As social media and online content sharing continue to grow in popularity, active listening is becoming an important tool in the B2B marketer’s toolkit. You are probably already monitoring social media for mentions of your brand, but you need to do more than simply defend your brand’s online reputation. You must also actively listen for your keywords to learn what your customers, prospects and competitors are talking about – and then use that information to continuously create and enhance your messaging. In its Active Listening: The Key to Relevance and PR Results white paper, PR Newswire states that active listening “measures the quality of the interaction between your brand and your audiences,

This week, we joined our friends at Women's Foodservice Forum for an interesting discussion regarding diversity hiring and promotions in the workplace. The speaker reinforced the concept that a company's "tone at the top" does more to promote critical missions throughout the organization than any other tactic in play.  In other words, up and down the corporate structure, employees are impacted when they see top leadership leading by example. This is also true from a marketing perspective. Employees who witness their bosses acting as brand protectors and brand ambassadors are likely to follow their example. Some of the ways that management can demonstrate good brand practice: - define a clear mission statement and