5 Steps For Social Media Content Marketing

Content Marketing and Social Media Food For Thought

Think you’re a marketer merchandising a non-media product or service? Think again. In today’s content marketing driven, social media world, you’re a digital media entity. Extending beyond your organization’s website, emailing and other communications, your media empire includes blogs, photographs, video, presentations and other content whether you own them or not.

Like the original Mad Men, you must convey your product’s message. But now you’re competing with other brands, media entities and consumers for your target market’s attention. To breakthrough with your point of view, you must think differently about your brand, consumers, and media. Continue reading

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PR: How To Avoid a Social Media Crisis

9 Steps To Mitigate PR Crisis Potential

Social media crisis requires boy scout mentailityA social media crisis is every PR professional’s nightmare. No one wants to wake up and discover his firm or client is a negative trending topic on Twitter or other social media platform.

In today’s always on, always connected world, everyone has a personal publishing and distribution platform at his fingertips so the potential for social media flare ups, whether it’s an angry customer or an employee having a bad day, always exists. For example, even a well-loved brand like Jet Blue had trouble when a frustrated steward used an emergency exit to leave one of their planes. What matters is your ability to handle the situation with a cool head. Continue reading

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7 Ways To Create Killer Content for Business Blogs

7 Business Blog Post Ideas Every Business Can Use

Business blogs require more than a rehash of other ho-hum corporate content. To be effective, your business blog must offer information that prospects, customers and fans feel drawn to consume. They should feel like your blog is reaching out and pulling them in. Continue reading

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Facebook’s IPO: 5 Ways It Will Affect Your Marketing

What Facebook’s IPO Means For Marketers

As Facebook’s IPO nears, there continues to be speculation about the firm’s worth, especially after its disappointing first quarter, 2012 results. For marketers, the question is how will Facebook change their business model and what impact will it have on their budgets? (Here’s a white paper assessing publically available information on Facebook’s IPO by marketing data scientists Rhonda and Perry Drake of Drake Direct.)  Continue reading

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Mobile Search: 15 SEO Experts Give Their Advice [Research]

Can Your FInd Me Now? How To Optimize for Mobile Search

Mobile search is an integral part of any mobile marketing strategy given the steady growth of smartphones and tablets. Use mobile search to ensure that prospects and customers can find you when they actively look for you on-the-go.  (Here’s some more mobile shopping data you need now!]

According to Performics, mobile searches account for about one out eight Google paid searches and tablets account for about two out of every five mobile searches.  Continue reading

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Feeding The Content Marketing Beast – 7 Places to Find Cheap Content

22 Cost Effective Content Marketing Sources [Research]

What’s your biggest content marketing challenge? For one out of five marketers it’s producing sufficient content and for another one out of five marketers, it’s having enough budget to cover the cost of content marketing according to Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs’ September 2011 research.

So what’s a marketer to do? In short term you may be able the shift budget and resources from other marketing and communications, but chances are that you’ll still need more content and budget. This is essential since content marketing thrives on being constantly refreshed.  Continue reading

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How to Create Fail-Proof Blog Posts – 15 Must-Have Factors

15 Key Elements Every Blog Post Needs

Key to Fail-proof bloggingEvery blogger prays each blog post is a home run yielding lots of readers, social media shares and comments. As Mack Collier has pointed out and I strongly agree, you need to focus your blog on achieving your blog goals, not just chasing social shares or comments. To this end, writing consistently strong blog posts yields results over time. (Don’t take my word for it, check out how SEO whiz Rand Fishkin shows this for his wife’s blog.)

While every blogger will have a relatively weak post once in a while, if you’re phoning it in your readers will know. Therefore, each post has to include every critical element. Continue reading

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Why Online Video Is Hot [Research]

7 Elements that Make Online Video Attractive

Online video is hot. While traditional television viewing has remained stable, consumers are slowly changing their viewing habits.

Concurrently, marketers are looking to online video to expand their content marketing offering and advertising options. Further, online video enables media entities, stars, marketers and individuals to contribute to the format’s evolution. Digitas’ NewFront examined a variety of different offerings.

To understand these changes, let’s examine the research findings. Continue reading

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360 Degree Branding

10 Brand Elements To Assess

360 degree branding goes liveBrands enhance the value of the products, companies and people they represent whether for a B2B, B2C, Not-for-Profit (aka NFP) or solopreneur. Today’s social media-connected, content marketing rich environment demands you have a 360 degree brand.

Since this new multi-dimensional approach extends beyond most organization’s traditional brand guidelines, you must expand your brand to define it in terms of all of the senses. To this end, think in terms of tangible and intangible elements associated with your organization. Continue reading

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The One Reason You Need Content Marketing [Research]

5 Content Marketing Tips

In today’s advertising rich environment, you need content marketing regardless of whether your organization is a B2B, B2C, Not-for-Profit or solopreneur. The one big reason is trust! Beyond the fact that content marketing powers social media, search and sales, marketers must use content marketing because consumers don’t trust advertising.

This isn’t a newsflash. While advertising credibility has been on the decline for years, recent Nielsen research link underscores this continuing trend. Continue reading

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15 SEO Experts Give Their Best Social MediaTips

How To Optimize Your Social Media Marketing For Search

Search and social mediaSocial media plays an important role in search. In part, people turn to their friends, colleagues and the public on social media networks to get answers to questions they previously used search engines to find information.

Additionally, increasingly, search engines incorporate results from social media platforms. Therefore, marketers should ensure that their social media marketing is optimized for their key search terms.

Here are fifteen search experts’ recommendations for social media.

Continue reading

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