Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by John Darwin
Literary Review - December 2020 Issue
Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. Articles marked are only available to subscribers.
The Splicing Handbook
The only handbook devoted to splicing today's ropes, this bestselling reference covers every kind of splicing project a boater will ever need.
Using Social Media for Your Business? Don’t Forget About Analytics
Social media is becoming more and more popular for businesses as they continue (or begin) to recognize the great benefits it can have. From recruiting, to leads, to brand awareness, and everything in between, social media can do a lot of good for companies looking to boost their client base, and overall, their business. But all too often, we see businesses hastily organize an approach for social media without taking much time to think actual strategy.
Social Media + Brand Awareness 101
Membership on social media has its perks. Of course, it’s not too hard to become a member–many people have. But when utilized correctly, the social media community can be an incredible group to have at your disposal. There are a lot of ways to use social media, but in terms of harnessing the sheer power of social media, few uses are as common or effective as increasing brand awareness.
For Businesses, Pinterest vs. Instagram: Which Makes More Sense?
It’s no secret that photos and videos are an important part of social media. It makes sense–people love photos, and social media is all about people. But when it comes time to expand out of the realm of Facebook and Twitter, many companies get hung up on the choice between Pinterest and Instagram. Both are very popular platforms that are heavily photo-based, leading many businesses to wonder which platform they should use. Is Pinterest better? What about Instagram? Why don’t I just do both?
Has Social Media Reached Its Saturation Point?
Last October, Facebook came around and admitted that activity amongst teenagers was declining on the network. Every big social network–Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Twitter–is still gaining users, but some are growing at a slower pace than before, and exoduses like those we’re starting to see by teens on Facebook have some brands concerned that social media usage is starting to plateau. But is that actually true? Is social media slowing down?
You Made a Mistake on Social Media. Now What?
Today’s world is rife with examples of social media gone wrong. From the hilariously awful Mike Jeffries saga in 2013 to much less egregious hashtag overloads, it seems like it doesn’t take much for a company to jettison itself into infamy on social media. Okay, so that may be a bit of an overstatement, but the same principle still applies. Mistakes happen, and you have to be ready to deal with them.
Old vs. New Media: What Matters Today?
For businesses and agencies that were once (or are still) involved in ‘old media’–newspapers, magazines, print publications, et al.–it may seem that the transition to ‘new media’–i.e. social media–would be easy. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. As old media continues dying out, old media houses and businesses struggle to adapt to today’s changing world.
Why Facebook Brand Page Reach Plummeting, What’s a Brand to Do?
A new blog published by Ignite Social Media contains some information that’s likely to be pretty frightening for companies with Facebook brand pages. You can read the article yourself for the full stats, but here’s what I think is the most important: There’s a lot of other good data in the post–and I encourage you to read it–but the findings ought to have companies with Facebook brand pages scrambling to recoup their losses. So really, what’s a brand to do?
Most Top Brands Don’t Engage With Their Twitter Followers But You Should
A few weeks ago, Adrian wrote a post about engagement and social media. In it, he argued that the term “engagement” is a bit of a misnomer in social media; many brands wrongly assume that engagement means success, and accordingly that a lack of engagement means failure. And I agree–engagement is often a poor indicator of success (or failure) on social media.
Where Sales And Marketing Meet
I am not really a numbers guy. For a minute, I am going to pretend as if I am. Here are a few numbers you need to care about: 5.4, 37 percent, and 57 percent. 5.4: That is the average number of people in B2B buying groups today, according to the CEB. Thirty-seven percent: That is how far through the average purchase decision conflict goes amongst individuals in the buying group, again from CEB research.
Developing a Social Media Strategy
We’ve been revising our strategy process internally here at SMC. At its core, that means closely examining each aspect of our strategy process and deciding what’s important, what isn’t, and what needs to be changed. That review has forced us to think hard about the questions we ask and how we ask them, and it’s also shed a lot of insight on what key questions we think businesses need to ask when developing a social media strategy.
What to Do When Your Social Media Strategy Is Not Working
We all want perfection the first time around. It’s a natural human instinct. Of course, things don’t always work out that way. Businesses rarely nail things directly on the head on their first try at social media. Whether because of changing goals, shifting audiences, reduced budgets, or some other confluence of factors, companies don’t always get their social media strategy totally correct on their first run. That’s the bad news. The good news is that all hope is not lost.
Case Study: How Your Blog Affects Web Traffic
A client of ours on the West Coast is a great example of thought leadership gone right. Several years ago, this client — a strategy consulting firm — published regularly. It even had relationships with publishers such as Fast Company and Harvard Business Review, through which it published several series of articles. As business picked up, however, publishing became less of a priority.
Manufacturers and Social Media: Pinterest 101
A few months ago, one of our manufacturing clients sat us down and asked us if we’d start a Pinterest account for them. Our first thought was, “What in the world would a manufacturer do with a Pinterest account?,” but after some thinking–and a few more months of research–we’ve started slowly leveraging Pinterest for that client, and now feel that it can actually be a seriously valuable asset.
SOCIAL MEDIA, MARKETING, BRANDING, BUSINESS, STRATEGY
There’s a disconnect between how marketers use social media for clients and how marketers use social media personally. “We want to be thought leaders,” their brands say. So, many marketers publish articles many times a day, not bothering to monitor as much as they should or interact when they should or seek out users how they should. Then, these same marketers are befuddled when their clients’ accounts don’t get any interaction. “It’s okay,” they say.
3 Takeaways from Facebook’s Acquisition of WhatsApp
Facebook made the largest purchase ever of a venture-capital-backed startup when it announced that it would be buying WhatsApp, a popular messaging service. The $19 billion purchase (yes, that’s billion with a ‘B’) dwarfs Facebook’s $3B offer to SnapChat, and has analysts all over the world wondering what exactly Facebook is planning.
Do Not Be The Best In the World At What You Do, Be The Only One In The World Who Does What You Do
Talking about the Grateful Dead, rock promoter Billy Graham once said, “They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do.” Whether you’re a Deadhead or not, it would be hard to argue that the Grateful Dead was not unique. It only takes a few minutes of listening to figure that out. In a world filled with thousands of bands, the Grateful Dead found a way to be the only ones who did what they did—the only ones with their sound and image.
5 Dos and Donts for Recruiting Using Social Media
Unless you’ve happened to read our recent white paper (and if you haven’t, you should. It’s free!), you probably haven’t read much here about recruiting using social media. Because short of our white paper, we haven’t done too much writing about it on our blog. But social media is an extraordinarily powerful tool for recruiting.
How to Jumpstart Your Social Media
But as great as it is, even we’re not going to pretend that social media should be the sole element of your marketing efforts. Social media is great on its own, but it’s even better when paired with other marketing efforts and word-of-mouth that make the sum of your marketing more effective. After you’ve been on social media for a while, we recommend doing something we call jumpstarting your social media.
Facebook Showdown- Impressions vs. Likes
Many brands get on social media expecting to create a Facebook page, post for a few weeks, and then suddenly have thousands of followers. But unless your product is on Shark Tank and goes viral, or you already have tens of thousands of fans lined up waiting for you to start a Facebook page–both of which are fairly unlikely, by the way–that’s just not the way that social media works. Growing your following on social media, especially on Facebook, takes time, effort, and–wait for it–an ad.
Your Twitter Audience is Probably Much Smaller Than You Thought
Until recently, projected impressions were one of the best methods for measuring brand awareness on Twitter. Projected impressions on Twitter are a simple function of how many posts you make times the number of followers you have. If you have 200 followers and make 10 posts in a day, your projected impressions for that day will be 2,000. Not bad! Not so fast, says Twitter.
Next-Shoring Online: Using Social Media to Track Down Innovation Hubs
Reshoring is a pretty popular buzzword in the manufacturing world today. It refers to the process of bringing back once-outsourced jobs to the United States, making it (unsurprisingly) the exact opposite of offshoring. But in the newest publication of McKinsey Quarterly, McKinsey argued that it’s not reshoring or offshoring that are going to be the important terms headed into the next era of manufacturing–it’s going to be something they’re calling next-shoring.
Revisiting the Three Cs of Twitter
Despite the ephemerality of social media, there are some rules (or guidelines) that have persisted for some time. One of those sets of guidelines that we’ve found to be fairly stable over the last year or two is something we call the three c’s of Twitter. As we noted earlier last year, Twitter is like the board game Othello: it takes a minute to learn but a lifetime to master. Anyone can post anything on Twitter, but it’s much more difficult to get a stable hold on people’s attention.
Social Media and the Power of Listening
I’ll be the first to say it: if you’re getting on social media because you want to open the sales floodgates for your business, you’re probably going to be disappointed. At least in the short-term, that’s not what social media is best at. It can absolutely be used for sales and recruiting–we use it in that capacity, quite successfully, for many of our clients.
CEOs Gone Wild (On Social Media)
“We do things because they are right and just and that is who we are. That’s who we are as a company. When I think about human rights, I don’t think about an ROI.
Sometimes, The Best Thing You Can Do is Shut Up - AlleyWatch
In a recent episode of This American Life (569: “Put a Bow on It”), radio journalist Zoe Chace addressed a tough question: “What could VW possibly say right now to make us trust them again?” The first person she turns to in her quest to solve this dilemma is someone who should know: Brad Haley. He is the guy who brought Jack in the Box back from the edge after their food caused four children to die from E. coli. (Tough job, right?) The first thing he told her? Ads can only do so much.
Is Pinterest Poised to Take Over Twitter?
A few months ago, we wrote about something we’ve received quite a few questions about – whether Pinterest or Instagram is better for businesses. And while that debate still stands (short answer: it depends), it looks like Pinterest may have another rival that’s not Instagram: Twitter. Pinterest recently joined Facebook and Twitter as one of the top three social referrers of traffic, an important stat for those not yet convinced about the business value of Pinterest. But that’s not all.
Strategy Breakdown: Developing Your Platform Strategies
The strategy development process is by far, the most important element of the social media planning process. In fact, it may be the most important element of your social media presence in general. Without a strategy–and without regularly checking in to make sure you’re staying on strategy–your social media presence will often end up as a decentralized, off-message, resource-sucking mess. But it’s not just as easy as developing an overarching strategy and calling it good.
Social Media: Why Platform Distinctions Are Becoming Less Important
Two of my most recent posts have been about new features on Facebook and Instagram, 2 of the main social media platforms around. In my post about Facebook embedding, I wondered how long it might be until we can tell social media networks apart only by their user base and not by their feature set. That time, I think, is now.
Does Privacy Exist On the Internet? - AlleyWatch
No, no–I’m not talking about the recent NSA surveillance scandal. I’m talking about the fact that despite what you might like to believe, nothing you say online is private. The Internet is changing the way we think about privacy. That one mean thing that you said on Twitter can come back to haunt you at any time. Don’t assume that anything you post, no matter when it was posted, will be overlooked. Differing perceptions of internet privacy can likely be attributed to different generations.
Marketing Stunts on Twitter: Good or Bad
For better or worse, social media has brought with it its share of users and brands looking to get others’ attention. No surprises there–it’s not a new thing to want to get attention, nor are publicity stunts of any kind a new phenomenon. Take J.C. Penney’s recent Super Bowl mitten tweets as an example. J.C. Penney had the bright idea to promote its new mittens by tweeting with mittens.
Empathy In Marketing: Why It Matters (And How To Have It) - AlleyWatch
Dev Patnaik, CEO of Jump Associates and strong proponent of empathy in business, said a while back that “the problem with business today isn’t a lack of innovation; it’s a lack of empathy.” While one might think that marketing — an industry based on open communication — would’ve figured it out by now, the truth is that many marketers today still undervalue, or at least misunderstand, empathy.
5 Keys to Successfully Monitoring Social Media
Social media is a great medium for connecting to your customer base in ways you’ve never connected with them before. But because it’s a two-way medium–something that many businesses aren’t used to–many businesses are scared off by the threat of negative feedback. The truth is, negative feedback is a fact of life on social media. Some businesses will get it regularly, others will never get it at all, and most will only see a negative comment every few months or so, if that.
5 Signs Your Social Media Strategy Isn’t Working
For every client we have that’s well-versed in the ways of social media, we have two more who are starting on the ground floor and may not know a tweet from a hole in the ground. Assessments of success come easier for those clients who are familiar with social media, but are much more difficult for clients who already are confused about its practicality.
5 Ways to Build Employee Advocacy on Social Media
Think for a moment about the companies you most admire. Whatever the industry, geographical location, or company size, chances are there are a multitude of factors that make you admire them. Great branding and good content are probably in the mix, but I can almost guarantee that the company’s employee advocates play some part, too. Ultimately, companies are made up of people.
Why Trust Matters
It determines, at some level, who will buy from you instead of going to a competitor, how well your audience will react when you ask something of them, and most importantly, what level of brand loyalty you’ll see, whether you’re a coffee shop or a precision manufacturer. Without trust, it’s hard to get customers to keep coming back. Interestingly enough, trust in business has been going down recently.
Social Media Curating for Dummies
You’re not a dummy. But maybe you’re new to social media, and that’s okay. On social media, content you post can be broken down into three main categories: content you create (blog posts, white papers, etc.), content you curate (relevant articles from around the web), and conversations you have with other people. Content you create and conversations you have with others are fairly self-explanatory, but what exactly does it mean to curate content, and how do you do it?
It’s Time to Stop the Brand Double Standard - AlleyWatch
There’s a disconnect between how marketers use social media for clients and how marketers use social media personally. “We want to be thought leaders,” their brands say. So, many marketers publish articles many times a day, neither bothering to monitor as much as they should nor interact when they should or seek out users how they should. Then, these same marketers are befuddled when their clients’ accounts don’t get any interaction. “It’s okay,” they say.
What the Hell Happened to Reddit?
Alright, everyone. I’ll ask. What the hell happened to Reddit? The “Front Page of the Internet,” Reddit.com rose to prominence some years back when another content aggregation site, Digg, made an update that pissed off a lot of users. Those users wanted a similar place to share ideas, content, and off-color comments, and thus Reddit was born. (In a nutshell.) Over the last couple of weeks, however, Reddit has gone meta; the site itself has been all over the front page of the Internet.
Why Good Social Media is a lot Like Working Out - AlleyWatch
Confession time: I’m not an athlete. I’m uncoordinated, lanky, and when I was younger, never got much into sports. (Watch me try to shoot a basketball or throw a football for five minutes if you want to understand.) Continuing on into college, I wasn’t really much into exercise, despite the fact that I worked at a gym. Enter today, and things have changed just a bit.
How Reddit Made a Youtube Channel Go Viral and Why it Will Not Happen to You
Recently, a video of a guy trying to fold paper more than 7 times with a hydraulic press made it to the front page of Reddit. If that sounds boring, it is not; the man behind the camera has a charming Finnish accent and, spoiler alert, the attempt to fold the paper ends in a (relatively) spectacular explosion. That is not the remarkable part, though.
The Power of the Newsletter - AlleyWatch
A few weeks ago, a prospect reached out to us via the contact form on our website. He was the owner of an agency on the East Coast and wanted to learn more about our services. One of our salespeople got in touch with him, started the official sales process and the rest was history. Somewhere along the conversation, we asked how the prospect had heard of us. He said he signed up for our newsletter last spring and had seen our weekly content marketing digest in his inbox every week since.
The Everlasting Allure of In-Person Events
Recently, tens of thousands of people flocked to Omaha, Nebraska for “Woodstock for Capitalists,” also known as the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder’s meeting. At this year’s event, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger fielded questions about everything from Valeant Pharmaceuticals to activist investors to Coca-Cola. If this sounds routine for the annual meeting, it is—except for the fact that this year, the event was streamed live for the first time.
The Incredible Power of Comparison In Storytelling
If you write content for a ‘boring’ industry and you aren’t harnessing the power of comparison to strengthen your storytelling, you’re missing out. Dating back to my days in college researching John Milton’s Paradise Lost, I’ve always been impressed with the power of comparison. When you’re knee deep in a project and suffering that all-too-common tunnel vision, nothing widens your perspective and gets you thinking quite like an unexpected link to another story or concept.
Robot or human, that is the question when it comes to social media.
An Oxford University study from March of this year found that automation may threaten half of the United States workforce. The study lists loan officers and receptionists as the most likely careers to be automated (98 and 96 percent likelihood, respectively), while elementary school teachers and surgeons are probably safe (.4 percent likelihood for each). One career you might think would be safe – writing – actually isn’t.
How to Develop a Voice on Social Media
Those are just a few of the many words past clients have used to describe the voice they want (runners up include “intelligent,” “confident, but not too confident,” and “unique”). And that’s all well and good. The trouble is, when it comes time to actually execute on the voice a client wants, those describing words don’t do a whole heck of a lot of good. My “authoritative” may be different from your “authoritative,” and what “professional” means to me may not mean the same thing to you.
Geopolitics and Imperialism: the British Empire and Halford Mackinder 1890-1940
Browser does not support script. Browser does not support script. Browser does not support script. Loading the player... Browser does not support script. Download : Audio Speaker(s): Dr John Darwin Chair: Professor Dominic Lieven Recorded on 25 February 2010 at Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House It was perhaps no coincidence that Halford Mackinder, the most famous exponent of geopolitical theory, wrote his seminal essay in 1904 when British world power seemed on the verge of a secular crisis.
How to Deal with Negative Reviews on Social Media - AlleyWatch
The rise of social media has made it easier than ever for customers to share positive experiences about your business with others. Social media has also made it easier than ever for these customers to express dissatisfaction. As all too many business owners know, two big platforms — Facebook and Yelp — make it extremely easy for customers to leave business reviews, good and bad. In most cases, reviews stay on your page forever.
Davis, John Darwin - Greensboro News & Record: Obituaries
Davis, John Darwin Davis, John Darwin posted 4 hours ago September 26th, 2016 Print Create a hardcopy of this page Font Size: Default font size Larger font size BLACKSBURG, SC John Darwin Davis, 49, formerly of Sanford, died Friday, September 23, 2016. A memorial service will be held Friday, October 7, 2016, at 3:00 PM at Bridges-Cameron Funeral Home Chapel. An online service is needed to view this article in its entirety. You need an online service to view this article in its entirety.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with John
Contact John, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack