About the author: Mary Ellen Slayter
Mary Ellen Slayter leads SmartBrief’s general business and finance team. Before joining SmartBrief, she was at The Washington Post, where she authored the Career Tracks column and worked as an editor in the business news department for 8 years. She has a master's degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and a B.S. in agronomy from Louisiana State University. That means she can correct the pH of your lawn, as well as the typos on your resume.
Social media-powered recruitment: How NBCUniversal builds its employer brand online
This question-and-answer session is with Monica Pons, head of executive recruitment for NBCUniversal. Describe NBCUniversal’s employer brand in five words or less. NBCUniversal: A Universe of Opportunity How do you integrate that with the consumer brand, particularly in social media? We are using social media to inspire and engage audiences. Our Twitter account is employer [...]
Q-and-A with Lars Schmidt: How NPR uses social media for recruiting
Lars Schmidt is the director of talent acquisition at NPR. NPR has a very strong consumer brand. How do you integrate that with the employer brand, particularly in social media? We’re fortunate to have a great consumer brand, active and established channels in social media, and many engaged followers and fans. To me, that was [...]
How Discovery and OPEI used social media to spread the word about environmental stewardship
Discovery Education and the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute’s Education and Research Foundation have partnered to create TurfMutt, an online, science-based program designed to help elementary educators teach an appreciation of backyard and community green spaces and landscapes. We spoke with OPEI and Discovery about the role social media played in spreading the word about the [...]
How Discovery uses social media to engage its audience
This Q-and-A is with Gayle Weiswasser, vice president of social-media communications for Discovery Communications. How would you describe Discovery’s social-media strategy, in a nutshell? Across our networks, we use social media to deepen our engagement with our fans. We do this by building community among fans of our networks and shows, delivering valuable content that [...]
How Lenovo got big results by placing small bets
This guest post is by Jeremy Epstein, founder and chief marketing navigator at Never Stop Marketing, and Jay McBain, head of Lenovo’s small- and medium-business sector. For six consecutive quarters, the small- and medium-business team at Lenovo had trailed its industry by an average of 10%. That changed significantly when Jay McBain, the director of [...]
Facebook finds a way to predict your ethnicity
This post is by Kaukab Jhumra Smith, a contributing editor at SmartBrief. A team of researchers from Facebook has come up with a way to predict the ethnicity of Facebook users in the U.S. by using a combination of U.S. Census data and an analysis of users’ first and last names. The team won the [...]
11 tips for creating better online video
This post is by SmartBrief contributing editor Kaukab Jhumra Smith. Videos that are going to be viewed primarily online or on mobile screens must be created differently than those watched on TV, says Mary Coffman, a broadcast journalism professor at Northwestern University’s Medill News Service. Coffman, who also leads video-training sessions at the National Press [...]
Spreading the Smarties love, one tweet at a time
Some people just manage to maintain their brand’s Twitter account, but Liz Dee of Ce De Candy has taken it to another level. She is leading her family-owned company through the ever-changing trends of social media. Rebecca Pollack met up with Liz at the Sweets & Snacks 2010 Expo in Chicago and learned that the [...]
