continue reading

COLLEGE DEGREE and COLLEGE DEBT? NO GUARANTEE FOR A GOOD JOB

banner james carlini - Carlini's Corner

By James Carlini

Did you know that the amount owed on college student loans is over $1 Trillion and two thirds of the graduating seniors (in 2011) owe a little over $26,000 when they walk out trying to find a job?  (Source: http://projectonstudentdebt.org/ )

The amount owed for student loans is more than what is owed on the total amount of credit card debt.  The big difference is that you cannot Continue reading

FLASH MOBS, FLASH ARRESTS: SMARTPHONE JUSTICE

banner james carlini - Carlini's Corner

By James Carlini

Last weekend, Chicago’s Magnificent Mile experienced teen-age flash mobs (organized looting) creating disturbances and mayhem among people there who were trying to enjoy the downtown shopping district.

This has been going on for several years, but the Chicago media has filtered it out of their stories until Continue reading

Devon Blaine SoCal Publicist of the Year on Professional PR and Crisis Intervention

devon blaineDevon Blaine, founder and owner of The Blaine Group in Beverly Hills

Talks to OPM about her award for publicist of the year, The business of professional public relations, business, promotional and marketing strategy and the Blaine Groups specialty in crisis planning, control, intervention and management.

Devon Blaine Audio Interview on her life, career, PR, promotion, winning publicist of the year and crisis management ►Right Click and “Save Link As” to Download File◄

NOTE: There was one question, on the recording that was asked,but somehow did not get recorded. The question was about women having to work harder to build a business. Devon answered that she did not believe that to be true….. Listen to the audio to hear her full answer.

One of the things I like about what I do is meeting and working with public relations professionals. I have been blessed to work with some big names and many smaller companies.

The other side of that coin is that I have also worked with many companies that call themselves professionals, but only seem to be playing at it. Public relations, I have found, can rarely be faked. They say even a blind squirrel can occasionally find a nut or two, but I have rarely seen a bad PR firm pull off a successful event or project.

What I have seen is that promotion is a tricky game and that you can never be sure that any effort will deliver a result, but you can be assured that no action or a half hearted stab at it will result in failure .

So when I get to work with firms like The Blaine Group, it just makes my day and my life easier. They are professionals that do what they say and say what they do and they work at under-promising and over-delivering, not the other way around.

I believe I have been blessed to know and work with people like Devon and her amazing staff and believe that if you are serious about your product, project, service or business, that you should seriously consider The Blaine Group or a firm that can and will deliver. – JW

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devon blaineDevon Blaine

A professional communicator, Devon Blaine is the founder, president, and CEO of The Blaine Group, Inc., a total communications agency established in 1975, which was recently named the 24th largest public relations firm in Los Angeles.

She has represented many diverse business, manufacturing, financial and healthcare clients  and several bestselling authors with their publicity needs, both promotional and as a crises intervention and management specialist.

Devon Blaine is experienced in all facets of the communications industry. She has written newspaper and magazine columns, scripted radio and television commercials, served as a production supervisor, strategized political issues and campaigns, developed and implemented investor relations plans, and created communications campaigns for a diverse range of clients.

Besides helping other businesses maximize their success, Blaine has long been active in numerous organizations that aid entrepreneurs, thus earning her reputation as “the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur.”

She is three times a past president of the Los Angeles Venture Association (LAVA), a dynamic and diverse group composed of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other money providers, and service providers which exists for the sole purpose of creating win‑win‑win situations amongst its members.

Devon is past president of the California chapter of National Small Business United, a grassroots leadership organization for free enterprise with the mission of improving the climate for  small businesses in the United States.  An elected delegate to the White House Conference on Small Business, she was active in the California delegation since 1978 and served on the Board of Directors of the 1980, 1982, and 1984 California State Conferences on Small Business.  Blaine was appointed as a delegate to the 1986 White House Conference on Small Business by then U.S. Senator Pete Wilson, and elected by her peers to co‑chair the California delegation.

Additionally, she is a past president and a founding board member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners and was honored as their Woman Entrepreneur of the Year in 1987.  She is also an active member of the Los Angeles Angeles Mid-Market Professionals, TEAM, PRO, Bruin Professionals, Association of Venture Founders, the Chief Executive Officers’ Clubs, and the Public Relations Society of America.

In 2012 Devon Blaine was named Book Publicist of the Year by Book Publicists of Southern California specifically for the international campaign The Blaine Group waged on behalf of Abbey Road To Ziggy Stardust by Ken Scott and Bobby Owsinski, Alfred Music Publishing.

In nine months, Ken Scott has had more than 150 exposures:  interviews, reviews, book signings, speaking engagements, etc., including coverage in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, WGN, ABC, NBC, events at the GRAMMY Museum, The Beatle Fest and more… in short, a wildly intensive and effective campaign.

The Publicist of the Year Award also recognized  the body of work her agency The Blaine Group has implemented through the years including representing four best sellers:  Nice Girls  Do:  And You Can, Too, by Dr. Irene Kassorla; On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors, by J. Patrick Wright; Meg, by Steve Alten; and Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You To Know About, by Kevin Trudeau.

The Blaine Group

Formerly an actress and model, Devon Blaine established The Blaine Group, a Beverly Hills‑based full‑service communications agency specializing in public relations, book public relations, financial public relations, investor relations, crisis management, the development of collateral material, marketing, and advertising in 1975.  Since that time, the agency has expanded dramatically, creating successful communications campaigns for clients in diverse fields.

As a total communications agency, Blaine Group has implemented consumer, trade, and financial public relations; investor relations; and advertising efforts and have provided marketing strategy, based on conducting market research, for a diverse range of companies and organizations. They have also created and managed special events and fundraisers and have directed community relations projects.

In addition, The Blaine Group provides a variety of special communications services to its clients. These include managing crisis situations; conceiving and coordinating seminars and press conferences; event and party planning; developing master plans and collateral materials; proposal, article, letter, and speech writing; conducting surveys; and publishing newsletters and brochures. They both create and implement.

Today their client base encompasses a wide range of businesses and industries with particular emphasis on business-to-business communications, publicly-held companies, technology-based businesses, the medical and healthcare fields, environmental-related firms, consumer products, publishing, fashion and beauty, continuing education, non-profit organizations and trade associations, and the world of show business.

The Blaine Group, Inc.

A Total Communications Agency
8665 Wilshire Blvd., Suite #301, Beverly Hills, CA 90211
O 310/360-1499 · F 310/360-1498
E-mail:  devon@blainegroupinc.com

WordPress.com Members Claim Your Blog on Alexa

Claim a WordPress.com Blog on Alexa

There are so many things to think about out there in the Webisphere nowadays. Some are important and many many more… Not so much.

Obviously Google, Bing and Yahoo are pretty important, but have you heard of your site Alexa score?

If not, you should get acquainted with this service. The Alexa rating can say a lot about a site. It rates your site against a huge number of sites around the world and nationally and the numbers are based on mostly activity. Having a great site that ranks well with Google does not have to necessarily have the best traffic, but with Alexa, traffic is key to your getting the best rating.

Most sites start out in the tens of millions and you know when you are starting to do well when you get to around one million. Alexa does not show full stats for your site till you are ranked in the top 100,000 internationally. I want my sites to be under 500,000. You can gauge your site or your competitions sites etc…

Here is an explanation of Google Page Rank vs. Alexa logolitic.com/how-to-pagerank-alexa-rank/

Go to Alexa now and type in a few well known or favorite sites of yours to check out the numbers.

Once you understand this service you will probably figure out why it may be important to have your site properly registered at Alexa, though in the past this has been an issue for sites at WordPress.com.

I have been registered for a little while now and the person that explained to me how to do this just wrote a blog post on it with pretty simple instructions on how to do it. – JW

Heres the Post…..

by on 2012/03/13

Alexa.com is one of the big players in the search engine business that has been around since 1996. Although it isn’t as large as Google.com or Bing.com, it plays a unique and important role.

Specifically, Alexa openly gives detailed site metrics and traffic reporting with its search results that a large number of tools and people use when evaluating a Web site. Also, Alexa has an extensive set of APIs and Web Services that are commonly used by a large number of third party search tools

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, and so in my opinion it is likely to continue to grow in stature along with Amazon. As well, it has close ties to both Google and the Open Directory Project, which are both prominent players in the search world.

So bottom line here is that getting your site into Alexa and having it properly catalogued is pretty important.

But the process of claiming your site in Alexa is not easy if you are trying to claim a WordPress.com site. There is a lot of mis-information out there as well as incompletely written instructions (including on the Alexa FAQ site itself). I found this out the hard way today.

In order to save everyone some time I am putting together this article on how I successfully registered my WordPress.com hosted blog with Alexa.

Step #1: was to create an account with Alexa. This is fairly straightforward, just follow the instructions the site gives.

Step #2: Once you have your Alexa login and you are logged into your new account, click on the second toolbar tab on the top of the site titled ‘Claim Your Site’ .

To continue reading………………………………

Jay Conrad Levinson on New Guerrilla 2.0 Marketing Concepts

Guerrilla Marketing Newest Concepts

Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the bestselling book Guerrilla Marketing talks to us about his books, new marketing concepts and his keynote address he was to  be giving at Bob Bare’s More Power LIVE Conference Sept 20-23rd 2012 in Dallas.

Sadly Jay passed away October 10th of 2013 after battling cancer.

Interview with Jay Conrad Levinson – Guerrilla Marketing Continue reading

20 Steps To Being A Pinterest Superstar

20 Steps To Being A Pinterest Superstar

Posted by: Tracey Lott Heitzman on May 24, 2012 15:32. Posted in Multifamily Insiders

Tagged in:

How to be a Pinterest SuperstarSome of you may have already jumped on the Pinterest band wagon and some of you may still be wondering what exactly it can do to help increase traffic to your communities.

The number one reason to use Pinterest is for the referral traffic – that is the percentage of Pinterest visitors who click on links to go to other sites, is far higher on Pinterest than other social media sites, according to Mashable.com.

As of March 2012 Pinterest was ranked as the #3 social media site, with 104 million visitors.  Here’s the ranking:

  1. Facebook: 7 billion
  2. Twitter: 182 million
  3. Pinterest: 104 million
  4. LinkedIn: 86 million
  5. Tagged: 72 million
  6. Google+: 61 million

If you haven’t already signed your community up for Pinterest, you will need an invite from a fellow member.  In signing up our communities, I invited them from my personal account and learned that it was easier to register them using our Twitter accounts.  When using Facebook to sign up, it kept wanting to use the administrator’s information— not the community’s page.

Here are 20 Steps to Help You Become a Pinterest Superstar:

Read More…..

This is a great article by Tracey Lott Heitzman from our wonderful friends at Multifamily Insiders

I have read the twenty ways to become a Pinterest Superstar and if you want to know what is pinterest, how do I / you use Pinterest and much more, this is a great place to start finding out how powerful pinterest is and is becoming. – JW