John Cass

Hello, I'm John Cass, author of the PR Communications blog.

I started this blog in 2003, as a place to practice and write about my profession - marketing, explore how to use the web for marketing, and connect with the wider marketing & communications community.

Yet in using the word “marketing,” I often find I’m in disagreement with people about the meaning of the word. To me, the ongoing industry variance about the meaning of marketing gets at the heart of what it means to be a successful marketer.

Marketing is the process of optimizing better products, rather than the process of sales and promotion, building better products means developing better places to distribute by connecting products and services with customers, developing a price that works and providing the best promotion.

Here I use the classic four P’s of marketing to demonstrate that marketing is not just about promotion.

To be successful at marketing, I believe it is not just about improving the process of marketing, but how you improve the process. Let me show how a definition of marketing gives you a strategy for conducting marketing. In the 1980’s I read the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing’s definition of marketing: The process of listening to customer needs and wants in order to satisfy those needs and wants efficiently and profitably. The step of listening, whether through dialogue or observation, gives marketers insights into how to improve the four P’s of marketing.

Listening has always been at the heart of my work in sales, marketing and PR. After college, I started work in sales, working for value added technology resellers in California, selling complex b2b software and hardware sales. Listening to the market and to customers has more than once given me insights into how to structure a service or build a product that met customer needs. And by demonstrating I listened, customers become even more committed to remaining customers.

In 2007 my book, "Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging," was published by Butterworth-Heinemann an imprint of Elsevier, Inc. In the book I explore how social media gives marketers a tremendous opportunity to listen and conduct a dialogue with customers. The book explains why marketing is the strategy to use in social media, because social media makes it easier for companies to listen to customers. In the book, I wrote about ideas and tools for how to use the web for marketing using blogs. A big part of the book is about how the process of blogger relations is not just media relations, pitching to bloggers, but rather the process of engagement for listening. And as a result of listening, if a company takes action on what they have heard, ordinary customers often turn into evangelists.

During the 2005/6 calendar year, I served as President of the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association, where I successfully led the AMA Boston chapter, growing the chapter’s reserves, size of the board, and increasing the number of programs such as chapter’s mentorship program. Today I’m still involved in the chapter supporting the social media team and our salesforce.com CRM integration efforts.

Currently, I am serving as a Founding Fellow and Advisory board member for the Society of New Communications Research. I became involved with the society because of my work with the global blog week 2004 and my study on corporate blogging in 2005 when I was Director of Blogging Strategies at Backbone Media. We just celebrated the 5th anniversary of the Global PR blog week, an event where the future of the web and PR was discussed virtually.

I am originally from the United Kingdom. Manchester is my home town, though I grew up in Stockport, and Bramhall. I moved over to the United States in 1992.

Since 1992 I’ve lived in California, Seattle and Massachusetts, working in the technology industry.

I’ve held senior positions in marketing, social media strategies and public relations for a number of companies including; 48hourprint.com, an online printing company, RedV Network, a consumer software company, Quotium Technologies, a web load testing software company, Portent Interactive, an interactive agency, and I was the Director of Blogging Strategies for Backbone Media and the online community manager at Forrester Research.

While I’ve run a number of corporate blogs including the Backbone Media blogsurvey blog, the jobs at Backbone and Forrester were very much related to how a company runs a successful engagement strategy using social media. I bought ideas to both companies, and learned from the experience from colleagues and through the execution of campaigns and processes.

Over the last six years I’ve continued to write my PR Communications blog, exploring how a company builds an engagement center for listening, and I’ve conducted research into case studies and projects to understand how a company monitors, triages, responds in social media, measures results, and takes actions based upon listening strategies. Two Society of New Communications Research studies where I wrote a series of case studies include The New Influencer and the Nuance study I explored how companies are building the nuts and bolts of an engagement infrastructure for social media.

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Blogging is all about starting a conversation with another individual. I don't mind if someone from a company posts useful and relevant information on my blog. But that information has to be within the context of an existing conversation. I reserve the right to delete or edit content and links from comments on this blog if I think you are just making a sales pitch or trying to increase your SEO standing.

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© 2003-9 John Cass